The Hastings Trawler - 5 (May 2006)

EDITORIAL

‘There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth publishing, to find honest men to publish it, and to get sensible people to read it when written.’

Info Panel Publisher Graham Frost Editor-in-Chief Francisco Ferrer i Guardia Production Editor Bobby Cramp Illustrators Lesley Prince, Richard Warren Robert Sample Photographer Graham Frost Contributors Stuart Christie, Jan Goodey, Joy Melville, Pauline Melville, Ted Newcomen, Steve Peak, Peter Roe Advertising Bea Jarvis ✆ +44 — 07974457472

Uner Tan, a Turkish researcher, has reported that a Turkish family has five siblings who exhibit signs of ‘Reverse Evolution’ — they walk on their wrists, never having learned to walk upright. The human mind can also reverse elvolve. Read Stuart Christie’s article on The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code to see how easily logic and reason can be suspended in favour of blind irrational faith. But there is hope! The Hastings Trawler is here to stimulate those little grey cells and provide a beacon for those who seek understanding and trawl for reason among the oceans of nonsense which threaten to drown us all.

Graham Frost, Publisher

Published by Boulevard Books, 32 George St. Hastings TN34 3EA ✆ +44 (0)1424 436521 www.thehastingstrawler.co.uk editor@thehastingstrawler.co.uk Annual subscription £36.00 (UK) £46.00 (airmail RoW)

Cover artwork Hastings Gothic Catherine and Tom Cookson © Robert Sample Printed by: Abbot Print, The Applestore, Workhouse Lane, Icklesham, East Sussex TN36 4BJ ✆ +44 (0)1424 815111 F +44 (0)1424 815222 @: sales@abbotprint.co.uk http://www.abbotprint.co.uk

Except where indicated otherwise, the copyright in all articles, photographs and illustrations remains with the author, photographer or artist. © 2006 by Boulevard Books. All rights reserved.

No portion of this publication may be photocopied, reproduced or retransmitted without prior written authorization from Boulevard Books.

Thoughts for the month: If you find mistakes in this publication, please remember they are there for a purpose. We publish something for everyone, and some people are always looking for mistakes!

‘A change of rulers is the joy of fools.’ — Rumanian proverb ‘There is one thing in the world more wicked than the desire to command, and that is the will to obey. — William Kingdon Clifford

IN THIS ISSUE

April 2006, Vol II, Issue 4 ISSN 1745-3321

THE TALK OF THE OLD (AND NEW) TOWN A public arena for news, views, gossip and tittle-tattle about goings-on in Hastings, St Leonards-and beyond. 2-3 ELECTIONS: Ted Newcomen looks at ‘Granny-farming’ and the possibilities it presents for electoral malpractice . 4-5 WHITHER HASTINGS?: The town is on the ‘up’ says London’s trendy property magazines. But will it ever regain its ‘summer sweetheart’ status in holidaymakers’ hearts and minds. Peter Roe investigates 6-7 ENVIRONMENT: Hastings Country Park is becoming one of the most important wildlife sites in the UK. Hastings ecologist Murray Davidson talks to Peter Roe about the effects of the current regeneration programme. 8-9 PROFILE: World-famous author Catherine Cookson was born 100 years ago this June. Steve Peak looks at her life and the role of Tom Cookson, ‘the man behind the woman’.

10-12 PSEUDOHISTORY: We look at the background to the plagiarism case being brought against The Da Vinci Code and ask why people are so fascinated by the irrational.

14-26 HASTINGS PEOPLE: Novelist Iain Sinclair talks to Joy Melville about his writing and why Hastings is his kind of town.

27-28 FICTION: ‘Sometime it comes round again’ by Pauline Melville.

29-31 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

31-32

www.tvhastings.org Hastings’ own (free) global-local internet tv channel Serving the community — and local democracy

April ‘06 | THE HASTINGS TRAWLER

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FORUM

THE

HASTINGS TRAWLER THE TALK OF THE OLD (AND NEW) TOWN A Snitch in time

MINISTER IN HASTINGS

T

he other month Hastings was ‘treated’ to a visit by Home Office Minister Hazel Blears. You know her, the little one with the hairstyle and expectant eyes of a Highland Terrier, just waiting for somebody to throw a stick and shout ‘fetch’. I swear if the woman had a tail … Well, you know what I mean?

I have to admit if it were me throwing the stick it would have to be across an eight-lane motorway or in front of the 7.55 to London Bridge.

Sorry if that sounds cruel, but I have strong negative transference when it comes to Mrs Blears. I think it has something to do with my early days at primary school. I’m sure I sat next to Hazel or someone very much like her.

She was forever holding up her hand and saying stuff like ‘Miss, Miss, he’s eating sweets in class again Miss!’

As a result, I got given a hundred lines to write out and ended up scribbling my life away on The Hastings Trawler while Hazel was rewarded with the job of class wastepaper monitor and later got promoted

by Tony Blair to Home Office Minister. It speaks volumes about the unfairness of life and the efficacy of the British education system. But I don’t hold it against the woman, nor do I have a chip on my shoulder.

Snitch, sorry, I mean Minister Blears, was in town to speak to the media 2

THE HASTINGS TRAWLER|April ‘06

about Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs). Although, I noted from the local paper that ‘Nigel Barry, ASBO co-ordinator for the Safer Hastings Partnership, did not wish to comment on the story’. Perhaps he would feel more comfortable talking to The Hastings Trawler? Our contact number is at the front of the magazine.

Tattletale, sorry I’m doing it again — Mrs Blears said ‘Part of the government’s Respect Plan is to be tough on cases of anti-social behaviour and I had a sense today things are improving’. I only wish I could have been there to egg her on and show her how tough the authorities are really getting in Hastings.

I would have invited Mrs Quisling — damn it! I mean Mrs Blears, to ride on one of our local Blue double-decker buses run by Arriva. Where, on the bulkhead, near the driver, and in full view of fair-paying passengers is a notice telling potential thugs and vandals what penalty they can expect to receive if caught damaging private property.

The notice is put out jointly by Arriva Kent and Sussex Ltd and Kent Constabulary. It informs any little tearaway who can actually read that if they are over 10 years of age and are convicted of damaging private property they are liable to imprisonment of up to 14 years. I kid you not, have a look next time you catch an Arriva bus.

I was on the floor, laughing in stitches — Christ knows what effect this sort of silly hyperbole has on

young thugs? Are the bus company and police serious? We all know that convicted murderers rarely serve more than half this sentence.[Less if they appeal, ed.] They might just as well have claimed that that any pickpockets found guilty will be transported to Australia for life. On second thoughts not such a good idea — that would only encourage desperate people who watch too many episodes of ‘A Place in the Sun’.

The local Hastings and St.Leonards Observer has recently run a story about one harassed mother of a young lawbreaker who claims that her son and other ‘selfish, violent and thieving louts proudly collect newspaper clipping of their criminal antics are laughing at soft courts’. In the same edition was another story about the 1,800 offenders in Hastings who escaped going to court after police issued them with a caution. There is a definite mismatch here between the draconian penalties threatened on the one hand and the reality of sentencing as it is actually experienced in the courts.

