Rye Harbour Nature Reserve is, we are very sorry to report, losing both its Warden and its Assistant Warden at the end of this month. Richard Knight and Pam Haddon, who have been at the Harbour for some seven years, are moving on. Richard will be looking for contract wardening jobs with the RSPB as a preliminary to (he hopes) a permanent job as warden of an RSPB reserve in a couple of years' time - an essential move, since the Rye Harbour reserve is not an RSPB one. He is already fixed up for the summer at the Nagshead Reserve in South Wales. Pam has taken a job as assistant conservation officer with the Dorset Nature Trust based in Dorchester, and they are hoping to find a house near there in due course.
Richard and Pam will be very much missed locally, both for their own sakes and for their years of unstinting work on the reserve. We gather they have just completed a book to be published by the RSPB on the breeding habits of terns - very much a speciality of the Rye Harbour reserve - which will incorporate the results of their work here. Maybe in a few years' time we shall see Richard as front man for one of the BBC's admirable natural history programmes which issue so regularly from its Bristol studios? Maybe Pam's delightful drawings will be a standard feature of RSPB publications (and we certainly hope she finds time to continue with her bird models). Anyway, we hope they will come back sometimes and check up on how things are going in the Far East.
At rather short notice, the Friends of the Rye Harbour Nature Reserve are arranging a presentation to Richard and Pam before they leave (so please don't show them this issue of the GAZETTE!). Contributions may be sent c/o Pat Bonham, 87 Winchelsea Road, Rye (cheques payable to the Friends). Pat is going to have difficulty contacting some of the non-local people who regularly use the reserve, so if you know of anyone who may not have heard about the presentation and might like to contribute, it would be very kind if you would pass the information on.
The GAZETTE has recently been in touch with Mr. Michael Dearing, Secretary of the Transport Users' Group. This organisation was founded some years ago to keep an eye on transport in the Hastings and Bexhill area, but it is now extending its interest as far as Rye, and it looks like being a most useful addition to our watchdog organisations. Mr. Dearing was involved in the "Save our Railway" campaign in the 1970s and tells us he has worked for various transport users' organisations in the area for nearly thirty years! He issues a very informative newsletter and is in contact with all sorts of strategic people and groups, and his organisation clearly has a great deal more punch than anything we could set up in Rye alone.
The Group is not only concerned with trains, but buses as well, and Mr. Dearing tells us that at the beginning of April a new service is to run two-hourly from Camber to Brighton, along the coast to Eastbourne and calling at Lewes. It will be "limited stop" and the overall journey will take just over 2 hours - not much more than the train, and with no changes and no need to lug the shopping over those confounded footbridges at Hastings and Rye on the way back! More details later.
The GAZETTE is the Group's first Rye member - the first, we hope, of many. Subscriptions are only 75p for an individual (40p for a pensioner) or £2 for an organisation, and should go to Mr. Dearing at 6 Holmhurst Lane, St. Leonards. Obviously, the more support the Group gets from Rye, the more it will be able to support us - so do join if you possibly can. We may need it before long!
2.
The recent burglary at the Museum has left its collection short of certain pieces of militaria which Mr. Bagley, the Curator, would very much like to replace. Some things will be more difficult to find than others, but Mr. Bagley points out that the Museum will be able to pay - within reason - for what it wants; he adds that the items must be in good condition.
They are looking for three 1914-18 medals: the 1914-15 Star, a Service Medal (two, actually, were stolen), and a Victory Medal. These are the least of their problems - the other three items were all not only Royal Sussex Regiment relics, but from the local 5th (Cinque Ports) Battalion, which makes it much more difficult. Mr. Bagley wondered if there might be GAZETTE readers who possess these things as family souvenirs, and if no he would be extremely glad to hear from the owners:
(a) 1914-18 War - officer's sword, leather scabbard, sword knot, 5th Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment.
(b) c. George VI - officer's sword, 5th Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment, in metal scabbard.
(c) c. 1905 - khaki service cap, either officer or private, with badge of the 5th Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment, which includes the Cinque Ports Arms.
