Holidays in the Sun

In his 1973 book, Anarchy in Action, Colin Ward argued that anarchist society “is always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state and its bureaucracy, capitalism and its waste, privilege and its injustices, nationalism and its suicidal loyalties, religious differences and their superstitious separatism.” He felt that anarchism was not some “speculative vision of a future society” but “a mode of human organisation, rooted in the experience of everyday life, which operates side by side with, and in spite of, the dominant authoritarian trends of our society.” For Ward, one of the best examples of anarchy in action was the allotment site, where ordinary people were the catalysts and designers of their own space and community.

The site where I have an allotment is leased from a fruit farmer by the parish council, who in turn rent plots to individuals. But the organisation of the site is carried out by an association of allotment-holders: mowing the communal paths and areas; maintaining the seed exchange; organising seasonal celebrations and events; helping or clearing struggling plots. Put simply - anarchy in action.

The allotment is blooming this year: an abundance of strawberries; a huge harvest of early potatoes; brassicas bursting out of their netting; plump beetroot; our best garlic crop yet; and with lush sweet corn plants and rampant pumpkin and squash stems yet to produce, it will be the best year we have had. With the sunniest summer since 2006, when we had a bumper vegetable crop in our garden, it is not hard to work out why. But it is not sunshine alone that has produced this exceptional crop: last autumn I bought a tractor load of cow muck from a local farmer and top-dressed the whole plot with it.

But the allotment really comes into its own when the kids are off school. It is an extra open space for them to relax and play in, or help with weeding and harvesting; and the site’s communal area can host impromptu football and cricket matches or shared family barbecues during the long summer holiday. This is, of course, the six-week break that Gove wants to move, reduce or traduce because he sees it as an anachronistic throwback to a seasonal rural economy. Well, some of us depend on these holidays in the sun and are still governed more by that cyclical, regenerative calendar than we are by the diktats of the hard-nosed metropolitan political elite.

Austerity Art

Sometime in 1974, when I was 11 or 12 years old, my dad took me to a new restaurant in Woolwich, south-east London. He had read about it as it was the only British outlet of a chain that was huge in the United States and, as we were passing through Woolwich on one of our regular Red Bus Rover trips around London that we took on Saturdays when Millwall were not playing in the capital, he decided we should give it a try. I have no exact memory of what we ate that day but I do remember my dad’s words as we left the restaurant: “Well, that was terrible; it’ll never catch on.” Typically, he was half right. It was terrible, but it did catch on. We had, of course, just visited the first McDonald’s in this country.

Where my dad was most at home eating when we went on a Red Bus Rover – a very early version of the Oyster card but for buses only – was at Jolyon on the corner of the Strand and Duncannon Street, opposite Charing Cross station. It was one of a chain of cafeterias that were successors to the Lyons teashops, or Corner Houses as three of the central London branches were known, that had dominated high streets for the previous 70 years. Struggling to maintain the demand for large-scale affordable dining that had grown out of the war-time canteen culture, the 1970s saw a make-over that relied on formica, brown geometric patterns and a funky renaming to reflect the founding father, Joseph Lyons. The re-launch failed and by the end of the seventies the Lyons name was most well known as a brand of ice cream. The restaurants never regained their place at the forefront of British life that they had occupied before, during and after the Second World War.

Just how integral Lyons teashops were to the post-war cultural landscape can currently be seen in an exhibition, The Lyons Teashops Lithographs: Art in a Time of Austerity 1946-1955, at the Towner gallery in Eastbourne. Facing a drab period where rationing still held sway and raw materials were prioritised elsewhere, J. Lyons & Co found an imaginative way of sprucing up their restaurants and illuminating the lives of their customers: they commissioned a series of large lithographs, from artists of the day, to cover the walls of the teashops. Over three series, in 1946, 1951 and 1955, 40 separate prints were produced by leading artists such as L.S. Lowry, John Nash, John Piper and David Gentleman. Most of the contributors had worked as official war artists, documenting daily life on the home front in a time of conflict, so the shift to peace time adversity was a natural one.

All 40 prints are on show at the Towner, along with some original sketches and paintings that informed the lithographic process carried out by commercial printers Chromoworks of Willesden. Depicting life in post-war Britain, they present a fascinating example of the power of public art. The most successful at the exhibition are those, such as People by Barnett Freedman and The Railway Station by Edward Arrdizzone, that provide a glimpse of the grind of the time – the crowds and careworn faces of that austere post-war world. East Sussex features with Edwin La Dell’s view of Hastings from East Hill and Clifford Frith’s brooding The River Rother at Rye. But for me, nestling next to each other in a corner of the gallery, the contrast between Carel Weight’s melancholic and autumnal Albert Bridge and the spirited and energetic Herne Bay Pier by Anthony Gross, shows the true resilience of ordinary people in an age of austerity.

