State of Independence

The centre of Bexhill-on-Sea is one of those rare places these days that has not become a clone town. Not being chock-full of hospitality chains and multiple retailers – they have been mostly confined to the Ravenside Leisure Park on the way out of town – it has retained an air of independence and an appearance of spontaneity. Perhaps because of this, it has gained an unfair reputation for being old-fashioned; the reality is, this is what towns are like if they don’t allow the demands of rapacious profiteering to prevail.

Firmly flying this flag of independence is record shop, Music’s Not Dead. Situated at the bottom of Devonshire Road, a short shuffle across from the De La Warr Pavilion, Music’s Not Dead stocks a wide range of music on CD, including new releases and an extensive amount of artists’ back-catalogues. Prices of most discs are surprisingly cheap and there is also a large section of bargain CDs at three for £12. I did spot a vinyl section, but I didn’t go too close being an ex-vinyl junkie in remission. There is also an area where you can sit down and read music magazines.

The shop was opened a couple of years ago by Del Querns and Richard Wortley and they have established a welcoming place for record rack flickers to browse and buy. And they are clearly very knowledgeable: when I visited, I picked up a copy of The Broken Family Band’s 2007 album Hello Love for a fiver (cheaper than Amazon) and was recommended to check out the lead singer’s most recent venture, Singing Adams.

As an experience – be it buying a new release, coming across a forgotten album you had always meant to get or talking to people about music – it has to beat downloading tracks bent over a computer or waiting for the postman to arrive with that cardboard packet. And the best thing of all, if I had not popped into Music’s Not Dead, I would never have found out about the live music they put on: Turin Brakes are playing in the shop next Sunday, 29th September, at 4pm - and it’s free.

Downland: part eleven

Ridler’s gallantry – essentially survival with dignity – had earned him decorations and promotion by the end of the war; but neither of these would augment the back pay and pension that he had been demobilised with to ensure him a reasonable standard of living. Before the war, he had lived well until his father’s inheritance had come to an end. The life of a young gentleman had been an expensive one: houses, horses, tailors and travel had all drained his money away. With no further expectations, he was forced to accept the security of a commission as a second lieutenant to avoid humiliation and the pack of pursuing creditors. The same mistakes again would be the end of him. He had been determined to find a way to live where he would be master of his own destiny. Never again would he put his trust in arrogant fools like Townshend. He could not work for those whose privilege, power and incompetence were bare for all to see. He would set out alone. After handing in his army greatcoat and form Z50 at East Grinstead railway station, he had received another pound to supplement his meagre resources. And then he had bought a poultry farm.

Sergeant Terence ‘Shorty’ Short, a fellow traveller who had come through the march to Anatolia with Ridler, had a pair of elderly parents who needed to sell Postern Poultry Farm. Failing to be alerted by Shorty’s unwillingness to take it on himself, Ridler bought it for a song. But he had known nothing of keeping chickens and his heady optimism eventually turned to bitter failure. His fundamental error had been to try to fatten up layers to sell as birds for the table. The quality of their lays deteriorated in the process ,and his bread and butter income from delivering eggs to pubs and restaurants in the River Wandle valley foundered. And this sacrifice did not pay the dividend he had hoped for: never able to afford quite enough feed for the purpose, the fattened birds were little more than adequate at best, scrawny at worst. The long decline was arrested by an outbreak of avian tuberculosis and, after two miserable years, Ridler slaughtered the remaining birds, levelled the chicken sheds and left the land for his creditors to fight over. And then he had done what any level-headed, ex-serviceman, chicken farmer would have done: Ridler ran away to join the circus.

Blue Sunday

The dog days are fading and summer’s lease has nearly run its course. Larkin’s toad is about to squat on my life again. Walking the Seven Sisters with the sea on my left and ovine-trimmed grassland to my right, the first day of September sunshine was playing dreamily on the English Channel.

The further west I walked along the undulating path, the more people I encountered picnicking on the cliff top. Gazing out at the blurred line between sky and sea, the horizon only made distinct by the slow stately progress of the occasional tanker, they seemed transfixed by being at the very edge of the land.

The ground along the cliff top was dotted here and there with chalk stone patterns. These were clearly arranged by human hands but what I first thought were examples of Andy Goldsworthy-style land art, on closer inspection revealed themselves to be something more mundane: names, phone numbers, boy bands, slogans – the lingua franca of tourist graffiti.

By the time I reached the final sister, the eastward view back along the coast to Birling Gap was magnificently crowned by the silhouette of the Belle Tout lighthouse. But it was to the west, as Seaford Head and Cuckmere Haven hove into view, that the unlikely azure of the sea dispelled the Sunday blues and caused the spirits to soar.