We shall hope to report in due course that Mr. Bagley has been successful in his search; contact him at Church Square. Readers will know that Museum exhibits with local connections are always credited accordingly in the labelling, which of course adds to their interest. So if you should have your great-uncle's cap and badge, or even your father's sword, and would care to sell them, his name would be perpetuated in the Museum.
The next meeting of Rye Town Council takes place at the Town Hall on 12 March. Much of the business, as usual, consists of receiving reports and recommendations from the Council's four committees: General Purpose and Finance, Planning, Leisure and Tourism, and Bequests. So the meeting, beginning at 6.0, does not normally take very long, since much of the work has been done in committee. Council agendas are posted in the Town Hall foyer a week or so before each meeting, and of course anyone can attend (though not speak - this is only allowed at the Annual Town Meeting later in the year); committee meetings are also held in public.
Among decisions awaiting formal confirmation on Monday is the 1984 Mayoring - we innocently jumped the gun over this with an announcement some weeks ago of the new Mayor's name and the date of the Mayoring. We are sorry to hear that the sensible proposal for using the bus station kiosk as a waiting-room-cum-tea-bar seems to have been dropped, with no apparent enthusiasm expressed by the bus company. The Planning Committee has discussed various applications, and also talked about the bypass, though in this respect nothing very conclusive seems to have happened yet. The Leisure and Tourism Committee has agreed on a tighter sales and accounting system for the Rye Model. The Bequests Committee has had a letter of thanks from the WRVS for a grant of £100 towards Meals on Wheels at Christmas, and discussions are still going on about next winter's senior citizen's party or whatever - the committee decided against any form of summer outing.
When the new Rye Bowls Green was no more than a faint hope, the Town Council set aside a sum of money towards its eventual establishment, and this was added to by events organised in the town by other people. As readers will know, Rother provided the green in 1982, and built the pavilion, and the Council has used most of the money from the fund to help with this in one way and another. There was, however, a balance of £455, and Rother's Mr. Hudson, looking sadly at the bare concrete floor of the pavilion, suggested that perhaps the Council might like to provide some vinyl floor covering? This is to cost £345, and the balance of the fund is to be spent on purchasing second-hand woods to be used for hiring out. (This money could not be spent on the Bowls Club specifically, hence the problem aired elsewhere about the Honours Board for the Club, but fortunately the Lottery Fund - now closed - was just able to wring out a final grant of £92 for this.)
- 3 - THE RYE GAZETTE, 7.3.1984
Last Wednesday evening, members of St. Mary's congregation sat basking in the warmth of Len Stocks's new heating and playing guessing games about church finance. A diocesan speaker from Hellingly had brought facts, figures and videos to the Rye area, and on Wednesday it was the turn of St. Mary's to hear what it costs to run our particular church.
Many readers will know that at the end of the nineteenth century some parishes were "rich" ones, i.e. generously endowed with property and glebe land left by former parishioners which paid a handsome salary to the incumbent; others had no endowments. The system was therefore reorganised from the early 1900s to pool all the parochial resources so that eventually all incumbents were paid the same, regardless of the parish's previous financial history. So those who, like the Editor, had assumed that St. Mary's had lots of money tucked away somewhere to top up its current receipts were suddenly disillusioned! Even the vicarage (now the rectory) is not a long-established perquisite; for many years the incumbents lived in one of a succession of rented houses, and it is, we were told, only fairly recently that a house was bought specifically as a parsonage - and the diocese (not the parish) paid the extra £20,000 required to purchase the present house when the previous one was sold as being too expensive to manage.
The audience was invited to guess what different aspects of church management cost, and some people were nearer the truth than others when the actual figures were given. Taking into account that St. Mary's only had a curate for half of 1982 (the year under consideration), but allowing for national insurance and pension contributions, the theoretical cost of renting a house, and normal job expenses including car and telephone, the total cost of providing the parish's clergy was £16,441. Running the actual church was another £12,463 on top of that: heat, light and cleaning cost £1,556 in 1982 (and the new heating won't actually reduce this, merely be more effective for the same money); insurance, £1,008; sacristy expenses (cost of church services), £1,398; choir and organist, £950; repairs, £4,803; and other normal expenses, £2,748. In 1982, the parish's financial support for home and overseas mission work amounted to just £790 (but a slightly indignant voice pointed out that it was a good deal more than this in the following year).
