OUR RYE HARBOUR

MEMORIES AND STORIES OF PAST AND PRESENT RESIDENTS OF RYE HARBOUR

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THE RYE PARTNERSHIP

RYE COASTAL HERITAGE PROJECT, 2011

OUR RYE HARBOUR

MEMORIES AND STORIES OF PAST AND PRESENT RESIDENTS OF RYE HARBOUR

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Contents

Foreword ...... 7

Julie Downey ...... 8

Kathleen Duffy ...... 12

Joyce Tugwell ...... 16

Peggy Batcheler ...... 19

Terry Denham ...... 19

Charles Piggott ...... 20

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Foreword

So why are people from Rye Harbour known as Harbour Ducks ? This is the question on my lips, but I’m not sure if it’s an insult or not, and the last thing I want to do is upset the group of residents (past and present) who have gathered to share their stories of Rye Harbour with me.

Working alongside the enthusiastic Rye Harbour Group , I learned alot about Rye Harbour village, its people and their resilience in the face of adversity, and also learned about the value of a real community bond. There are many other isolated places in that have grown up round an industry or as an accident of geography, but Rye Harbour is special.

Many of these other places have long ago lost their community bond and even their cultural identity, but not Rye Harbour. Incomers are accepted, but tend to be transient, few stay. Many of the residents of Rye Harbour can trace their families back many generations. There are surnames that you hear time and again...Cutting, Head, Downey, Pope, Caister, Milgate, Saunders, Clark, Igglesden, Stonham and Southerden. I am assured there are a few more but these are the names that came up during the course of the project sessions.

I have been struck by the deep rooted bond to the village, even with those who had moved into Rye or further afield. Perhaps it is the shared history of the Mary Stanford lifeboat disaster that binds them, or growing up in such a desolate and isolated spot.

I hope that you enjoy this brief look into the memories of the Rye Harbour Group. There were three members of the group who do not come from Rye Harbour, but whose contribution to the sessions and this booklet were both welcome and invaluable. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Kate Head for all of her efforts as a volunteer on this project, particularly as a driver.

Chrissy Stower – Programme Manager

Julie Downey

I have always lived in Rye Harbour. My mum, who died recently, was known as Nanny Pat to everyone, she was originally a Caister, an old Rye Harbour family. There are still Caisters in Rye Harbour. My grandfather was Spencer Caister. He was a Long Line Fisherman at Rye Harbour. This meant he was on the shore. He used to peg a long line with hooks along the beach at low tide, and at the next low tide would go back to see what he had caught. He also used to go cockling and shrimping, anything that was done from the shore. My great-grandfather was the youngest skipper to go out from Rye Harbour, and my gran’s brother went down with the Mary Stanford lifeboat.

Most of us at the Harbour are connected to each other, where families have intermarried over the generations. I am related to the Downeys, the Caisters and the Popes, and through my husband the Cuttings. My husband’s great-uncle was Arthur Downey and Morris Downey was my great-uncle.

Left: The picture shows the Downey family, Nell, Liz, Ethel and Alice with the twins Morris and Albert. Morris would later be lost, along with his cousin Arthur, with the Mary Stanford. Ethel was Julie’s Great- grandmother.

They used to keep family Christian names going, so it gets a bit confusing when you are trying to work it all out. There are so many people called by the same name. Elizabeth is a name that has run throughout my family.

My mum used to say that she could remember all the crying after the Mary Stanford disaster. She would have been 5 years old at the time. There were only about 150 people who lived in Rye Harbour in 1928, and nearly every family had lost someone. In some cases they had lost more than one. Although there had been other lifeboat

8 disasters, none has ever been as bad as the Mary Stanford, where all 17 of the crew were lost. My great-uncle Morris and my husband’s great-uncle Arthur were both lost in the Mary Stanford.

Each year there is a memorial service held for the crew, and representatives from each of the family light a candle for the crew member as his name is called. My mum used to be our family’s representative, but now it is me.

Right: Funeral of the crew members of the Mary Stanford, 1928.

Far right: Morris and Albert Downey

The people of Rye Harbour had alot to cope with. The Mary Stanford disaster took away most of the men who run the fishing fleet from Rye Harbour, but then in 1933 the village was flooded making life even more difficult.

Left: The Tram Road during the floods of 1933.

Right: Julie in Tram Road today.

My dad did his apprenticeship as a shipwright, a boat builder, at Rock Channel in Rye, at Phillips Boatyard. Back in my dad’s day there were alot of boats coming and going from Rye Harbour.

