Essex Past: The Newsletter of the VCH in Essex
No. 2 Autumn 2003
When the first issue of this Essex VCH newsletter appeared last spring, we received a gratifying amount of praise and really very little in the way of criticism. On the latter front, several of you wondered whether we could possibly collect enough material to fill two newsletters each year. But we find we have exactly the opposite problem: we could fill an issue twice as long, largely thanks to the willingness of the editorial team to provide excellent contributions.
This second newsletter is sent to you together with the notice of our Annual General Meeting. The timing is deliberate. Although the package inevitably includes such formalities as an agenda, minutes and a reply form, we felt that the annual reports from both Chairman and Editor deserved a more permanent home. So instead of those numerous sheets of paper, all too easy to mislay, their reports are included in the newsletter, as are brief details of the Appeal's fundraising results for the year.
It is clear from the reactions of our readers that the altogether fascinating glimpses of the fundamental work of research — on the early fishing industry, manor houses in the Sokens and Clacton in World War II — were by far the best liked sections of Essex Past no.1 — and Chris Thornton and Shirley Durgan have provided more gems in this issue.
The Chairman's report and the back-page news between them give a fair picture of both problems and potential solutions in the years ahead. However difficult things may become, we think you will agree that these pages are illuminated by what our new County Editor calls his ‘cautious optimism'.
NEWSLETTER EDITOR
Report from the Appeal's Chairman
A chairman's annual report is usually one of optimism, looking to the future with a sense of well being, profits are up, and the shareholders ought to be pleased that their investment is secure. I wish I could be that optimistic. True, donations continue to come in, and some are most generous for which I am very grateful. True, we are able to give to the University of Essex ten thousand pounds each year to help support the editorial staff. True, the County Council continues to make a substantial grant towards the work of the Victoria County History of Essex and support from the central committee of the VCH has grant-aided the Clacton project for which there is a separate report.
There is a dark side that will gradually emerge over the next eighteen months. Just as the London Boroughs formerly in Essex found it increasingly difficult to support our work in the light of smaller government funding, so our main grant giver, Essex County Council, has intimated that when the current concordat is due for renewal in 2005 it will have to consider seriously its continuing support. The loss of this major grant would have a disastrous effect on our work, and the Essex Advisory Board would have to consider whether continuing to research and write the history of this great county is sustainable. We are not quite at that stage, and discussions are being held between all the interested parties. You will of course be kept up to date on how matters progress, either through future newsletters or on our website.
By the time you read this, Janet Cooper will have enjoyed her first weeks of retirement. At our formal farewell to Janet, the Appeal Fund committee presented her with an engraved crystal box, reflecting her connection with the histories of the counties of Oxford and then Essex, and with the choir of her local church at Hatfield Peverel. Later, after her last Appeal committee meeting, we took Janet to a cheerful lunch.
I also report the retirement of the General Editor, Professor Anthony Fletcher, who moved to that position three years ago after a period in the Department of History at the University of Essex.
I have to thank the members of the Fund's committee for their help over the past difficult year. Lastly, I sincerely thank the supporters of the Fund. If ever a time your support was needed more, it is over the next two to three years.
CHRIS MANNING-PRESS
The Editor reports on Essex Progress and Plans
In the last issue Janet Cooper explained how we had revised the publication plans for our current work, the scale of the material suggesting that we publish not one but two seaside volumes. Thus we are now concentrating on the first volume concerned with the modern seaside resorts in Clacton, Walton, Frinton, Holland-on-Sea and St. Osyth. Although we have now temporarily halted research on the second volume, concerned with the earlier history of that area as well as Kirby- and Thorpe-le-Soken and St. Osyth, we are extremely fortunate that Janet, despite her official retirement, has agreed to keep on working.She hopes to complete her histories of Great and Little Clacton up to the advent of the resort, and these will be of immense benefit to the project. Additionally, she has already completed a parish history of Frinton to c .1880, which will become the first draft text to be mounted on the VCH Essex website (www.essexpast.net). Do take the oppor-tunity to look at the website again in November, as we now intend to develop it into a major mode of transmission for the VCH's research and as an engine to encourage involvement and support from the wider community.
