Bohemia Village Voice

By Julian Munby

On a recent visit to my grand-child in Bohemia, I was delighted to find Heather Grief’s newly published history of Bohemia Farm to Summerfields Estate, an excellent account of this most interesting place with some fascinating maps.  But there are almost too many coincidences for comfort.  I live near to Summerfields in Oxford (where the School still lives on); while my great-great grandfather lived just across the road inBohemia, and his father bought land from a Scrivens (possibly an ancestor of my Strivens grand-child?).  What the history of Bohemia has now shown me (in reproducing the 1835 map of the new turnpike road) is that my mother’s ancestor, Joseph Dicks, was one of the first people to live in ‘upper’ Bohemia, in the settlement nucleus around Tower Road, as from 1834 he owned and lived in premises on the east side of Bohemia Road (plot 65 on the 1835 map), now Nos. 81-87.

Joseph Dicks

Joseph Dicks was a cooper from Crowhurst, born around 1801 and married to Philly from Battle, with seven children in the 1851 Census.  The chance survival of the title deeds of Nos 81 and 83 Bohemia Road (now a dvd and babywear store) in the East Sussex Record Office allows something more of his story to be told.  He bought 30 perches of land in 1834 from George Scrivens at Spittleman Down (as this end of Bohemia Road was then called because of the old hospital nearby) on which he had already built a house.  By 1873 he had built three more houses and although the street numbers have changed more than once, the deeds (which come down to 1959) allow the address to be identified as Nos 81-87 Bohemia Road (including the Little Shop and Joe Joes).  The Turnpike map shows that in 1835 there were very few houses nearby, so Scrivens and Dicks can perhaps be seen as the original Spittledown pioneers promoting the Bohemia settlement.

Bohemia Place

Joseph’s will was proved in 1875, by which time his eldest son Abraham was a lawyer in Australia, and George was a wheelwright in Bexhill.  Edmund Dicks (my great-great grandfather) was a carpenter who we find in the 1871 Census living in Middle Street (now Spring Street) with his wife Mary Ann and five children.  Then an (as yet unknown) tragedy struck, and by 1881 he was dead, and his widow was living in part of a house at 58 Bohemia Place with five children (two left, one possibly died, and also one more child), and by 1891 she had moved again to 88 Bohemia Place, still with five children (one left, one possibly died and yet one more child that she must have been carrying in 1881).  How did she cope?  Was she was living over a shop, or in a whole house?  By 1881 her two eldest boys Joseph and Henry Abraham (my great grandfather) were coach-painters and back living at home, which must have helped.

Upper Bohemia

The Census returns (and to some extent the Hastings Directories) show the great variety and movement of a shifting population of workers and artisans living in often crowded conditions in Bohemia – no doubt a far cry from the apparent respectability of St Leonards-on-Sea, but it must have been a lively and interesting place in which to grow up.  One wonders if one of the original attractions of upper Bohemia was the distance from the town centres, perhaps benefitting from less interference by Hastings Corporation and the established church?

Joseph Dicks

If I read the maps right, Tower Road is a realignment of the old road from Crowhurst (now Springfield Road) as it joined the London Road into Hastings (see Yeakell and Gardner’s large-scale map of 1778), and it must have been straightened out as the various new roads were made running down to St Leonards.  If Joseph Dicks is a representative of the fast-growing rural population spilling out into towns to find work, it is interesting that he went as far as the end of the road and not much further, but was able to raise his family by raising mortgages and building on a small plot of land and then presumably letting the houses (which were only sold after his death).  With their gambrel roofs and prominent dividing gable walls they can be seen on the left of the old photograph of Bohemia Road with the ‘Special’ tram going by, and although they appear the same, a peep behind shows that they were built in stages.

Henry Dicks

It was the next Dicks generation that went further, to Bexhill and Australia, while as carpenters, wheelwrights, and coach painters they followed a continuing tradition derived from Joseph’s coopering in Crowhurst.  My grandfather Henry Dicks was in part a woodworker when he started work in Maidstone before the Great War, while his brother Albert moved from the carriage to the motor trade when he went to the USA to work on car rather than coach bodies in Springfield, Masachusetts.

My next task is to trace all the births, marriages and deaths, and find out what happened to the daughters.  I am not even sure if they were chapel or church folk – quite apart from the very special Hastings nightmare of confused and missing parish boundaries and records!  Any news of Dicks offspring gratefully received, but forget family history; anyone working on the history of the community in Bohemia will find a rich field in this unusual and fascinating place.

J.T. Munby BA FSA, Oxford Archaeology, Janus House, Osney Mead, Oxford OX2 0ES. [received December 2010]