Vanessa Redgrave - Brighton Festival Guest Director 2012

WHCA AGM

The Annual General Meeting of the West Hill Community Association, at which the accounts will be adopted and the officers and committee elected, will be held on Tuesday 29 May 2012 at the West Hill Hall. Nominations for the committee must be seconded and sent with the written consent of the nominee to the Hall. The business of the meeting will be followed by our perennial favourite, the Quiz. Refreshments and bonhomie free. All welcome.

By May, the 46th annual Brighton Festival will be in full swing. Vanessa Redgrave brings her passion for acting, freedom and human rights to the festival as Guest Director. Many of her interests are explored in the wide-ranging programme across music, theatre, dance, film, literature from acting to politics, to memory and nostalgia, to homeland and story-telling, to humanitarian concerns and economic and social issues.

In 2011 Brighton Festival took the art world by surprise appointing Burmese democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi as Guest Director. A programme was built around her struggle for freedom of speech, democracy and giving a voice to the powerless. Vanessa Redgrave continues this purpose and returns to Brighton to take part in, and contribute to, the production of this ‘glorious festival’.

20mph Zones have started to appear in Brighton and are spreading quickly. Whether or not they will be effective remains to be seen.

Please contact me with any queries and problems, email theppp@gmx.com or phone 07768 002328 between 11am and 6pm.

Steve Percy, (chairman) PPP

Fred was the son of George Sawyer who, according to the 1851 census, was a Timber Merchant and had a yard in Upper North Street. At the 1871 census, George was still a Timber Merchant and employed 10 men. Fred had 3 brothers, Walter, Frank, who became a Professor of Music in Leipzig, and Charles, who died in 1884 at the age of 21. Fred was educated at the Brighton Grammar School, which was then located in Buckingham Road before being moved to the Dyke Road/Old Shoreham Road site. On leaving he was articled with the firm of Brighton solicitors, Messers David Black, Freeman, and Freeman Gell, where he remained (for some time as managing clerk) until 1888, when he started a practice of his own in Ship Street.

Although trained as a lawyer, his investigations and comment on the history and traditions of Sussex is where his forgotten work lies. Fred contributed approx 220 questions, answers and comments to Notes and Queries, the first being in 1877 when he answered a question about John Drury, the vicar of Brighton in 1575. Fred contributed over 20 articles to the Sussex Archaeological Collections; again this was a mixture of historical and folkloric articles including such diverse titles as Sussex Folk Lore and Customs Connected with the Seasons, and St Wilfred’s Life in Sussex and the Introduction of Christianity. Papers he read before the Brighton Natural History Society included The Erosion of the Sussex Coast and Earthquakes in Sussex.

In the 1800s it was generally agreed that, when escaping to France in October 1651, Charles II had stayed in the King’s Head Inn, in West Street. Fred’s researches dismissed this association as he proved the inn had not come into existence until about 1750. Fred proved as conclusively as possible that Charles had stayed at The George Inn in Middle Street, before being ferried across the channel by Nicholas Tattersell. Writing in the Sussex Agricultural Express in January 1883, Fred described the nineteenth century custom of ‘the bushel’. On New Year’s Day, a bushel measure of ale was provided by the landlord of the Red Lion Inn at Shoreham, and ladled out into pint glasses by a ‘baler’. I’m sure the twenty-first century hostelries could equal this!

In 1886 Fred married his cousin Mary Ann Weston, and moved the 100 metres or so along Buckingham Place towards Seven Dials to number 31, where in 1889 their son George Frederick was born. On Sunday morning, 8 June 1891 following a bout of Influenza and asthma, Fred died. He was only 39.

Their son George died in 1911, and Mary Ann lived until May 1917, when she died from a heart attack in a taxi when returning home from Queen’s Road. One area of Fred’s work is kept alive today. In January 1884, Fred published the text of the Steyning Tipteerers’ [Mummers’] Play in the Folk-Lore Journal. Each year on Boxing Day, the Chanctonbury Ring Morris Men perform the play.

Chanctonbury Ring Morris Men performing the Steyning Tipteers Play

Sean Goddard (email: s.p.goddard@sussex.ac.uk)
I would like to acknowledge the help of Louise Gaskins, of Kingsland, Georgia, USA who is a descendant of Fred by marriage.