Integration into the Department of History, University of Essex, continues to provide both challenges and new opportunities. Supervision of students taking a range of qualifications has been most rewarding. This year the County Editor, for example, has supervised undergraduate projects on the cloth trade in Lavenham, a Norfolk Regiment soldier's diary of the Gallipoli campaign, and a history of Hornchurch airfield. Dissertations in progress for higher degrees stretch across the late 16th-century landscape of Chelmsford and Moulsham, aspects of poor relief in early 19th-century Essex, and Mersea Island in WWII. The intellectual gains that the staff make through interaction with students (and colleagues) should not be underestimated and will improve our historical research and writing. Additionally, Shirley Durgan has pioneered an increasing amount of collaborative work. Her work with the Clacton VCH Group is detailed later in this newsletter, but she has also reached agreement with two independent researchers. Dr. Peter Boyden of the National Army Museum will be contributing an article on the development of Walton's resort to 1914, as well as another on the spatial development of Frinton to the same date, while Dr. Paul Rusiecki (an Essex graduate), is preparing a thematic article on the history of Walton, Clacton and Frinton during the First World War.
In advance of the arrival of Herbert Eiden, our new member of staff, Shirley and I have been discussing the plan of the seaside volume and the allocation of work over the next two years. At the moment we plan 5 main sections for the volume. The first will cover the period to 1914, with separate articles covering the establishment and growth of each of the three main resorts. The second will cover most of the 20th century, divided chronologically into a number of sub-periods giving an integrated account of the whole seaside. The third section, from c .1970, will cover the period after the tourist trade had markedly declined. This chronological framework will then, we intend, be supported by two further thematic sections. An architectural description of the 19th- and 20th-century seaside buildings will probably be undertaken by a consultant who will work closely with VCH staff. The final section will include comprehensive institutional histories of churches and other places of worship; of schools and colleges; of clubs and societies; and of hospitals and nursing homes. All this is still under debate, and subject to further development and change, but I hope it gives you a taste of what is to come.
CHRIS THORNTON
Our new assistant Editor
Dr Herbert Eiden is the newly-appointed Assistant County Editor for VCH Essex. He studied history, philosophy and politics at Trier in Germany and at Stirling, and took his MA and PhD under the super-vision of Franz Irsigler at Trier. His PhD on the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381 was published in 1995 (in German) and focused in particular on identifying rebellious peasants and piecing together the exact course of events at the local level in Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk and Kent. In completing his PhD he spent a very enjoyable 15 months researching manorial documents and central judicial and administrative records in archives in Essex, East Sussex, Kent, Suffolk, Norfolk, the Canterbury Cathedral Library, the British Library and the Public Record Office. He has published some of his findings on the Revolt in Essex and Norfolk in History 83 (1998) and in the English Historical Review 114 (1999). His main interests are medieval and early modern social and economic history, the history of mentalities and local politics.
Before he joined the staff of VCH Essex and the Department of History at Essex at the beginning of October, he worked as a research fellow in projects on the history of money (1250-1750), the history of witchcraft (1550-1700), and the history of international trade fairs (1250-1550). He has published a range of articles in these fields and edited a volume of an international conference on witch-trials. He also taught medieval history and regional history at the University of Trier. In his leisure time, besides reading political magazines, newspapers and historical novels, he plays basketball and football.
Dr. Eiden is married to an English historian who works on German history. He is looking forward to the start of his new work for the Essex VCH and to having more opportunity to explore the Essex archives and countryside.
The members of the Clacton VCH Group have been working extremely hard on the final stages of their book, so that the typescript can go to the printer very soon. The writing has been done by Elizabeth Austin, who has skilfully condensed the wealth of information in the longer, footnoted, accounts, and the material gained from interviewees about their memories, into a relatively short account of Clacton during the Second World War. The aim has been to combine the official story from documentary sources with the recollections of the people affected, using as far as possible primary (i.e. original sources), in a book written in an accessible style to reach as wide an audience as possible.
