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Sandgate

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June 2022

This magazine is compiled and edited by David Cowell who is totally responsible for content. If you do not wish to receive these magazines please email UNSUBSCRIBE to him at david@thesentinel.org.uk

Sandgate Farmers Market Saturday, 4th June Catherine Jordan Cakes Delightful treats from a professional patisserie

Usher's fruit and veg are based locally with lots of fruit, veg and salad sourced locally. For example their potatoes are sourced from O&P Gowers In Acrise.

Arkwrights Pantry Lovely foodie gifts including a range of Chilli based products from Carrington Foods Ltd. who are based in Faversham.

Anji's Interiors

We’ve been sourcing ingredients and accessories from expert producers and artisans in exchange for a fair price for over 30 years.

What better time to chat about your energy and internet supply...and a chance to win £20,000

This Free Spirit

NEW

Working for local, national and international clients and companies from her studio based in sunny Sandgate, on the South Kent coast, Anji creates beautiful bespoke quality curtains, blinds, soft furnishings and interior decor to suit your requirements.

original handmade knitwear, clothing and gifts.

Have you lost your connection to creativity? Create, connect and revitalise your creative soul, chat and have some well deserved 'creative me time' and learn to mosaic in my pop up gallery on Tontine St.

Pauline's hand made toys Conventional and wrap style masks, soft toys and so many more wonderful hand made gifts Gill Thompson Jewellery

* Unique gifts - Gill makes only one piece * Commissions accepted * Gill can bring broken jewellery back to life * Gill uses precious, semi precious gems,freshwater pearls, glass and crystal beads

St Paul's Church will be there promoting their 200th anniversary. They will have their fantastic new 60-page souvenir brochure plus mugs, tea towels and postcards.

1950s Soviet Polish map of the southeast and the place names spelled phonetically in a south London accent - you live in Sendgyt. 3

Our thanks to the Sandgate Parish Council and the Community Gardeners for allowing us to reproduce this diary page. We hope to make this a monthly feature in the magazine but you can read all the diary entries by clicking on this box. When life gives you lemon trees, and a world of guerrilla gardening. It was a week of cancellations due to the fact we had even more rain, bringing the total so far for this month to a whopping 47.2 mm! Anyone who has not seen the garden for a couple of weeks is amazed by the lush green growth and how quickly everything has shot up and matured. Very little watering to do, just some of the pots, and a few new plantings, but otherwise everything seems quite happy. We have been eyeing up the fig trees as they seem to be doing particularly well and quite laden with fruit this year. The cucumbers got planted, as well as some of the flowering annuals, new coriander plants got planted, and a few celery plants. The garlic had to be lifted as it had rust again and will fail to thrive. It made small bulbs, but very edible and much appreciated. We had this problem with garlic last year so it may be a good idea to see if we want to tackle the situation next year or give up the garlic. The compost bins 1 and 2 got turned, and bin 1 which was empty, is half full already. We just seem to have got out all the tender plants and made room in the cold frames and before we know it, we have to start thinking about sowing the seeds for autumn, winter and even next spring. More spring onions got Enbrook this week 7

sown into modules as did basil and swedes. The next planting of lettuces in June got pricked out into modules as soon as two leaves had come through. We had several visitors on Saturday. The elderly gentleman who presented us with a lemon tree two weeks ago, came to see if it doing alright and was delighted to see it has three flower buds already, so seemed satisfied that the tree was indeed quite Another visitor happy there. We were also visited by two Ukrainian ladies currently staying with our lovely Ukrainian gardener, Tatiana. We were delighted to welcome them to the garden, and they got stuck in watering, sowing seeds and generally browsing and chatting to everyone. They took back with them some salad leaves, pea shoots and broad beans. We hope they will visit again. As usual, a busy week is ahead of us, and lots to sort out and tidy before the Jubilee weekend so that all is looking its best. The guerrilla garden in Golden Valley is being planted up and starting to fill out and look so much better than it ever did before. It has been noticed that the tree pits in Augusta Gardens, Folkestone West, have been beautifully planted with all manner of gorgeous flowering plants and this year edged with a wooden border perhaps to highlight to the council weed sprayer that the planting is deliberate by locals, and can be bypassed – our fingers are crossed. What’s next? • Catch up with rained off jobs such as weeding of Golden Valley and Fremantle Park • Sow more seeds! • Plant more flowering annuals in available spaces • Keep checking on the tomatoes for side shoots which need removing

Guided Walks Around Old Hythe Every Thursday, June to September Discover the secrets of this ancient Cinque Port and soak up the atmosphere amongst its historic architecture. See the Royal Military Canal, built to keep Napoleon at bay. Visit St Leonard’s Church (free tour included) and wonder at the bones in the famous ossuary/crypt. Tours of the church (without a walk) start at midday.

