Tony Brooks
[Copyright © 2014, Anthony R. Brooks. Adapted from Anthony R. Brooks (2008) The Changing Times of Fulking & Edburton. Chichester: RPM Print & Design, pages 189 and 262.]
[The essay that follows comprises a transcription of the twelfth chapter of Bygone Sussex written by William E.A. Axon and published in 1897. The illustrations also come from the book. Apart from a few minor punctuation changes, the text is exactly as it appeared originally.]
A favourite excursion of those who run down to the seaside to consult “one of the best of physicians” — he whom Thackeray has well described as “kind, cheerful, merry Doctor Brighton” — is to the Devil’s Dyke. To that picturesque spot with an evil name there come pilgrims by coach, by train, and on foot to gaze upon the wide expanding landscape of the Weald, to have their fortunes told by the gipsy “queens” who ply their trade in flagrant defiance of the statute book, or to disport themselves in the somewhat cockney paradise that has arisen on this lovely part of the South Downs. The Dyke itself is the work of Mother Nature in one of her sportive moods, when she seems to imitate or to anticipate the labours of man. Here she has carved out a deep trench that looks as though it were the work of the Anakim. It has its legendary interest also, for the Sussex peasantry hold, or held, that it came into existence by the exertions of the “Poor Man,” as the Father of Evil is here euphemistically called. Looking over the fertile Weald, his Satanic Majesty was grievously offended by the sight of the many churches dotted over the smiling plain, and he decided to cut a passage through the Downs so that the waters of the sea might rush through the opening and drown the whole of the valley. An old woman whose cottage was in the vicinity, hearing the noise made by the labouring devil in his work of excavation, came to her window, and holding her candle behind a sieve, looked out. The “Poor Man” caught sight of the glimmering light, and hastily concluded that the sun was rising. The mediaeval devil could only do his malicious deeds in the dark, and so he slunk away, leaving the Dyke incomplete, as we now see it. Lest anyone should doubt this story, the marks of the “Poor Man’s” footprints are still pointed out on the turf.
Here, too, are the evidences of an oval camp with massive rampart and broad fosse, occupied probably by the Romans, whose coins have been found, and by still earlier warlike inhabitants of the district. When the eye has satisfied itself with the fine prospect, landward and seaward, we may undertake a short pilgrimage to a little known Ruskin shrine. Below us northward are the villages of Poynings, Fulking, and Edburton. The last is known to archaeologists for its leaden font, which is said to date from the end of the twelfth century. Here Laud, the pious, ambitious, unscrupulous, and unfortunate prelate, is said to have officiated. To him is attributed the gift of the pulpit and altar rails in the church.
Descending the steep slope of the South Downs, and breathing the invigorating air which has won so many praises, we are soon in a rustic road that leads to the church of Poynings. The church is one of great interest and dignity. It is early Perpendicular, cruciform, and has a square central tower. The alms box is an ancient thurible of carved wood. “Puningas” — and Punnins is still a local pronunciation — was restored, with other lands, to the thane Wulfric by King Eadgar, who pardoned some of his vassal’s slight offences in consideration of receiving 120 marcs of the most approved gold. When Domesday Book was compiled the manor was held by a feudatory of the powerful William de Warren. Inside the church are some monuments of those stalwart soldiers, the Poynings, and outside there are still traces of their ancient home from the time of Stephen to that of Henry VII. Their name is enduringly written in our history in “Poyning’s law“. In 1294, Sir Michael, lord of this manor, was summoned to Parliament as the first Baron de Ponynges. His son Thomas was slain in the great sea-fight at Sluys. The son of this soldier was Sir Michael, the third baron, who was with Edward III at Crecy, and at the surrender of Calais in 1347. When he returned to his castle, he was appointed one of the guardians of the Sussex coast, then in danger of a French invasion. When he died in 1368, he bequeathed “to him who may be my heir” a “ruby ring which is the charter of my heritage of Poynings”. The barony passed by the distaff to the Earls and Dukes of Northumberland. Sir Edward Poynings, a grandson of the sixth baron, had his home at Ostenhanger in Kent. Whilst Lord Deputy of Ireland, he induced the Irish Parliament, in 1494-5, to pass a measure by which all the laws of England were made to be of force in Ireland, and no bill could be introduced into the Irish Parliament without the previous sanction of the Council of England. He died in 1521 the Governor of Dover Castle. “Who more resolved than Poynings?” asks Lloyd, “whose vigilancy made him master of the Cinque Ports, as his valour advanced him general of the low-county forces, whom he led on to several services with such success, and brought off, with the loss of not above an hundred men, with honour from the Lady Margaret, and applause from the whole country.” Poynings passed by sale to the Brownes, and by failure of heirs reverted to the crown in 1797.