During the last few weeks group members have been reading through the draft, checking queries, and preparing a preface, lists of contents, acknowledgements and abbreviations. They have also been acquiring an ISBN number and checking copyright. The title, Clacton at War, 1939-45 , was chosen, and the author was agreed as ‘Clacton VCH Group'. The names of group members will be listed on the inside title page. Much time has also been spent on agreeing on a suitable map and about 30 illustrations. Mary Fairhall and Kenneth Walker, local experts on the subject, have each read through the draft carefully to check for accuracy and errors, and their help is gratefully acknowledged. The Group has had so much enthusiastic encouragement from many sources that it has been decided to have 1,500 copies printed and to go slightly above the 80 pages originally planned. This is in order to be able to acknowledge everyone who has helped and to provide more illustrations and make the book more attractive to buy.
The Group is extremely grateful for the extra £500 given by the VCH Essex Appeal Fund and an additional £200 from the Central VCH towards publication costs which has made this possible. The price of the book will be £5.95, plus an additional £1 for copies sent by post. One group member will be taking charge of marketing. Chris Thornton has been updating the VCH Essex web pages, and information and pictures about the Clacton Group and the book will soon be online.
When the typescript has gone to the printer, group members will focus on the launch and publicity. The Group is delighted that Essex County Libraries have offered to host a high-profile launch on 25 November at Clacton Library. Those invited will include representatives from the Appeal Fund, the VCH Trust, Essex County Libraries, Essex County Council, Tendring Council and the VCH. Group members hope to follow that up with an event in Clacton the following weekend to promote the book to local people. All this should also be very good publicity for the work of VCH Essex.
CHRIS THORNTON: The ‘Red Cliffs' of Essex ?
A fascinating article in the Journal of the English Place-Name Society (1997) by W.A.R. Richardson draws attention to certain enigmatic coastal place-names on late medieval European sea charts and sailing directions. A large number of features on the coast of Britain were known by southern European mariners by completely different names to those used by their northern brethren. For example, the Cape of Harwich (cauo de arois), recorded north of the Thames in a set of direct-ions published by Rizo in 1490, seems likely to be an Italian term for the promontory known as the Naze at Walton. The Portuguese used a similar spelling for Harwich, aroiche , on their charts until in later centuries all nations adopted some spelling of The Naze to identify this mark.
An especially puzzling landmark, known as the ‘red land' or ‘red earth', appears in a similar position north of the Thames in directions recorded in a range of Romance languages. On Alonso de Santa Cruz's map of England (1545), preserved in the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, the mark actually appears as ‘Sierra Bermeja' (red mountain range!) probably a copyist's error for ‘Tierra Bermeja' (red land). Richardson searched in vain for names along the Essex or Suffolk coast which could have given rise to this nomenclature. The possibility that the name was a reference to the hundreds of coastal mounds of burnt earth remaining from Iron-Age and Roman salt-pans, known locally as ‘Red Hills', was rapidly and deservedly dismissed. After all, their height hardly suggests that they could have been prominent enough landmarks to serve visiting mariners tossed about on a stormy sea!
Richardson's close textual analysis of these southern European sailing instructions, and of an 18 th -century English chart that records ‘reddish cliffs' south of Harwich, led to the conclusion that the ‘red lands' were an alternative name for the Cape of Harwich, otherwise the Naze. However, the chase was then given up with the comment that the whole of the coastline has been so eroded that there is no way of knowing what these cliffs looked like or whether they were, indeed, reddish. Here, however, some elementary geology, and the sort of local knowledge available to the VCH staff, can be brought into play. Land in the north of Tendring District, and along neighbouring parts of the Suffolk coast, contains a variety of Pliocene deposits resting on a bed of London Clay. The most significant exposure of one of these, comprising a deep bed of mixed sand and fossil shell debris (crag), appears along the eroding cliff at Walton's Naze. Heavily stained by iron oxides, and appearing in association with coarse red sands, this deposit is variously described in geological reports as ‘red-brown' or of a ‘rusty hue', giving rise to the name ‘Red Crag'. Other similar, though typically less exposed, deposits are to be found in locations south of Harwich and on the Suffolk seaboard. While the north Essex coast has indeed been severely eroded since the Middle Ages those parts lost to the sea at the Naze are likely to have had similar geology to the surviving cliffs. Exposures of Red Crag can therefore be identified as the most likely origin for the ‘red lands' or ‘red cliffs' guiding mariners from southern Europe along the Essex coast between the 14th and 16th centuries.