After the war my dad took part in the film Dunkirk, with Richard Attenborough. He was part of the flotilla of little boats who rescued the soldiers from the beach. He took a boat over to pick up the actors. My mum and I were in the film too. There is a very brief shot of us sitting in a boat. It goes past so fast if you blink you will miss it.

Rye Harbour has changed, even in my lifetime, but from what my mum used to say it was very different in her day. When I was growing up there were no caravan sites, just fields and very few houses. I remember the summers as always being warm and sunny. We used to swim every day and go down to the beach.

We used to swim in the river down at the harbour, when I was about 10 years old. We would change in the train carriages. The carriages were disused and had been abandoned for years. As kids we used to play in them all the time. You wouldn’t be allowed to do it now because of health and safety.

When I left school I went to work for Webb’s Bakery in Rye. I worked down where the windmill is and also up in the High Street. Now I help my daughter, who lives in Rye Harbour with her children, and also my son, who lives at Beach with his little boy.

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Kathleen Duffy

I come from Rye Harbour although I now live in Rye. My family was a fishing family, the Heads. Both my dad and my uncle Bill were fishermen. My dad worked on the Caister’s boat. My uncle Bill was a quiet man. He was made a prisoner of war by the Japanese. He was writing a book about the Mary Stanford, my brother has it now.

My family lost three members in the Mary Stanford lifeboat, my grandfather, Herbert Head, the Coxwain, and two uncles, James and John. My son is an artist and has painted me pictures of the three of them. They hang on my wall at home. My grandfather was only 47 years old at the time and my uncles were teenagers, 19 and 17. They never found John’s body. My mum used to say he was under Camber Sands.

My uncle Bill used to tell the story of how on the night of the disaster someone came and told them something was happening on the beach. Gran got them up and off they went. In those days they used to have to run along to the old lifeboat station between Rye Harbour and , and then pull the lifeboat down the beach into the sea. So many people would go, not just the crew.

After the Mary Stanford went down the lifeboat was found upside down on the beach. The removal company from Rye, Wright and Pankhurst, who used to have a yard next door to what until recently was The Forge restaurant, were called in to move the boat.

Top left: The old lifeboat station as it is today.

Right: A lifeboat being pulled down into the sea.

Bottom left: Tom Cook, of the Wright and Pankhurst yard.

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There used to be a school at Rye Harbour, I never went there but my oldest br other did. I had to walk or catch the bus to Rye to go to school. My school was where they are going to build a supermarket now. When we were growing up the people from the Harbour were known as Harbour Ducks and we used to call those from Rye Rye-ites . There are stories of children from Rye Harbour being stoned by children from Rye, to make them go back to the Harbour.

During the war the Harbour was a busy and an important place. Our families were not evacuated, but further down the coast they were , to make way for the soldiers . We had alot of soldiers at Rye Harbour .

My dad joined the Navy and worked on the minesweepers out of Portsmouth. Most of the fishermen had left and moved down the coast to Fleet, in Hampshire. The fishermen were machine-gunned when they went to sea. The only fishermen left were old. My dad went back to fishing after the war, and then went to work in the concrete factory.

We lived opposite an Ack Ack gun. It was very noisy. We had a couple of lucky escapes. We were coming home from school, on the East Kent bus , when our bus was machine-gunned by a German fighter plane. My brother Bert was a prefect and he and the girl prefect told us to get down under the seats.

Left: A wooden house in Tram Road after an air raid

At the beginning of the war we didn’t have an air raid shelter and my mum wouldn’t let us children be evacuated. She said that if we went we would go together. During one air raid, we were standing by the fire , when a bomb dropped on one of the wooden houses opposite us in Tram Road. Another time, when we were able to go in to an air raid shelter, my mum was upstairs in her bedroom with the nurse. We were in the shelter with our gran, with the door open, which looked out over the beach. We could see the doodlebugs coming in from the sea. When they went silent you knew they were

about to drop. One cut out right over our house and then suddenly turned and came down over the river, bombing the golf course at Camber.

There were 12 of us and you didn’t get very many sweet coupons. My mum was always sending us up to the shop, owned by Alf Saunders, to ask him if we could have next month’s rations. He used to say “your blooming mum!”, but would give us the rations.

Life was very different for us growing up than it is for children now. We didn’t have a bathroom. We had a tin bath and a copper. My dad used to go shrimping. My mum would fill the copper for our baths and when that was emptied she would refill the copper to heat the water for the washing, and then dad would come home with the shrimps, and mum would have to empty the copper out to refill it for the shrimps.