Meet at Hythe Town Hall, High Street CT21 5AJ at 10:30am - no need to book. Walk £2 per person (Ossuary £2 extra).

Allow 1½ hours for walk plus 45 minutes for church/ossuary

Chair’s report at the Annual General Meeting on 20th May

To quote L P Hartley's famous phrase ‘The past is a foreign country’ and certainly we all did things differently during lockdown but thankfully the present means the hall being what it is meant to be a community hub. The hall is fully opened for regular and one-off hires including the Danny Boyle crew filming the new Sex Pistols’ television drama who used the hail as their base and the premiere of a local production company’s A Simple Tale of Love before it moved to London. In particular I would mention the use of the hall for table tennis, which following our purchase of three new tables, has gone from strength to strength with four sessions now in play with growing numbers of participants. A good example of investment reaping its reward as has the hall in general following the internal refurbishment with hall’s hire rate up nearly 50% from March 2019 (pre-Covid) to March 2022 (post Covid). The farmer’s market remains a challenge but one which David, with considerable assistance of his wife Sue, continues to manage but is an area which we need to keep under review. A mixture of Covid and other grants has meant that the successful completion of the internal refurbishment and with a balance of c£20,000 in our reserves means that we can now move onto the external refurbishment of the hall so therefore fulfilling our role, as trustees, of effectively 10

managing our asset. If we can crack the issue of disabled access whilst we do it then we really will have achieved our ambition of a first class community facility accessible to all. Referring back to the past and present I am pleased to see that the external clock has been repaired and I thank Richard Grundy for his assistance in resolving this issue. Also a thank you to Jan Holben, in the Responsible Person role, for checking the accounts. Finally but definitely not least, a thank you to David who runs the hall most effectively and as I said last year’s report leaves us as Trustees with a more modest role than trustees of some other community facilities I know about!

All now available in paperback and on Kindle Set in Folkestone in the heady days of the late 60s. They say if you can remember it, you weren't there!

Two plays. One an imaginary meeting between Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan in a Fitzrovia pub. The other is Caitlin Thomas reminiscing after the untimely death of her husband.

This is the tale of Hana, a young girl who moves from where she was born in London, to the Kent coast. They discover a wonderful area called Prince's Parade which is full of amazing animals, has a beautiful canal and is right next to the sea too! By buying this book you will be helping to protect it. All profits from it will be donated to the Save Prince's Parade campaign which aims to halt plans to develop the area into a housing estate. Very funny, and surreal story about a man and a woman on their first date: Bolton Brady and Veda, set in London, November 2001. Bolton is forty, not into assets, has never lived with a woman and looked into the future and seen loneliness. So he decides to do something about it. He advertises in a lonely-hearts column, and receives six replies, but after experiencing one disaster after another only Veda remains between him and his sanity. As the day unfolds the line between reality and fantasy becomes blurred, building to a surreal, yet poignant, conclusion. 14

This walk through the history of Sandgate to the present day was first performed at the Chichester Hall a decade ago on Wednesday, 9th June. It is now available on Kindle or in paperback.

Now available on Amazon. Great evocative yarns of worldly travels.

A Loose Cannon tales of a lapsed activist

Ted Parker

The title of the book hints at how, as a ‘loose cannon’, Folkestone born Ted’s risk-taking got him into trouble on a number of occasions whilst being a considerable advantage in his working life.

As a young journalist, Reg Turnill met most of the prewar political personalities and later became the BBC's space correspondent being the only one in the press room when the historic Houston we have a problem message came from Apollo 11. 15

All now available in paperback and on Kindle Janet Holben. Paperback. Folkestone Cemetery has around 15,000 graves (27,000 people) there are stories of skulduggery and innocence, murder and bravery, grandeur and squalor – but mostly there are stories of everyday people living their lives. This account brings some of those stories back to life and will perhaps bring an understanding of how Folkestone was shaped by terrible wars, widespread disease, the unforgiving sea, the new railway and fashionable society – but mostly, by the people who lived, loved, made their livelihood and finally died here.

Westbrook House School Folkestone was a fee-paying preparatory school for boys aged 6 to 13 years. It was situated in three existing adjacent former late Victorian private houses in Shorncliffe Road with a 3-acre playing field to the rear which backed onto the main railway line. It was the life-time ambition of Kenneth N G Foster (1903-1984) (photo c.1958) who initially bought up the first house in 1946. Under his Headmastership the school started taking both day and boarding pupils in 1947. By the 1950’s the school was thriving requiring a sizable number of characterful teaching and domestic staff.

Us he rs no fru w it a on nd -l i n v e eg

You can now order on-line at: https://www.usherswholesale.com/box

or by telephone on: 07515 529425

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We deliver to Folkestone, Cheriton, Hawkinge, Capel, Alkham Valley, Saltwood, Sandgate, Seabrook, Hythe

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