Bloody British History: Brighton E-Book

David J. Boyne

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Serie: Bloody British History
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 167

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Burned in a barrel of tar! Brighton's Historical Horrors Revealed! Brighton scandals including rioting rockers, military misdemeanours and three terrible trunk murders! Strike! Barbarity at the Battle of Lewes Road. Baptised then beheaded: Stories of Saxon savagery! Strafed by Nazi machine-gunners: The terrible true tale of the Brighton blitz! Containing more than 60 illustrations and 2,000 years of history, here is the dark and dreadful saga of Brighton. With bombs and battles, riots and rebellions, tidal waves, terrors, and some terrible true crimes, it is no wonder that the city was once dubbed 'The Queen of Slaughtering Places'!

Leseprobe

With special thanks to Chris Stone, Mark Howell, Carl Salton-Cox,

Russel Rose, Hannah Rose Tranter, Tess McNally-Watson, Tanay Sharma,

Beverley Green, Juanita Hall and Cate Ludlow for their kind assistance …

… and a fond farewell to the Brighton History Centre.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

100,000,000 BC–AD 410 From Primordial Algae to the Romans

AD 477–1066 The Kingdom of the South Saxons: Slaughter, Sanctity and Slavery

AD 1000–1086 The Norman Conquest (1066 and Before That)

AD 1264 The Battle of Lewes

AD 1554 Burnt to Death in a Barrel of Pitch

AD 1651 The Great Escape

AD 1703 Storm Warning

AD 1795–1800 Corruption in the Camps

AD 1795–1936 Gambling Mania

AD 1803–1827 Pistols at Dawn

AD 1801–1834 Stand and Deliver

AD 1817 The Battle of the Tar Tub

AD 1831 Trunk Murder Part 1

AD 1216–1860 The French

AD 1916 ‘The Day That Sussex Died’

AD 1915–1918 Death in the Desert

AD 1926 The Battle of Lewes Road

AD 1928–1935 The Fight for the South Downs

AD 1934 Trunk Murders Part 2

AD 1940 Invasion Alert!

AD 1940–1944 The Brighton Blitz

AD 1940–1945 Wartime Crime

AD 1964–1981 Mods and Rockers

Copyright

100,000,000 BC–AD 410

FROM PRIMORDIAL ALGAE TO THE ROMANS

BRIGHTON IS A shortened version of the older Saxon place name Brighthelmstone. Thus in one sense Brighton has only been around since the Saxons arrived just over 1,500 years ago. There have, however, been many previous occupants in and around Brighton and Sussex that are equally a part of its history, so by way of introduction this opening section will briefly consider the first 100 million years of life here, from primordial algae to the Romans.

The most permanent impact on Brighton and its landscape has been that left by its very first inhabitants, the microscopic green plankton that lived here 100 million years ago. Back then it wasn’t just the place where the Downs met the sea – it was the sea. The Downs are actually the remains of those first residents, compressed in their centillions on the seabed over millions of years, to form the chalk that we see today.

The Romans may have left the odd road, the walls of Pevensey Fort, and the marvellous mosaics at Fishbourne Palace as evidence of their occupation, but the scale of their legacy pales into insignificance in comparison to the majestic landscape bequeathed to us by these little green creatures. Indeed, given the use of chalk in the construction industry in recent centuries, it is even possible to suggest that the plankton have also had a far greater impact on the built environment than the Romans. Around 65 million years ago, as the dinosaurs became extinct, the plankton moved away to new waters.

Humanoids arrived considerably later, although then, as now, Sussex appears to have been a popular location. Taking advantage of the improving climate between glaciations, an ancestor of ours known as Homo heidlebergensis had moved into West Sussex some 500,000 years ago. Boxgrove man, as he has become known, lived on the beach and appears to have enjoyed an early version of the Atkins diet, rich in animal protein.

The chalk cliffs at Ovingdean. (Tanay Sharma)

Several ice ages and 300,000 years later our more recent cousins, the Neanderthals, were camping on a beach in Brighton behind the Marina. Without the benefit of the present-day Asda store they also lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, as is testified by the wealth of butchered animal remains that have been found in the same layers from 200,000 years ago. On the menu for Homo sapiens neanderthalensis were a range of delicacies, including mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, bison and whale. Whilst the hunting of the big land mammals must have taken some considerable expertise and coordination, it has to be assumed that the whale was a more opportunistic find that had been washed up on the beach.

