Brighton's War Memorial

 

On 30 November at 12 noon, the museum's curator of local history & archeology, Dan Robertson, will give a 45 minute talk about the Old Steine war memorial. It was built in 1922 to the design of Sir John William Simpson KBE FRIBA, the eldest son of Brighton architect Thomas Simpson. Sir John is better known locally as the designer of Roedean School, 1898, which imposingly adorns our cliff tops.

Meet in Museum Lab (first floor)

Roedean School

The Brighton & Hove boundary - then & now

c.1900. The boundary line runs along the right side of the bollards and between Brunswick Terrace on the left and Western House on the right. Photo; RPM

c. 118 years later. The bollards have been changed and possibly moved slightly into Hove. The Peace Statue was erected in 1912, Embassy Court in 1935.

The long view.
On the boundary Brighton's King's Road to the right changes to Hove's Kingsway on the left.

See also: Western House & Western House & Embassy Court

Hove College pupil remembered

Church of the Holy Cross, Middlezoy, Somerset.

In February this year Hove College Old Boy Jeremy Malies, 1974/78 traveled to the West Country and laid a wreath for fellow collegian Victor Buchan. Victor died in October 1940 when his plane disintegrated shortly after take-off from an aerodrome in Middlezoy, Somerset. The plane was a civilian craft - a Percival Vega Gull. The RAF requisitioned most of them. Buchan was 29. He was born in Steyning, married with no children.

See also: "Just an old wall . . ."

WW1 commemoration in Hove Cemetery

An avenue of 30 Fagus Sylvatica Dawyck beech trees has been planted in Hove Cemetery to commemorate the centenary of World War One. Each tree represents around 100 men from the city who gave their lives.


The Lord Lieutenant of East Sussex, Mr Peter Field, planted the final tree to complete the avenue in a ceremony also attended by the High Sheriff of East Sussex, Mrs Maureen Chowen, the Mayor of Brighton & Hove Councillor Mo Marsh, and veterans from the Brighton & Hove branch of  the Royal British Legion.

The avenue is in the south side of Hove Cemetery.

Seafront mathematics

Twenty-four of the original cast- iron columns removed from the West Pier have been transported to a foundry for professional treatment and will be re-used as part of the new landscaping scheme on the east side of the BAi360. The design and arrangement of the columns is inspired by the 'Golden Spiral' which is used to achieve balance and harmony in architecture, art and design.

The historic columns are beautiful but functional artefacts which originally supported the lavishly decorative  structure above, and new cast-iron column surrounds have been designed to suggest the relationship between functional and decorative.
 
Historic aspects are also reflected by the inclusion of two carefully chosen quotes from "Walking on Water" — a history of the West Pier by Fred Gray, and lead to the central plaque that puts Eugenius Birch, designer of the West Pier, at the very heart of the spiral.

The Golden Spiral, otherwise known as the Fibonacci spiral (after the Italian mathematician) is a curve that increases constantly in size without changing its basic shape. This is demonstrated by using squares which also increase in size using the Fibonacci scale, i.e. 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5 where each number is the sum of the 1, 1, 2, 3, 5 where each number is the sum of the preceding two.

The French architect, Le Corbusier used the Fibonacci series of numbers in his system of proportion "Le Modulor" and the system is frequently observed in nature, for example, within shells, the cochlea of the human ear, and even spiral galaxies. It can also be seen in the formation of hurricanes, the shape of certain spider webs and the arrangement of seeds in a sunflower.

See also: BA i360 landscaping

2013, the T-shirt Festival

Rather like religion really. Don't expect to understand it. - Just believe.

The Clock Tower "time ball" rises again . . .

The gilded copper time ball was originally designed to rise up the mast as every hour approached and then, on a telegraph signal from Greenwich, drop down again as the hour was struck. It was turned off soon after the tower was inaugurated in 1888. Nearby residents had complained about the noise created by the wind whistling in the longitudinal slots up which the ball rose, and to cure the problem the slots were covered in.

