eastsussex.gov.uk

East Record Office Report of the County Archivist April 2009 to March 2010 2010/11_411 Front cover: The Maltings from , c1930 (ACC 10305), with details of the Paine separation agreement, 1774 (ACC 10423) Back cover: Bathing beauties from the inaugural programme for SS , 1935 (ACC 10439) County Archivists of 1950-1953 Bernard Campbell Cooke (1897-1953) 1953-1959 Francis William Steer (1912-1978) 1959-1964 Richard F Dell 1964-1965 Mary Elizabeth Finch (1923-2007) 1965-1970 Cedric G Holland (1932-1983) 1970-1974 S Carl Newton 1974-1981 Alan Arthur Dibben 1981-2000 Charles Roger Davey 2000-2010+ Elizabeth Margaret Hughes

The shape of things to come? A computer-generated view based on our plans for The Keep, including a projection-wall on the front elevation. Introduction

Welcome to this 60th anniversary edition of our annual report. The fi rst County Archivist of East Sussex was appointed in January 1950, which is the date that we have taken as marking the offi cial beginning of East Sussex Record Offi ce. Read more on ESRO’s offi cial history and developments, its ups and downs, later on in this report in Christopher Whittick’s amusing and thought-provoking recollections. As if in anticipation of the anniversary, we were honoured in November by a visit by His Royal Highness the Duke of , who toured The Maltings to meet staff, Friends, searchroom visitors and local children to learn more of what we do.

Elizabeth Hughes (ESRO), Peter Field (HM Lord Lieutenant), Christopher Whittick (ESRO) and HRH the Duke of Kent, examining his grandmother Queen Mary’s signature in the Lewes Castle visitors’ book, 1927

To deal with the present, the year was once again dominated by efforts towards achieving The Keep, the partnership project between East Sussex , Brighton & City Council and the to build a new Historical Resource Centre, but the core work of the Record Offi ce also continued as busily than ever, despite several disruptions, as this report seeks to illustrate. In the year of events marking the second centenary of his death, we were delighted to bring back to Lewes a most important document dating from Tom Paine’s time in the . It was another year in which accessions reached record numbers, but our spirits were dampened by the sudden death of Julian Fane, who had become such a charming friend and generous benefactor to the offi ce.

1 Following the decision of the Heritage Lottery Fund not to contribute towards The Keep, an options appraisal was undertaken to consider a way forward. The results indicated that an affordable building could be achieved within the existing partnership funding and this design was taken forward. The revised design is similar in concept to the original proposal. The capacity of the strongrooms remains the same, ensuring that there will be enough space for accruals for twenty years after opening, in accordance with British Standard 5454. The so- called ‘People Block’, which will house the public and staff areas, has been reduced both in size and specifi cation. However, we are confi dent that the resulting building will be something of which all the partners can be proud.

An assessment of the revised design’s sustainability by BREEAM (BRE Environmental Assessment Method) rated it as Very Good; but local planning regulations require an Excellent rating. Work on improvements continued during the year and at the time of writing we are optimistic that we will achieve Excellent. Features contributing to the building’s sustainability include rainwater recycling, a biomass boiler for heating, the inclusion of a green roof (indigenous grassland mix) to the public and staff block and photovoltaic cells on the plant room roof. We expect to submit a planning application in the late summer or autumn of 2010. We also began to draw up Activity and Business Plans, appointing consultants to help us. The Activity Plan will ensure that the service reaches as many people as possible both on and off the premises, including schools and local communities as well as traditional users. Some of this work will be done in partnership with other services and organisations such as libraries, museums and the voluntary sector.

The Business Plan will set out the running costs for the services within The Keep, including those proposed in the Activity Plan, and the income that could be achieved to help to offset them. Both plans were due to be completed in the autumn of 2010. Extensive consultation has been undertaken with interested parties, possible partners, users and potential users throughout the life of the project and this continued throughout the year, culminating in preparations for a major public consultation exercise across East Sussex and and beyond to be held in May 2010, seeking views on the project as a whole and on the current designs. The Keep project has attracted national attention, both for its ethos of partnership working and for its sustainability; Wendy Walker, the programme manager, was invited to give a presentation to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Archives in May 2009.

Detail from a map of Berwick Common, 1752 (ACC 10255)

2 Partnership working was also the key to Living the Poor Life, a nationwide project co-ordinated by The National Archives (TNA) to catalogue and digitise the correspondence between offi cials in 21 local nineteenth-century Poor Law Unions and the Poor Law Commissioners in . East Sussex Record Offi ce recruited, encouraged and supervised a group of volunteers to work on the letters from the Rye Poor Law Union 1834-1843 held at TNA, working from digitised images, and the results were expected to go online in late summer 2010 on TNA’s website (www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/livingthepoorlife). The correspondence adds an extra dimension to the information held at ESRO and is an invaluable source for family and social historians.

Buildings and weather featured quite strongly in Record Offi ce life this year. The Maltings was closed during August while structural works in the strongroom were carried out. 10% of our holdings at The Maltings were transferred to Newhaven to reduce the loading on the mezzanine and supports were installed on both levels. At the same time, the public and staff areas were completely redecorated. I believe that it was worth the disruption as the place looks a lot fresher after its paint job – and tidier! In December and January we also lost half our heating to coincide with the worse snow for 30 years and had to run a limited service from the hall while it was sorted out. However, with the exception of one day, the Record Offi ce remained open throughout with staff going to great lengths to get to work to serve the few brave searchers who also struggled in. Our Southover outstore was completely re-roofed from January to April, requiring us to limit production of documents for three months, and extractors were installed there to help control the humidity. The cold weather also affected our archive store in Newhaven when a pipe burst, sending water into the storage area. Fortunately, it was noticed almost immediately and damage was minimal, but we took the incident as an added incentive to redouble our efforts to box up as many archives as possible, both as a buffer against adversity and in preparation for the move to The Keep. This has been a major project this year and will continue as we prepare for the move.

We have continued to seek external funding to support the core service and have had considerable success, as the Document Services and Outreach and Learning sections of this report explain. And we have several potential projects in the pipeline, including a European Union INTERREG co-operation with our colleagues from the archives départmentales of Seine- Maritime, based in Rouen.

Jane Bartlett was kept busy by requests under the Data Protection and Freedom of Information Acts, and achieved a response-rate within the statutory timescales of 93%, well above average for local authorities. In 2009 we received 582 FOI requests, a 33% increase over 2008 (437).

The service continued to host the East Sussex Museum Development Offi cer, who is paid for by the government’s Renaissance Funding. This post supports museums within the county, helping to identify additional fi nancial support, but also benefi ts the Record Offi ce by opening up new partnership and funding opportunities.