The final influx of nomadic hunter-gatherers followed the retreating ice of the most recent glacial event, and arrived in Sussex from 8,000 BC, during the Mesolithic era, having walked across what is now the English Channel. There are about half a dozen major clusters of flint tools and objects found from this period in the county, one of which is around Brighton.

Mammoth on the menu for Neanderthal man. (Titus 332)

At about 4,300 BC the Neolithic period began, typified by a new more settled approach to Stone Age living. With the domestication of animals and the growing of crops these people could now live more permanently in the same location, leaving surplus time and energy to start constructing more comfortable dwellings and ever more ambitious monuments.

Whitehawk Camp is one of the earliest, largest and most complex examples of such a communal monument to be found in northern Europe, and dates back to around 3,500 BC. Set on a hilltop, with commanding views as far as the Isle of Wight, it consists of a series of circular ditches and banks with several entrances. Unfortunately much of it is now variously obscured by allotments, the pulling up section of Brighton racecourse, and perhaps most thoughtlessly by part of a late twentieth-century housing estate. The discovery of a hearth containing the fragments of skulls belonging to five young people, aged between 5 and 20, suggests there may have been human sacrifices, or even cannibalism, on the site.

With the arrival of the Bronze Age in the 3rd millennium BC, settlements sprouted up all over the area, particularly on the Downs. Evidence of such dwellings has been found at Mile Oak, West Blatchington, Patcham, Plumpton Plain, Coldean Lane and Varley Halls.

PILTDOWN MAN

Forgery is a common part of living in the present day. From dodgy £20 notes and equine beef-burgers to fake designer jeans, we are surrounded by fraudulent misrepresentation. None of these examples, however, can match the longevity and influence of the greatest fake in the history of Sussex – the Piltdown Man.

On his discovery by Charles Dawson in 1912, he was claimed to be the missing link between apes and men, dating back several million years. Dawson had taken a few skull fragments to the Geological Society, and as a result was accompanied by a British Museum scientist to the Piltdown Pit for further excavations. On this survey more parts, including a jawbone, were found, but it seemed only Dawson had his eye in and he made all of the finds.

There was a mixed response from the scientific world, with British scholars generally being more accepting than those from America or Europe. The British scientists had wanted Piltdown Man to be real, so it was much easier to fool them. As a result of the importance given to the ‘discovery’, other genuine finds were ignored for nearly half a century. The hoax went on until 1953, when the skull was identified as being from a medieval-period human, the jaw from an orang-utan that had lived 500 years previously in Sumatra, with the teeth belonging to a fossilised chimp. The bones had been dyed and the teeth filed.

This was not the first time that Dawson had been creative with the construction of ancient history. He had in his collection a range of fake articles far more numerous than any pre-Christmas stall on Western Road could muster. Chinese vases, Roman statues, and the Brighton ‘Toad in the Hole’, a toad that had apparently been encased in a flint nodule, were all part of his repertoire. They were all about as real as a £20 Rolex.

Having examined Dawson’s life and collections, author and archaeologist Miles Russell told the BBC that ‘Piltdown was not a one-off hoax, more the culmination of a life’s work’.

What have become known as Iron Age hill forts dominate the Downs around Brighton and were originally thought to be purely defensive in nature. Devil’s Dyke, Thunderbarrow Hill, Ditchling Beacon and Hollingbury Hill provide examples of such structures. In recent years both their age and their purpose have come increasingly into question. Many of these features were already in use during the later Bronze Age period and it has been suggested that they may also have served as administrative and residential centres for the Iron Age aristocracy.

The progress from stone to bronze and then iron-based cultures was probably the result of the same longstanding inhabitants adapting to novel technologies, in much the same way that we have adopted mobile phones and computers. In the first century BC a new wave of Celtic peoples, the Belgae, started arriving on the shores of England, driven along in front of the expanding Roman Empire.

Hollingbury Iron Age Hill Fort – the golf course came later. (Reproduced with the kind permission of the Royal Pavilion and Museums: Brighton and Hove)

The Atrebates took up residence in Sussex, and their kingdom stretched beyond the current county borders into both Kent and Hampshire. Their domain was far larger than that of the British chieftains who had ruled from the hilltops, and the centre of administration moved to an urban settlement known as an oppidum, which for the Atrebates was probably on the coastal plain near Chichester. They also introduced coins as means of exchange, although it is unclear as to whether this welcome innovation was accompanied by an embryonic banking industry.