As if this isn’t bad enough then there is considerable anecdotal evidence from low-ranking police officers and others working in the court system that when it comes to very minor offences you are more likely to end up in court if you are:- a) working, b) not in receipt of any state benefits, and c) a home owner.

Why should the prosecution service go after minor offenders who are never going to be in any position to pay fines, however small they may be,

FORUM

when they know full well that they have a much better chance of actually making malefactors pay small fines levied by the courts if they are responsible citizens with jobs, property, and other commitments.

It’s an unwritten policy that Squealer Blears and the criminal justice system just don’t want to own up to. Sorry, Hazel, I just can’t help myself! TN Correction and update

MARINA PAVILION

I

must apologise and make a correction to the article in the February issue of The Hastings Trawler that appeared under the title ‘Unpleasantness at the Burton’s St. Leonards Society’.

It was not the project architect who accompanied Ms. Abigail Gilbert from Sea Space Ltd for her talk on the 14th January 2006, but the company’s Communication Consultant, Mr Tariq Khwaja.

Readers may recall that the main contractor Westridge Construction Limited had actually walked off the job and progress was practically at a standstill. It’s probably worth reprinting part of the statement that appears on the firm’s website* as they don’t actually wish to talk to the press at the moment, a sure sign that something has gone pear-shaped — clearly they are very unhappy bunnies:— The Urban Renaissance project for the renovation of St. Leonard’s Marina Pavilion was won via competitive tender by Westridge Construction Limited who tendered the lowest price although it transpired that these costs were in excess of Sea Space’s (the client’s) budget for the scheme.

Westridge Construction Limited subsequently worked with the client and the client’s design and financial consultants to identify savings in order to meet the available budget having commenced initial works on site on 10th October 2005 under the

contractual security of a number of consecutively issued Letters of Intent.

During the course of numerous meetings and constant dialogue, changes to both the scope of works and final contract terms were proposed by Sea Space which culminated in Westridge Construction Limited and Sea Space failing to agree final contract terms.

The last accepted Letter of Intent determined that Westridge Construction Limited had no authority to continue works on the project beyond 4:00pm 19th December 2005 and arrangements were made to ensure safety, security and vacation of the site by this time.

Following cessation of work on site, Westridge Construction Limited have maintained a dialogue with Sea Space to ensure the smooth transition of Project Management control to Sea Space, whose responsibilities for the site from 4:00pm 19th December 2005 have included Insurance and Health and Safety.

For anyone who can’t read between the lines it means that this project is a COMPLETE COCK-UP! Sea Space Ltd is now attempting to project manage the scheme by itself — quite what skills and experience it has in this area remains to be seen. Any subcontractor coming in to finish the job is going to be very wary given the project’s unfortunate history. This will surely add an extra premium to the price of any new tenders — let’s hope there’s enough money left in the original £1.7 million kitty!

In early March the steel erectors started back on site to continue their work which may be completed by the time this issue of The Hastings Trawler goes to press. Whatever happens, the project is unlikely to be finished in time to open this summer, and given the ‘death-shroud’ that normally envelops this end of St.Leonards seafront during the winter months it seems unlikely that any new restaurant will open before Summer 2007.TN * www.cluk.co.uk/news

England, this England!

LITTLE BRITAIN

T

he Hastings Trawler doesn’t generally do jokes but some stories are so quintessentially 21st Century Britain that you have to give them an airing: — Once upon a time there was a shepherd looking after his sheep on the side of a deserted road crossing the Sussex Downs. Suddenly, a brand new bright red Porsche 911 appears and screeches to a halt beside him.

Out steps the driver, a woman wearing a Chanel suit, RayBans and a Cartier watch, and asks the shepherd ‘If I can guess how many sheep you have, can I keep one?’

The shepherd looks at the large flock and says ‘OK’. Whereupon, the woman whips out her wireless laptop computer, enters the NASA website and scans the field using GPS technology. She then opens a database linked to 60 Excel files with logarithms and pivotal tables, and then prints out a 150 page report on her mini-printer.

She studies the report and says to the shepherd ‘you have exactly 1,586 sheep’. The shepherd replies ‘That’s amazing — you can have the pick of my flock’. So the woman packs away her equipment, looks at the flock and puts one in the boot of the Porsche.

As she is about to leave the shepherd asks ‘if I can guess your profession will you return the animal to me?’ The woman thinks for a moment and then agrees to the wager.

The shepherd says ‘you’re a management consultant aren’t you?’

‘That’s right’, responds the woman, ‘but how did you know?’ The shepherd replies ‘it’s simple, first you came without being invited. Second, you wasted a lot of time telling me something I already knew. Third, you don’t understand anything about the work I do but interfere anyway. And now can I have my dog back please ?!!!!’ TN

April ‘06 | THE HASTINGS TRAWLER

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ELECTIONS

Granny Farming

by Ted Newcomen

G

ranny farming, in case you’ve never heard of the expression, is a form of electoral malpractice whereby party activists visit retirement and nursing homes, purportedly to help the elderly and immobile to exercise their voting rights. Residents are asked to fill out ‘absentee voter’ forms, allowing them a proxy or postal vote.

When the forms are signed and gathered, they are then secretly rewritten as applications for proxy votes, naming party activists or their friends and relatives as their proxies. These people, unknown to the voter, then cast the vote for the party of their choice. The trick relies on elderly carehome residents typically being absentminded, suffering from dementia, or otherwise unlikely to cause a fuss.

Electoral administrators will tell you that ‘Granny farming’ isn’t that widespread but the truth is nobody knows actually how much of it is going on. It can certainly flourish if election offices have ‘sloppy procedures’ and are under-resourced so that they can’t (or won’t) check signatures.

Electoral fraud, or rather cases of electoral fraud that actually come to court, are indeed a pretty rare phenomenon in Britain. That’s despite some fairly well-publicised cases such as that in St. Ives in 1992 when more than 70 electors complained that Conservative supporters had used their votes by proxy without permission. Some said they had signed nothing, including one man who was supposed to have signed a request for a proxy vote without even being able to spell his own name. Four people were actually dead by the time they ‘voted’!

In 1998, a Conservative and a Lib4

THE HASTINGS TRAWLER|April ‘06

Dem Councillor in Hackney were both jailed for electoral fraud. Then there was the more recent case in Birmingham which involved the Labour Party. So you can see it’s a crime that crosses the entire political spectrum — it’s a dirty little secret that they all share.

Following the last election many new examples of the inadequacy of the present system came to light, such as the registration of 250 names of pensioners supposedly living in a nursing home in Bethnal Green, East London. Trouble was that the home had closed 18 months previously — yet the names of the residents remained on the electoral roll. Formal complaints about this and other irregularities were made to the Returning Officer, but he failed to take any action due to the lack of resources to look into such issues.