These three categories add up to just under £30,000. Money coming in during the year in the form of subscriptions, covenants (and the invaluable tax relief on them), and actual cash in plate and collecting box totalled £21,000. So even a church like St. Mary's in a comparatively affluent town costs the diocese, in theory, some £9,000 a year subsidy. And this whole exercise was a theoretical one, designed to bring home to the congregation the need for what the Diocese of Chichester's "Cheerful Giver" campaign calls "living giving"; certainly, neither the speaker nor St. Mary's PCC Treasurer Chris Davson was asking for money then and there. But the point was made very strongly by both, that if people who normally give money regularly to the church will only covenant it, then for each £10 per annum actually paid over by the donor, the PCC can recover a further £4.30 from the Inland Revenue. The form, says Mr. Dayson, is a very simple one, and is no longer irretrievably binding for seven years as it used to be, so donors need not worry about over-committing themselves if their circumstances should change; and in the meantime, their contributions are worth almost half as much again. And, it was pointed out, a covenanted donation need not be made in one lump: a regular 20p a week in the collection plate amounts to £10 a year, even allowing for the two weeks when you were on holiday; and this, if you can truthfully say you have given it, counts just the same as one cheque for £10. (The diocesan speaker raised an interesting red herring about covenanting one's contributions to coffee mornings and jumble sales, but the local management was less than enthusiastic about the possibilities of this!)
After the meeting, we asked Mr. Dayson how far visitors' contributions helped to run the parish. "The tower" he said, to our surprise, "is what keeps the church up!" We saw what he meant when he told us that the money taken by the patient people who sat at the tower foot last summer was £5,800. To this should be added a further £8,000 collected during the year by the church's boxes: a total of
(continued...)
4.
nearly £14,000. So it is easy to see why Mr. Davson won't hear a word said against the tourists; our church is in a rather special position (in every sense) as far as non-Rye visitors are concerned, and he feels they do us well. Incidentally, the church tower has till now been open to visitors for some six months each year, depending on the weather; but there are now plans to devise a little snuggery inside the door to the tower so that it can be open during the milder winter months as well without anyone freezing to death on duty. The Tower rota is run by Mrs. Tina Gray (Rye 224136) and anyone who could spare a few hours to help out here should contact her.
For those (like the Editor) not much given to map-reading, it was interesting to note from the literature handed round that whereas Rye is the last parish but one on the eastern boundary of the Diocese, Chichester is the last parish but three on the western boundary. It makes Thomas Peacocke's problems with being a long way from the Education Authority's HQ in Lewes seem quite minor in comparison!
Mr. Don Bentley of Freight Express Seacon noticed with interest in a recent shipping paper that the Cinque Ports are to adopt the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious; all the Cinque Ports Mayors are to go to Portsmouth early in April to look over their new baby, and the official ceremony will be in Hastings later the month. Our own Mayor tells us that he certainly intends to be present in Portsmouth - we shall hope for a report when he gets back.
HMS Illustrious gave Rye Sea Cadets, and a similar group from Dover, a very exciting cruise from Dover to Portsmouth last summer, and photos in the Rock Channel HQ bear witness to the affection in which they hold the ship. They have been hoping for a visit from her Captain to inspect the unit, but she has been on station in the Mediterranean for longer than originally expected; perhaps he will be able to combine the inspection with his official visit to Hastings?
Several weeks ago, we reported on the forthcoming election for the Community Health Council. If anyone wants to see exactly what happens at the meetings, the March one is reasonably accessible for Rye people - in the recreation room at St. Helen's Hospital at 2.30 on Monday, 19 March (parking, please, outside the hospital bounds). Secretary Anthony Wade says the public are very welcome to attend this and all the CHC's meetings, and the Chairman makes it a practice to give an opportunity for members of the public to raise matters from the floor about any aspect of local health services - or people may prefer to write beforehand to Mr. Wade so that a answer can be prepared (Hastings District CHC, St. Helen's Hospital, Frederick Road, Hastings).