During the Clock Tower's extensive renovation in 2002 attempts were made to re-activate the ball mechanism, and although it worked for a while problems soon arose. It would be interesting to know details of the endeavours that have finally been crowned with success. Someone surely deserves a medal for dogged persistence!

I don't know if they've cured the noise problem but a friend who lives  directly opposite isn't complaining so far. Maybe modern flats are better insulated or we have become accustomed to a higher level of background noise in which mere wind-whistling is lost.

The Clock Tower was commissioned by a local advertiser James Willing to commemorate Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee in 1887. It was designed by a London architect John Johnson and, although it has come in for much criticism in the past, even threats of demolition, the Brighton Pevsner now describes it as "supremely confident and showy". It is Grade II listed.

The new memorial at the Chattri

 

To the left of this photo is the memorial, unveiled September 2010, which displays the names of 53 Indian soldiers who died while hospitalised in Brighton during the period 1914-15. The last Indian soldier left Brighton in 1916. The original intentions of the then Mayor of Brighton, and prime instigator of the Chattri, Sir John Otter, have therefore been finally realised, thanks to the efforts of the Commonwealth Graves Commission.

Commencing in 1951, the British Legion organised an annual pilgrimage and memorial Service at the Chattri. This continued until 1999 when  the Legion discontinued it, citing old age and declining numbers of attendees. Hearing of this, Davinder Dhillon, a local Sikh teacher, approached the Legion with a view to resurrecting the event and under his stewardship the ceremony has been held annually on the second Sunday in June since 2000. The next service is on Sunday, 12th June 2011. Attendees come from as far away as Bradford. All are welcome.

"Phiz" gets a Blue Plaque

At a small ceremony today, the City Mayor, Cr Geoff Wells, unveiled a plaque to commemorate the famous Dicken's illustrator, Hablot Knight Browne, at his last home in 8 Clarendon Villas, Hove.

This had been preceded by an opening address from Cr. Averil Older, Chair of the Commemorative Plaque Panel and followed by an account of Hablot's life and career from a local member of the Dickens Society, Andrew Carslake. Mr Carslake revealed, among many other fascinating facts, that Hablot was the son of his elder sister Kate with  Captain Nicholas Hablot of Napoleon's Imperial Guard. Hablot Knight Browne is buried in a handsome grave in Brighton's Extra-Mural Cemetery.

The ceremony was also attended by members of the City's Plaque Panel and the well-known actor Brian Capron who kindly hosted a coffee reception at his nearby home.

St. Nicholas Churchyard 100 years ago

According to the Brighton Mortiquarian public health legislation enacted to curtail cholera and other epidemic diseases forbad burial in St Nicholas from around 1854, and this was followed in the 1870's by a clearance of monuments. This clearance must presumably have been rather selective, since in the early 1900's, as this postcard (postmarked 1906) shows, the churchyard was still well crammed. 

The low stature of the trees in this picture also remind one that Brighton was originally a very treeless town (Trees in Brighton - an earlier opinion) and it was not until the later half of the 19th. century that tree-planting began in earnest. By the 1940's the tree-cover in the churchyard and along its boundary was quite extensive. Some trees and shrubs were removed during the second clearance in the 1950's leaving the churchyard more like it is today.

See also: "St Nicholas Churchyard".

Into the Labyrinth

Often visitors to older burial grounds assume that the box tomb – coffin shaped as it can be – holds the body of the deceased. Sometimes they will even pry away at loose capstones trying to peek within. The bones are not within the stones however – but far below them.

Read complete article at:- The Brighton Mortiquarian.

New Memorial at Chattri

At midday today a new war memorial, built by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, will be unveiled,  which bears the names of 53 Indian soldiers who died during the Great War.

The Chattri, completed in 1921 was largely the work of the then Mayor of Brighton, Sir John Otter, who had intended that the names of all who had been cremated there should be engraved on the monument. However with records dispersed after the Great War this was not found possible at the time and has only now been implemented thanks to the dedication of the CWGC.

The unveiling of the new memorial is being filmed as part of a new education resource being prepared by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which examines the often overlooked contribution of servicemen and women from India during the two world wars.  This education pack will be released in October 2010.