In fact, electoral fraud is a topic

that’s been smothered by a conspiracy of silence — the crime that dare not speak it’s name, the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about. In practically all cases of electoral irregularity, the silence from the non-implicated political parties is always deafening. Why? Because they are all at it, and provided nobody is discovered it’s OK. Even if someone is occasionally caught red-handed then a collective sigh of ‘there but for the grace of God…’ is whispered in the nation’s constituencies.

In the previously mentioned Birmingham case, the judge brought down a whopping 192-page ruling which damned a government statement that said there were no proposals to change the rules governing election procedures. Justice Mawrey told a packed courtroom ‘anyone who has sat through the case I have just tried and listened to evidence of electoral fraud that would disgrace a banana republic, would find this statement surprising’.

In reality, the entire system is an open invitation to fraud, manipulation, and malpractice, and yet there is still no mechanism in place to easily detect such dishonesty. The Electoral Reform Society is clearly

ELECTIONS

concerned, and although it’s in favour of more postal votes, it wants to see more safeguards in place. To try and stop the practice of ‘granny farming’ it wants to see proxies available only to those living outside the UK and local authorities to have the resources to randomly investigate registrations.

Back in February 1994 a Home Office working party considered the future of absentee voting and concluded: ‘voting in person at the local polling station in general provides the least opportunity for impersonation or electoral fraud’. It continued ‘a move to absent-voting on demand might increase the opportunity for fraudulent applications to be made without the 2002 2004 2005

Election Borough European/ Borough Parliamentary/ County

knowledge of the elector. On balance, we consider that the risk of increased fraud outweighs the potential advantage for the electorate of making absent-voting available to all’.

The current government has totally ignored these recommendations and pushed for increased postal voting which has certainly put huge pressures on election staff in town halls across the country.

Nationally, there are about 15,000 nursing and residential care homes providing accommodation for approximately 426,000 residents.

Most are elderly, some are adults aged 18-65 with mental or physical health problems. In East Sussex alone there are over 400 registered homes

Postal 5,541

Proxy 86

Turnout 32.09%

7,095

84

34.05%

8,748

36

59.01% 56.53%

Parliamentary County

with around 9,000 elderly residents, and the entire system still appears to be very vulnerable to electoral fraud. A worrying thought when you consider that the 1992 General Election was supposedly decided by just 1,241 votes in 11 key marginal seats!

With the imminence of the May elections in mind, we asked Hastings Borough Council how much postal voting has increased in recent years compared to turnout, how many electors there are, and what steps are being taken to prevent ‘Granny farming’ at a local level (see box below): The number of electors as at 1 March, 2006 is 59,227. All postal and proxy application forms require the elector to sign the application form and signatures can be checked.

It is also an offence to falsely apply for a postal or proxy vote. We will be using these powers to ensure that postal voting is free from fraud That’s all right then!

A Sunday Times Top 250 Company? an you imagine working for a company that has a little more than 600 employees and has the following statistics?: — 29 have been accused of spouse abuse 7 have been arrested for fraud 19 have been accused of writing bad cheques 117 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses 3 have done time for assault 71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit 14 have been arrested on drugrelated charges 8 have been arrested for shoplifting 21 are currently defendants in lawsuits 84 have been arrested for drink driving in the last year

C

“We understand you removed the little tag from your mattress”

Which organization is this? each year designed to keep the rest of us in line.

635 MPs that cranks out hundreds of new laws It is the House of Commons, the same group of

April ‘06 | THE HASTINGS TRAWLER

5

OP-ED — WHITHER HASTINGS?

THE LOST RESORT!

by Peter Roe

H

astings hit its holiday heyday in the 1950s, offering over 8,000 serviced beds to the sun-seeking hordes who headed for the seaside every summer. With its quaint Old Town, its fishing boats and beaches and a cricket ground smack in the middle for dad, Hastings earned a regular place in the top three British holiday resort favourites.

Then it all began to go wrong.

More money and more leisure time broadened the horizons of the holiday classes, who abandoned tradition to seek the sun abroad. The big hotels and seafront flats grew emptier and shabbier.

In the struggle to make ends meet, landlords began converting thousands of holiday lets to bedsits and maisonettes, much of it of indifferent quality.

Holiday accomodation dropped steadily through the 60s, 70s and 80s.

Today, the town has only around 1000 holiday-specific beds, compared to Eastbourne’s 7500.

Eastbourne, in fact, managed to weather the holiday crisis better than Hastings. It kept up the standard of accomodation and worked hard to attract new, younger, visitors. It now boasts paragliding, mountain biking and a bustling marina that lures in 3,000 visiting boats a year.

Last year it won Group Leisure magazine’s prestigious Best UK Resort award, enticing four million visitors to contribute to its £343 million tourist industry.

By comparison, Hastings averages fewer than half a million visitors each year. And its tourist industry is worth just £147 million, even counting the money spent by those who service the industry.

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THE HASTINGS TRAWLER|April ‘06

HASTINGS IS ON THE UP. UP WITH KENSINGTON, CHELSEA AND PIMLICO AS THE PLACE TO LIVE, SAYS COUNTRY LIVING MAGAZINE. UP IN THE TOP TEN BEST BUY LIST, SAYS THE FIRST TIME BUYER PROPERTY INDEX. GOVERNMENT GRANTS, A NATIONALLY-FETED CAMPAIGN TO MAKE LANDLORDS SPRUCE UP DECREPIT PROPERTY AND A CRACK-DOWN ON CRIME ARE ALL HELPING THE TOWN SHED ITS SHABBY, KISS-ME-QUICK, IMAGE. HASTINGS IS RISING LIKE A SEASIDE PHOENIX FROM THE ASHES OF ITS OWN ECONOMIC DECLINE. BUT WHY DID IT SINK SO FAR? HOW DID HOLIDAY HAVEN BECOME THE LOST RESORT? AND WILL THIS NEW FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX TAKE HASTINGS BACK TO ITS GLORY DAYS AS EVERYBODY’S SUMMER SWEETHEART? NO, SAY THE EXPERTS. AND WE DON’T WANT IT TO, ARGUES PETER ROE.

It could be argued that those who ran the town during that crucial period simply didn’t react fast enough to the changing needs of holidaymakers. But Hastings also had special problems.

In the pre-Thatcher years the town’s cheap, empty, properties began to fill with the victims of social change in London and the industrial towns of the north.

At that time, the unemployed and disadvantaged could collect their benefit money from anywhere in the country, not just their borough of residence. In fact some London boroughs and northern towns actively encouraged the migration of their less well-heeled, effectively paying the unemployed to leave.

Many chose Hastings. Why not claim your benefits from a cheap rental by the sea? The fact that the town couldn’t offer much in the way of jobs didn’t seem to matter.

Unemployment and crime rose with the numbers of disaffected, and the town’s reputation continued to drop.

The families who had been the backbone of the tourist industry drifted away, and the downward spiral continued.

Part of the problem was the geography of the town itself. The quaint, narrow, streets and unlit side alleys of central St Leonards proved a breeding ground for crime and drug dealing. New street lights had to be squeezed in so close to the houses that they just helped burglars gain access to upper windows. The town swapped its place at the top of the holiday haven list for one on the crime capital chart.