Julius Caesar avoided Sussex when he raided Britain in 55 and 54 BC, although it is believed that he was on good terms with Commius, the King of the Atrebates, at that time. They would later fall out when Commius supported the rebellion of Vercingetorix in Gaul, and he was fortunate in evading the Roman Army and escaping back to Sussex. This was a temporary upset however, and in the years before the full Roman invasion of Britain in AD 43, a number of his descendants would seek and receive the sanctuary of the Emperor in Rome, at times of internecine strife back home.

The Romans brought a long period of stability to the region, leaving a rich inheritance in West Sussex where the city of Chichester was the largest settlement, connected to London by Stane Street. To the east lay a more agricultural hinterland, although villas from the period have been found near Preston Park in Brighton and at Southwick, whilst Stanmer Park was home to a Roman temple.

The Pax Romana started to break down after AD 270, and the villa at Preston Park was burned down around this time. The great ‘Barbarian conspiracy’ of AD 367, when the province was invaded by Picts, Scots, Attacotti, Franks and Saxons, aided and abetted by an assortment of slaves, deserters and discontents from within, was the writing on the wall for Roman Britain. Although order was eventually restored, within a few years the Empire contracted back to the Continent, and the time of the Saxons began.

AD 477–1066

THE KINGDOM OF THE SOUTH SAXONS

Slaughter, Sanctity and Slavery

DURING THE THIRD and fourth centuries pirates from the north of Europe had started raiding the British coastline, leading to the strengthening of defences along what was called the Saxon Shore, which stretched from the Wash to the west country. Even before the official Roman withdrawal from Britain in AD 410, Germanic troops were being used both in the Roman Legions and as mercenaries in the defence of the province.

By the middle of the fifth century these mercenaries, perhaps dissatisfied with the going rate for their services, and encouraged both by the weakness of the Britons and the wealth of their lands, had started to invite over their friends and families. In around AD 455, Hengist and Horsta, former mercenaries employed by Vortigern, the leader of the Britons, arrived from Jutland to establish a kingdom in Kent.

In 477 the Saxons wanted a piece of the action, and Aelle landed with three ships on the coast of Sussex, somewhere near Selsey Bill. Here, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘they slew many of the Welsh’, before driving the survivors, in an early version of ethnic cleansing, into the then wild and densely forested Weald.

As Aelle moved slowly eastwards across the modern county, in 485 he ran into a counter-attack from the obstinate Britons (or Welsh, as the Chronicle also referred to them, reflecting the geographical location that they had been driven into by the Anglo-Saxons at the time of writing) on the banks of a river known as Mearcredsburn. Whilst there is still some doubt as to the actual location of this battle, local folklore has it taking place on Slonk Hill to the north-east of Shoreham.

This was but a temporary setback for Aelle and his men, and by 491 they were besieging the last outpost of the Britons in coastal Sussex, at the old Roman fort of Pevensey. In due course the isolated defenders were overrun, and according to the Chronicle, Aelle proceeded to ‘slew all that were therein; nor was one Briten left there afterwards’.

For the next two centuries the South Saxons carried on quite happily in their pagan ways, their isolation largely allowing them to avoid the internecine wars between the larger, and now largely Christian, kingdoms of Wessex, East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria. Their near neighbours in Kent had been the first to accept this second Roman incursion, although the still dense forests of the Weald provided an impenetrable barrier to the spread of Catholicism into the still pagan Sussex. Both peace and paganism were to be rudely displaced in the latter part of the seventh century, with St Wilfrid of Ripon playing a leading role.

Appropriately enough he had first come across the pagan South Saxons in the year 666. He was returning from a visit to the Continent when his ship was blown off course and beached on the coast of Sussex. The locals were less than welcoming and attacked the stranded party, leading to a battle in which Wilfred and his retinue had to fight for their lives. During this struggle the South Saxon host was repelled with many dead, including their high priest, whilst Wilfred successfully escaped on the incoming tide.

Harold II is crowned, the last King of the Saxons. (Myrabella)

By the time he returned in 680, the Sussex shore was a little more welcoming. The new King Aethelwalh had married a Christian wife, and had himself converted a few years previously. Furthermore, Wilfrid’s arrival coincided with the end of a severe drought that the pagan gods had been unable to resolve. So dreadful were the conditions that, according to Bede, groups of up to fifty starving people would jump from the cliffs to their deaths, to escape their desperate circumstances.