The Record Offi ce’s other activities and achievements, no less important than those already mentioned, are covered in the rest of this report.

3 Archive Services

Public Services Searchroom attendance has shown a decrease during the period, partly the result of the various building works during the year and the wintry weather. However, document production fi gures increased despite the closures. Most visitors (61%) were tracing their family trees, 27% were studying local and house history, 4% were educational users and 3% business users. Although the number of hours of paid research was considerably down on last year, the number of copies sold remained buoyant.

Postal and email enquiries were down on last year but, as ever, ranged across a wide variety of subjects including English Civil War pro-Royalist tracts; arrests in Brighton during the general strike of 1926; the trial of author Rupert Croft-Cooke; and the infamous Crumbles of 1924. We were also able to provide information about their time in local authority care in the 1950s to several enquirers for whom no case fi les had survived.

Improvements to note this year, in addition to the decoration work, included an additional Saturday opening (we now open the second and fourth Saturdays each month) and the installation of an adjustable table for the hall. This was bought by FESRO, our Friends’ organisation, and has made access to resources more convenient for wheelchair users.

We took part in another national user survey in May. The results showed a continued high level of satisfaction with the quality of advice (94% good or very good) and helpfulness and friendliness of staff (99%). 81% of respondents rated the overall service good or very good. The restrictions of the Record Offi ce building continued to score us low on physical access (18% poor or very poor) and visitor facilities (26% poor or very poor). Asked to state where improvements were most needed 51% mentioned visitor facilities, 40% physical access, 17% document delivery, 16% copy services, and 13% catalogues and guides.

The survey also revealed our visitors’ reasons for using the Record Offi ce. 68% are studying for their own personal recreation but 15% are in formal education, 11% on personal or family business and 6% came in connection with their employment. While the majority come to the area primarily to visit the Record Offi ce, 22% stay overnight, 53% eat out locally, 59% use local services and 24% visit other places of interest, contributing to the local economy.

Detail from a map of Berwick Common, 1752 (ACC 10255)

4 Public Service statistics

2006-2007 2007-2008 2008-2009 2009-2010 Search room visitors 5,623 4,683 4,937 4,318 Visitors not able to have fi rst choice of day 589 544 513 469 Documents consulted 35,792 36,115 27,502 29,176 Post/email enquiries 3,498 3,381 3,988 3,804 Telephone enquiries 7,136 7,913 6,589 5,277 A2A website hits 363,070 329,036 N/A N/A ESCC website hits (ESRO pages) 2,346,753 3,349,891 Copies sold 7,751 6,607 5,729 6,496 Hours of paid research 326 262 241 177

Propaganda leafl et designed by Jasmine Rose-Innes dropped by the RAF over French-speaking Belgium in 1943 (ACC 10362)

5 Document Services

Again the number of deposits has risen – in excess of 400, not counting items such as magazines and additions to existing archives which often appear on our desks, sometimes causing minor landslides. Of that number, the Letter in the Attic project (of which more below) accounts for over 80 separate accessions. We are glad that so much material continues to fi nd its way to us, and express our grateful thanks to the donors and depositors of archives, and to our Friends organisation (FESRO) for funds to purchase the many items which become available in the saleroom, privately and online.

Major additions have come from organisations which have deposited in the past such as the East Sussex Federation of Women’s Institutes and the Lewes Little Theatre; the latter included papers of its founder the Revd Kenneth Rawlings (1885-1969), rector of Lewes St Michael, pacifi st, actor and the theatre’s original producer and director. Accessions also came from a wide range of schools, ecclesiastical , parish councils, the Freemasons, and solicitors’ offi ces. All cannot be mentioned individually here, but a full list can be found at the end of the report. Every depositor must be congratulated for their good record-keeping, and we are delighted that they have the confi dence to entrust their archives to our care.

We exist primarily as custodians of the records of East Sussex County Council. The Transport and Environment Department was the source of an interesting copy of an artist’s impression of the manor of Mote in Iden in c1500 (10415), prepared for an issue of The Meresman, its in-house rights-of-way journal. We also received photographs showing work on the Lewes by-pass, 1975-1977 (10373) – it is hard to believe that it was opened only in 1977. County Council records which are no longer needed for administrative reasons are transferred to our Record Centre at Newhaven, which holds almost 150,000 fi les. A part-time archivist, Beki Cox, has been appointed to work on the appraisal of these records to ensure that items of historical interest are preserved, and to create much-needed space at the records centre. At the time of writing, she had appraised almost a thousand fi les.

As part of a clearing exercise in Lewes Town Hall basement, we received a large transfer of minutes and other records from Council (10211; 10336). The records were suffering from mould, a constant threat in badly ventilated storage areas, and needed a lengthy stay in our conservator’s cavernous chest freezer. Borough Council Planning Department sent a set of terrier sheets, c1950, showing sites owned by the council (10290) and providing a valuable key to the deeds of the properties.

Before the advent of local authorities, Justices of the Peace sitting in Quarter Sessions had administrative as well as judicial duties. We received notebooks of Robert Henry Hurst, recorder of Hastings and Rye, 1862-1882 (10301) as a private donation; it is always gratifying to receive such strays from offi cial records. We are the repository for other authorities, such as hospitals, and organisations responsible for rivers, water-supply, drainage and sewerage. A wage-book for Hospital, 1946-1949 (10462) provides a useful insight into pre- NHS staffi ng, and we received three useful drainage plans for Hastings Local Board of Health, 1857-1859 (10424) to add to our holdings for .

6 As the Diocesan Record Offi ce for Anglican parish records, we hold the archives of all the county’s ancient parishes. Recent gems include a map of Berwick common by Christopher Mason, 1752 (10255), and watercolours of the wall paintings of church by Clive Rouse, 1936 (10524). We have also had deposits from a range of churches of other denominations, including the long-established United Reformed Church (10249), which closed for worship in 2010.

Whereas many records arrive unsolicited, others need to be actively pursued. It was fi tting that in the bicentenary year of the death of Thomas Paine (1737-1809), author and revolutionary, our major sale-room success was the purchase of the separation agreement between him and his Lewes wife Elizabeth Olive, 1774 (10423). As with all our purchases, no County Council money was involved: the bid was made up of grants from the MLA Purchase Grant Fund, the Friends of the National Libraries, FESRO, Lewes Town Council and donations from several individuals. We are very grateful to them all. It could be argued that the fi nancial settlement made to Paine as part of the agreement meant that he was able to afford his passage to America, a springboard to a world stage and immortality. Over two centuries later his words were quoted by Barack Obama in the presidential inaugural speech in January 2009. On 4 July 2010 it gave us great pleasure to present a copy of the document to Tony Benn, in Lewes to unveil Marcus Cornish’s statue of the town’s most famous inhabitant.