Then the national asylum seeker crisis added a new dimension to Hastings’ fall from grace.

Nobody could fail to feel compassion for the lost souls forced to flee their home countries in search of a safe place to live. But the system that allowed agencies to acquire the rights to place asylum seekers was questionable at best. These agencies didn’t even need to notify tthe Council about asylum seekers as they weren’t permanent residents.

Hotels like the Adelphi (ironically, the Greek word for ‘brother’) were packed with people of opposing political and religious views and no money. Serbs, Croats, Iranians and Iraqis lived side by side, swelling the numbers of those just passing through.

Nobody even knew how many were here, though hindsight says numbers peaked at about 850, a sizeable influx for a small seaside town. The figure now is under 100.

The town’s stock continued to drop under the weight of high unemployment, a large itinerant population and lack of investment in property, infrastructure and jobcreation. And the national press continued to generate those ‘Holiday Hell’ headlines....

Long-term Hastings residents argue now over what turned the tide — but turn it did.

Investment helped — the transformation of the old Sea Life Centre into today’s Underwater World boosted visitor numbers in the mid80s. So did the opening of the Shipwreck Heritage Centre and the smartening up of St Clement’s Caves.

A key turning point was the opening of Priory Meadow — the loss of the by-then little used cricket pitch a small price to pay for a smart new shopping centre.

OP-ED — WHITHER HASTINGS?

Whither Hastings? — The Lost Resort!

More recently, over £1 million in national and European grants was handed to tourist businesses, helping provide face lifts for the Jenny Lind, the White Rock and Zanzibar among others. The big clean-up is ongoing, with a cool half million about to be spent on completely refurbishing the town’s famous funicular — the steepest in the country.

And the Borough Council’s brave assault on lazy landlords, using the threat of daily fines to building maintenance, has transformed much of the seafront.The campaign has been so successful it has been adopted by other local authorities across the country.

As the town smartened and improved, its artificially low house prices began to attract buyers from out of the area, causing an unprecedented boom. Prices are still rising gently, despite the national slow-down. And new businesses are being actively encouraged, the government chipping in with a £3.5 million grant for enterprise growth and encouragement

earlier this year.

The changing demographic profile and better policing has had a dramatic effect on crime too — latest figures show overall crime down 50 per cent in just the last five years.

But even with all these improvements the town will probably never see summers like the 50s again.

In any case, say the town’s planning and tourism experts, hard-selling newlook Hastings as a summer holiday centre again would be a mistake.

One senior official told the Trawler ‘There simply isn’t the space or the infrastructure to cope with a large increase in the traditional summer holiday market.

‘Nobody wants the town to be gridlocked every summer, nowhere to park, endless queues for entertainment, even in the name of economic growth’. Instead, the plan is to go all-out to attract a new breed of tourist. Our source said: ‘We see the future as attracting affluent, shortbreak visitors all year round. The type who have an exotic main holiday in the

Far East, go skiing in the winter, have a short break in Paris, Amsterdam or Venice, and then want a break in the UK. ‘They’re the people we want to come to Hastings and 1066 Country.’

Events like Hastings Week in October, Jack-in-the-Green in May, the Chess Congress in December and January will be heavily promoted.

Later this year the Normans are coming (again) to talk to the town’s tourism bosses about marketing William the Conqueror and the Hastings French Connection.

‘You can’t get much better brand recognition that 1066, and both we and our French counterparts are very aware of it and working hard to capitalise on it’, said one HBC tourism expert.

Hastings, it seems, is moving firmly towards a brighter, more prosperous future. Who knows — in time we might see well-heeled short-breakers enjoying five-star fish in a lovely Heritage Centre restaurant instead of coaches and chaos on the Stade.

April ‘06 | THE HASTINGS TRAWLER

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HASTINGS COUNTRY PARK

Where sheep may safely graze — ‘low-level’, of course!

HASTINGS COUNTRY PARK, DECLARED A ‘COUNTRY PARK’ IN 1974, IS A UNIQUE AREA OF MARITIME CLIFF WITH A CLIFF-TOP AREA OF MARITIME ACID GILL HEATH, (INCLUDING SOME SCRUB, ANCIENT WOODLAND), NEUTRAL GRASSLAND, AND AMENITY THE CLIFFS HERE GRASSLAND.

GRASSLAND

AND

WOODLAND

CONSTITUTE THE LARGEST AREA OF THE

HIGH WEALD RIDGE THAT MEETS THE SEA. THIS SANDSTONE AND CLAY COASTLINE IS UNIQUELY POSITIONED BETWEEN THE ALLUVIAL PLAINS OF

BAY

RYE

PEVENSEY BAY AND THE NORTH AND SOUTH DOWNS. PETER ROE REPORTS ON THE AND

CHALK OF THE

CHANGES BEING MADE UNDER THE

by Peter Roe

CURRENT REGENERATION PROGRAMME.

‘Strayed Sheep’: William Holman Hunt, 1852

H

astings may have grabbed the national headlines for its massive regeneration programme — the biggest of any town its size in the country. But the town’s garden, Hastings Country Park, has been quietly undergoing its own facelift — one that could bring a nature-loving army of new visitors to the town.

The operation has left some scars.

Fences have been smashed, wire cut and angry voices raised.

But as the bandages come off there are clear signs that the facelift has so far been a success. The park is firmly on the way to achieving its architects’ dream of becoming a national nature reserve.

Barn owls are breeding there for the first time in ten years. There’s been a spectacular increase in endangered farmland birds, like bunting, yellowhammer and tree sparrows.

Rarities like the firecrest and the black redstart — both on the Amber List of Birds of Conservation Concern — have been spotted. A harrier has taken up residence, the first in many years.

Wildlife experts say HCP is becoming one of the most important wildlife sites in the UK — perhaps even internationally.

The restoration has been — and 8

THE HASTINGS TRAWLER|April ‘06

continues to be — a huge task.

Imagine your garden is the size of 200 football pitches. You’ve been away for a while — a long while — and the man you asked to cut the grass hasn’t bothered.

Bramble, gorse and bracken are everywhere. That rolling lawn is now an impenetrable jungle. Slurry spillage from the farm next door has poisoned the ground, killing your plants and driving off the birds and bees. It’s a wasteland.

The word despair wouldn’t come close. But in the end you’d roll up your sleeves, get out the shears and the mower and start getting it all back together again.

That’s exactly what’s been happening in Hastings’ garden.

In this case the men rolling up their sleeves are ecologist Murray Davidson, Nature Reserves Officer Andy Phillips, and a tiny Park Rangers team led by Manager Martin Jenks.

Together with a small, unsung group of local volunteers who give up their weekends to slash bracken and bramble they are transforming Hastings Country Park into a nationally-recognised wildlife haven.

Although the town’s cliff tops were designated a country park in 1974, its importance was largely ignored in a

social climate that had other priorities.

The countryside just wasn’t sexy.

Money and effort went elsewhere.

And, until 2000, part of the area was an intensive dairy farm, Fairlight Place Farm. The tenant there had struggled for years, cash problems contributing to poor land management and slurry run-offs that polluted precious surrounding countryside — including a legally protected Site of Special Scientific Interest.

