Brothers in the Dust

In Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the ghost of Christmas present admonishes Scrooge for his lack of charity to those less well off than he. “O God! To hear the insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!”, he exclaims at Scrooge’s declaration that the poor should die to decrease the surplus population. Dickens’s leaf was metaphorical but in Eastbourne, twenty years after Dickens wrote those words, there was a more literal leaf that sought to raise those less well off out of the dust.

Today, on a slightly down-at-heel stretch of Seaside, the road that runs behind Eastbourne’s coastal Royal Parade, sits an imposing buff and red brick building. Topped with a four-faced clock tower and a high pitched roof with a gothic arched window at its gable end, it manages to appear both civic and sacred at the same time. Squashed between Senlac House - where future motorists come to sit their driving theory test - and a National Tyres garage, its signage advertises that it is home to an academy of performing arts and a community arts centre; but this was not always the case.

Leaf Hall – the town’s oldest public building - was named after William Laidler Leaf, Victorian philanthropist and evangelical Christian, who had a holiday home on the town’s Grand Parade. Leaf was aware that the dwellings to the east of the pier were in stark contrast to the hotels, houses and apartments occupied by the wealthy; and he noticed that the occupants were largely unemployed and virtually destitute when the holidaymakers, that the resort’s trade relied upon, left at the end of the season. Wishing to alleviate poverty and, more importantly for Leaf, keep the idle out of the pubs, he persuaded William Cavendish, the 7th Duke of Devonshire and the town’s largest landowner, to donate a space where Leaf could build a venue to sustain and educate the working classes.

The architect was Robert Blessley, who also designed Eastbourne’s Grand Hotel, and construction began in 1863. The building’s commanding exterior was intended to inspire reverence in its users and, once inside, respect for its lecture hall, library and reading room. Books could be borrowed for tuppence a week, at a time when the town had no public library, and penny lectures could accommodate audiences of up to 200. But the focus was not just improvement: there was also a large kitchen and serving room and, in the harsh winters of the 1880s, Leaf Hall dispensed 3,000 pints of soup and 3,000 loaves each week.

Despite these philanthropic endeavours, the people Leaf most wanted to reach were put off by his support for the temperance movement. Allowing the Band of Hope and the Salvation Army to base themselves at the hall, attendance amongst working men dwindled and the building became a target for violence organised by local publicans keen to protect their trade. In fact, this was to be the start of the Eastbourne Riots (an oxymoron if ever there was one – or a Half Man Half Biscuit song) of the 1890s when Sunday processions by the Sally Army would be violently disrupted by paid hooligans and large crowds would gather to watch the spectacle.

As the new century began, Leaf Hall lost its missionary zeal and concentrated instead on being a proto-foodbank and a pre-NHS medical centre where local doctors provided free care to those who could not normally afford their fees. With the advent of the welfare state after the Second World War, Leaf Hall’s philanthropy became largely redundant; although now, in the twenty-first century, the town is hosting a foodbank again.