Coming home: Paul Myles, Christopher Whittick and Bloomsbury’s Simon Luterbacher with the Paine separation agreement of 1774 (ACC 10423)

7 Another auction success was the purchase of three Sheffi eld Park map books, 1820-1824 (10261). As avid readers of our reports will know, the estate archive was dispersed in the saleroom in 1954 and 1981 and we endeavour to mop up any remnants which come to our notice. These fi ne little volumes are pocket-sized, and would have fi tted nicely into the greatcoat of the land agent making his rounds. We were given an interesting valuation of the estate made in 1760 by Richard Way for his prospective brother-in-law John Baker Holroyd in 1760 prior to his purchase of the estate (10442). Way did his best to dampen the impetuous Dubliner’s enthusiasm for the property. Houses are ‘ready to fall’, rack-rents are low ‘the idle disposition of the people towards smuggling is perhaps the cause of this great evil’. Land sells cheaper in Sussex than in any counties and few people choose to purchase in the wilds since a ‘great part of the land is wet, cold and poor…’.

We were delighted to discover that local writer Julian Fane wished to entrust his extensive archive to us, at the same time offering a generous endowment. His fi rst editions included what was to be his fi ftieth and fi nal work The Night Sky, for which a launch was planned, to be co-hosted by our Friends organisation. Sadly he died on 13 December 2009 before this could happen. Thanks are due to Diana Crook, Julian’s archivist and FESRO member, for keeping the papers in such excellent order. Collecting a major deposit is usually a cause for celebration, but it was a miserable day indeed when we drove away from Rotten Row with Julian’s papers.

Maidstone Museum kindly put us on the trail of the records of Plumer Verrall, an early 19th- century Lewes auctioneer. We visited Kent to meet one of his descendants, who donated an auction book, 1832-1839, and other items, including a rental of the manor of Isfi eld, 1864 (10489). Kent was practically home territory compared to a trip to to collect the archive of the Drewe family of Oakover in and Castle Drogo, which had been assembled by the grandson of Julius Charles Drewe (1856-1931), founder of Home and Colonial Stores. In 1910 he commissioned Edwin Lutyens to design and build Castle Drogo, a forbidding granite fortress now administered by the (10210).

It is good to receive records which represent the county’s maritime heritage. The Sussex Division of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve was established, under the command of Admiral Brand of Place, soon after the RNVR was founded in 1903. During the Second World War HMS King Alfred, a training centre for offi cers, was based next to its headquarters in Hove. This subsequently became the King Alfred Centre, and in 1951 the Sussex Division was constituted as HMS Sussex. We received a wonderful archive of photographs and fi lms which include an earlier group of naval volunteers, the Brighton Battery of the Royal Naval Artillery Reserve, or Volunteers (10215; 10284). An 1877 photograph album shows a riotous collection of sailors, many of whom look as if they have come straight from a production of HMS Pinafore.

Close to home, a set of photographs show Southover Grange after its purchase by Thorold Arthur Stewart-Jones, a barrister and businessman, in 1907 (10321). They are a poignant reminder of peaceful times – Stewart-Jones was killed on the Western Front in 1915, aged 41; his sixth child was born two months after his death. His widow, Eva Joan, and mother, Emily Pauline, were prime movers in erecting a granite cross outside the north-west corner of Southover Church, dedicated in 1921; the family left the Grange in the following year.

8 The Brighton Battery of the Royal Naval Artillery Reserve, 1877 (ACC 10284)

A British tar is a soaring soul His nose should pant and his lip should curl As free as a mountain bird His cheeks should fl ame and his brow should furl His energetic fi st should be ready to resist His bosom should heave and his heart should glow A dictatorial word And his fi st be ever ready for a knock-down blow W S Gilbert, HMS Pinnafore, 1879

9 Moving from town to country, farming is represented by deeds and papers of the Fleet family of Shortbridge Farm, Fletching, 1779-1929 (10394), a day book of Thomas Carey of Crowlink Farm in Friston, 1868-1895 (10204), the Gay and Corbett families of Horsmans Farm, in , fruit farmers (10245), and the Hole family, tenant farmers of Birling Gap Farm at the turn of the twentieth century (10501). Rural concerns are apparent in letters from Elizabeth Harcourt of Wigsell in , 1708-1709 (10464), who worries that her crop of hops will be spoilt by the hot weather. Photographs of the Wickham family, 1890-c1950 (10265) feature the Nutley Brass Band (above), which was established from the remnants of the Temperance Band. Charley Wickham worked as an agricultural labourer, gardener and carter; he also played the euphonium and was a founder-member, and later its bandmaster.

Photographs of Beacon School, Crowborough, came up on eBay, and although our bid was unsuccessful, we were able to contact the purchaser, who generously agreed to sell them to us for less than he paid. The photographs date from the 1920s and 1930s, when prep- school life clearly involved naked bathing, the pursuit of butterfl ies and be-goggled masters with their motorbikes (right), reminding one how much attitudes have changed (10279).

10 The sale of the contents of Stoke Brunswick School merited a pro-active response. Brunswick School, based in Hove from 1866 and the alma mater of Winston Churchill from 1884 to 1888, migrated to in 1897; in 1958 it found a new home in the historic Dutton Homestall in , a re-erected mansion of the 16th century which had belonged to the Dewar family of whisky distillers. It was joined there in 1965 by Stoke House School from Seaford, which had moved to Sussex from Stoke Poges in 1913, presumably for the bracing sea air. The new institution was named Stoke Brunswick. The school, which lies one fi eld inside the county boundary, closed suddenly in July 2009 and the contents were put up for auction. With very little notice we were able to step in and buy several lots of school photographs, and a subsequent appeal for the rest led to the acquisition of four additional accessions of photographs, either for scanning or as donations.

Sports day at Stoke House School, Seaford: headmaster Arthur Spring-Rice Pyper pushing for second place (ACC 10512).

We borrow photographs and papers to scan when the owner does not wish to part with the originals. We acquired a miniature of William Dallaway of East Hoathly, a friend and contemporary of the diarist Thomas Turner (10378), and copies of a set of miniatures of the Sclater family of Sutton Hall and Park, c1805-1860, were added to the family archive (10433). Scans were also made of glass negatives showing (1899-1983), general practitioner and acquitted murderer (10405). These date from the 1920s and 1930s and show Adams as a pillar of the community, and a trusted helper at local boys’ camps.