The Park had its picnic spots and its footpaths — but the three glens lost the beauty that inspired William Holman Hunt to famously paint Warren Glen in 1852 as a perfect example of the English coastline.

Thankfully, times change. A new awareness of the environment began to develop nationally. The countryside became sexier.

In 2001 Hastings Borough Council stepped in, ending the farm’s tenancy and launching, with English Nature, a long-term plan to turn the whole area back into something the town could be proud of.

Overall strategy fell to Murray Davidson, the first ecologist to be employed by a local council anywhere in the south east.

He said ‘It’s hard work persuading policymakers of the importance of

HASTINGS COUNTRY PARK

The Fire Hills: Fairlight, Hastings

natural green spaces in urban areas.

But Hastings has taken (its) responsibilities very seriously.’

In fact, the town has seven designated LNRs — far more than national recommendations for countryside access in towns and cities.

The Country Park, though, has been the single biggest project. The current three-year budget will see £234,000 of taxpayers’ money spent.

How at least some of that cash has been used has caused fury in the Glens.

The loss of grassland, hedging, field verge and woodland has driven the wildlife out of HCP for many years.

The experts plan to bring lost habitats back by allowing small numbers of cattle and sheep to graze the glens.

But grazing means fences — and fences mean trouble.

Over the years the distinction between actual, legal footpaths and convenient shortcuts has become blurred. Dog walkers and ramblers have trodden their own favourite paths across the Park.

And when the council tried to fence future grazing fields, angry walkers took matters into their own hands.

Stockproof fencing was regularly cut and smashed as ramblers tried to keep what they regarded as their rights of way open.

Murray Davidson is rueful but unrepentant.

He said ‘The key to restoring the Glens is the reintroduction of lowlevel grazing. Properly managed, it will see a reduction in gorse and bracken and an increase in the acid grassland for which the area is famous.

‘But I can categorically say we have not fenced off a single public footpath.

There are new fences in Warren Glen around fields we plan to graze, but we made doubly sure we didn’t fence off any footpaths. All the other fencing simply replaces inadequate historical fences.’

For now, diplomacy now seems to have won the day. A rethink and some new gates have allowed walkers to keep their favourite non-shortcuts, at least when cattle aren’t grazing.

Mr Davidson said ‘The aim of the park is access for all, and we are doing our level best to achieve that.

Balancing it against protecting wildlife can be tricky, but I think we’re getting there.’

The Council plans new information boards, leaflets and open meetings to keep people up to speed with the Park’s development.

Over the next few years there will be big changes at the Park. Car parks will be resurfaced, footpaths drained and restored and derelict farm buildings rebuilt to allow grazing cattle to overwinter.

New hedging and the gradual scraping of bracken and gorse will allow heathland to regenerate,

encouraging insects, birds and wildlife. There are plans to extend access for the less able, and to improve the Visitor Centre.

Mr Davidson said ‘The regeneration of such an important wildlife area is a slow process. You can’t just rip out all the bracken at once, for instance — it has to be done over a period of years to minimise damage to breeding wildlife.’

But what will all this work and expenditure mean to Hastings?

Murray Davidson is clear. ‘This is one of the most important wildlife sites in the UK and internationally. It is a unique place.

‘There is a long way to go, but we feel we can make this one of the best managed accessible wildlife sites in the UK. ‘If we can encourage people who love nature to come here and want to come back because it’s a very special place, then that’s the ultimate goal.

‘We may even one day have Hastings Country Park designated a National Nature Reserve — and that would be wonderful for the town.’

Ecclesbourne Glen

April ‘06 | THE HASTINGS TRAWLER

9

PROFILE — Catherine and Tom Cookson

War that pushed her into a 15-year period of mental breakdown, despair and near suicide. Tom rescued her from this and gave her the confidence and inspiration to start writing. Her novels reflected much of the pain of her life, with many of them being set in the rundown north east.

Tom was a stimulation not only to Catherine, but also to many of his pupils at Hastings Grammar School, now the William Parker. He was not the most skilful teacher, but he treated us youngsters in a decent, straightforward and human manner, unlike a number of his staff-mates.

Sion Jenkins would have felt very much at home in Hastings Grammar School.

Katie and Cookie

by Steve Peak

SCARRED CHILDHOOD

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BRITAIN’S BEST-READ AUTHOR WAS BORN A HUNDRED YEARS AGO THIS JUNE. CATHERINE COOKSON WAS ONCE THE MANAGER OF THE LAUNDRY IN THE HASTINGS WORKHOUSE, BUT HER LIFE WAS TRANSFORMED BY A SHY LOCAL SCHOOLMASTER — WHO ALSO TRIED TO TEACH STEVE PEAK SOME MATHS. STEVE CONSIDERS TOM COOKSON’S ROLE IN HELPING CATHERINE BECOME BRITAIN’S TOP-SELLING NOVELIST.

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atherine Cookson was born and brought up in great poverty, the illegitimate daughter of a Tyneside barmaid. Yet, by 1990 she was Britain’s 17th richest woman, and in the mid-90s she was the country’s most-read author, writing nine out of ten of all borrowed library books.

When Dame Catherine died, in June 1998, she had completed 103 novels, sold over 120 million books worldwide and had £20 million in the bank — all of which went to charities.

Catherine and Tom Cookson had very different personalities. She came from the poorest working class 10

THE HASTINGS TRAWLER|April ‘06

background, while he was an Oxford graduate. She was strong-willed and dominant, while he was soft-voiced, sensitive and quiet. Catherine was said to be the driver in their relationship, with Tom the passenger.

But despite the problems he had with her, Tom always loved her, and he died of a broken heart just 17 days after her death. His obituary in the Times described him as ‘the man behind the woman’.

Catherine suffered from depression for much of her life, not least because of her inability to have a child. It was the still-birth and miscarriages of four children during the Second World

atherine Cookson was born as Catherine (Katie) Ann McMullen on 20 June 1906. She never knew her father and was brought up by her illiterate and uneducated step-grandfather, John McMullen, her grandmother, Rose, and the woman she initially thought to be her sister, Kate Fawcett. It was only when Catherine was seven that she discovered that the alcoholic Kate was actually her mother.

Catherine was born at 5 Leam Lane, at the entrance to the Tyne Dock in East Jarrow, near the mouth of the River Tyne. This was a heavy industrial landscape of docks, jetties, railway lines, bridges, warehouses and workshops, interspersed with farmland, nursery gardens and a few rows of houses for local workers.

When she was five, Catherine’s family moved round the corner to 10 William Black Street, part of a small estate.

Tyneside was one of the poorest areas of Britain, and in these bleak surroundings fatherless Catherine was brought up by an impoverished family, in constant fear of the workhouse. Her childhood was deeply scarred by abuse, violence,

PROFILE — Catherine and Tom Cookson

alcoholism, shame and guilt, wounds she carried all her life and which came across so many times in her novels. She always had negative, selfdestructive tendencies that damaged both her personality and her relationships with other people.