CHRIS THORNTON: Convalescent Homes at the Seaside
One important task undertaken by VCH staff over the summer was a trip to the National Monuments Record at Swindon to gauge the extent of photographs and other images available for informing and illustrating our work. The English Heritage staff working there are enormously helpful to the VCH and arrangements have been made for the copying of photographs at cost and for the reproduction of images both in our volumes and on our website. The NMR files frequently contain miscellaneous materials that prove very useful, and items that particularly caught my eye on this visit were a series of journal articles and architectural plans concerning seaside hospitals and convalescent homes from publications such as The Builder . Back at the office the history of these institutions is being further fleshed out, using sources such as directories, and a rapid check of the ERO's on-line catalogue SEAX has revealed further significant documentary materials to be examined. It is clear that some homes were built in connection with existing hospitals inland, some through private charitable endowment and yet others by public subscription, and investigating their origins may throw significant light on the social history of the resorts.
While we now think of sea-bathing as chiefly pleasurable, initially much of its impetus came from its supposed health-giving benefits. Additionally, the sea-air came to be seen as medically valuable to a wide range of invalids, and therefore accommodation was frequently built on the cliffs with rooms, verandahs, and balconies facing the sea. Here occupants could enjoy air ‘salubrious and bracing' as one Walton directory of 1902 put it. The Claughton Convalescent Home was established on Walton's Parade in 1885, while the ‘Home of Rest' connected with the Field Lane Mission in London, was used in summer months in 1902 for ‘poor invalids requiring the sea air'. Other homes were later erected at Naze Park, including one for the Poplar Hospital for Accidents (1909), the Samuel Lewis Seaside Convalescent Home (1910), and the Mabel Greville Convalescent Home.
However, Clacton had a far greater number of such homes, most built after 1890 with impressive buildings accommodating large numbers of patients. John Groom's Crippleage and Flower Girl Mission (1890), had detached houses to accommodate orphans and a holiday home for 50 blind and crippled girls. Among those following in quick succession were the Middlesex Hospital Convalescent Home, Holland Road (1894); the Convalescent Home of the Eastern Counties Idiot and Imbecile Asylum, Marine Parade East (1895); The Clacton and District (Cottage) Hospital, Ellis Road (1899); and the Reckitt Convalescent Home, Holland Road (1909) for patients from the Great Northern Hospital. One of the largest and most famous was the Sunday School Union Children's Holiday Home (Passmore Edwards Holiday Home), Marine Parade East, erected in 1898 for over 100 ‘delicate and ailing' children from Sunday schools. Similarly the Ogilvie Home of Recovery, Holland Road (1912) had 100 beds for children from elementary schools who, though poorly, did not require hospitalisation.
Who runs the VCH?
Although we all tend to regard the Essex editorial team as the centre of our VCH universe, there naturally have to be national organisations behind the editors, not only to ensure country-wide consistency in the county histories, but to deal with finance and administration and to organise and control what is a very large publishing activity.
Nationally, that is all the responsibility of the Victoria County History Committee , whose members meet four times a year at the Institute of Historical Research in London. The Chairman is Professor Chris Dyer and, in addition to the members of the central VCH Directorate, there are representatives from both London and other Universities, from local authority councils that fund VCH projects and from county VCH Trusts, together with a number of outside experts. The VCH Essex Appeal Fund Chairman, Chris Manning-Press, is a council member of the committee in his role as vice-chairman of Essex County Council, which has always done so much to maintain funding to the Essex VCH.
The overall strategy of the VCH, the formulation of policies to execute that strategy and all monitoring and review are the responsibilities of the central VCH Directorate : currently the Executive Editor, Dr Alan Thacker, and the Architectural Editor, Elizabeth Williamson, eventually to be joined by a newly-appointed Director and General Editor following Professor Anthony Fletcher's retirement at the end of the year. Apart from their frequent formal policy meetings, the Directorate Editors also deal with day-to-day work on the Histories.
