Sentinel hythe april 2018 in a5

Hythe

May 2018 This newsletter is compiled and edited by David Cowell who is totally responsible for content.

If you do not wish to receive these newsletters please email UNSUBSCRIBE to him at david@davidcowell.net

HYTHE!TOWN!BANDSTAND! ‘Summer$Season$Live$Entertainment$ $ $

located$in$the$pretty,$secluded$parkland$of$Oaklands’$ !

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LIVE!MUSICIANS! !

Local!&!Visiting!Acts!

FREE!ENTRY! 3pm!–!5pm!

THE!2018!LINE!UP…! ! !

Sun!27!May! Mon!28!May!

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Sun!3!June!!!

Sun!10!June!

Sun!17!June!

Sun!24!June!

(unless!otherwise!stated)! ! !

Occasional!Seating!

Provided! !

Nearby!Toilets! !

Oaklands!Café!! at!Age!UK!providing!! light!refreshments!! !

Children’s!Play!Area! !

Grass!Picnic!Area! &!TreeTline!Sheltering! !

Located!just!2!mins! walk!from!the!High!St! adjacent!to!Oaklands!

Health!Centre!&!Library! in!Stade!Street! !

Nearest!car!parks!are! located!on!Mount!St!! (by!Aldi)!and!Portland!

Road!(by!The!Green)!! ! ! ! !

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BIRCHINGTON$SILVER$BAND! HYTHE$TOWN$CONCERT$BAND! DAYS$GONE$BY! TOTALLY$COVERED!

Sun!1!July! !

Sun!8!July! !

HYTHE$TOWN$CONCERT$BAND! POPERINGE$BRASS$BAND$(2.30pm)!

Sun!15!July!!

HYTHE$FESTIVAL$PRESENTS…$$ POP$IN$THE$PARK$(1.00pm)!

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Sun!22!July!!

Sun!29!July!

DR$SYN$&$THE$SCARECROWS! VIKKI’S$VOCALS!

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Sun!5!Aug! Sun!12!Aug! Sun!19!Aug!!

HERE$COME$THE$GIRLS$ KENT$POLICE$BAND! HYTHE$TOWN$CONCERT$BAND$

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Sun!2!Sept!

Sun!9!Sep!

ELVIS! MISS$HOLIDAY$SWING! ! !!!!!!!!!Cancellations!&!changes!of!acts!may!occur!without!prior!notification! !

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ONE$FOR$THE$ROAD! THE$DUETTES

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Support your local Farmers' Markets

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Farmers Market

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Art and Craft Market

Great range of bread, pies, fruit & veg, meat, eggs, cheese, savouries and quiches, cakes, preserves and chutneys, gifts, jewellery, homewares and plants (stall holders may vary between markets).

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Shop Local. www.sandgatebusiness.org.uk

Sandgate Library is open Mon, Tue, Fri & Sat 9:30 - 1:00 and 9:30 - 4.30 Thurs (closed Wed).

For more information call 01303 248563 (mornings only) Sandgate Library, James Morris Court, Sandgate High St. CT20 3RR

Support local events

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No job too small Please call to discuss your needs If you have any photographs of the area either current or past do send them to me by email and I will feature them in future editions.

If you just have prints do drop them round to Clyme House (see back page) and I will scan.

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I am delighted to inform you that three electronic editions of The Sentinel are now published.

We now produce a Sandgate, Hythe and a Newington version each month.

If you would like to receive a copy of any please email me at: david@davidcowell.net and put the name of the version you require ie The Sentinel Hythe or The Sentinel Sandgate/ Hythe etc in the subject line.

Hythe Farmers’ Market takes place on the second and fourth Saturdays of the month from 10am until 1pm.

In the Methodist Church Hall, Chapel Street, Hythe, Parking is available nearby.

For more information call (01303) 266118 or 268715

To advertise in three The Sentinels with circa 3580 targetted readers and growing please email me at: david@davidcowell.net for a rate card.

Thank you.

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Berck Twinning Association organizes an Art weekend On June 22nd, 23rd, 24th 2018 in the Kursaal in Berck-sur-mer (France).