Perhaps that resilience explains why the streets are not filled with people throwing bricks in protest at our current age of austerity - but it does not explain where the response of art is now. I cannot imagine the fast food heirs to Lyons embarking on a similar project - corporations regularly sponsor art exhibitions, but that is merely advertising. What J. Lyons & Co did was to directly commission, oversee and exhibit these artworks to enrich the lives of the ordinary people who drank their tea.

The Lyons Teashops Lithographs: Art in a Time of Austerity 1946-1955 is at the Towner gallery, Eastbourne until 22nd October 2013. £5.50/£4 concessions.

Crisis Management

It is a depressing fact that the most read item on this blog over the last three months is one I posted in October 2012 about Foodbanks in East Sussex run by the Trussell Trust, a charity working to combat poverty and exclusion through the provision of emergency food to those in crisis. This is not surprising considering the drastic changes to the welfare state which took place in April this year. Reductions in housing benefit, council tax benefit and child tax credit, the abolition of crisis loans for general living expenses and changes to the disability living allowance have made the lives of many ordinary and vulnerable people living in East Sussex intolerable.

Back in October, I wrote that Foodbank had doubled the number of people it had helped during the previous year at its 250 centres across the country, and that existing Foodbanks in Eastbourne, Hastings and Hailsham had become an essential part of life for thousands. There are now 325 Foodbanks nationwide and the Trussell Trust look set to increase the numbers they help by 170% this year. Here in East Sussex, an additional Foodbank has opened in Bexhill and is soon to be joined by one in Uckfield.

Food is donated to Foodbanks by individuals, businesses and local organisations; professionals such as doctors, health visitors, social workers and Citizens’ Advice Bureau staff identify people who are not managing and issue them with a voucher that can be redeemed for three days emergency food. Mostly, Foodbanks are being used by the working poor, the unemployed and the elderly who need to bridge the gap until the next payday, benefit or pension payment, or keep away from the clutches of payday loan companies.

If you are in need of help or want to donate or volunteer, local Foodbanks can be found here or at the following four locations in East Sussex:

The Methodist Church
Sackville Road
Bexhill-on-Sea
TN39 3JB
07866 570468

Albury House
1 Cornfield Lane
Eastbourne
BN21 4NE
01323 409925

Sheriff Place
Rear of Link Shop
1 George Street
Hailsham
BN27 1AD
01323 844428

The Hastings Centre
The Ridge
Hastings
TN34 2SA
07970 810008

Downland: part nine

Electric trams glide and rattle; an endless promenade. Their delicate waltz stretches the length of the street: from St. George’s Circus at the bottom, to the terminus at the top. From the overhead cables, sparks shower down outside the doorway of number 72 Waterloo Road. The cascade briefly illuminates the lettering on the window boards: ‘George Burchett – Artistic Tattooing – Crude Work Covered or Removed – Antiseptic Treatment’. It is late in the afternoon on a day late in November. Ridler is standing on the step; below him on the pavement is Gladys. She is impatient to catch the tram back home. Seventy-five times in six months they have made this trip; three times a week since 24th May 1934 – the date when Ridler had put his skin in Burchett’s hands with a formal letter of permission - they had travelled up from the clipped, suburbia of Raleigh Gardens in Mitcham, to the metropolitan mayhem of Waterloo Road. And now that it was finished, Ridler was taking one last look at this scene, taking in the sensual bustle before him.

Warm orange lights from shop windows reflect on wet glassy pavements. Angelic haloes of bright, white mercury street lamps plot a route that melts into a blue-grey infinity in the smoggy middle distance. Beneath the lights of this heavenly procession a more moribund parade: be-hatted travellers flood on foot to and from the railway, cheap cardboard suitcases hanging at their sides; passengers of a superior bearing, sweep through in Hackney carriages; market traders and barrow boys running their stalls from their pitches to the arches of their night-time perches. The carts’ clatter adds to the cacophony: steam trumpets from the engines above pierce the darkness; urgent bursts of the policeman’s pea-whistle direct the traffic at the junction with The Cut; the paper seller at the corner alternates his cry between “Star, News and Standard!” and “Germans re-arming, says Churchill!” The air is cold and damp and heavy with a sulphurous taste – the beginnings of a London particular from Bankside and the home fires burning in the Coin Street terraces. A hint, also, on the breeze of yeast and hops drifting downriver from the Anchor brewery to join the malodorous soup. He had known chaos nearly twenty years before - the noise and stench of war – and it was on its way again.