In Essex, we have an Advisory Board in overall charge of monitoring progress of the Essex volumes. Its members are drawn from all the organisations that help to fund the Essex VCH: the University of Essex, Essex County Council and the Institute of Historical Research. The Board meets at least twice each year.
Although we have no say in the content or administration of the VCH, our own Victoria County History of Essex Appeal Fund should of course be mentioned. A registered charity set up by Robert Wood, the Fund Committee meets quarterly and has 11 current Trustees: John Appleby, Ken Hall, Geoffrey Hare, John Hunter, Sir Alex Jarratt, Patricia Lewis, Stan Newens, Lord Petre, Joan Smith, Chris Starr and Pam Studd; together with Chris Manning-Press, Chairman, Charlotte Ryder, Vice-Chairman and Patricia Herrmann, Secretary & Treasurer.
Appeal Fund Result 2002-3
All of you who are reading this newsletter are current or very recent donors to our Fund so, in addition to giving you news of editorial activities, we would like to tell you how fund-raising has fared this year. During the 12 months that ended on 30 September 2003, we received an overall total of £10,434. Of this, £1,825 came from corporate donations. We received handsome gifts from two individuals, but the lifeblood of an organisation like ours comes from the steady — if now gentler — flow of repeated regular contributions, both large and small. Several Essex history societies and a few parish councils have helped in this way, and very very many individual benefactors give an amount each year by banker's standing order, most with a gift aid declaration, enabling us to claim an extra amount from the Inland Revenue. A splendid total of over £8,500 came to us in from individuals..
We have given an undertaking to Essex University that we will guarantee £8,000 towards VCH costs each year, and we have always been able to exceed this. Last year we gave them £10,000, provided £656 towards the expenses of the two groups of volunteers and also spent £281 on insurance and rebinding cost of the VCH Library. You will of course work out that the expenditure exceeds our income for the year, but we started with a healthy bank balance of over £9,000 and at the end of the year still have £8,700 in hand.
All that is excellent: we would like it to be better, especially in view of the problems outlined by the Chairman in his report, so this is a plea for help. The Hon Treasurer, Patricia Herrmann (01245 222562) will be happy to supply additional copies of this newsletter if you would like to give them to your friends — and if you can persuade them to support our work, donation and gift aid forms can be sent to you too.
TREASURER, APPEAL FUND
Had you heard?
— that Essex University, where the VCH editorial team sits, has a new Chancellor? Lord Phillips of Sudbury OBE, one of the UK's leading lawyers, has taken over from Lord Nolan, becoming only the fourth Chancellor at Essex University. We are delighted to tell you that Lord Phillips lists ‘history and the arts' amongst several leisure pursuits.
Heritage Lottery Fund Award
Just as Essex Past goes to press, we have had a press release from the Heritage Lottery Fund:
‘£3.5 million boost for Local History Studies
The Victoria County History has been awarded a Stage One Pass of £3,598,000 for a project that will make high quality local history information more readily available to researchers from all walks of life.
The five year project ‘England's Past for Everyone' will produce 17 in-depth local history collections, covering ten counties across England. The studies will be produced in paperback and on-line, helping everyone to explore the history of the place where they live and where their families come from.
Schoolchildren will benefit too with the creation of ‘History Footsteps' materials that will help them achieve their National Curriculum goals.'
As you will by now know, in Essex we were disappointed to have been one of the many already existing VCH counties not included in this HLF bid, but there is now the potential for VCH Essex to make a bid of our own to the regional (East of England) HLF Board.
_______________________________________________________________
The VCH Essex newsletter, which is distributed to all our donors, is published twice a year (spring and autumn) by The Victoria County History of Essex Appeal Fund, a registered charity number 103306.
It is printed by Contact Reprographics at the Cowdray Centre, Colchester.
For information, please contact the Hon Secretary, Patricia Herrmann, at West Bowers Hall, Woodham Walter, Maldon, Essex CM9 6RZ