Another local face appeared on television recently. Miss June Cox, who works in Penny Royal's upstairs room full of handicraft materials, is also a cookery and craft demonstrator for the WI, and as a result of a demonstration to the East Kent Federation was asked if she would go on the WI's national list. Of course, she said - and thought no more about it.
Imagine her surprise when, elbow-deep in dough for the Hastings WI Market (she is a member of the Three Oaks branch) she had a phone call asking if she could provide some recipes for BBC's tv-am with an eye to doing a demonstration for them! She offered four recipes; they chose two, and rang back inviting her to produce them at Lime Grove - at just two days' notice (apparently someone had failed them). So, Miss Cox, having finished her bread, started in to prepare the selected dishes (we stupidly forgot to ask her what they were!), and finally loaded the finished products plus spare sets of ingredients into her car and drove to Lime Grove. Here, in the breakfast television studio, she was photographed at various stages of the preparation and also, of course, showing off the delicious end-products. Nobody can now watch her performance, because both programmes went out last month; but she has promised to let us know in advance if she is asked to appear again.
5.
London Weekend Television have now departed from Rye for the time being, and are due back early in June. Unable to resist the lure of seeing someone floating in Rye Bay on a kitchen table, we went down to the mouth of the harbour on Thursday morning and did see just that - eventually. The Camber side of the harbour arm was packed with people, cars, assorted clutter and a large van which bumped its way nervously down the track to disgorge two identical kitchen tables. The Harbour Master's launch was one of two in attendance; there was also an unaccountable fire engine (we hoped it would make rain, but it didn't).
Kitchen table no. 1 behaved beautifully, convincingly cast up on the beach with a melancholy group standing round it. But we suspect that kitchen table no. 2, with its original outriggers having been shortened at the water's edge, proved inadequate at rehearsal, since it was brought hastily back to shore. Some frantic carpentry then produced an elaborate substructure which did, in fact, bear the weight of the two ladies dressed as Lucia and Mapp (but we think they were not really Geraldine McEwan and Prunella Scales). The morning had started off ideally, with a flat calm and a lot of mist. But these things take ages, and as time went by and the tide continued to fall it was clear that before much longer the table, in water deep enough to float it, would be almost out of range of the camera on shore, even allowing for a telescopic lens. However, it did float, with its double burden, and it was filmed; and at that point the sun came out. In the book, the table is swept down the river into a fogbound Rye Bay; we record here and now that it was filmed completely static in brilliant sunshine, and it will be interesting to see in November how that scene actually appears on the screen...
Earlier in the week, on a drizzly day in the churchyard, the cast were filmed dedicating a memorial to the theoretically drowned mariners, and here they had another problem. Georgie Pillson, played by Nigel Hawthorne, habitually dyes his hair a rich chestnut. Mr. Hawthorne obligingly did the same, of course (and looked so unlike Sir Humphrey that it was difficult to believe it was the same actor). Bareheaded out of respect, he stood beside the memorial stone dressed in a beautifully fitting morning coat - topped between shots with a polythene rain-bonnet to prevent rich chestnut streaks from running down his face! It was slightly disconcerting, too, that the actor playing the Vicar was so similar in build and appearance to our own Canon Maundrell - coming upon him in his cassock and surplice, we were for a moment completely deceived. But it has certainly been very enjoyable seeing the familiar characters in their proper settings, more or less, and afficionados will be really looking forward to November.
We mentioned last week that planning permission had been obtained for the start of the new fire station in Mill Lane. Too late, alas! Michael Bourn tells us that the whole project has now been put back not just for a year but to 1985/6. We asked if he'd like to comment, and he said no, not in a respectable newspaper. He doubts if the new station will be built during his service with the Brigade; which is hard, because they have been waiting a very long time. At a Fire Service meeting last week, a smart new appliance for Brighton was displayed, costing £150,000 - "There" said an official to Mr. Bourn, "is your new fire station..." The first stage would have cost £96,000, and made a lot of difference to the Rye firemen; but they are a cheerful lot, and are starting to redecorate the present one instead. (Back to Benson for a moment: he opened the Ferry Road fire station when he was Mayor, and there is a plaque inside to say so.)