We continue to add to our fi ne collection of maps. Awcocks, Coxs and the Mill Farms in Fletching, part of the estate of Sir Wilson, were depicted in 1764 by Henry Watson (10341), thought to be his only survey of an estate in the British Isles; it probably resulted through acquaintance with Sir Thomas when they served in the same regiment. Shortly after its completion Watson travelled to Bengal as fi eld engineer with the East India

11 Company, and the Fletching survey came with his printed plan of the marine docks under construction at Calcutta, c1780. In June we bought three very scrappy-looking letters relating to the marriage-negotiations of Sir Thomas’s second cousin Elizabeth Wilson between 1725 and 1727 (AMS 6916). They revealed a fascinating story of intrigue and illegitimacy – by general repute Elizabeth was the daughter of the statesman Spencer Compton, Earl of Wilmington – with an added strand of Jacobitism. The negotiations, conducted by the family lawyer Anthony Trumble (who had married Elizabeth’s mother), foundered in 1727. Elizabeth became the wife of James Glen of Linlithgow (1701-1777), for whom Compton obtained the governorship of South Carolina in 1738.

Our holdings for the Coleman family of Brede were supplemented by the purchase of a plan of estates of William Coleman in Brede, Beckley, Ewhurst and in Sussex, and Ivychurch, Kent, by John Adams of , 1823 (9286). We also bought a plan of Bell Reeds in Mayfi eld and Waldron showing land enclosed from Beacon Down Common, c1820 (10251). Long ago we obtained a photograph of William Figg’s map of Banks and other farms in Isfi eld and , 1820, which was given to the owner of the farm by William Grantham in 1978. The present owners have now kindly agreed to deposit the original with us (10445).

A cartographer’s tools delicately depicted by the meticulous penmanship of John Adams of Tenterden, 1823 (ACC 9286)

12 Additions to records of a large number of sporting organisations include committee minutes of Maresfi eld Lawn Tennis Club, 1948-1968 (10331), and Park Cricket club records, 1957- 2009 (10330). We were delighted to be the recipients of memorabilia commemorating Glynde and Cricket Club’s historic victory in the National Village KO Cup at Lords in 2009, an event attended by several members of staff (10377).

Writer Sheila Kaye-Smith (1887-1956), who was born in St Leonards and based many of her works locally, was not represented in our holdings until the purchase of letters, 1922-1923, which pre-date her marriage to the Rev Theodore Penrose Fry, a curate at Christ Church St Leonards in 1924 (10288). Both later converted to Catholicism, whereupon Fry had to give up his Anglican curacy. The couple moved to where they established a Catholic chapel, St Teresa of Lisieux. The letters consist of answers to a series of questions submitted by a journalist, requesting information on the sources of her novels. We were delighted to trace a copy of the resulting article in the 1923 issue of The Bookman.

Luckily on a number of occasions we have been offered a second chance to acquire records which have eluded us. Deeds of 14 High Street, Lewes, 1610-1829 which had formed part of the library of Sir Robert Megarry, were inspected in 2006 at booksellers, who were offering them for sale at £850. That was declined, but the opportunity was taken to make a detailed calendar of them. They were subsequently purchased by the person who had alerted ESRO to their existence, and we have so far picked off six of them since their appearance on eBay in 2009 (10268).

We might shudder at the thought of letters being sold for the value of their postage stamps alone, but that is the way of the philatelical world. A collection of interesting letters to William Tanner, a watchmaker working in Gibraltar, from his family in Seaford and Horsebridge, 1814- 1819, was spotted in the Tunbridge Wells stamp auction catalogued as postal history items, and our man on the spot snapped them up at a bargain price (10432). Many letters of the Courthope family of Whiligh in Ticehurst have been purchased from stamp dealers in the past, and we were able to buy a further cache of twenty-fi ve, 1813-1879 (10518).

Turning from philately to twitching, four volumes of the papers of Thomas Parkin (1845-1932), of Hastings, ornithologist, Fellow of the Royal Geographical and Royal Historical Societies, and founder-president of the Hastings and East Sussex Natural History Society, contain letters, copies of his articles, and local sale particulars, 1891-1933 (10323). Parkin was the fourth son of the Rev John Parkin, the vicar of Halton, Hastings, and after dabbling with the church and the Bar, where he never received a brief, found his calling in travel and birdlife. He helped establish Hastings Museum, to which he donated a collection of stuffed birds when it opened in 1892; this was followed in 1930 by his collection of around 5,000 birds’ eggs. He retained only that of the extinct Great Auk, of which he was especially proud.

Other interesting purchases include papers relating to the sale of the estate of Thomas Lennard, Earl of Sussex, in and Sussex, 1706-1717 (10263). Thomas Lennard (1654-1715) inherited the Barony of Dacre from his father Francis Lennard, and was created Earl of Sussex in 1674. He served as a gentleman of the bedchamber 1680-1685 and in the words of the Complete Peerage ‘through litigation, reckless extravagance and losses by gambling, he had to sell, in 1708, and other estates.’ A photograph album of

13 Glyndebourne, 1883-c1954 (10238) which descended in the family of the former housekeeper Georgina Daniels, adds to our knowledge of this famous local mansion. Papers concerning the service of William Ivor Grantham in the 6th (Cyclist) Battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment (Territorial Army), 1915-1985, another eBay purchase, expand the archive of the Grantham family of Barcombe (10269).

An international fl avour was added by the papers of Jasmine Rose-Innes (1915-1998), writer, artist and photographer, 1918-1998 (10362), whose interesting and varied life began in South Africa, where she became a member of the Black Sash, a non-violent white women’s resistance movement. The archive includes a set of propaganda leafl ets which she designed during the Second World War for dispersal in occupied Europe. This work was commissioned by the designer and typographer Robert Harling, who also hired to produced wood- engraved vignettes for his Admiralty Weekly Intelligence Report.

Propaganda leafl et designed by Jasmine Rose-Innes dropped by the RAF over Flemish-speaking Belgium in 1944 (ACC 10362)

14 Raising the Tibetan fl ag in Sedlescombe: the Pestalozzi Village, c1960 (10461)

We are involved with the lottery-funded project ‘Pestalozzi – 50 Years in East Sussex’ and travelled out regularly to the Pestalozzi International Village at Sedlescombe to assist with the conservation and listing of its archive. Set up initially to help European refugees following the Second World War, the trust has offered educational opportunities to many students from Third World countries in the years since its inception, and the archive will be deposited here when the project is complete.

15 A tip-off from Museum led to our acquisition of Ditchling Common terriers – lists of owners and occupiers, sometimes accompanied by totals of stock grazing on the common – and minutes and accounts, 1760-1864 (10516). A plan by the schoolboy Thomas Brown Daniel of a perambulation of the boundary of the Borough of Hastings, 1820, includes picturesque place-names such as Old Woman’s Tap and New Bank, with a fl otilla of ships and boats out at sea, their rigging shown with apparent accuracy (10565). Daniel grew up to be a master-mariner but died prematurely when commanding the Hercules of London, bound for New South Wales, in 1835.