Wild Bill who? The name Wild Bill Davison probably means nothing to most readers of The Whistler. If asked to guess they would probably suggest he might be a legendary figure from the Wild West or a friend of the Lone Ranger. Bill [1906-1989] was, in fact, a very great jazz cornet player.

I first fell in love with Bill’s style of cornet playing when I was a student in the 1950s. I was playing the trumpet in a university jazz band. Although I could not hope to achieve the fierce drive and rhythmic confidence of his playing, I did learn a lot from listening to his recordings. In 1957 he came to London and I learned even more from seeing him on stage. Later in life I heard him in person many times and eventually got to meet him.

Wild Bill Davison

Talking to Bill that evening my mind went back to the time when I first came across his name in a jazz magazine. “Wild Bill Davison” – I imagined a huge man, built like a lumberjack, forearms bulging like Popeye’s, blowing ferociously into a very large trumpet. Bill, of course, was barely of average height, a neat dapper man, with quite small feet. His instrument was the cornet, – neat, small, shiny, a natural extension of himself. Although he could certainly play loudly, Bill always varied his volume from phrase to phrase very effectively. His power came from a strong rhythmic drive, never from relentless blasting. The peak of Bill’s career came in the 1950s. For several years he was part of the house band at Eddie Condon’s club in New York. He was in his prime. With Cutty Cutshall on trombone and Edmond Hall on clarinet he formed one of the finest front line combinations ever to play in the traditional jazz style. Bill’s playing was fundamental to this success. Always varying the melody to his own style, never rigidly tied to the beat, he led with drive and imagination. He told me several times how much he owed to his relationship with the great negro clarinettist Edmond Hall; they inspired each other with fire and excitement. In fact, Bill broke the colour bar at Condon’s club by insisting that Hall should join the house band.

One strong memory of Bill remains with me. One night in the 1970s, at the Pizza Express in Soho, I was listening to him playing with a British band. I half closed my eyes. Suddenly I saw a rather brash young man, his hair slicked straight back, playing the cornet in a very “hot”, aggressive style, pushing down the valves with vigorous, emphatic gestures, as if determined to give extra feeling to every note that he played. He could not have been more than 18 or 20 years of age. Opening my eyes it dawned on me that over all the wearisome, cynical years of clubs and bars Bill had never lost a certain youthful enthusiasm and excitement; it still fired every note that he played. Six months before he died I saw him for the last time. While he was playing I half closed my eyes again. The young man was still there, still playing with the same style and passion.

Peter Batten

Dickens was a regular visitor to Brighton, first visiting in 1836 while he was writing Oliver Twist. Four years later, he returned for a week and wrote chapters of Barnaby Rudge during his stay. In May 1847, Dickens and his wife Catherine stayed at the Bedford Hotel, while she recuperated from an illness, and he continued writing Dombey and Son. The book is partly set in Brighton, and Chichester House at 1 Chichester Terrace, is said to have been the house described in the novel as ‘Dr Blimber’s Academy for Young Gentlemen’, attended by Paul Dombey Jr.

When writing, Dickens worked at a desk at the window, in absolute silence and, using a goose-quill pen, wrote 2,000 words a day. He finished the book in March 1848 in Brighton, and he and his family stayed on for several weeks. During their stay, Dickens’s illustrator, ‘Phiz’ (Hablot Browne) brought him his sketch for the book’s frontispiece. For this stay, the family had taken lodgings at 60 West Street but, according to one biographer, ‘he had not been in his rooms many days when a strange incident happened ­ both the landlord and the landlord’s daughter went raving mad! This awkward predicament constraining the lodgers to seek refuge at the Bedford Hotel’. In September 2004, three letters written by Dickens to Mr Ellis, the manager of the Bedford Hotel, were sold at auction for £2,400 by Gorringes in Lewes. ‘I had a most amusing conversation with one friend, that Captain Collins’, wrote Dickens on June 8, 1867. ‘His chatter to the trippers was very witty…I feel much better for my short stay here, also the characters one meets at these seaside places.’ After describing his boat trip on the Skylark, he observed ‘it was a lark, the sea was rather choppy’.