Catherine soon became determined to escape the slums and misery she was experiencing as a youngster. And she quickly realised that she had to become tough and hard-hitting to fight her way into a better life, which she felt she deserved. But her neighbours grew to dislike the ‘hoitytoity’ Catherine that began to emerge, and although she eventually escaped Tyneside, she did it at the expense of having few friends.

The young Catherine was an avid reader who decided she would like to be a writer. She wrote her first short story, ‘The Wild Irish Girl’, when she was eleven, and sent it to the local evening paper, but it was returned unpublished.

Catherine left school at 13. Her first work was as a maid and then a self-employed artist. In 1924, aged 18, she became a laundry-checker at the Harton workhouse, close to Tyne Dock. Over the next five years she tried to better herself, including having several boyfriends. But these relationships were all unsuccessful

Tom Cookson: ‘the man behind the woman’

Nan Smyth: the lover

and by 1929 she felt she could achieve no more in the north-east, and that she should go south.

In March 1929 Catherine moved to Essex, becoming a laundress at a workhouse near Clacton. Then, in December that year, she successfully applied for a well-paid job — £3 and six shillings a week — as head laundress at Hastings Workhouse.

She took up lodgings in Clifton Road, Ore, just up the hill from the workhouse in Frederick Road, and started work there in February 1930 Catherine liked Hastings, describing it later as ‘another world, in which everything moved at an easy-going pace and no one looked poor or even drab’. And in this refreshing town she aimed to start her better life.

But it is in Hastings that Catherine’s life became more culturally complicated and ceased to fit into the classic working class mould that she tried to paint in her later life. She seemed to start living what today would be called a bisexual life, although then it was unmentionable. She switched from being what she portrayed as a straight working class northern girl to a welloff southern woman.

Within a few months she became close friends with a masculine Irish

woman, Nan Smyth, and they started sharing a flat in West Hill House in the Old Town, in December 1931.

Catherine then invited her stilldrunken mother Kate to move in as well, but this was quickly seen to be mistake. So Catherine sought the home of her dreams — and found it in Hoads Wood Road, off Elphinstone Road.

In 1933 she managed to take out a £1,000 mortgage on a very large ‘gentleman’s residence’ called The Hurst, a Victorian 14-bedroom mansion in large grounds. This she turned into a combined old people’s home, lodging house and nursing home, run by herself, Kate and Nan. Photos of Catherine in The Hurst’s garden in the 1930s show Catherine enjoying a life that seemed to bear little relationship to the north east and her childhood. But Kate and Nan were very difficult to live with, and Kate was forced to move back to West Hill House in 1935, and Nan left in 1938.

Catherine developed her first serious relationship with a man in 1937, when she met Tom Cookson.

It was said to be love at first sight.

Catherine recalls in her autobiography Our Kate: ‘In that first second of meeting, fate was fixed for both of us. It happened as quickly as that.’ Tom said: ‘My life only began when I met her. Everything stems from that.’

Tom was born in 1912, the son of a verger at a church in Chingford, Essex. He went to a local grammar school and then to Oxford University, where he graduated with a maths degree in 1935. He started as a maths teacher at Hastings Grammar School, in Nelson Road, in 1936.

Tom had a very different personality to the loud and pushy Nan. He was small — only 5 feet 4 inches tall — and shy. But he had a gentle firmness and genuine supportive interest in other people that made him especially attractive to women such as Catherine who

April ‘06 | THE HASTINGS TRAWLER

11

PROFILE — Catherine and Tom Cookson

needed a father-figure. In 1937 Tom moved in with Catherine, who then forced out Nan a year later.

Catherine left her job at the workhouse in July 1939, and she married Tom in June 1940 in the St Mary-Star-of-the-Sea Church in Hastings High Street. In December that year, their first baby was born.

But he was three months premature — and he was dead. They lost three more babies in the next four years.

Catherine had missed family life as a child, and now she could not create her own family. This tragedy plummeted her into many years of severe depression and mental anguish that only began to lift at the end of the 1950s.

Catherine began writing her first novel — Kate Hannigan — in 1946 to try and break away from her psychological problems. It was published in 1950, prompting her into almost non-stop writing for the rest of her life. She often wrote two books a year, although she did not become most popular until the late 1960s. It was in 1969 that Our Kate was published, and it was one of her first big successes, but it had taken 12 years to write.

In 1953-54, Catherine and Tom moved home, to a smaller house called Loreto at 81 St Helen’s Park Road. This six-bedroomed, betterbuilt property had a swimming pool and a 2.5 acre garden, and was beautifully sited on the edge of St Helen’s Wood. The garden of The Hurst has had several houses built in it, and a planning application for No 81 wants to put three properties there.

‘GREATER THAN THEIR KNOWING’

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n the early 1960s, the youngsters at Hastings Grammar School (myself included) were still unaware of the teacher’s wife who was soon to become world-famous. All we knew was that one of the few decent 12

THE HASTINGS TRAWLER|April ‘06

teachers had a missus who seemed to help him, while he helped us to face up to unfriendly surroundings at the school and in the world around.

The Grammar School was a watered-down imitation of a public school, symbolised in the long black cloaks all teachers had to wear.

Cookie, as Tom was known, was not one of the number of teachers who seemed to be suffering from some little mental difficulty. It was not Cookie that drove one of my schoolmates to suicide, or forced another to start sobbing uncontrollably in the middle of a lesson until he was led out, never to be seen by us again. You did not have to keep your back to the wall if you passed Cookie in a corridor. And it was not Cookie that took obvious delight in whipping minor offenders with a cane or that sent them home if their hair was an inch too long (that was the violent headmaster George Henshall).

Cookie was one of the handful of staff you could talk to openly, without fear of something unknown. And the delight of his lessons was that he had almost as little interest in maths as the rest of us. It was difficult to do well in one’s maths exam when your teacher frequently stopped halfway through lessons and started lecturing on the problems of modern society or the closeness all humans should feel towards trees. He could even give us useful advice on playing snooker!

Many of us liked Cookie, but he did not like all of us. He was clearly appalled by several of my class-mates whose main ambition in their last year, 1963-64, was to join the military police in Britain’s African colony Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) so that they could ‘shoot blacks’. I remember how Cookie stood at the front of several maths lessons staring wide-eyed at this group of racists, sitting in front of me, while they joked about what they would be going to do with guns. He was unable to say anything, but he kept twisting his cloak round and round his arms.

Cookie retired from teaching in 1969 and became Catherine’s fulltime helper and organiser. But he seems to have been a sad man. The Cookson biographer, Piers Dudgeon, in his book Kate’s Daughter, believes Tom was unhappy for much of his married life. Dudgeon quotes Catherine’s cousin Sarah as saying Catherine had ‘a lot of hate’ in her, with her only love being for Tom. ‘He [Tom] had a real up-anddowner with her. Whatever it was about I don’t know, but whatever happened between them in their life, Tom was always the one who had to say sorry. He always had to go and kneel by her bed. She twisted things round not just with him, but with anybody. I think she didn’t like people to be too happy. She seemed to resent if people were happy, too content.’