Although the emphasis here is necessarily on new accessions, we also spend much of our time cataloguing the backlog of holdings to make them fully accessible to our users. One major listing project was the archive of the infl uential theologian Alec Vidler (8784), and included letters from his friend written while teaching in India between 1921 and 1935. The deposit contained papers of no fewer than sixteen members of the extended Vidler family of merchants and auctioneers, who were deeply embedded in the fabric of Rye society.

Finally, a cautionary tale. Against our advice, several large bundles of deeds were withdrawn from the offi ce by their depositor. We were amazed to be contacted by the police within a matter of hours to be told that the deeds had been found abandoned, still in the bag in which they were taken. Initially viewed with suspicion, the package had luckily not been treated as a potential explosive device, and when opened a copy of the withdrawal form led the trail to us. The theft had not even been noticed. To those still in any doubt, the moral of this story is that your documents are defi nitely safest when held in our custody.

Muscular Christianity? Alec Vidler at a mission to fruit-pickers at West Walton, , 1932 (ACC 8784/9/6/3)

16 Work in Brighton and Hove

The ’ heart-throb? Diminutive ice-hockey star Patsy Sequin, 1937 (ACC 10439)

In June I received a phone call from Harold Corbin CGM who had deposited his grandfather’s First World War letters with us back in 2003. When I collected them he mentioned, as an aside, that he also had some papers relating to his own service with the RAF in the Second World War and wondered whether we would be interested in these at some point. Mr Corbin’s archive (AMS 6867) contains service records, photographs, memoirs and newspaper cuttings relating to his service with RAF Coastal Command between 1943 and 1945. He was awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal (Flying) in September 1944 for a number of actions against enemy shipping. Following one raid against German Navy ships at Bordeaux, Harold Corbin and his observer Maurice Webb baled out over Brittany as a result of severe damage to their Mosquito. They evaded capture and were picked up by the French Resistance who swiftly handed them over to American troops; the pair were back in England within 48 hours. The telegrams sent by Corbin’s CO to his wife in Hove on consecutive days (AMS 6867/2/1/7-8) illustrate the wildly fl uctuating fortunes of war: on 18th August 1944 he was missing presumed dead; the following day he was found safe and well in Allied hands. Meeting depositors is one of the pleasures of our job and some years ago I had a memorable session with Trevor Chepstow and his enormous collection of programmes, photographs, newspaper cuttings and correspondence with former staff of the Sports Stadium Brighton in West Street (10439). Very sadly Mr Chepstow died last year but on his instructions, his executors deposited the collection with us to ensure the long-term safety of his labour of love. The SS Brighton, as it was usually known, seems to be held in great affection by Brightonians who can remember the theatrical ice shows and the Brighton Tigers team who played their home matches in the art deco building. Mr Chepstow was able to collect a great deal relating to the Tigers, who enjoyed much success between 1935 and 1965.

17 This collection is an important addition to our holdings of sports archives. Although we hold the archive of Sussex County Cricket Club we have very little for Brighton and Hove Albion FC and the club’s own archive is thought to have been dumped during the move from the in 1997. But in August we received a large collection of programmes for matches between 1963 and 2009 which goes some way towards rectifying the loss; we hope it will form the basis for further deposits relating to the club (10320). Aside from the collection of Trevor Chepstow we received or purchased a number of archives relating to theatrical performance in Brighton. The largest is a fascinating series of letters sent to the manager of Brighton Aquarium, mostly written by prospective performers or their agents, and bought with the help of FESRO (AMS 6432/5). As well as housing fi sh and marine creatures, the Aquarium contained a concert hall which staged musical, theatrical and vaudeville shows. If the manager decided to book these acts (and other records we hold would reveal whether he did), the public would have been in for some acts of mixed quality. Who would not pay good money to see ‘Elexis, the Electric Lady’ who could give powerful shocks to members of the audience? On the other hand Elexis’ agent also offered ‘one of the largest giants ever exhibited who measures 5’ 11” and 40 stone’. The freak show appears to have been alive and well in the theatrical world of the late nineteenth century; also on offer were the vocal duo Herr Joseph Drasal who stood at 8’ 4” and Colonel Ulpts who was 34 inches tall. Some impresarios obviously had more ambition than putting a very fat man of above-average height on the stage for people to stare at, or pairing a dwarf with a giant in a singing duet: James Fuller of Hornsey Rise, London, had devised a show called ‘Our Heroes in the Soudan’ [Sudan] which, according to an attached cutting, was a ‘grand pictorial and mechanical illustration of the principal incidents of the war in the east ... complete with battle effects showing 2,000 mechanical fi gures’. Colonial wars cropped up again when four Theatre Royal playbills were donated in February (10478). These included a poster for a production of War of Afghanistan or The Horrors of the Khyber Pass dating from October 1843. More Theatre Royal playbills dating from the mid- 1860s came up at a local auction in March (AMS 6895). Once again the generosity of FESRO allowed us to make this purchase, which sheds a little light on the early life of Nelly Rollason who acted in many of the productions. In 1867 she married Henry Nye Chart and, as Ellen Nye Chart, went on to manage the theatre after her husband’s death in 1876.

A theatrical agent takes advantage of the craze for all things Japanese – The Mikado would appear two years later (AMS 6432/5/15/6)