Such dire conditions left the inhabitants in a much more receptive frame of mind to this new god who brought the rains with him. Wilfrid also introduced new methods of fishing that not only alleviated the famine and aided in the conversion, but also pioneered the development of the industry upon which the settlement at Brighthelmstone would come to be based for the next 1,000 years.

The return to a time of plenty soon attracted the attentions of a West Saxon noble, Caedwalla, who was in exile in the Weald. His forces ravaged Sussex, killing King Aethelwalh, before being repulsed. Whilst in Sussex he had met Wilfrid, and was so impressed that he too converted to the new religion. Having become King of Wessex, Caedwalla returned with a vengeance, and put the South Saxons into a state of slavery.

In 686 he also attacked the last remaining heathen outpost, on the Isle of Wight, slaughtering or enslaving the whole population from King Aruald downwards. In keeping with Caedwalla’s new faith, Aruald’s two sons were duly baptised, before being duly executed. As part of the resettlement of the island, Wilfrid was awarded 300 hides of land and a share of the booty, although to his credit he did release several hundred slaves who had been awarded to him.

SLAVERY

Slavery was endemic during this period, frequently the by-product of an economy in which warfare and raiding played a large part. One such victim was a young girl of pagan background, and thus probably from Sussex, named Balthildis. In 641 she was sold for a low price to an official at the Merovingian court in Francia, where she converted to Christianity and attracted the attentions of Clovis II. She married him and became Queen of the Frankish kingdom of Neustria, and later assisted her sons Clothar and Childeric in their accession to the thrones of Neustria and Austrasia.

Harold II dies at the Battle of Hastings. (Myrabella)

Despite her elevated status she never forgot her origins, and was an early campaigner against slavery, using her power to pass laws against enslavement and the associated export trade. As well as being renowned for her generosity to the poor, she also used her new wealth to buy many of her kin out of bondage. Despite such efforts slavery would continue to be a large factor in the medieval economy, and contributed in no small part to the wealth of a later Saxon family of Sussex origins, the Godwines.

THERE’S A SAXON IN MY KITCHEN

There was a shock in store for the builders renovating the kitchen of a house on Exeter Street a few years ago. As they were preparing to lay a new floor and digging down to the foundations, they uncovered a skeleton. Concerned that this might be a Brookside-style scenario, the police were called in. However, a team from the coroner’s office rapidly concluded that it was not a recent burial.

Archaeologists examined the bones and concluded that they belonged to a Saxon woman from around AD 800, and that it was just one of many similar burials found in that area. The remains were removed to a local museum and the builders were soon renovating the kitchen on a brand new floor.

AD 1000–1086

THE NORMAN CONQUEST

(1066 and Before That)

THE YEAR 1066 is probably the best known and yet the least understood in English history, with William the Conqueror’s close-fought victory at the Battle of Hastings commonly seen as marking the end of the Anglo-Saxon era and its replacement with Norman rule. Such neat dividing lines rarely bear close scrutiny, and this particular generalisation is no exception, as a brief examination of the monarchy in the preceding sixty-six years of the eleventh century will illustrate.

William’s coronation on Christmas Day, 1066 made him the tenth King of England since the millennium. Until Edward the Confessor’s death earlier that year, there had been eight kings, four of whom were Anglo-Saxon and four who were the leaders of the Vikings, who had resumed their bloody raids in the latter part of the tenth century.

As the crown switched backwards and forwards from Anglo-Saxon to Viking to Anglo-Saxon several times, some continuity was provided by Emma of Normandy. She was the daughter of Richard the Fearless, Duke of Normandy. Emma was the wife of two kings (Aethelred the Unready and Cnut), stepmother to two more (Edmund Ironside and Harold Harefoot), and also the birth mother of King Harthacnut and Edward the Confessor.

Perhaps unsurprisingly in this complex familial line, she was also given the English name of Aelfgifu, which was the same as that of the two different mothers of her royal stepsons. They were the first wives of Aethelred and Cnut, although helpfully one was from York and the other from Northampton. To go full circle in this complex web of Viking and Anglo Saxon dynastic relations, Emma/Aelfgifu was also the great aunt of William the Conqueror.

Despite the marriage of his sister Edith to Edward the Confessor, the only king who didn’t have a direct place within this convoluted family tree was Harold Godwineson, although he was reputed to have been betrothed to William’s daughter Adeliza whilst in Normandy. Harold’s Danish mother Gytha Thorksidda had also been the sister-in-law of Cnut.