We used to live next door to a man who used to take us up the river to Rye on his boat, to buy coal from Corralls. We would buy the coal and then bring it back on the boat to the Harbour. In those days we used to keep the coal in the kitchen. We had a black range in the kitchen for cooking and heating water.

When the trains were still running to Rye Harbour my mum used to send us to follow the train track to pick up the coke that was dropped by the trains. The train didn’t come right into the Harbour, it stopped just outside of the village. My sister and I walked up with a pram that we filled with the coke. One day we were walking along when some cows came towards us. I was very scared and wouldn’t walk past them. My sister and I had to lift the pram over a fence and walk along a field until we were past them. My sister told me I’d be in trouble with mum when we got home. I was always scared of everything. My husband and I moved to Winchelsea Beach. We had an outside toilet and my husband had to shoo away our big white chicken that always chased me when I went out to the toilet.

When I was a child there were alot more fishermen. The Harbour was full of fishing and boulder boats as well as those bringing in coal, timber and concrete to the wharf.

The fish used to be landed at the slip. As children we would have to go down and carry the boxes up the slip. They used to land alot of herring then and then smoke them. Now you don’t really hear of local herring. We also used to help Mr Mills, who was a Boulderer. We used to go down to the beach and help him fill his trugs.

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Joyce Tugwell

I grew up in , but my grandparents lived at Rye Harbour, and every summer holidays I would come to stay with them. I remember the first time that my dad brought me to the Harbour, I didn’t want to stay, but when he came to get me to take me home I didn’t want to leave.

My gran used to pack up a picnic and then we would go down to the beach. We would pick up the blue and white stones for my grandfather, who would carry them in his trugs that hung from the yoke around his neck. The stones were then loaded onto his boulder boat, the Sarah Elgar .

The highlight of the day was the trip back up the river in the boat, to the Boulder Hard, where the boulders were unloaded. The Boulder Hard was on the Point, which is where the new lifeboat station is. The next day we would go back and load the boulders onto trucks that would carry the boulders to Staffordshire. The boulders were used to make fine pottery, such as the Willow Pattern, in the Staffordshire potteries. Each of the Boulderers and his wife would be given a free dinner service. The boulder boats were not very big and they used to be used for fishing as well.

Left: Joyce’s grandfather carrying the boulders.

Above right: The Sarah Elgar. Left to right, Bobby Mills, Bill Milgate, Mrs. Milgate, John Milgate, Dorothy Milgate and Rover the dog.

My husband when he was about three was always going out in the boat with his uncles. His mum used to tie him up with string to try and stop him. He would go down to the quay and they would say “Come on then” and off he would go to sea!

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I used to stay for the whole of the summer holidays. All the children used to get on the ferry to go across to Camber. My grandfather wouldn’t let me go, so I used to sneak on board, get into the middle and crouch down, asking the others to hide me. My grandfather used to stand and watch out for me. The ferry was just a small rowing boat with a few rows of seats, and it used be get so overloaded it would sit further and further down in the water. Johnny Doughty was the last ferryman. He also made records of sea shanties. Before him was Mr Selwood, and before him Dick Cutting.

There used to be a lighthouse on the other side of the river at Camber. It was pulled down at the end of the 1960s but I don’t know why. Things have really changed. There are a lot more visitors.

When I was young the only visitors to Rye Harbour would be artists. They would come to Rye Harbour, pitch their tent for a few days and paint the boats.

Right: The picture shows an artist at work in Rye Harbour.

Each summer, whilst I was in Rye Harbour, the Hastings carnival would be on. My mother used to send over a parcel with balloons, streamers and hats. A couple of my Rye Harbour friends and I would decorate my grandparent’s front garden and put on a puppet show. We used to charge all the children 1d to come and watch our shows.

The day that war broke out I was staying at Rye Harbour. All the children were in a church service. A man came in and went up to the vicar, who was kneeling at the altar, with his back to us, praying. The man whispered in his ear and the vicar stood up very casually, turned around and said, “Children. I want you all to go home, quietly and quickly. Don’t ask any questions. Just do as I say.”

We went home wondering what was going on. When I got back to my grandparents my father was waiting for me. He said he had come to take me home because the war had broken out, and my mum wanted us all together. I had never biked to Hastings before, but I did that day, all the way to Hollington.

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Peggy Batcheler

I have never lived in Rye Harbour, but have been friends for many years with Kath Duffy and thought I would come long to the group to keep her company.

When I was first married my husband and I lived in one of the old Nissan Huts that were left over from the war. It was all we could afford when we first started out. They used to be behind Freda Gardham School. At one time the tram had run through where my garden was.