Ten Rye firemen were among the guests at a thank-you dinner last week given by Mr. and Mrs. Giles of Playden Oasts to the people who helped them during and after the fire last summer. The hotel has now reopened, and everyone will wish them a successful summer season.
8.
Friday, 9th Arthritis and Rheumatism Council coffee morning, CC, 10.30 to 12
Civil Service Retirement Fellowship coffee morning, FEC, 10.30 Nat.Hist.Soc., "Flowers of the Roadside" (Trudy Side), FEC, 7.30 "In and around Rye" - a film show for FEC funds, FEC, 7.30 (see GAZETTE no. 72)
Saturday, 10th Freda Gardham School Spring Fair, New Road, 9 to 12 Winchelsea Floral Group jumble sale, FEC, 10.30
Sunday, 11th Attic Sale, Community Centre, 10 to 1
Monday, 12th Rye Town Council meeting, Town Hall, 6
Tuesday, 13th St. Mary's Tuesday Club (Hazel Mclnstrey on her recent visit to Australia via Singapore and Bali), 2 East Street, 7.30
Wednesday, 14th SDP coffee morning and bring-and-buy, FEC, 10.15 (GAZETTE no. 72)
Over-60s Club, Red Cross, 1.45
Rye WI, "The Lighter Side of being a Mayor" (Jo Kirkham), FEC, 7
... to Andrew Law of Pottingfield Road (and Freight Express Seacon) and Lynn Morgan of Westfield, who were married at Westfield on 18 February; they are living in Hailsham, near the school where Lynn teaches.
... to Anna Carmichael and Peter Friedrich, who were married in East Wittering recently. Anna is the daughter of the Rev. and Mrs. Peter Carmichael, formerly and still sometimes of Rye; she met her German-born husband when she was working with mentally handicapped children in India where he is a member of the Calcutta consulate staff.
... to Gary and Jacqui Batcheler of Udimore Road on the birth of their daughter Mickyla Jane (7 lbs 6 ozs) on 28 February - a sister for Kimberley and Lianne, and a third grandchild for Mr. and Mrs. Peter Batcheler of Cooper Road. Mum and baby are now back home, but Jacqui won't have to worry about the cooking. Gary is the chef at the Mermaid, who cooked lunch for the Queen Mother in 1982.
• We are glad to say that Mrs. Newman of Udimore Road has now been moved to Rye Hospital; and Mrs. Ethel Bourn is back home in Rope Walk.
• When we heard the name of Rye's new postmaster, we wondered: could Mr. Brian R. Clark be one of the local Clark family which is so built into Rye's history? Not so, he says; he is a Hastings man, and he has worked for many years at Hastings Post Office before taking over here at the beginning of December.
• Planning: this week's list has an application from a St. Leonards man to site a residential caravan adjoining 136 New Winchelsea Road (the last house).
• Alan Davies's exhibition at the Easton Rooms (till 20 March) is entitled "1984" and doubtless readers of that book will identify more of the action than we could - though the notorious rats certainly appear in several of the pictures. Mr. Davies comes from Kent and has had a number of exhibitions in London and else-where; he has shown in Rye before. He says that "the genesis of his work is usually a single wandering line, drawn or incised, that eventually builds into some sort of conclusion" - faintly reminiscent of the infant-school technique of "taking a pencil for a walk" but in fact a very much more professional approach than that!
THE RYE GAZETTE is registered as a newspaper with the Post Office, and published by Mrs. Mary Owen, 94 Udimore Road, Rye (Rye 222303). News items for inclusion are always welcome - deadline Monday afternoon, Tuesday 9 am for emergencies. The GAZETTE costs 25p weekly, and is delivered to subscribers and pick-up points on Wednesday; extra copies and back numbers can be ordered from 94 Udimore Road, while a few spares are available at Squirrels, 9-13 Cinque Ports Street, Rye.
(Copyright Mary Owen 1984)