From Poynings there is a road leading to Fulking, and on the way many capital views of the round breasts of the South Downs can be had. Fulking is merely a hamlet of the parish of Edburton, and is a somewhat debateable land, for whilst it is situated in the Rape of Lewes, the parish to which it is a tything, is in the Rape of Bramber. It contains about 1,330 acres of arable, pasture, and down land. In Domesday Book it is mentioned under the name of Fochinges, and was then held of William de Warren by one Tezelin, of whom nothing more is known. It was situated in Sepelei (Edburton ?), which William de Braose held. Before the Normans came, Harold held it in the time of King Edward. It was assessed, both in the Saxon and Roman times, at three hides and a rood.
It is a striking evidence of English persistence. This little hamlet has continued for more than eight centuries; how many more no one can say. It has not even been important enough to have its own separate church, but, nevertheless, it has persisted manfully in the struggle for existence. A winding street of mingled villas and cottages is the Fulking of to-day, nestling in trees, beneath the sheltering wings of the South Downs, and apparently as unconscious of the gaieties of Brighton as if it were a thousand miles away.
Fulking is the end of our Ruskin pilgrimage, for here on the right hand of the road is a fountain with a red marble tablet, on which is inscribed:
TO THE GLORY OF GOD
AND IN HONOUR OF
JOHN RUSKIN.
PSALM LXXVIII
THAT THEY MAY SET THEIR HOPE
IN GOD AND NOT FORGET.
BUT KEEP HIS COMMANDMENTS
WHO BROUGHT STREAMS ALSO OUT OF THE ROCK.
John Ruskin, who besides being a teacher of art and ethics, is also a geologist, was appealed to by some friends of Fulking who were anxious as to its water supply. There is an abundant gathering ground, but Nature appeared to be elusive, and the water courses ran other ways. Mr. Ruskin’s aid was effectual, and the ancient hamlet has now its own abundant supply. Lower down the road, and past the hostelry of the “Shepherd Dog” — a true South Down sign — is the storage house of Fulking Waterworks. On the tablet of this we read:
HE SENDETH SPRINGS
INTO THE VALLEYS
WHICH RUN AMONG THE HILLS
OH THAT MEN WOULD
PRAISE THE LORD
FOR HIS GOODNESS
The exact source of the first inscription will be seen in Psalm cxxviii, 7 and 16; and of the second in Psalm civ, 10, and cvii, 8, 15, 21, 31.
Those who honour Ruskin as a great teacher of truth and righteousness, will find something appropriate in this memorial of him in the solitary street of the little hamlet, whose feudal lord once upon a time was Harold, the last of the Saxon kings.
Reference
Geoffrey passed away in the Sussex County Hospital on the 4th December 2013. His funeral was held at Worthing Crematorium on the 13th of January. He was one of the very few left of his generation who had been born in, lived in, Fulking/Poynings all their lives. Geoffrey was born in 1929 at Perching Manor, he grew up and worked on his father’s farm as did his brothers. During the war, although under age, he was a member of the Home Guard where he became a crack shot winning many trophies and cups.
Whilst visiting Findon, Geoffrey met Jo, his wife-to-be. They married in 1950 and moved into the house called “The Perch” on the Edburton Road. By 1963 Geoffrey was running his own farm at Findon. As their family grew, they moved to “The Springs”. With a family of three growing lads, Jo decided they had to find an additional source of income to supplement the household budget.
Jo’s father had a smoked fish business in Suffolk which was working very well so she decided to try this idea out. With Geoffrey’s assistance they built their first small smoker. This was a success and soon they were having trial sales of the products and the business started to become established. Finally, the point was reached where Geoffrey had to decide to give up farming and concentrate entirely on the fish smoking business. His decision changed the whole of their family’s lives.
“The Springs Smoked Salmon” was established and grew from strength to strength. They were soon supplying the airlines and top London restaurants with smoked salmon and other smoked items. Whilst working very hard, they also found time to enjoy life with their well earned success. Occasionally he would recount fascinating stories of the wonderful holidays he and Jo had enjoyed in parts of the world which, in those days, were not as readily accessible as they are today.
In 1978 Geoffrey and Jo moved to “Downmere” in Poynings and, in 1990, they retired leaving two of their three sons to run the business at Edburton, whilst the third son went to Australia and started his own successful “smoked fish” business there, following in the family tradition.
I first met Geoffrey in 2003 when I sought his help for information for my book on the history of Fulking and Edburton. He agreed to help and we soon became good friends. The more I got to know him, the more I learned. He had an amazing wealth of knowledge on life in Fulking before and after the war and the vast of changes the village went through from a village of farm labourers, small holdings, nursery staff, etc., to the very different village we know today. He told tales of the problems he had encountered and had had to deal with, ones that required skill and diplomacy. He thought the world of his staff and treated them well.