It really was a tin hut. We had no bathroom or inside toilet. The toilet was out in the garden. There was no mains drainage and once a week, early in the morning, someone would come and empty the tanks.

I had a black range in the kitchen and that was how I used to heat up my water. Apart from that we had a sitting room, a bedroom and a coal hole.

Terry Denham

I come from Brixton, but moved down to Rye, and now I think I live in heaven. I love it here.

I have come along to the group to learn more about the area. I find it really interesting.

I remember the old black ranges. Washing days were always on a Monday. I used to make myself scarce, otherwise I’d have to turn the mangle, and mum always caught her hand in it and I would get a clout!

Talking of doodlebugs, I used to live in a house up at Cadborough Cliff in Rye. There used to be a big house at the top of the road that was hit and knocked down. The people had then moved to the house that I later lived in.

Charles Piggott

I started work at the age of 14 in the Rock Channel Shipyard in Rye, during WWII, and helped to build Motor Fishing Vessels (M.F.V.), which were then used for the duration of the war as minesweepers and for other ‘unspecified duties’.

My interest in ships and the history of shipbuilding has led me to research shipbuilding in Rye from the ancient Cinque Ports of medieval times to more recent history.

Ship building was revitalised in 1939. A workforce and local apprentices were soon engaged to build ships’ lifeboats. The yard was made fully operational. The old slipways were repaired and a contract to build eight 75 foot MFVs was given to the new management of Charles Morris & Co. Keels of English Oak were laid and Rye was building ships again.

My personal memories of shipbuilding in Rye are still vibrant and I remember just how busy, noisy, dirty and smelly it was.

The sounds of ship building echoed across the river: the sharp crack of caulking mallets, chopping sounds of adze and axes, the shouting of orders as hot steamed planks were forced into place by sweating men and boys, the resounding hammer bows as great spikes fixed the plank to heavy oak ribs, while the next hot steaming plank was being carried on broad shoulders from the steam box, at a trot, for they had no time to lose; it must be cramped into place before it cooled. The smell of the tarred oakum and pitch as the ship on the next slipway was being caulked.

When I started work at the yard at the age of 14, the first of the M.F.V.s had just been launched. She lay in the fitting dock and was having her engines installed. Every high tide she was afloat, so any work remaining to be done to her bottom had to be ‘tide work’. I was set to work with Alec, a very hard old man in his 60s, but a first class carpenter. A man of few words, but he and I got on quite well. I learnt alot in the months that I was his mate.

From the carpentry and bench work I was put on the other slipway with the gang. The first job was ‘planking up’. This was very heavy work for a young lad. Those three-foot G cramps wanted a lot of turning. We had to work fast, as I have said before. It was go, go, go, until the plank was in position. More than once the air raid warning sounded while fitting a hot plank. We just worked on, to get it fitted before the plank cooled too much to take the bend.

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Left: Boatbuilding at Phillips Yard, Rock Channel

M.F.V. 1055 was launched on a midday spring tide (the highest of the month). She was sent on her way down with a great cheer, and not enough check ropes to stop her ramming into the opposite river bank! No damage was done, and we heaved her round into the Fitting-out Dock.

I had a few months caulking on the other ship, and a new keel was laid on the vacated slipway. In no time the stem and stern posts were in place. We were now working on three ships.

The engines were fitted into the ship in the dock with the winch, masts and all the deck fittings. The superstructure was assembled. The galley and engine room hatches were of steel , the wheelhouse and deck salon of timber. She was nearly ready for sea trials.

Only a limited number of shipyard workers were allowed to go on the sea trial as it would be under Royal Navy supervision. Only if you had unfinished work on her might you go down to the harbour with her, and maybe go on the trails the next day.

If you were under 18 years old there was a pink form of consent that must be signed by your parent or guardian. The harbour was in the Restricted Area, and you would be going to sea in wartime. There were three RN personnel to supervise the trial, one officer, a PO engineer and a leading hand. I was lucky to go on two of the trials. It was a great adventure for a young lad; to feel her power into an Easterly swell and go through all the manoeuvres; to run the measured mile a full speed; to go astern on a figure of eight course. These are a few of the tests that I remember.

With the end of the war, the workload at the yard slowed down, with only some repair and other small jobs being done. In recent times the whole area of Rye’s biggest and only surviving shipyard has been built over. Work units and expensive houses with their own moorings block any access to the river. The Rye Sea Cadets use the old joiner’s ship and sail loft as their unit.

Most of the men and some of the dozen or so boys who built the last real wooden ships in Rye are gone. I am glad that I worked with them 66 years ago and was one of the last boys to help build real ships at Rye.

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