English and German local artists from our twinned towns can bring their works of art: paintings, photographs, sculptures, terracotta sculptures will be exhibited (please send your photos of your works of art ASAP for the selection to the e-mail address below: daniele-dore@hotmail.fr You are all more than welcome to visit this free exhibition.

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Call Steve on 07484263508 restorationman@live.com Call Matt on 07766355880 allpine@tesco.net www.allpinefurniture.co.uk

rear of: 97 Dymchurch Road, Hythe, Kent CT21 6JN We are bespoke kitchen and furniture makers We can make what you are looking for Handmade furniture for kitchens, bedrooms, offices, studies, dining, lounge and more..........

We specialise in traditionally styled, solid pine and oak furniture, handcrafted and superior quality for your home or business.

We offer a one-to-one service, creating furniture to perfectly fit our customer's own specifications - from bedroom suites to kitchen units.

All of our products are hand-finished with natural bees-wax, or painted to your requirements.

Find us now at the Malthouse Fri and Sat: 9.30 - 5 pm The Malthouse, Malthouse Hill, Hythe, Kent, CT21 5BW 11

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www.aridzonaawnings.co.uk For the finest German engineered awnings and glass rooms Installed by a Kent based family company.

Call Sam Ruddle for a free survey on 0330 6600949

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The editor of The Sentinel is also responsible for sending Hythe and Sandgate related event information to the Folkestone Herald. If you have an event you wish to publicise it is needed by Tuesday at 17:00. The information should appear in the edition two weeks later although it is not gauranteed.

Paul worked at Crundens and since its closure has provided this excellent service.

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When:

May 12 @ 2:00pm

Duration:

2:00pm to 5:00pm

Cost:

£free (pre-booking is recommended)

Location:

Quarterhouse, 49 Tontine Street, Folkestone, Kent CT20 1BN

At the centre of Street Wisdom lies the idea that every moment is extraordinary and every street is full of inspiration. We will use the streets around Quarterhouse to help us find fresh answers to old problems in this powerful three hour guided experience

We currently meet on Saturday mornings at the Library between 10:00 and 11:00.

This is essentially a drop in service whereby you can make contact with us, and share your views.

“Take positive action in a changing world through food, sharing, creativity and wellbeing”.

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As a part of our attempted fitness regime, my wife and I often walk up past St Leonard's Church along North Road and down Lucy Hill.

The repetitive route is matched only by our constant intrigue as to who was the eponymous Lucy and now I know. He was Sir Henry William Lucy. Born in 1842 he was one of the most famous political journalists of the Victorian era.

In the second part of his biography Sixty Years in the Wilderness he said Some years later I revisited Hythe, a holiday often repeated. In 1883, before starting on a journey round the world, we bought a piece of land commanding a far-reaching view over the great highway of the Sir Henry by John Singer Sargent Channel. We settled upon building plans, and when we came back, lo there stood, rock-built, red-tiled Whitethorn*, a happy home through succeeding years, with its garden where roses grow beyond compare, and through late spring nights the nightingale sings. [editor: *Whitethorn is now called Lucy].

I was so pleased to find he had written at length about Hythe in his book Faces and Places and I am delighted to reproduce it here: CHAPTER VII. A CINQUE PORT. Skulls piled roof high in the vault beneath the church tower supply the only show thing Hythe possesses. There is some doubt as to their precise nationality, but of their existence there can be none, as any visitor to the town may see for himself on payment of sixpence (parties of three or more eighteen pence). It is known how within a time to which memory distinctly goes the skulls were found down upon the beach, whole piles of them, thick as shingle on this coast. The explanation of their tenancy of British ground is popularly referred to the time, now nearly nine hundred years gone by, when Earl Godwin, being exiled, made a raid on this conveniently accessible part of England, and after a hard fight captured all the vessels lying in the haven. Others find in the peculiar formation of the crania proof positive that the skulls originally came from Denmark.