Alas he will be sadly missed by all those who knew him.
Tony Brooks
[Editorial note: Geoffrey Harris’s own 2007 recollections of his life and family can be found here.]
C18. Two storeys. Four windows. Faced with roughcast. Tiled roof. Glazing bars intact.
F.A. Howe, who lived next door in the 1950s, is, as usual, more informative:
The rectory appears to be eighteenth century. If any part of an older building is incorporated, it cannot be much for George Keith (Rector 1705-1716) complained of the rectory as “old and crazy and low”; about the year 1710, when he was ill in bed, the wall against which it stood gave way and tumbled into the garden, drawing the bed and its occupant halfway through the breach. This event, and the heavy timbering of the attics may be pointers to an early date in the eighteenth century for the present building. Subsequent alterations were the adding of a range of stables at the east end by Charles Baker (Rector 1754-1784), which survive except for the coachman’s cottage, and which replaced others farther from the house. Early in the nineteenth century some internal replanning, including the substitution of the present meagre entrance on the east side for one on the south front were made. In 1868, the patch of grassland south of the old east approach to the churchyard was exchanged for crownland north of the church. The Reverend Francis Gell (Rector 1884-1891) dignified this approach, which now ran within his garden, by the erection of the lych gate.
A model railway ran round the grounds of the rectory garden between 1939 and 1945 when Robert Westall was the incumbent and there is some evidence that this layout, or one similar to it, thought to have belonged to a friend of a previous rector, may have been in place from as early as 1924. As far as local residents can recall, it was between a 3″ and a 5″ gauge and electrically driven. The track was supported on piers and ran on a low platform through the garage, where the rolling stock was stored and there was another, smaller, model railway layout in the house itself. Reverend Westhall also had a printing press and was a very competent typesetter. He thus produced the Parish magazine and other church notices himself. He and his family owned a pony and trap and he used this when visiting sick parishioners, often bringing them new laid eggs and items of food (rationing had started in January 1940). Unsurprisingly, Reverend Westall was a popular member of the local community.
In the 1950s, the combined effects of poor management and the Church of England’s losses on the stock market meant that St. Andrew’s and its associated buildings, which included the rectory, became dilapidated. No rector was appointed to St. Andrew’s — there was just a ‘priest in charge’. To prevent the situation becoming any worse, the parishes of Edburton and Poynings were amalgamated in 1957 and John Francis Cornish was appointed as Rector of Edburton and Poynings, a post he held for 22 years. He lived at The Rectory in Poynings. Edburton Rectory, also known as ‘The Vicarage’, was sold in the same year and became a private house.
In 1962, the house was purchased by Teddy Hales and his American wife Anne. Teddy Hales worked as an Inspector of Schools and was influential in getting world history included in the secondary school syllabus. He was also an historian of the catholic church and published half a dozen books in that area between 1954 and 1965.
Like the Reverend Westall, Teddy was a model railway enthusiast and he set about improving the train layout, adding tunnels, viaducts, signals and a station. He eventually modified it to the point where, by removing pieces of glass from an exterior wall, he was able to operate the trains around the garden and through the house, from his office desk. For wet days, he also had a 0-gauge layout, which ran around the upper floor, connected via small holes cut through the walls of each room.
Teddy Hales died in Italy in 1986 and the former rectory was sold. The new owner commissioned further extensive repairs and landscaped the grounds. The path leading to the lych gate entrance to the church is no longer used and, since the house was connected to the mains water supply in 1964, two of three wells in the grounds are also no longer in use. The third is retained in service for watering the garden.
Tony Brooks
References
[Copyright © 2013, Anthony R. Brooks. Adapted from Anthony R. Brooks (2008) The Changing Times of Fulking & Edburton. Chichester: RPM Print & Design, pages 201-203, 279-280, 330, 425-426.]
Holy Trinity, Poynings; St Andrews, Edburton; St John the Evangelist, Newtimber;
The Transfiguration, Pyecombe [www.downlandchurches.co.uk]
December 2013
Sunday 8th December – Advent 2
10am Holy Communion Newtimber
6pm Carol Service Pyecombe
Traditional Carol Service with the Mid Sussex Brass Band
Sunday 15th December – Advent 3
10am Holy Communion Poynings
11am Holy Communion Edburton
2.30pm Carol Service Newtimber
6pm Carol Service Poynings
Sunday 22nd December – Advent 4
10am Holy Communion Pyecombe
6pm Carol Service Edburton
Tuesday 24th December – Christmas Eve
3.30pm Christingle Service Poynings
11.30pm First Communion of Christmas Pyecombe Edburton
Wednesday 25th December – Christmas Day
8am Holy Communion Poynings
10am Holy Communion Newtimber
Sunday 29th December – Christmas 1
10am Holy Communion Newtimber
But if you don’t know what the acronym stands for then you probably aren’t the ideal candidate for this vacancy at Edburton Contractors Ltd.
