Autumn Lecture Series with Chris Hare
A new afternoon lecture series at Arundel Museum this autumn, with local author Chris Hare. The talks will run from Wednesday 8th to 29th October
The talks will start at 2pm, refreshments available beforehand.
Booking link here for all the talks. Early bird price £7.50 per talk, thereafter £8.50 per talk.
The Wicked Trade: smugglers of Arundel and West Sussex, Wednesday 8th October
During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, smuggling was endemic in Sussex; not just along the coast, but also further inland, where most of the contraband was stored. Arundel, being a port, and only a few miles from isolated beaches, popular with smugglers, such as Climping, was an ideal centre for the smuggling trade. Fights and skirmishes between smugglers and the authorities, be they Excisemen or Coastguards, were frequent and often bloody. The story of smuggling is one of desperate times leading to desperate measures, and the reality was far away from the imagined fantasy of recent years.
Stand and Deliver! A History of Highwaymen, including Jack Upperton, the Burpham Highwayman. Wednesday 15th October
Robbery on the King’s highway goes back to the earliest times, but the emergence of gangs of highway robbers or of the individual highwayman, on horse and well armed, dates back to the seventeenth century and the aftermath of the Civil War, when defeated royalist soldiers took to robbing wealthy puritans. Highway robbery reached its height in the following century, with some highwaymen, such as Dick Turpin, Jack Rann, and John Nevison, becoming celebrities. Some, like Claude Duval, even became heart-throbs. This talk will also include some Sussex highwaymen, including Burpham’s own Jack Upperton, whose criminal deeds and still remembered in local folklore today.
Charms, Cures, and Potions: keeping well in Old Sussex, Wednesday 22nd October.
In an era when most people could not afford to go the doctor, and when the skills of doctors and the potency of their medicines were very limited, most people relied on folk cures and remedies. Local cunning men and women could provide herbs, plants, and even animal cures for a range of maladies. There were also charms, incantations, and rituals, that were employed to cure the sick or keep sickness at bay. There were not only physical illnesses to contend with, many people believed in the malign presence of witchcraft and the real danger of being ‘sin-struck’ with curses and the ‘evil-eye’. There were rituals and charms for dealing with this threat too. Some of these ‘old wives tales’ probably did some good, others none at all, and some probably did more harm than good. Yet in times when death was eve-present to people of all ages, and few reached what we would today regard as old age, these folk practices and beliefs were central to people’s lives.
All change! How the coming on the railway transformed Sussex forever: seaside resorts, market gardening, tourism, and the dream of a rural idyll, Wednesday 29th October.
Hard as it is to believe today, before the coming of the railway to Sussex in the 1840s, this county was underpopulated and poor. Many emigrated, despairing that the good times would ever return and hoping for better things in a new land overseas. Yet, by the 1850s, the railway was transforming the fortunes of Sussex, employment opportunities were increasing, and with the new jobs came higher wages. Small, insignificant little villages like Worthing, Littlehampton, and Bognor, became bustling seaside resorts. While horticulture increasingly displaced traditional agriculture. A Sussex man or woman of 1900 had very different and improved expectations of their forebears of 1800; and it was the railway that delivered the change.