Fields of Gold

Who could have failed to notice the proliferation of fields of gold in the countryside this summer? At first glance, it looks as if crops of the ubiquitous rape have taken an even stronger hold of the fields and meadows but it is, in fact, the dazzling sparkle of the creeping buttercup.

The very wet weather last year, lack of spraying and compacting of the soil by cattle hooves, which stops water from draining away, have created favourable conditions for swathes of ranunculus repens on grazing land. And they have cropped up in other places: roadsides, gardens and village greens. There is even a clump tumbling into the water from the side of the pond on my allotment. So heartening a sight is this vivid display of wildflower in these days of uncertain climate – both meteorologocial and economic – that I am embracing the invader and letting it share my plot.

Others are not so accommodating. Being toxic to horses, cattle and sheep, fresh buttercups are a problem for farmers. That is why those yellow pastures are not inhabited by livestock at the moment; but spraying is apparently ineffective once the buttercup has flowered. So, we may as well enjoy the vista and let our children keep checking who likes butter.

Downland: part eight

As the hedgerows lining the road began to recede, Ridler could see the light at the entrance to his own landed estate: Deanland Caravan Park. And, passing through the symmetrically arranged white, beige, and beryl boxes, he found his own aluminium castle, his own Firle Tower: a 1951 Fairholme Romeo caravan. Through the net-curtained window, in the lit interior – the mantle of the bottle gas light shining brightly – he could see Gladys; reading glasses on, rollers in, reading Reveille. He could hear the low murmur of the radio set; home service or light programme? He could not tell. Probably the light programme. The Clitheroe Kid would have been on earlier. Gladys was persisting with it, despite refusing to find it funny because it had replaced her beloved Educating Archie at the end of its series. Every time that ventriloquist’s dummy had been left in a taxi or on a train she had worried herself into a frenzy. Ridler blamed himself; they had never had children. On the cover of Reveille was a picture of Elvis Presley, home on leave from the army. He knew that Gladys must be looking again at the spread of pictures of Presley posing in his colonial mansion and at the RCA recording studios. She had been just as interested earlier in the year when there were stills of him having his conscription haircut. The superficiality of the quiff and hips of this rock ‘n’ roller struck him as pretence compared to what he had done. Ridler had indelibly marked himself and, only fifteen years before, he had become the world’s highest paid showman. And it had led to here: a caravan near a village in the shade of the Downs. The trail of exile and exhibition, the path of failure and desperation, the sunlit peak of equilibrium and acclaim – it led to here. He took off his jacket, held out his bare forearms and examined his striated skin with its broad African equid brindling. He pushed down the handle with his tattooed hand, pulled the door out towards him and went in.

A Dickens of a Storm

As flaming June arrives, here is a salutary reminder that the midsummer month can also be as harsh as any in the cruellest winter. In June 1863 – 150 years ago – The Times newspaper ran the following brief story:

“THREE DEATHS FROM LIGHTNING. On Wednesday Mr WELLER, a shopkeeper in Glynde, a small village in East Sussex, accompanied by his wife and another woman, went to Brighton, about 11 miles distant, in a light cart, to transact some business. On their return in the evening they were overtaken by a severe thunderstorm that prevailed for several hours, and it is supposed that the cart was struck by the electric fluid, and the three inmates almost instantaneously killed, as their lifeless bodies were discovered at an early hour yesterday morning by a person who was returning from Glynde to Lewes.”

There are probably countless tales of tragedy such as this in national and local archives but what makes this stand out is that the storm, affecting a large area of East Sussex and Kent, coincided with one of Charles Dickens’s many late visits from his home, Gads Hill in Kent, to Brighton. He subsequently included it in one of his pieces of misery tourism. My first knowledge of it was when it was read to me by Andrew Brooke, erstwhile Sussex Sedition contributor and now resident of Somerset, as we stood in Glynde churchyard at the grave of the three victims as part of one of own misery walks a couple of years ago. Dickens, of course, brings the storm – its range, drama and tragedy – vividly to life, much more than an archival footnote ever could.

“Ranscombe Brow, a bold hill skirted by the road from Lewes to Glynde (the village of the glen), is situated about a mile and a half from Lewes, and commands, even from the road, an extensive view of the valley, both inland and seaward. The road winds through a wooded dell, and is darkened by very high and very thick hedges on both sides. Nothing can be seen except the sky. But, on issuing from between the hedges, and rounding the brow, an extensive flat landscape of pastures, watered by the Ouse, startles the view. The effect is striking, even on a fine summer afternoon, and must have been appalling in the night and the early morning of the 25th of June, when the darkness of night increased the gloom between the hedges, and when continuous lightning was enkindled all over the extensive view.