In August 1976 Catherine ended nearly half a century of self-imposed exile, when she moved back to the north-east, where she and Tom lived for the rest of their lives. By the mid1970s she was known around the world as an author. In 1976 she was awarded an OBE, and was made a Dame in 1993. But her health was bad. She had five heart attacks, a major operation, pneumonia, vascular disease and anaemia. In her last years she was nearly blind.

Despite her difficult personality, she was very generous in helping the poor, making many charity donations. But this brought strains.

In 1992, with Tom recovering from stress linked with her huge mailbag, she said Britain had become a ‘nation of beggars’ and vowed in future to ignore the many begging letters she had received up until then.

Catherine died at 12.30pm on Thursday 11 June 1998 at her home, near Jesmond Dene, Newcastleupon-Tyne. Tom died 17 days later.

Neither had close relatives, and in his will Tom left all their £20 million savings to charities to help alleviate the sufferings of those afflicted as Catherine had been all her life.

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13

BOOK REVIEWS — PSEUDOHISTORY — (The Code War)

The Fraudster, the Fantasist and the Fiction writer The DA VINCI CON or the Abbé Saunière’s ‘Treasure’s

by Stuart Christie SINCE THE BIRTH OF SPECULATIVE FREEMASONRY IN THE EARLY 17TH CENTURY, LARGE NUMBERS OF INTELLIGENT AND OTHERWISE WELL-INFORMED, SANE AND SENSIBLE PEOPLE HAVE BELIEVED THAT MUCH OF WHAT WAS HAPPENING AROUND THEM ONLY OCCURRED BECAUSE IT WAS SET IN MOTION BY SECRET SOCIETIES, THE MOTORS OF HISTORY. MANY STILL BELIEVE THAT VIRTUALLY EVERYTHING UNPLEASANT THAT HAPPENS CAN BE ATTRIBUTED TO THEM AND THAT THERE IS AN OCCULT FORCE OPERATING BEHIND THE SEEMINGLY REAL FAÇADE OF PUBLIC AND POLITICAL LIFE. WHAT HAS BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT THE PRIORY OF SION IS A MONUMENTAL EXAMPLE OF A VIEW OF THE WORLD SHAPED BY HOKUM-POKUM AND IRRATIONALITY, AND EVEN THOUGH IT IS SOMETIMES AMUSING, IT IS ALWAYS DISTURBING WHEN INTELLIGENT PEOPLE SERIOUSLY TALK NONSENSE, TAKING FICTION FOR REALITY. AS MANY OF THESE AUTHORS HAVE FOUND OUT TO THEIR ADVANTAGE, IT NEVER PAYS TO UNDERESTIMATE PEOPLE’S CREDULITY. THE DA VINCI CODE HAS BEEN TRANSLATED INTO 44 LANGUAGES AND SOLD OVER 44 MILLION COPIES WORLDWIDE SINCE ITS PUBLICATION IN 2003. BRITISH SALES RECENTLY PASSED THE FOUR MILLION MARK, 1200 OF THESE BY OTTAKAR’S IN HASTINGS AND AROUND 500

BY OLIO BOOKS. IT HAS ALSO BEEN ADAPTED INTO A HOLLYWOOD BLOCKBUSTER FILM SCHEDULED to open at the Cannes Film Festival in May. NOW READ ON…

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hrist did not die on the cross. He was taken down alive and then quietly shipped out with his wife or partner, Mary Magdalene, to begin a new life in the south of France, hence the empty tomb. It was their children’s bloodline that four centuries later launched the Merovingian dynasty, which ruled in early Medieval France from 476 to 750 AD. This is the central hypothesis of the authors of the 1982 book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail: Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. According to their account, itself repeated from embellished secondary sources, the ‘secret’ of this ‘bloodline of Christ’ and the House of David — the ‘Holy Grail’ — lay hidden for centuries, until one day in 1891 four ‘ancient’ parchments referring to an 800-year old secret

association, the Prieuré de Sion, were allegedly ‘discovered’ by a village priest inside a hollowed-out Visigothic pillar.

The priest subsequently became inexplicably wealthy, spending money extravagantly and conspicuously. In 2003 this story was presented as fact by novelist Dan Brown and provided the basic storyline in his novel The Da Vinci Code.

THE FRAUDSTER...

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lmost nineteen-hundred years after the crucifixion, in July 1885, a 33-year old, right-wing, Royalist priest, François Bérenger Saunière, a Catholic 1 Integrist ,was appointed as the incumbent of Rennes-le-Château, a small hill-top village within the

‘FACT: The Priory of Sion — a European secret society founded in 1099 — is a real organisation. In 1975 Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale discovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory of Sion, including Sir Isaac Newton, Sandro Botticelli, Victor Hugo and Leonardo da Vinci’ Dan Brown The Da Vinci Code bishopric of Carcassonne in southwestern France. His salary was 75 F a month.

The church was in an area in Provençe of considerable historical and archeological interest. Originally consecrated to Mary Magdalene in 1059, thirty-six years before the First Crusade, it was rumoured to have been built on foundations which dated back to the sixth century, the end of the Visigothic period.

Abbé Françoise-Bérenger Saunière: b.11/4/1852 — d.17/1/1917

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THE HASTINGS TRAWLER|April ‘06

BOOK REVIEWS — PSEUDOHISTORY — (The Code War)

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his part of the Languedoc, in the foothills of the Pyreneees had been, in the 13th century, a stronghold of the Cathar or Albigensian heresy (don’t ask!), but by the end of the 19th century, it was the Integrist heartland of self-righteous, ‘fortress’ Catholicism.

Shaken by the French Revolution and subsequent upheavals, these were dogmatic believers who rejected everything modern and democratic in French history since the Revolution of 1789; they were Catholic fundamentalists for whom reality and history were simply too complex; Dostoyevskian characters obsessed with organisation, hierarchy and ritual, who

Rennes-le-Château, Département de Aude

rejected, as a matter of principle, everything that was not Traditionalist Roman Catholic.

Impermeable to the reality of the post-Medieval world in which the Eucharist was not cloaked in their anachronistic, Gothic, Baroque, Tridentine day-dreams, they ignored it.

Like the Essenes, they distinguished clearly between the saved and the unsaved; their world view was that God was indifferent to righteousness and justice among those outside the literal walls of the temple; only the traditional Catholic Church, with all its rites, liturgy, sacraments, mysteries and culture, had the power to prevent the

(© Puttnam & Wood)

corrosive metaphysical and physical corruption sapping the social and spiritual order. They longed for an imaginary pre-Enlightenment world in which virtuous, peaceful, happy and devout workers and peasants belonged to a guild, attended religious processions — and deferred, unquestioningly, to their betters.

TROUBLESOME PRIESTS

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érenger Saunière’s antiRepublican activities soon landed him in trouble with the government. In January 1886, after only five months in his parish, he was suspended by the Prefet de l’Aude and ordered to leave Rennes-le-Château. The suspension of troublesome priests such as Saunière was not an unusual governmentimposed punishment for the dissenting anti-Republican sermons priests were delivering from pulpits during the runup to the general election of October 1885.