But Saxon or Dane, or whatever they be, it is certain the skulls were picked up on the beach, and after an interval were, with some dim notion of decency, carried up to the church, where they lay neglected in a vault. The church also going to decay, the determination was taken to rebuild it, and being sorely pressed for funds a happy thought occurred to a practical vicar. He had the skulls piled up wall-like in an accessible chamber, caused 17

the passages to be swept and garnished, and then put on the impost mentioned above, the receipts helping to liquidate the debt on the building fund. Thus, by a strange irony of fate, after eight centuries, all that is left of these heathens brings in sixpences to build up a Christian church.

A good deal has happened in Hythe since the skulls first began to bleach on the inhospitable shore. When Earl Godwin suddenly appeared with his helm hard up for Hythe, the little town on the hill faced one of the best havens on the coast. It was, as every one knows, one of the Cinque Ports, and at the time of the Conqueror undertook to furnish, as its quota of armament, five ships, one hundred and five men, and five boys. Even in the time of Elizabeth there was a fair harbour here. But long ago the sea changed all that. It occupied itself in its leisure moments by bringing up illimitable shingle, with which it filled up all water ways, and cut Hythe off from communication with the sea as completely as if it were Canterbury.

It is not without a feeling of humiliation that a burgess of the once proud port of Hythe can watch the process of the occasional importation of household coal. Where Earl Godwin swooped down over twenty fathoms of water the little collier now painfully picks her way at high water. On shore stand the mariners of Hythe (in number four), manning the capstan. When the collier gets within a certain distance a hawser is thrown out, the capstan turns more or less merrily round, and the collier is beached, so that at low water she will stand high and dry. Thus ignominiously is coal landed at one of the Cinque Ports.

Of course this change in the water approaches has altogether revolutionised the character of the place. Hythe is a port without imports or exports, a harbour in which nothing takes refuge but shingle. It has not even fishing boats, for lack of place to moor them in. It is on the greatest water highway of the world, and yet has no part in its traffic. Standing on the beach you may see day after day a never-ending fleet of ships sailing up or down as the wind blows east or west. But, like the Levite in the 18

parable, they all pass by on the other side. Hythe has nothing to do but to stand on the beach with its hands in its pockets and lazily watch them.

Thus cut off from the world by sea, and by land leading nowhere in particular except to Romney Marshes, Hythe has preserved in an unusual degree the flavour of our earlier English world. There have indeed been times when endeavour was made to profit by this isolation. As one of the Cinque Ports Hythe has since Parliaments first sat had the privilege of returning representatives. In the time of James II it seems to have occurred to the Mayor (an ancestor of one of the members for West Kent in a recent Parliament), that since a member had to be returned to Parliament much trouble would be saved, and no one in London would be any the wiser, if he quietly, in his capacity as returning officer, returned himself. But some envious Radical setting on the opposite benches, was too sharp for him, and we find the sequel of the story set forth in the Journals of the House of Commons under date 1685, where it is written: "Information given that the Mayor of Hythe had returned himself: Resolved by the House of Commons that Mr. Julius Deedes, the Mayor, is not duly elected. New writ ordered in his stead."

Hythe is a little better known now, but not much. And yet for many reasons its acquaintance is worth forming.The town itself, lying snugly at the foot of the hill crowned by the old church, is full of those bits of colour and quaintnesses of wall and gable-end which good people cross the Channel to see. In the High-street there is a building the like of which probably does not anywhere exist. It is now a fish-shop, not too well stocked, where a few dried herrings hang on a string under massive eaves that have seen the birth and death of centuries. From the centre of the roof there rises a sort of watch-tower, whence, before the houses on the more modern side of the street were built, when the sea swept over what is now meadow-land, keen eyes could scan the bay on the look out for inconvenient visitors connected with the coastguard. When the sea prevented Hythe honestly earning its living in deep-keeled boats, it perforce took to smuggling, a business in which this old watch-tower played a prominent part.

This is a special though neglected bit of house architecture in Hythe. But everywhere, save in the quarters by the railway station or the Parade, where new residences are beginning to spring up, the eye is charmed by old brown houses roofed with red tiles, often standing tree-shaded in a bountiful flower garden, and always preserving their own lines of frontage and their own angle of gable, with delightful indifference to the geometric 19

scale of their neighbour.