"Shortly after eleven o'clock on Wednesday night, a tradesman of Glynde, Mr. Henry Mocket Weller, aged fifty, conducted by one Mary his wife, aged forty-nine; and a young woman, Elizabeth Bingham, about thirty-five years of age; drove along this road from Lewes in a one-horse cart. Elizabeth Bingham was about to be married to Mrs Weller's brother, "after," as the local phrase describes it, "they had walked out together for ten years," and she was going to Glynde to make some preparations for her wedding. As he passed a policeman while leaving Lewes, Mr Weller said, " Good night ; it is very rough." At the Southerham tollbar-gate, Mrs Weller and Miss Bingham were alarmed, and Mr Weller was pacifying them. He was over-confident in the steadiness of his horse. Mr Weller sat on the right driving, his wife sat next him holding up an umbrella, and the bride on the left of the scat in the cart. On issuing from between the dark hedges and reaching the brow, they must have seen the whole landscape, the sky, the distant hill-tops, the pastures, the river, a-blaze with continuous lightning. I read the story of the catastrophe in the fresh marks on the spot. The horse, seized with maddening panic, had suddenly started away from the view of the lightning, wheeling the cart very sharply round, and springing up the steep embankment. The marks of the wheels and hoofs on the grass of the embankment, show that a terrible struggle ensued between horse and driver, the horse wildly plunging anywhere away from the storm, and the driver pulling the right rein to bring the horse down into the road. All three had tried to get down from the cart on the right side, together. The horse then fell over, capsizing the cart, and entangling all three under it. They were killed by the fall, the wheel, and the kicking horse…What a touch of pathos is added to the terror of these storms, when we remember their wrecked victims, the hopes they destroyed, and the homes they desolated! How are we to characterise the fool-hardiness which neglects all the known precautions against their dangers?

“More than three hours after the catastrophe at Ranscombe, a Lewes tradesman was driving home in a four-wheeled chaise. It was the darkest, coldest, most eerie hour in the morning, about half-past two o'clock. On the road at Ranscombe Brow, his horse shied. He applied the whip gently, but the horse would not advance. His son jumped down and tried to lead the horse, and then both father and son tried to lead the horse ; but he would not pass something on the road. It was very dark. They could see nothing. At last a flash of lightning showed a cart turned on the axle, and they discerned a woman lying close under it. The woman did not answer when spoken to, and they discovered she was dead. Another flash of lightning revealed another woman rather more under the cart. After procuring a lantern and assistance, and while drawing the cart away from the horse, a man was seen under the wheel. The forepart of the cart was kicked in.

“These three victims of this storm were buried in the churchyard of Glynde on the following Sunday. A long funeral procession, with about thirty couples of mourners, followed them from the village to the churchyard. The coffins, according to ancient Sussex custom, were carried on the shoulders of sixteen men, attired in long white smock-frocks, with black neckties. One large grave received all three, and they were laid down in the order in which they travelled. From a thousand to fifteen hundred persons were in the churchyard ; and a crowded congregation listened in the church, in tears, to a discourse reminding us that in the midst of life we are in death.

“This great storm left its mark at other places. At Maidstone and Herstmonceau, hailstones, or rather bits of ice, of oblong shape and broad as pennypieces, fell, breaking skylights. A policeman on duty at East Peckham was struck by lightning and seriously injured on the left side. A retriever dog was killed by his master's side at Hurstpierpoint. A poplar was shattered into splinters in the village of Kemsing. At Cuckfield, the lightning entered a cottage by the chimney, burned a small hole through the bedroom floor, passed through the sitting-room below, and left by the door, which happened to be open. At sea, four sailors were knocked down on board the Britannia collier, lying off Brighton. At Wilmington, the Eagle beerhouse was set on fire and gutted, the inmates escaping for their lives. At Spring Cottage, Fount Road, Tunbridge Wells, a man and his wife were struck in bed, the latter lying for some time insensible. None of the furniture in the room in which they were sleeping was injured, but the stone sink in the kitchen was shattered to pieces. In Ely Lane, Tunbridge Wells, the lightning struck a cottage, breaking pictures, damaging ceiling, and smashing panes of glass and a chimney mirror. A horse grazing upon the rocks at Denny Bottom either fell, being frightened, or was knocked or swept down from the rocks, and was fatally hurt. The lightning over the whole range of the storm scorched flowers, corn, especially oats and barley, although the damage was not considerable; and it positively benefited the hop bines, by debarring them of noxious insects.”