One of my Nan’s most remarkable memories from a lifetime in Hastings, concerns the day in (or around) 1930 when, walking the promenade with her mother and father on one of the family’s regular Sunday walks, she saw the Zeppelin Airship R101 flying slowly along in the distance. Continue reading Hastings in Wartime Part 2
On Sunday 31st May 2009 the last survivor from the TITANIC disaster died. Millvina Dean aged 97 years was living at a nursing home in Hampshire and only this year stars involved in the Hollywood blockbuster film of the tragedy agreed to contribute £20,000 to her fees. Continue reading Titanic Survivors
The 2009 Hasting Beer and Music Festival proved to be a huge success with the people of the town with over 8,500 people attending. Chairman Steve Millea “ I am overwhelmed by the support as we planned the event for 7,000 people but 8,500 is unbelievable Continue reading Hastings Beer Festival
The photograph on the center pages is from the Arthur Woodgate collection
and shows him and his classmates as they were about 1920.
There will be few who recognise the faces but the list of names is
a very different thing. They are old Rye names, almost to a man, and
they went on to forge a great part of the town’s pre and post war
history. Continue reading The Class of 1920
Hot new pennies are cast down on the heads of eager youngsters waiting on the street below. They pounce and rake up a few coppers for sweets and other small delights in a melee’ of arms and legs.
It is a tradition that goes back to times when there was no social security and all the charity on offer came from well off benefactors in the town. It was a time when charity really did begin at home. Continue reading Have the Pennies Become Outdated?
At the Blue Cross Animal Centre, Northiam two old building had to be joined together for the animals to go in. In one corner, where they were to be joined up there was a great big witch hazel tree. Continue reading Building In The Villages
Football, the soccer variety, captured the imagination of the people of Rye well before the turn of the 19th. Century. There were doubtless many teams playing the old “kick and rush” style of football in Rye and the surrounding districts in the days of the great Corinthians and Wanderers – but legend only tells the story of pre-1900 soccer matches played in the Town.
1904 saw the first success recorded in the new century. In that year the Rye Football Club carried off the Tunbridge Wells Charity Cup in front of capacity crowds at the Central Ground, Hastings. That evening the victorious team was welcomed at Rye Station by hundreds of enthusiastic supporters who had been unable to get tickets for the match. The Rye Town Band played “Sussex By the Continue reading 100 Years of Rye Soccer
In the nineteenth century, on a ridge of high ground, in the part of greater Heathfield known as Punnetts Town, there were two windmills. One ground the corn, but it is the other, the one that worked wood working machinery, that this piece of history is concerned. Continue reading Rise & Fall Part Two
My sister and I were evacuees from London at the outbreak of the war, on 3 September 1939, and were accepted as pupils at Rye Grammar School by the Headmaster, Mr. Jacobs. That first hard winter – – there were very heavy snow falls in January 1940 and East Kent buses were unable to reach Winchelsea Beach for many days – – was a phoney one so far as military activities over East Sussex and Kent were concerned. The situation changed dramatically by the summer, with the fall of France and a threatened German invasion of England. Continue reading Aerial Warfare Over Rye During World War Two
One of Rye’s most famous cobbled streets is Watchbell Street. Set at the very top of the town it is steeped in history. Walking over the blue boulders on a wet winter evening it it easy to imagine the rumble of brandy kegs being rolled by smugglers and hear the impatient whinney of horses waiting to pull their illicit cargo to inns and ale houses throughout Sussex & Kent. Continue reading Watchebell Sreet