The South-Eastern Railway Company have laid their iron hand on Hythe, and its old-world stillness is already on Bank Holidays and other bleak periods of the passing year broken by the babble of the excursionist. In its characteristically quiet way Hythe has long been known as what is called a watering-place. When I first knew it, it had a Parade, on which were built eight or ten houses, whither in the season came quiet families, with children and nurses. For a few weeks they gave to the sea frontage quite a lively appearance, which the mariners (when they were not manning the capstan) contemplated with complacency, and said to each other that Hythe was "looking up." For the convenience of these visitors some enterprising person embarked on the purchase of three bathing machines, and there are traditions of times when these were all in use at the same hour - so great was the influx of visitors.

Also there is a "bathing establishment" built a long way after the model of the Pavilion at Brighton. The peculiarity of this bathing establishment is or was when I first knew the charming place that regularly at the end of September the pump gets out of order, and the new year is far advanced before the solitary plumber of the place gets it put right. He begins to walk dreamily round the place at Easter. At Whitsuntide he brings down an iron vessel containing unmelted solder, and early in July the pump is mended.

This mending of the pump is one of the epochs of Hythe, a sure harbinger of the approaching season. In July "The Families" begin to come down, and the same people come every year, for visitors to Hythe share in the privilege of the inhabitants, inasmuch as they never - or hardly ever - die.

Of late years, since the indefatigable Town Clerk has succeeded in waking up the inhabitants to the possibilities of the great future that lies before their town, not only has a new system of drainage and water been introduced, but a register has been kept of the death-rate. From a return, published by the Medical Officer of Health, it appears that the death-rate of Hythe was 9.3 per 1000. Of sixty-three people who died in a year out of a population of some four thousand, twenty-three were upwards of sixty years of age, many of them over eighty. Perhaps the best proof of the healthfulness of Hythe is to be found in a stroll through the churchyard, whence it would appear that only very young children or very old people are carried up the hill.

The difficulty about Hythe up to recent times has been the comparative absence of accommodation for visitors. Its fame has been slowly growing 20

as "The Families" have spread it within their own circles. But it was no use for strangers to go to Hythe, since they could not be taken in. This is slowly changing. Eligible building sites are offered, villas have been run up along the Sandgate Road, and an hotel has been built by the margin of the sea.

When news reached the tower of the church that down on the beach there had risen a handsome hotel, fitted with all the luxuries of modern life, it is no wonder that the skulls turned on each other and - as Longfellow in the "Skeleton in Armour" puts it "Then from those cavernous eyes Pale flashes seem to rise, As when the northern skies Gleam In December."

This is surely the beginning of the end. Having been endowed with a railway which brings passengers down from London in a little over two hours, Hythe is now dowered with an hotel in which they may dine and sleep. The existence of the hotel being necessarily admitted, prejudice must not prevent the further admission that it is exceedingly well done.

Architecturally it is a curiosity, seeing that though it presents a stately and substantial front neither stone nor brick enters into its composition. It is made entirely of shingle mixed with mortar, the whole forming a concrete substance as durable as granite. The first pebble of the new hotel was laid quite a respectable number of years ago, the ceremony furnishing an almost dangerous flux of excitement to the mariners at the capstan. It has grown up slowly, as becomes an undertaking connected with Hythe.

But it is finished now, handsome without, comfortable within, with views from the front stretching seawards from Dungeness to Folkestone, and at the back across green pastures, glimpses are caught through the trees of the red-tiled town.