18 Another infl uential Brighton woman, the landowner and merchant’s wife Letitia Tarner (1841-1933), bequeathed land on Carlton Hill to the Brighton and Hove Nursery School Association. Original photographs, lists of children’s birthdays and brochures of the nursery came our way when QueenSpark Books deposited their archive in October (10468). The school still runs as the Tarnerland Nursery but opened in September 1933 as the Margaret McMillan Open Air Nursery School as a tribute to the socialist propagandist. McMillan (1860-1931) espoused the concept of ‘physiological education’, valuing the physical well-being of children as much as their intellectual development, and the nursery sold itself on having baths, land for play and a nurse Design for the sign for the who would check each child every morning for minor Margaret McMillan school at but contagious ailments. Perhaps rather improbably, Carlton Hill, Brighton, 1933 the records contribute another important strand in the (10468) ’s radical past. The last couple of years have been diffi cult ones for Brighton and Hove’s churches and November saw a signifi cant event in the history of St Peter’s which was leased to Holy Trinity Brompton, an evangelical congregation. Before the handover I cleared the storeroom of any archives. Sorting and listing the records (PAR 277) has been a dirty, time-consuming but worthwhile process – we now have the original plans of the chancel dating from 1904; images of most of the Vicars of Brighton, c1785-c1997 and First World War rolls of honour to mention but a small fraction of the accession. Just the other side of the Level from St Peter’s lies Park Crescent, designed by in the 1840s. The minutes and accounts of the Park Crescent Grounds Committee were deposited In July (AMS 6884) and reveal a great deal about the social life and everyday goings on of residents in these exclusive houses. The sense of strained gentility which they exude makes it perhaps not surprising that there is no mention of the 1934 ‘trunk murder’ of Violet Kaye, whose body was found in the basement of number 44, and a wartime sense of discretion produces only oblique references to the bombing of numbers 24-26 on 25 May 1943. However, the committee were forthright in expressing their views on many other aspects of the Crescent’s life. They did not like the idea of the Home Guard putting an ammunition shelter in the grounds and in June 1945 they turned down the suggestion of a party to celebrate VE Day as it was considered too long after the end of hostilities – a celebration for VJ Day was suggested instead. This was also squashed when offers of support were deemed inadequate to enable the party to go ahead. At the height of the war, ignoring the Government directive to ‘Dig for Victory’, the committee felt that the lawns should not be ploughed to grow crops as they considered the soil too poor and that such a disturbance would threaten the trees. We hold a number of archives relating to the work of the Women’s Land Army in East Sussex and we loaned some of them to Brighton Museum for their very successful exhibition The Land Girls: Cinderellas of the Soil. Included was the diary of former Land Girl Pauline Hockney (1919-1983), who served at The Deans, (AMS 5439/1).

19 The diary gives a vivid description of her life in the Land Army and of her surroundings. She clearly had no time for Brighton though, ‘Awful place, lousy shops, in fact just like Hammersmith. Same sort of people as well.’ The insurance man James Gray (1904-1998) obviously viewed Brighton and Hove in a more positive light and spent much of his life collecting photographs of the towns. In all he compiled 39 albums of photographs, dating from the middle of the 19th to the end of the 20th century. Some views are familiar and almost unchanged, whilst others are barely recognisable. The collection was bequeathed to the Regency Society and last year they transferred the originals to ESRO for safe keeping (10477). Thanks to their hard work every image in the collection has been scanned and published on the Regency Society website. Views can be searched for by road name or brought up in the original order imposed by Gray, who fi led his shots by area.

A boy and his dog on the site cleared for the new Marks and Spencer’s, Western Road, Brighton, 1932 (James Gray collection, The Regency Society; 10477/26)

Papers and scans collected by the Letter in the Attic project, which was run by My Brighton and Hove community website and QueenSpark publishers, were transferred to ESRO in June. The project encouraged people to deposit diaries, letters, postcards and memoirs relating to Brighton and Hove and was a great success: in all 80 new accessions were received ranging from individual letters to the archive of the Brighton Mendicity Society. The majority of the records taken in by the project are scans from originals and the technical and administrative challenge of making available records in a relatively new format means this excellent collection is not yet accessible. Work to rectify this is on-going and I expect to report a successful resolution in 2011.

New accessions are coming in at an almost unprecedented rate at the moment so next year’s report looks like being a bumper edition.

20 Outreach and Learning

Led both by ESRO and in partnership with local organizations, our Outreach and Learning projects have secured over £20,000 of funding.

If it wasn’t for the War was a pilot project funded by a grant of £10,000 from the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) under the stage 3 Their Past Your Future programme. It explored the impact of the Second World War on people’s lives, values and beliefs. The project focused on providing research skills and Oral History training to schools. This was a highly successful experience that involved 86 pupils together with teaching staff and trainee teachers, oral historians, and three History can be fun – Their Past Your Future group from volunteers from the Lewes District Queens Park School, Brighton Senior Forum who contributed their life stories. The oral history interviews have been deposited at ESRO. The school observed that the project had engaged the pupils who are less confi dent and usually don’t participate in class and recommended it as a programme from which all schools would benefi t. One of the seniors participating said ‘This was the best thing I have ever done, really!’

Lives of Tradition, another project supported by a grant of £7,000 from MLA as part of the Strategic Commissioning Programme continued its activities with Looked After Children. Its aim has been the exploration of Sussex Traditions, combining archive collections from ESRO and the University of Sussex with other heritage resources. Throughout the project the children and their carers learnt about the Copper family history at ESRO and explored their archive in an interactive learning workshop at InQbate, University of Sussex. The children also had the opportunity to sing with John Copper and interview him about his memories. Children also visited the and Museum, where they participated in blacksmithing workshops, made lace doilies, did Morris dancing and listened to traditional storytelling. Finally, the children were initiated into music composition at Crew Club’s studios in Brighton.

We continued to support the WRVS Heritage Plus project, one aspect of which was to help local museums reach and engage older adults. WRVS provided training on the provision of loan-boxes of objects to encourage reminiscences. ESRO visited Hastings, Eastbourne, Brighton and , where we demonstrated the ability of archives to complement and add context to objects used in reminiscence sessions. We have also supported the project’s family history courses in and by facilitating on-site and outreach visits. WRVS deposited the oral history material and publications produced as a result of their co-operation with ESRO, including photographs, DVDs, recipe books, and childhood and courtship memories from Newhaven, Peacehaven, Eastbourne and Brighton.

21 We were also awarded £5,000 from MLA for Real People, Real Voices, part of the Paralympic Region Programme. This project, developed in partnership with Heritage and the Oyster Project in Lewes (an empowering project run by and for people with disabilities), aims to collect responses to the archives of Chailey Heritage; it was just getting under way at the end of the fi nancial year.

Sound Maps of London Road aimed to explore the social fabric of a major Brighton street by collecting the memories, opinions and responses to changes in the area of people living, working, shopping and studying there. ESRO supported this project, which was part of the Adult Learning Festival, by providing facsimiles of maps, scrapbooks, newspaper articles and photographs documenting the Road and its communities.

We are partners with Action in Rural Sussex in Meeting Places, an HLF-funded project which began this year, working with year six students from Netherfi eld and Sedlescombe Primary schools and Claverham Community College to explore the history of buildings in Battle used as meeting places. The research and oral history will be used to develop a travelling exhibition partly accessible by mobile phone technology.

With the aim of engaging young families we have developed and trialled a session for under- fi ves combining archive photographs and objects from the collection of the Schools Library and Museum Service. Sessions focused on toys now and then and Sussex songs, and were delivered in Eastbourne at Devonshire Children’s Centre. As part of National Family Week in May, we worked at with the library and with Marshlands Primary School children and their families, including traveller children, introducing them to the idea of archives and community history.

