Bohemia Village Voice

Hastings Bygones – Volume 7 (Review by Jonathan Broughton)

Hastings Bygones magazine, volume 7

Hastings Local History Groups’ seventh volume of Hastings Bygones fascinates and amazes. Each contributor brings an unique and detailed account of their specialist subject: ‘Local Brickmaking’, ‘Hastings Station’, ‘Stereoscopic Photography’, to name just a few.

‘Eliza Cook’s Journal: A Visit To Hastings’, comments on Hastings’ development over a forty-year period during the 19^th century. Eliza Cook, an author and Chartist poet, edited her ‘Journal’ for five years. Most of her contributors were anonymous, because most of them were ladies with a social position, and writing in a public magazine was frowned upon. So the unknown lady who wrote ‘Age and Youth – Modern Improvements’, comments from the refined elevation of a higher social class. Her observations on Hastings and St Leonards are tinged with acerbic comments. ‘St Leonards, a bleak but not sublime stretch of seashore’; ‘The Old Town will probably melt away insensibly’. However she was quick to praise modern innovation. On her second visit, the railway had reached theWest Marina and she is enthusiastic about the ‘wonderful state of forwardness’ of the expanding area. And she happily denounces others of her class for their apathy when faced with ‘unsophisticated sensations. With that stony, sneering, fixed look, peculiar to English people’.

Opinionated, direct, her contemporary observations are unique.

‘Hastings and Aviation’ charts the beginnings of the cadet wing of The Royal Flying Corps, when cadets were billeted in the Palace Hotel, White Rock. The amalgamation of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Service to form the Royal Air Force, when King George V came to Filsham Valley to inspect the new RAF, the purchase of land at Pebsham Farm under the Civil Aviation Act for an airfield, which opened in 1938 and closed in 1960, first-hand accounts, when flight was still a novelty and a waterplane landing east of Hastings Pier in 1914 which attracted a large crowd, bring these pioneering days to vivid life.

Each article in Hastings Bygones is illustrated with excellent photographs, both old and new. Local history often slips out of mind and out of sight. Hastings Bygones keeps it relevant and fresh.

Hastings Bygones, Volume 7. Published by Hastings Local History Group, 2011. ISSN 1465-1246