On March 7 1850, Dickens came to Brighton for a fortnight, to work on David Copperfield, staying at private lodgings kept by William Bennett, at 148 King’s Road until March 20. In March 1853, he stayed at 1 Junction Parade, with the intention of working on Bleak House. However, as he told his friend Angela Burdett Coutts, the weather was ‘wonderfully propitious for walking, but hardly so for authorship as I have not yet made what can be called a beginning’. He also later complained that, during this stay, he ‘was brayed and brassily blasted into imbecility of mind, by German bands’.

In 1857, Dickens stayed in Brighton for a few days’ rest with his friend Wilkie Collins, whose play The Frozen Deep he had helped edit and had even performed in. Brighton was on the itinerary of several of Dickens’s professional national reading tours: in 1858, he began a provincial tour in Clifton on August 2 and closed in Brighton on 13 November. Another lengthy reading tour of England and Scotland ended here again, in November 1859. In 1861, he read from David Copperfield and Nicholas Nickleby at the Town Hall on November 6 and 7, then from Copperfield at the Royal Pavilion on November 9. He also gave an ‘unofficial’ reading to guests at the Royal York Hotel; a large portrait and several prints featuring Dickens’ characters now adorn the hotel’s lounge.

In 1868, he gave four readings at the Grand Concert Hall, West Street (which later became Sherry’s Dance Hall) as part of his (presciently-titled) 100-date ‘Farewell Tour’. On October 19 and 22, he read from David Copperfield and on November 2 and 7, he read from Nicholas Nickleby and A Christmas Carol. At the readings, he had his customary maroon table (now in the Dickens Museum, London), carpet and screen. In 1951, actor and playwright Emlyn Williams brought a show to the Theatre Royal, in which he recreated some of Dickens’s readings, even using the same sort of table and props.
Rose Collis

Reproduced with the kind permission of the author, Rose Collis

More recently, Simon Callow has taken up the mantle of ‘being’ Dickens in his show, Dr Marigold & Mr Chops, which played at the Theatre Royal in 2011. [Ed]

Six years ago my daughter Adele and her family left her old house, Rowan Cottage near Brighton Station, and moved to Christchurch, New Zealand – and she has just spent a fearful year following the massive earthquake that destroyed the city centre and the thousands of ‘aftershocks’ that occur on a daily basis, several times most days, in the 4s and 5s on the Richter scale. Recently, the Christchurch inhabitants celebrated the first anniversary of the initial quake and the whole city has been remembering the event; the 185 who died and the massive damage done to most people’s homes.

We received a letter from Adele, where she scribbled a few notes, telling us her ‘instinctive’ opinion as to how Our Brighton would have been affected if we’d been the victims rather than the New Zealanders – and although her comments were essentially a few paragraphs in a longer, personal message (she had no idea of writing an article!), it occurred to me that her four or five paragraphs, comparing the two cities, would read quite well as a very short article considering the aftermath of that event. That she was born and lived in Brighton all her life before she emigrated, and still very much sees herself as a ‘Brightonian’, oozes from her comments – even though she has only just been accepted as a New Zealand citizen!

If Christchurch had been Brighton & Hove

The central ‘red zone’, the cordoned off heart of the city, I imagine, would run from Western Road (say Waitrose area) to Churchill Square, including the Clock Tower, the whole of North Street down to the Royal Pavilion, the Museums and the swimming pool. The Lanes and trendy shopping streets down from Brighton station would all be destroyed; Queen’s Road a ‘no go’ area. The Stein area would now be a bulldozed open space – this expanse of flat land would stretch up through London Road and the Level to Preston Park. St James Street would be half OK with empty gaps, like pulled teeth, but there would now be creative entertainment happening in all the gaps!

However, Christchurch is not just a city with a broken heart, it is also one with deserted and silted eastern suburbs (liquefaction) and precarious hillsides. So how would these fit into my home town? Perhaps Moulsecoomb and surrounds, stretching to Falmer, would now be deserted, together with large parts of Patcham. In Elm Grove and Five Ways many houses would be severely damaged and, as a result, no longer lived in. These areas would be ‘zoned white’ – as the hill itself would be considered potentially unstable.