With the support of staff, FESRO, The Sussex Family History Group, Family Roots Family History Society, the Lewes Phoenix Project and our volunteers we ran a successful Open Weekend in November. There were displays of East Sussex maps, tours behind the scenes, conservation demonstrations and family and local history surgeries throughout the day. Of the participants who returned their questionnaires 85% said they would return to use ESRO. Some of the comments made during the day were: much more extensive than I’d realised; a wide and varied mixture and very good as covered many areas of Sussex.

We also continued our active programme of talks and visits to a wide variety of family history, local history and community groups as well as adult education courses run by Sussex University and U3A. We achieved press and media coverage on the development of The Keep, our involvement with the Pestalozzi 50th anniversary project and the purchase of Tom Paine’s separation agreement. We also welcomed a crew from South Africa fi lming for that country’s version of the celebrity family history series, Who Do You Think You Are?, investigating the Bean family ancestors of the South African broadcaster and adventurer Patricia Glyn.

Outreach and learning statistics 2006-2007 2007-2008 2008-2009 2009-2010 Events and activities 32 34 49 87 Numbers attending 1,727 945 1,710 1,777

22 Conservation

In the course of the year, 475 documents passed through the studio for conservation treatment. Some of these jobs involved only minor repairs to torn pages, but others, particularly when the document is unfi t for production, are much more time-consuming – the total includes 50 volumes, which altogether took three months to complete.

Roughly 10% of my work originates in new accessions, some of which need immediate attention at their point of entry into the offi ce before going into storage. This can be a simple job of cleaning or a major work of decontamination involving a three-month sentence in the blast-freezer.

We continue to work on the archive of a fi rm of solicitors from Hastings, which came to us in a shocking state. All the documents, amounting to at least three bays of shelving, needed blast-freezing to remove the mould. This work needed to be carried out in stages, and has of necessity to precede any archival work on the documents, the earliest of which dates from 1650. The job has already taken over two years, but we are now nearing completion.

There have also been a lot of glass plates coming our way of late; we have calculated that over 1000 have been dry-cleaned and boxed this year. The archive of John Skelton’s drawings continues to come to us in batches. All the designs have to be cleaned using specialist vacuums before they can be packaged and placed in the strongrooms.

Repair work has taken up only half my time this year; the rest has been spent tackling adverse environmental conditions. The weather has become so unpredictable that our air-conditioning is insuffi cient to cope with it. At least six months of the year have been spent at our outstores: repackaging many of the contents of Unit Y at Newhaven, and monitoring the replacement

23 of the roof at Southover. As well as being good housekeeping practice, the transfer of documents, some of them loose on the shelves, into standard-sized boxes is an essential preparation for the move to The Keep. We installed water alarms and pest traps into all the strongrooms, which are proving most effective.

We have completely rewritten our preservation programme, and updated our preservation policy, as well as the staff handling data sheets. Our volunteer policy has been rewritten as have the transportation guidelines. Occasionally I have been allowed out of the studio to give advice and guidance to other institutions on the appropriate storage of their archives.

For fun once a week a few members of staff have been learning how to make a book with me during their lunch hours. This has proved to be quite a success with the books coming along well and hopefully fi nished in time for Christmas.

As well as my usual helpers, the volunteers who have worked with me over the last year have included a PhD student, a history of art undergraduate and a graduate bookbinder. I am indeed very grateful to them, and provide tea and coffee as thanks.

Melissa Williams shows her work on a map of farms in Fletching (ACC 10341) to HRH the Duke of Kent

24 Records Management

The Record Centre continued to contribute to the success of the council’s accommodation strategy by managing records which could no longer be held by departments due to space rationalisation and offi ce closures. We received from departments twice the amount we were able to destroy, so pressure on space continued unabated.

However, we did begin to tackle one area of backlog at the Record Centre, the appraisal of fi les that have reached the end of their working lives but which need to be assessed for their historical value before they are either destroyed or passed to archives. We made a case to the department to fund a temporary Appraisal Archivist and Beki Cox started work in November, getting through the work like a knife through butter, and creating vital space at the Record Centre.

We experienced further problems with our buildings this year and suffered from water intake. Works carried out to reduce the risk of fl ooding included roof works to Units R and M in June and the insertion of an additional drainage pipe in January to Unit M to enable water to drain away from the building more effectively. These measures appear to have been successful.

We continued to work on revising retention schedules for East Sussex County Council, Brighton and Hove City Council and East Sussex Fire and Rescue Service to ensure that they are both up-to-date and future-proofed against departmental reorganisations.

Work experience placements, tours and advice were provided to people considering a career in archives and records management. In September, we welcomed to the Record Centre County Council, who wished to see large-scale records management in operation prior to setting up their own.

The Record Centre continues to meet its target of ensuring that all records are produced and returned to our customers wherever they are based in East Sussex and Brighton and Hove within 24 hours of receiving the request.

2006/07 2007/08 2008/09 2009/10 1,829 1,792 1,856 1,629 Transfers received metres metres metres metres Transfers received: ESCC 911 m 928 m 865 m 888 m BHCC 918 m 804 m 920 m 734 m Other customers N/A N/A 71 m 76 m Destruction of time-expired material 1,912 m 1,328 m 1,156 m 811 m Files returned to departments 3,872 3,629 4,528 4,373

25 Staff and volunteers

There have been quite a few staff changes. Sarah Jackson joined the public service staff as Archives Assistant to replace Fiona James. At The Record Centre Sue Thomas retired after 41 years working for the County Council (11 for the Record Centre) and was able to go out on a high note with an invitation to a Buckingham Palace garden party. Julie Williams also left as Record Centre Supervisor to relocate to , and Suzanne Mitchell, who had been working as Deeds Clerk, was appointed to succeed her. We also received departmental funding to appoint a temporary appraisal archivist at the Record Centre. James Painter was with us for the year to help with the workload and we were able to employ other agency workers for short periods. We remain most grateful for the contribution made by our growing band of volunteers. In 2009/10 we had 37 volunteers who, at a conservative estimate, contributed 3,390 hours to the Record Offi ce, the equivalent of two extra members of staff. They carry out work that would not otherwise be possible, including listing and indexing and assisting with conservation and outreach work. We offer our sincere thanks to every one of them. We also took a positive part in the County Council’s work placement scheme for under 19s and had fi ve such placements in 2009/10. One student became a long-term volunteer as part of her degree course, with particular emphasis on outreach work and has gone on to seek work in community outreach. Members of staff have also contributed signifi cantly to professional matters nationally and the promotion of historical and archival concerns locally. Elizabeth Hughes, County Archivist, served as secretary of the Association of Chief Archivists in Local Government and was involved in the negotiations to merge the organisation into the new Archives and Records Association; as a member of the National Council on Archives and the Renaissance South East East and West regional sub-panel; and as a trustee of Rye Museum. Christopher Whittick served on the Sussex Historic Churches Trust, the editorial board of Sussex Archaeological Collections, the Castle Management Committee, as a trustee of the Westgate Chapel in Lewes and of the Tom Paine Project. He taught palaeography and administrative history for the University of Sussex, at the Latin and palaeography summer school at Keele and on the UCL archives course. He is a Vice-President of the Sussex Archaeological Society. Philip Bye was on the council of the Sussex Record Society and the Research Committee of the Sussex Archaeological Society. He and Wendy Walker served on Screen Archive South East advisory group. Wendy also served on the Steering Group of the Public Sculpture of Sussex: National Recording Project based at Brighton University and was a member of the Local Government Group of the Records Management Society. Andrew Bennett served on the council of the Sussex Record Society and was a member of the Health Archives Group, and Andrew Lusted’s History of the Trevor Arms and other pubs in was published in May (right).

