Bohemia Village Voice

The Feud

Mr Howell emitted a sharp breath through his teeth and looked around the room.
“Well brothers, it seems that I have little choice but to deal with Mr Laidlaw in the same way we dealt with Mr Simpson,” he paused, “I say this, of course, reluctantly . . .”
A murmur of assent met these words and each member raised his hand in affirmation. “Well then, it is agreed; let us ensure that Hastings’ newest and greatest attraction will forever bear the blood, sweat and tears of we, its custodians.”
A brief round of applause followed Howell’s comments and the Masons filed out of their temple on St Leonards seafront with a renewed vigour, gazing down at the beach where, God willing, Hastings’ first pier would soon be constructed.
The year was 1869 and the Freemasons, led by the local builder John Howell, had a firm grip on town affairs. But the advent of the steam train had brought competition as well as tourists to Hastings’ beaches and the old social order was under attack.
New blood, like that lawyer Mr Simpson, and now this Glaswegian builder Mr Laidlaw, were challenging the existing lines of authority and Howell and the other Freemasons were determined to stop it. Normally Mr Howell was of a civilised disposition but when that pesky London solicitor had failed to back down graciously from his bid to organise the construction of the pier, Howell had been forced to threaten him and he was prepared to do the same again.
Mr Laidlaw, however, was a very different proposition to the timid solicitor Mr Simpson. A strapping Glaswegian builder with no connections in Hastings, Mr Laidlaw was a difficult person for Mr Howell and the Masons to intimidate. What was more, Mr Laidlaw had support from key figures in the pier’s planning committee including the top regional engineer Eugenius Birch. As a result, and despite Howell’s best efforts, Laidlaw and Sons were awarded the contract to construct Hastings’ pier and Howell and his Masonic friends faced the prospect of watching the building of this icon from the sidelines.
But if Howell was anything, he was tenacious and the Laidlaws’ efforts were plagued by problems from the very beginning. First, a primeval forest was discovered under the foundations of the pier, mysteriously around the same time a major deforestation occurred at the homes of many of Howell’s Masonic friends, and this was followed by an expensive lawsuit over funding.
Then, in 1917, and under the guise of the First World War, Howell’s son tried and failed to destroy the pier by fire. This failure appeared to exhaust the Howell family’s ambition for revenge, at least for a time. But this exhaustion would not last forever.
On the night of 5th October 2010, a young boy left his family home in St Leonards. Lighter in hand, he attempted to succeed where generations of Howells had failed before him. Circumstances favoured the young Howell – the pier was now on its last legs, closed to the public since 2006 – and yet, incredibly, the boy failed.
The pier’s iron girders and columns survived. The same girders and columns which had been placed by Laidlaw and Sons over 150 years before. The same girders and columns which had faced obstruction by ‘forests’, battering by storms and lashing by flames.
Hastings’s pier might have looked finished to most people on the morning of 6th October, but to at least one family in Hastings it was, and is, very much alive. An enduring symbol of the defeat of the old social order and the resilience of Glaswegian steel.