Have I made it too big or not big enough, I really couldn’t tell. Although the largest city and capital of the South Island, the population of Christchurch is probably about 300,000 (while Brighton & Hove’s is circa 400,000), expanse comparison is not easy. For size comparison, the central cordoned off ‘red zone’ of Christchurch, which is just the city centre, makes a rectangle of size 1.5 km x 2.5 km. But this is just the cordoned bit – the damaged and destroyed buildings stretch far beyond those fences. The suburbs of Bexley, Darlington, Avonside, Parklands, and Shirley now contain huge swathes of silted and saturated land; many of these areas have been, to some degree, written off. The hill suburbs of Huntsbury Heathcote, Redcliffs, Mt Pleasant and St Andrews have many white zone areas – and I haven’t even begun to think what part of Brighton might represent Lytelton or Sumner.

Adele Potter

Carol Ann Duffy

There are always pre-budget rumours, of loopholes to be closed, reliefs to be removed, and tax advantages to be, er, ‘disadvantaged’. These regular visitors include: the removal of higher-rate tax relief on pension contributions, the cessation of the ability to take 5% tax-deferred income from Life Assurance Investment Bonds, and the introduction of a lifetime cap on ISA funds, to name but three. There is also plenty of discussion, regarding the mooted mansion tax, but this is unlikely to bother most of us, even if it does materialise. Inevitably, whatever has been handed out to us, we will just have to live with it!

As for the changes due on 6 April, the part of pensions known as the ‘Protected Rights’ element disappears, and as a result there will no longer be a requirement to have mandatory spouses pension on annuity payments from them. If you are looking to take an annuity from a pension that was derived from contracting out of the State Earnings Related Pension Scheme, or from certain occupational pensions, then if your circumstances are right, you might be able to access better rates, on a single life basis. For those lucky enough to have large pension pots, or are likely to have, the lifetime allowance for pension holdings reduces to £1.5m. There is a strong need for advice, as there are steps that must be taken, quickly, in order to protect your future funds, if they are over the allowance, or there is a likelihood of being so at retirement. The small fund commutation (also known as ‘triviality’) limit remains at £18,000 and does not reduce down in line with the lifetime allowance, and there will be new rules regarding occupational pension funds below £2,000 in value.

Casting our minds forward to October, we will see the start of compulsory Auto Enrolment in a qualifying pension arrangement for some employees. Employers ought to note that they should take advice, to ensure they comply with the regulations, when the time comes for their business to fall into the net. There will be strict penalties for non-compliance. By 21 December, the EU Gender Directive will be in force, and it is anticipated that annuity rates will worsen for males, as expected, but also will worsen, rather than getting better, for females. This directive will also affect any insurance that is currently rated by gender, and may necessitate your reviewing all such insurances, to make sure you are getting the best rates. It may be a “buy now while stocks last” scenario for those thinking of arranging such cover. All personal protection insurances are expected to increase to some degree.

On that cheery note, I’ll bid you all farewell, until the balmy days of May.

David Foot

Of course, since David wrote that piece pre-Budget, we now know what happened…

"Well, that's a load off my mind.
Osborne's cutting the 50p tax rate."

A true allergy will produce a specific chemical response in the body, releasing antibodies and histamines that are responsible for many allergy symptoms, from hives and swelling to vomiting and wheezing. These are all understandable reactions by the body to a threat to try and get it out of the body as quickly as possible. An extreme allergic response, known as anaphylaxis, brings on these symptoms rapidly, accompanied by a sudden drop in blood pressure. As with intolerances, much can be done to take you further back from the edge of the cliff. Interestingly, it has been noted that mast cells will only release histamine when they are dehydrated.

Hydration isn’t just about drinking more water, however, but about ensuring that water is flowing dynamically around the body, nourishing and cleansing each cell. There is also specific nutritional support that you can put in for your adrenals, both in terms of how and what you eat, and particular nutrients such as vitamins C, B5 and B6.

To find out more about a natural approach to allergies and intolerances, come to my workshop at the Dragonfly Clinic on 15 May 2012 at 8–10pm (£10). Booking is essential: call 01273 311711. www.dragonflyclinic.com

Kirsten Chick
www.connectwithnutrition.co.uk