" A Literary Landscape of Sussex" talk by Dr. Geoffrey Mead to Winchelsea Literary Society, 25 February 2022

"Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him." The arresting opening sentence of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock emerged as Dr. Geoffrey Mead’s most startling quotation in the whirlwind tour of the Sussex literary landscape which he delivered to an appreciative Lit. Soc. audience. Patcham born and bred, Dr. Mead from the Geography Department at Sussex University had deployed his highly developed sense of place to successfully navigate the storm-wracked road to Winchelsea which had defeated the scheduled speaker, Alina Templeman. Proud of his Brighton roots, he contended that the importance of Sussex’s biggest town had been consistently underestimated, although the legacy of those whose attention was drawn to the place could be mixed, as Mead himself admitted in quoting from Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse; "Brighton looks like a town that is constantly helping the police with their enquiries". 

The audience was interested to learn that Graham Greene declined any claims to literary proprietorship when he said that Patrick Hamilton’s "West Pier" was the best book about Brighton. Hamilton also burnished his hometown’s raffish reputation in the post-war decades with his Hangover Square, a lurid account of the doings of the wild girls who were its residents.

Although most Londoners headed for Sussex were probably targeting Brighton, the opening image for the talk had been a 1938 Southern Railway poster showing a bearded rustic on the Downs evocative of Belloc’s poem lauding the great hills of the South Country, penned in Shipley, West Sussex where the writer lived close to the old Templar church. 

For those anxious about recent climate drama there was some reassurance in tradition with a description from The Anglo- Saxon Chronicle of 1014 of floods in our county which were exactly replicated in 2214. For those globalists, restless under a surfeit of parochialism, the county’s historic reach was highlighted by an unsolicited testimonial from the Venetian Senate (1397), commending the commodious harbour at Portus Camera (Camber to us nowadays). As the potential invasion coast, Sussex has been meticulously mapped by Government and we were shown a pre-Armada (1587) depiction where the detail included the information that the Gage family at Firle, as Catholics, were considered politically suspect. Their faith did not inhibit their utilising the stone from the dissolved Lewes Priory to rebuild Firle Place.

Primarily an antiquarian, William Camden traversed the country for Britannia (1586) where he commented on the flourishing iron mines and the furnace and hammer ponds in the ghylls which powered the bellows and hammers needed to work the iron. This drew on the wood available on the Weald as did the gunpowder mills and the Navy’s shipbuilding programme. It was surprising to learn that it could take two years for oxen to drag the trunk of a large oak on pallets along the swamp-like Sussex trails to the Royal Dockyards at Chatham. 

Celia Fiennes’ side-saddle tours of late Stuart England are an instructive primary source on society and the nascent industrial economy although admittedly she had an understandable predilection for fashionable towns and spas. She recounts the Great Storm of 1703 where deposits of salt could be found on leaves as far inland as Ticehurst. With his geographer’s hat on, Geoffrey noted approvingly that this would be consistent with the storm driving moisture from the sea all the way from Saltdean up the valley to Ticehurst. 

The much-lamented apathy which invests contemporary local politics was not apparent in East Hoathly where Thomas Turner reported disputes among the Vestry over the Poor Rate ending in sword fights. Turner attributes this to artifice, deceit and knavery although holding the meetings in the local ale house could have contributed to the febrile atmosphere.

From Burwash, Rudyard Kipling applied a romantic allure to a local pastime in his "Smugglers’ Song":

"Brandy for the Parson, ‘Baccy for the Clerk,

Laces for a lady, letters for a spy"

but the largely unreported and very profitable practice of owling, the illegal export of wool from England was particularly rife on Romney Marsh. Accounts could be subjective and the agronomist background of the celebrated rural rider, William Cobbett, may explain his dismissal of Ashdown Forest as "villainously, ugly spoil". It was galling for the Winchelsea audience to learn that Daniel Defoe had given their town and Rye barely half a line in his "A tour through the whole island of Great Britain", while Tunbridge Wells, the Las Vegas of West Kent according to our speaker, received four and a half pages for its aristocratic promenade in the Pantiles and its notorious raffling shops. I suppose he had to find material for MollFlanders and Roxana somewhere and to plant the seeds of civic outrage for future generations of Disgusted complainants to newspapers. Closet Corbynistas could draw solace from the torch still being carried for the Hastings-set The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist by Robert Tressell and those who like a bit of internecine literary satire can look afresh at Dallington, the Howling of Stella Gibbons’s "Cold Comfort Farm" which parodied the early "loam and lovechild" output of the productive Northiam resident, Sheila Kaye-Smith.

Having touched all the bases and stopped shaking the kaleidoscope of Sussex scenes coupled with literary quotations, Dr. Mead slid gently onto home plate with Sir Frank Short’s 1910 painting, "Winchelsea Marshes", and an evocative, forlorn and necessarily foreshortened picture of the Winchelsea Windmill before the Great Storm of 1987 left us only with the grindstones and endemic nasal abrasions.

William Doherty