Now that suitable accommodation is provided for stray visitors, Hythe, with its clean beach, its parade that will presently join hands with Sandgate, its excellent bathing, and its bracing air, may look to take high rank among watering places suburban to London. But there are greater charms even than these in the immediate neighbourhood. With some knowledge of English watering places, I solemnly declare that none is set in a country of such beauty as is spread behind Hythe. Unlike the neighbourhood of most watering places, the country immediately at the back of the town is hilly and well wooded. Long shady roads lead past blooming gardens or through rich farms, till they end in some sleepy village or hamlet, the world 21

forgetting, by the world forgot. In late July the country is perfect in its loveliness. The fields and woods are not so flowery as in May, though by way of compensation the gardens are rich in roses. Still there are sufficient wild flowers to gladden the eye wherever it turns. From the hedgerows big white convolvulus stare with wonder-wide eyes, the honeysuckle is out, the wild geranium blooms in the long grass, the blackberry bushes are in full flower, and the poppies blaze forth in great clusters at every turn of the road. The corn is only just beginning to turn a faint yellow, but the haymakers are at work, and every breath of the joyous wind carries the sweet scent of hay.

I am researching the history of Tynwald House in Hillside Street Hythe and would be most grateful if you could pass on anything you may know about the property. It is now a residential home for the elderly but has been a private dwelling in the past with owners such as Admiral Hall-Thomson and Charles Dynely Twopeny who was Mayor of Hythe between 1919-1922. Thank you.

Support local events

Programme 2018 The Friends’ 2018 concert brochure is available here.

Tickets Prices (unless otherwise stated): Evening and afternoon concerts £12; lunchtime concerts £7.

Discounted prices for Friends of St Leonard’s Church: Evening and afternoon concerts £10; lunchtime concerts £6. Join here.

WOW Design-led gifts and interiors 76 High Street Hythe Kent CT21 5AL

Tickets available from Brandon’s Music Shop, 55 High Street, Hythe CT21 5AD (01303 264429) and at church door 22

Support local events

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1st May 2018

A temporary cease-fire in the civil war allows a small Nepalese village to breathe a sigh of relief. Two young boys from different castes become close friends and raise a hen in hopes of selling the eggs. Offers a fascinating insight into rural life in Nepal.

Where The Tin Tabernacle, Portland Road, Hythe, CT 21 6FL. Parking in council car parks (including at Aldi) is free after 6 pm, and there are often spaces alongside the canal. Full disabled access.

3rd July 2018

5th June 2018

When A week in the life of a poetry-writing bus driver, and a quiet observation of the triumphs and defeats of daily life and of the poetry evident in its smallest details. A film of great gentle charm.

An extraordinary film about a blind masseur / swordsman who comes to a town in control of warring gangs. Funny, beautiful, violent, traditional and exuberant by turns, it shouldn’t work but does. An upbeat film to end our season.

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7.30 on the first Tuesday of the month, from October to July. Doors open 7.00. ' Entry £5 on the door, or £4 for Hythe Cinema Card holders.

Support local events

My signed copy of this delightful book

In his introduction to this book, Sandgate artist John Hoskin tells how he had been thinking about the project since moving into the area in Zoe and John at the exhibition 1977. The gestation wait was well worth it as this delightfully produced book of John's linocuts of Romney Marsh' churches gives an evocative feel for the historical and archeological space occupied by these buildings and Zoe's prose provides an enlightened and eloquent accompaniment. The book can be purchased from the Romney Marsh Visitors' Centre for ÂŁ10.00 and the exhibition is open until 22nd April.

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We're back for 2018 with another superb 8 weeks of cricketing fun with All Stars Cricket. Sign up now - boys and girls from 5-8 years old with 8 weeks of non-stop fun. The activity and game based programme is suitable for all skill levels, providing your child with the foundations to begin a lifelong love of physical activity and cricket, while making friends in a safe and enjoyable environment. Sign up here.

Anyone if Year 3 upwards can still enjoy their cricket at Saltwood CC - just visit www.saltwoodcc.com/colts for dates, times and sign up forms.

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If you would like to submit an article or letter please email it to me.

I will print almost anything as long as it’s not libellous, racist or unkind.

Name must be supplied but can be withheld if requested.

Please put your articles etc in plain text or Word and images should be in .jpg, .tiff or .png.

My contact details are: Address: Clyme House, Hillside Street, Hythe, Kent CT21 5DJ Mobile: 07771 796 446 Landline: 020 3239 5828 (via Skype) email: david@davidcowell.net