A postcard of Rectory Cottage, Edburton from c1900. The house is now known as Michaelmas Cottage.
Possibly the pre-reformation clergy house. C16 timber-framed cottage with plaster and red brick infilling, south end added later. Thatched roof, south end tiled. Casement windows. Two storeys. Two windows.
Hudson (Victoria County History) tells us that
Michaelmas Cottage is a small 16th century timber-framed house with a crown-post roof. A chimney-stack and an upper floor were inserted into the former open hall in the 17th century, and the house was at some time shortened to the north and extended to the south.
During his tenancy, F.A. Howe made a detailed study of “the three cottages, now merged, standing to the south of the church”:
The earliest of these is probably the oldest example of the house of the small yeoman farmer surviving in the parish, and, at least until 1956 it was substantially in its original condition. The walls, resting securely on the solid greensand, are of cob, or consolidated lime reinforced by straw or cattle dung. They are of an average thickness of twenty inches. They enclose the ground floor and support an upper storey of timber framing rising from an inverted king-post gable. The interior is divided by a timber-framed plaster-filled partition running up through both floors, making an entrance lobby 3’6″ by 3′ (the original purpose of the space behind is unknown: it is now a food-store) and the living room 12’0″ by 7’6″, with a height of 5’6″. There is a wooden staircase which may be later than the building. The upper storey, floored on beams resting on the cob walls had a bedroom over the living room from which a second room was entered through a doorway not four feet high under a beam cut away for headroom to the shape of a depressed Tudor arch, a feature of significance in dating the building. This second bedroom, almost entirely under the roof slope (the upright walls of both rooms are not shoulder high), was no wider than the lobby below and was lighted by a single window not more than a foot square. As late as 1900 these rooms were slept in by at least four people, the men in the larger and the women in the other. The living room had a chimney recess in the north wall from which extended the usual baking oven.
A notable and unusual feature is a small opening called an owl window set in the north gable end wall. At one time, grain was stored at the north end of the house, but mice and rats would enter under the roof thatch to raid and spoil the grain, rendering it useless. To prevent this, the window was left open allowing owls to come in and control the mice and rats (Customary Cottage, in Fulking, also has an owl window). Underneath the owl window was a massive, wooden water butt that stood about five and a half feet tall and alongside this was a rosemary bush that grew to a similar height.
Michaelmas Cottage, Edburton, viewed from the north in 2007. Note the owl window located off-centre immediately above the brickwork in the end wall.
The three cottages had a common owner by 1839 and were subsequently converted into a single dwelling. The house was known as Rectory Cottage around 1900 (see the early postcard reproduced at the top of this post) and later as Half Thatch (for a rather obvious reason) and as Glebe Cottages. For at least part of the first half of the twentieth century, the house was owned by the church. Thus a Mr. and Mrs. Smith were church tenants from 1939 to 1950. Mr. Smith was employed to maintain the vicarage garden and the churchyard whilst his wife took care of the interior of the church which was, at that time, notable for the smell of the lavender polish that she used. The couple also treated the church door once a year with linseed oil, maintained the oil lamps used in the church before electricity was connected and kept two coke burning stoves in working order for use when services and other events were scheduled. During the war, a barrage balloon broke from its moorings in Wish Park in Hove and came to rest in their garden.
Between 1950 and 1956, F.A. Howe and his wife became the tenants. Mr. Howe was a churchwarden and their son was a vicar who often visited the church and also preached there on occasion (he went on to become a bishop). Shortly after leaving Edburton for Henfield, F.A. Howe published A Chronicle of Edburton and Fulking which remains the definitive work on the early history of the parish.
In 1956, the church sold the cottage to Mr. and Mrs. Cavosa, who took up residence with their son and two daughters. Mr. Cavosa caught polio from eating ice cream from a shop in Burgess Hill and died shortly thereafter. In the 1980s, Mrs. Cavosa sold the property to Norman and Rita Holt who lived there until 2006, helping with the church and maintaining the cottage. The Holts renamed the house Michaelmas Cottage. During this time, Norman Holt identified some extensive, old foundations in the grounds, which suggest that a house, vicarage or large barn belonging to the church, but long since demolished, once stood on the site. However Norman Holt died in 2006, before he was able to provide more details of this interesting discovery.
Tony Brooks
References
[Copyright © 2013, Anthony R. Brooks. Adapted from Anthony R. Brooks (2008) The Changing Times of Fulking & Edburton. Chichester: RPM Print & Design, pages 165, 203-204, 281, 325-326, 409.]
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