The Address Book: Our Place in the Scheme of Things. Tim Radford

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СКАЧАТЬ property boom that followed Regency investment in Brighton during and after the Napoleonic wars, Hastings has had its share of famous residents, but many of them stayed there only fleetingly. The pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti brought the beautiful model Elizabeth Siddall to Hastings, and later married her there. Sir Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington, veteran of the eighteenth-century campaign to subdue India, was quartered there, and returned for a while during the war against Napoleon. Another soldier briefly billeted in Hastings and celebrated by a blue plaque was Sir John Moore, who died during the Peninsular War at Corunna in Spain and was immortalised by the poet Charles Wolfe in verses that children of my generation were required to learn by heart (‘Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, as his corse to the rampart we hurried …’). Byron swam off Hastings in August 1814, ate turbot there, walked the cliffs, and in a fit of pique threw an ink bottle out of a window. Keats visited Hastings, and Edward Lear painted there. A plaque commemorates Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell, who in 1707 sailed his squadron onto the rocks of the Scilly Isles, and perished with 1,400 other men. His connection with Hastings is that he ‘in about 1700 took the opportunity whilst sailing past Hastings to visit the house reputedly lived in by his mother’. Titus Oates, a turbulent figure from the seventeenth century (dismissed as an Anglican priest for drunken blasphemy, discharged as a ship’s chaplain for buggery), certainly lived in Hastings in his youth: he is now famous for producing fraudulent claims of a Popish plot against King Charles II, charges that ended with the murder and execution of a number of Catholics. Oates was later exposed as a liar, prosecuted for perjury, fined, pilloried, whipped, imprisoned for life and then a few years later released. The town’s shingle beach, its fishing fleet, its long history and its picturesque streets made it a popular resort for painters, but two of the best-known are linked not with the Old Town, but the new town, on the western side of the West Hill. Not far from my house in Hastings is one of the temporary homes of Robert Noonan, painter, signwriter and decorator. Noonan achieved his fame under the pen name of Robert Tressell, author of the socialist classic The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, in which Hastings achieved pseudonymous immortality as a place called Mugsborough. In fact, Noonan was a Dubliner who emigrated to South Africa and died in Liverpool: he lived only nine years in Hastings.

      A little further on is another house linked with a painter. The resident was to become one of the world’s most famous painted ladies. Anna McNeill Whistler, subject of a painting in the Louvre officially called Arrangement in Grey and Black, but known everywhere as Whistler’s Mother, moved to Hastings in 1875 and died there in 1881. She too came from somewhere else: North Carolina in the old American South. Members of her parents’ families kept slaves before the American Civil War; she married George Washington Whistler, an Indiana-born soldier who became an engineer, who built the first mile of passenger track in the US for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and who invented the locomotive steam whistle. She moved to Russia, because her husband served the imperial court as a consulting engineer during the construction of the first main Russian railway line, the link between Moscow and St Petersburg. These were the tracks that carried the train that brought Tolstoy’s heroine Anna Karenina to Moscow, to her fatal encounter with Vronsky, to public shame, unhappiness and finally death under the wheels of a locomotive. So Anna McNeill Whistler had already played, by marriage and location, an incidental role in the making of the cultural heritage of Europe, long before she came to England. She had five children: one of them was the painter James McNeill Whistler, and he composed her portrait in 1870, while she stayed at his London flat. Both Mrs Whistler and Tressell were conspicuous outsiders: that is, they were not Hastings people.

      But I now realise that, in my twenty-three years in Hastings, I have probably known very few people who could claim to have been born in the town, or even to have spent most of their lives there. Of the houses that border our own house and garden, more than half have changed hands not just once, but several times in those twenty-three years. Most of my immediate neigh-bours had moved to the town, as we had done, from some other place: London, Kent, rural Sussex, Surrey, the English Midlands, the West Country, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, Poland, South Africa, the United States and Australia. There is seldom a single reason for settling in one town rather than another: family connections and job opportunities play a role; so too does the cost of housing, and for most of my twenty-three years there, Hastings was conspicuously more affordable than many other south coast localities. Physical beauty must also have been part of the lure.

      Hastings began as a seaport, one of the Cinque Ports, a confederation of towns required by a Royal Charter of 1155 to maintain ships for a royal navy, should such a need arise. In return, Edward I gave Cinque Port townsmen the right to bring goods into the country from abroad without paying import duties, a right that seems to have been very unwillingly surrendered sometime in the reign of Edward III, and smuggling remained a significant source of income well into the nineteenth century. Hastings’s role as a naval and military base was relatively short-lived. What had once been a secure harbour was in the thirteenth century swept away by storms and coastal erosion, but the town survived as a home to fishermen, smugglers and traders, and it grew up around a small sheltered inlet in a narrow valley and then spread inland between two steep ridges called simply the West Hill and the East Hill, along the course of a stream called the Bourne: this is now submerged beneath a high road still called The Bourne. The town experienced the usual buffets of history, along with plague, fire, assault and property speculation followed by slump. It remained well known without ever becoming very fashionable, and much visited without ever becoming rich. In the course of the last five centuries, houses were renewed or restored, propped up and extended, built over and upstaged, in ways that would now give town planners the vapours. Old shops, warehouses and alehouses would become homes, and then turn back into businesses, or restaurants, or studios, or antique shops, and then morph back into accommodation again, while still retaining the paraphernalia of commerce about them.

      Hastings Old Town was where I first came across the phenomenon of a ‘flying freehold’, in which some long-gone property-owner might add an extra attic room or two to his house by building it over the roof of his immediate neighbour, and then leave subsequent generations of lawyers, tenants and freeholders to sort out the consequences for themselves. In one case, access to an eighteenth-century hillside cottage was only possible through the garden of the house immediately below it; in another, rows of little terraced cottages could be approached only by a footpath or a flight of steps; in a third, somebody’s little front garden and terrace sat on top of somebody else’s lock-up garage. Whole streets of properties could be quaint, picturesque, charming and barely habitable, so small were the staircases, so cramped the rooms.

      The appeal of old Hastings had a great deal to do with its long-term impoverishment, its place at the bottom of the property pecking order: old Georgian tiles and Welsh slates stayed where they had been put because owners could not afford to modernise; sash windows continued to rattle in the gales because unplasticised polyvinyl-chloride-coated double glazing was too expensive; householders had quite enough to manage, coping with dry rot, damp, death watch beetle, subsidence, defective drains and the notorious impact of salt-laden wind and rain on the property’s paintwork and timber. But for many visitors, the unexpectedness of some of the houses was its own reward; for others it was the view. Someone standing on the West Hill of Hastings could see, looking due south, a long sward of green punctuated by people walking dogs, children playing with kites, and little knots of picnickers, and beyond them the broken stones of a not quite levelled Norman castle, and beyond that the English Channel, the colour of pewter on an overcast day, a sheet of silver and azure when the Sun shone. A visitor who turned slightly to the east could see a tiny fishing harbour protected by a small breakwater, a row of broad-beamed, sturdy fishing boats hauled up each day onto the pebble beach, a collection of tall net-drying sheds protected by coatings of creosote or pitch, a fairground, a disorderly jumble of attractive roofs and house fronts on both sides of the valley, huddled together either for economy or security, with small and often steep gardens.

      Within view would also be two fine stone churches, and a handful of conspicuously handsome but not especially large properties. The townscape would be framed by woodland and terraces of allotments on the steep western hillside, but on the eastern hill, the houses would be crammed together until, just about СКАЧАТЬ