Mad Jack

Whenever I step into my back garden, the first thing I look for is the sharp silhouette of the spire of St. Giles at Dallington, some five miles away on the horizon. It has become something of a superstition for me: if the church is still there up on the ridge, then the earth is still turning and all things must be in their rightful place – I am comforted. But this summer, I have been deprived of my little ritual. The tower and stone spire, both originating from the early 16th century, are being repointed and are currently encased in scaffolding and plastic, forming a blob on the far horizon that is indistinguishable from the trees.

The importance of being able to see the spire from home is something I share with ‘Mad Jack’ Fuller, the erstwhile squire of Brightling. Hopefully, it is the only thing we have in common. John Fuller, who died in 1834 at the age of 77, was a controversial figure: an Eton-educated Member of Parliament, he was also a renowned drunk, plantation owner and supporter of slavery.

At the age of 20, Fuller had inherited a large Sussex estate (that is now Brightling Park) and Jamaican plantations from his uncle. By the age of 23 he had become a Member of Parliament - firstly for Southampton, then Sussex. His political career was doubly notorious: he once had to be detained by the Serjeant–at-Arms after a drunken incident with the Speaker of the House and, in one of his regular speeches in support of slavery, he claimed that the slaves on his plantations had better living conditions than many of his constituents.

But Fuller also had a philanthropic side. He was a sponsor of the young scientist, Michael Faraday and commissioned paintings from the artist, JMW Turner. And locally, he financed the first Eastbourne lifeboat, built the Belle Tout lighthouse on Beachy Head and purchased Bodiam Castle to save it from demolition in 1828. But it was with his building of follies that he left an indelible mark on the landscape of East Sussex.

The most striking of Fuller’s follies is the 65 feet-high Brightling Obelisk which stands without inscription or apparent purpose atop Brightling Beacon, the second highest point in East Sussex. Equally pointless, is the two-storey Fuller’s Tower on the Brightling – Darwell Hole Road. More purposefully, Mad Jack was inspired by his friendship with the German astronomer Friedrich Herschel to build his own observatory. Now a private home, the silver dome can still be seen from the Brightling – Burwash road. Fuller ended up beneath another of his follies: his mausoleum, a 25-foot pyramid, stands in the churchyard of St. Thomas à Becket, Brightling.

However, Fuller’s Point is the most perverse of all his follies. Fuller had made a bet with a friend that he could see the spire of St. Giles at Dallington from his home in Brightling. On returning home he realised that he could not see the spire after all. Rather than lose the wager, he had a 35-foot stone cone built in a field within sight of his house. It is more popularly called the Sugar Loaf - named after the conical loaves that sugar was sold as in the nineteenth century - and can still be seen in a field on the Battle to Heathfield road at Wood’s Corner. Whether the friend was fooled, or Fuller gained any comfort from seeing the Sugar Loaf every day, are not recorded.

Downland: part ten

Since the end of the Great War, Ridler had struggled: his living had been piecemeal, hand to mouth. But the war had been a terrible time; the guarantees of his peace-time commission – pay, rations and billet – had been replaced by humiliation, death and disease. The Mesopotamia campaign had started with all the expectation and certainty of a British military operation: they had marched in to Basra and Kurna with little loss or opposition and had carried on up the Tigris to garrison the town of Kut-Al-Amara.

In November 1915, General Charles Townshend had then led his troops into battle at Ctesiphon, the last major obstacle before the final march on Baghdad, with confidence. Having witnessed only surrender and desertion from the Turkish forces they had encountered so far, the ferocity of the battle - the casualties, the defeat and retreat - were a shock to Ridler. The British and Indians had lost more than half of their troops and were forced to return to Kut where thousands of Turkish soldiers had besieged the town. For 147 days they resisted the siege before the humiliation of surrender. 147 days of bitter cold, hunger and infection. And then Townshend simply capitulated, surrendered his command and abandoned his men to sit on the side-lines for the remainder of the war: a small island off the coast near Istanbul, use of a yacht, visits from dignitaries. Captivity in luxury was better for Townshend: after the war, when the treatment of his men at the hands of their Ottoman captors became clear, a death in disgrace.

Ridler had felt that treatment but the Indian troops had fared worse and, as they were marched from Kut to Anatolia, they were made to strip to the waist and walk bare-chested. Every village they passed through, people would flock to the roadside to stare at these half-starved Indian troops. Their rib cages pushing bleached bone hard against the paper thinness of their black skin, their pale eyes set deep in dark, emaciated faces and their abject submission to the will of their captors all made them a spectacle. In Aleppo, a guard made one captive dance, whipping at his ankles with a switch. Small boys, laughing with delight, threw pieces of bread. Ridler was spared this humiliation, but he too, had submitted to whatever was required to survive. Half did not see the travelling circus through to its end: 5,000 starved, tortured, beaten to death.

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.