26 Friends of the East Sussex Record Offi ce

FESRO has had another productive year, in which our activities ranged from involvement in planning for the Keep, via the provision of both learning and recreation for our members, to the contribution of almost £7000 towards the purchase of 48 groups of documents many and various, ranging from the separation agreement of Thomas Paine and two map books of the Sheffi eld Park estate, to a postcard purchased on eBay for 99p. Although the Paine separation agreement was the outstanding item, we are proud to have made it possible for ESRO to become such an effective presence in the saleroom. We all continue to be grateful to Ian Hilder for his essential work of monitoring eBay and negotiating with depositors.

Our ability to be generous was enabled to a large extent by the kindness and interest of Julian Fane, and FESRO adds its sorrow to that expressed elsewhere in this report at his passing. His enthusiasm, friendliness and support will be sadly missed by those of us who were lucky enough to meet and work with him. We aim to use his gift, augmented with some of our own resources, to set up a capital fund, rather than making grants from income as we do at present. As well as its more obvious benefi ts, such a policy will have the added advantage of keeping Julian’s memory green among both the Friends and our wider public.

The purchase of the Sheffi eld Park documents was particularly pleasing on two fronts. The books themselves provide another piece in the jigsaw of the scattered archive which ESRO are gradually working to re-create; in addition the auction house, Woolley and Wallis of Salisbury, kindly waived their commission on the sale when they realised that the document had been purchased on behalf of ESRO. I would like to take this opportunity to record our appreciation of their generosity. The Friends have also promised to support the purchase of more mundane objects like book rests, adjusting chairs and cups and saucers for use at social occasions and classes held at the Record Offi ce.

On a scorching hot day at the end of May, more than 30 members of FESRO and the Archives Society gathered at Lindfi eld, described by Pevsner as ‘without doubt the fi nest village street in East Sussex’. As that description suggests, Lindfi eld lay in the eastern division until 1974, making it an ideal location for a joint meeting We divided into two groups, with one gratefully heading for the cool of the interior of the parish church of St John Baptist with Colin and Judy Brent, and the other facing the heat of the high street with Annabelle Hughes. Then we swapped round, before having tea and biscuits at The Tyger, a fi ve-bay Wealden house by the church.

27 September found us in , where thirty friends gathered in the church of St Nicolas to hear Colin Brent deliver from the pulpit a 20-minute talk on its history. The smallest of the Five Ports, Pevensey is now a modest-sized village, strung out east to west along the spur and overlooking the drained brookland with its highly productive grazing, extending northwards to Hailsham and Herstmonceux.

In spring this year, Anne Drewery gave a series of evening classes in Latin for Local Historians, which was a great success and a very pleasant social occasion. By the end, we all felt that our rudimentary knowledge of the language had progressed, and perhaps more importantly that we now had the confi dence to tackle documents written in it. Anne donated her fees for the class to our funds – so FESRO has doubly benefi ted from her instruction.

An administrative sub-committee was set up this year to consider how FESRO would fi t into the administration of The Keep. It has been suggested that a Trust Fund should be set up to support The Keep in the future. Should the trust come into being the committee will continue to monitor the position of FESRO in relation to it. We intend that our principal aim should remain the provision of support for East Sussex and Brighton and Hove archives within The Keep. At the same time we will also continue to seek to represent the views of the users and assist in the provision of events and training for them.

When the request went out from ESRO to provide volunteers for a listing project on probate records, we were happy to oblige. A conventional gestation-period now having passed, it is appropriate to look back on our achievements. Until 1858, the probate of wills was the business of the church courts, and the archives of three such jurisdictions are held at Lewes – the Archdeaconry of Lewes (which stretches well into even old West Sussex), the peculiar of South Malling (ten parishes – or so we thought – from Cliffe Bridge to , with Edburton, and Lindfi eld in addition) and the peculiar of the Dean of Battle, confi ned to the boundaries of that parish. There are probably 43,000 registered wills, but they are the tip of the iceberg – once original wills, administration bonds, inventories, renunciations, proxies of guardianship and a host of other more obscure records are added, the archive must contain getting on for 120,000 items.

Disdaining Battle as too small, we began work on South Malling. It immediately became clear that the simple list of parishes within the peculiar masked a rather more complicated jurisdiction, with parts of , Worth, , Hartfi eld and Framfi eld falling within it. Michael Leppard kindly pointed out that in those parishes, each area was known as ‘The Hamlet’. At the time of writing, we have processed over four thousand wills and inventories, adding precise dates of the will itself and of the probate, the value of the estate and the names of the witnesses, through which we hope to built up information on doctors, lawyers and their clerks. Quite frequently, testators name the house, farm or hamlet at which they live, and this information has also been added to the lists. The original wills themselves range from elaborate affairs, decorated with illumination and fl ourishes, to scrappy notes of a few lines; indeed it is quite surprising to see the level of informality that the church courts were prepared to recognise as testamentary wishes.

28 The early wills – the series begins in 1588 – include a good number of do-it-yourself examples in which testators, unrestrained by the lawyer’s formulary, allow us a view of their feelings. We were all particularly charmed by John Gallett of Mayfi eld, whose will of 1598, was ‘written with my own hand; and though it be but simply done and without any counsel, I would have none of my children grudge at it, but be content and give God thanks that I am able to do for them as I do’.

One matter that has exercised the committee during the year is how to recruit new members to the group in order to ensure that it fl ourishes into the future. New membership forms have been designed and are to be distributed to all libraries in both the county and the city in the hope that we can achieve that aim during the coming year.

Sheffi eld Park and Home FarmFarm, 1884 (10261)

29