Saunière’s crime had been to read to his parishioners at least one in a series of editorials on ‘the enemies of the church’ from the local religious paper, La Semaine Religeuse de Carcassonne. These urged Roman Catholics to vote for the Union of the Right — a coalition of conservatives, Bonapartists and Royalists whose policy aims included the reversal of Republican anticlerical legislation and the restoration of the French monarchy.

The editorial in question was probably the one published the week before the elections: ‘Victory is not yet complete. Next Sunday’s ballot (October 18) must either ensure our triumph, or deliver us into the hands of the bitter enemies of Religion and the Fatherland. This is a solemn moment and we must deploy all our forces against our enemies. That must be our main objective… Let us act, pray, improve ourselves, be penitent… and perhaps October 18 will become a day of deliverance.’ 2 The secular authorities were not amused. France’s Minister of Religion,

April ‘06 | THE HASTINGS TRAWLER

15

BOOK REVIEWS — PSEUDOHISTORY — (The Code War)

THE HIÉRON DU VAL D’OR

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he Hiéron du Val d’Or was founded in 1873 at Paray-leMonial, a small town in the SâoneLoire, by a Jesuit priest, Father Victor Drevon (1820-1880), and a wellconnected Spanish nobleman with esoteric interests, Baron Alexis de Sarachaga (1840-1918). Sarachaga, who claimed to be a descendant of the Carmelite nun known as St Theresa, had been a close friend of Pope Pius IX and his successor, Leo XIII; he was also a Royalist conspirator and was under regular close surveillance by the French police for his alleged involvement in plots to restore the House of Bourbon to the French throne.

The choice of location at the Convent at Paray-le-Monial was because that was where, in 1673 and 1674, Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, a nun, claimed to have had visions of Christ and the blazing Sacred Heart of Jesus.

The Hiéron was not just a group, it had a complex of buildings at Paray-leMonial — a museum and research centre — which specialised in Eucharistic symbolism. The centre was located in a pentagonal building, which reflected the Hiéron’s obsession with geometry and sacred architecture.

In addition to promoting the Kingship of Christ, subjects studied included the history of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Kabala, mystical chivalry, Freemasonry and its associated symbolism.

Members of the Hiéron — a body which was personally approved by Pope Leo XIII — included bishops, cardinals, writers, historians and archeologists, as well as aristocrats such the Chambords, the Bourbons and the Habsburgs, the would-be Holy Roman emperors. One well-known member was the writer and former priest Louis Charbonneau-Lassy (1871-1946), the author of The Bestiary of Christ. Among his obsessions was the belief that the Templars had been in possession of secret knowledge The museum at the shrine of St Mary Marget provided the Hiéron with a highly effective recruitment

16

centre, which allowed them to target the many pilgrims who began arriving in droves in 1873, after Saint Mary Margaret’s first visitation. The Hiéron’s invigorating interpretation of militant Catholicism, with its occult and monarchical overtones, appealed to the gullible and superstitious pilgrims seeking to halt the democratic changes that were affecting all aspects of everyday life at that point in history Apart from the quasi-masonic rituals and hermetic mysticism associated with it, the Hiéron’s mainly political aims were much the same as all the other proselytizing Catholic pressure groups: Catholic Action (‘Mobilising true faith into action!) and Opus Dei (a strictly hierarchical and ‘discreet’ sect of lay Catholics who aspire to acquire and hold positions of influence in public life, thereby securing and maintaining Catholic spiritual and temporal hegemony over society). It propagated a Catholic-centric worldview at a time when the Church’s spiritual influence and temporal wealth and power was visibly crumbling — hence the contemporary doctrine of Papal Infallibility, announced at the First Vatican Council in 1870. Everywhere you turned, academics, writers and village Hamdens were challenging the very foundations of belief on which the Papacy had been built built. In effect, the Hiéron was playing the same role within the Catholic Church as did the supporters of the Trotskyist 4th International within the twentieth century labour movement.

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he main ambition of this wellfunded and influential cabal, was the creation of a united Europe under the twin hegemony of the Papacy and the Habsburgs — the Merovingian bloodline. This all fell apart, of course, in 1914 with the assassination in Serbia of Habsburg heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, and the forced departure of most of Europe’s Captains and Kings in 1918.

At the core of Hiéron ideology was the belief that Christianity was a primordial revelation, traceable to an antediluvian Atlantis, via the Celts, Judaism and Egypt. Christianity, according to them, had its origins in Atlantis — the

THE HASTINGS TRAWLER|April ‘06

legendary lost civilisation at the root of humanity. They spent a considerable amount of time, effort and money searching for proof to support this thesis through archeological excavations, the study of sacred symbolism, astrology and ancient texts (which is where the Abbé Saunière saw his opportunity to make a few bob).

The Hiéron was virulently antiMasonic, believing that French Grand Orient freemasonry was anti-Christian, having been corrupted by Protestantism and the ‘Jewish-led’ Bavarian Illuminati.

To restore its original nobility of purpose and the spiritual primacy of Catholic Christianity, Grand Orient Freemasonry had to be infiltrated in order to win control and reform it (again, shades of Militant and other Trotskyist groupings). From this process a new Christian Freemasonry would emerge, the Grand Occident Lodge, which would defeat the Godless ‘Grand Orient’ and reform the brotherhood’ in line with Ultra-Traditionalist Catholic principles.

It would also mean the Church could use Freemasonry’s presumed benign influence to prepare for the coming of Christ’s kingdom in the year 2000. This was another of its core beliefs — the need to prepare the world for the second millennium, when the religious and political reign of Christ the King would be ushered in by an absolutist panEuropean Roman Catholic sovereign with global ambitions.

The French authorities were also concerned by the double-meaning of the name Hiéron. In Greek it means ‘sanctuary’, but it also refers to Hiéron, the Tyrant of Syracuse (478-476 BC), whose use of mercenaries to build and sustain his vast pan-European empire caused the death of thousands. It also brings to mind the twentieth century Mexican and Spanish terrorist groups calling themselves the Guerrillas of Christ the King, Catholic-Carlist-Fascist terrorists, whose battle cry was ‘Viva Christo Rey!’ As for the Hiéron du Val d’Or, the deaths of its three administrators in 1926 led to the closure of its study centre at Paray-le-Mondial. This meant the end for the group as both a religious and a political movement. Another factor in the Hiéron’s demise was the Latern

BOOK REVIEWS — PSEUDOHISTORY — (The Code War)

René Goblet, complained to Monseigneur Paul-Félix Billard, the bishop of Carcassonne concerning the ‘reprehensible behaviour’ of four of his priests — one of whom was Bérenger Saunière — and demanded their immediate suspension. If the bishop did nothing, the minister threatened to use his powers under the terms of the Concordat of 1802. This gave the French government the power to divest priests of their duties and to order bishops and cardinals to impose punishments on recalcitrant clerics.

Billard defended his priests vigorously, arguing that they had the right to advise their parishioners, but he was over-ruled and the four priests were suspended, with Saunière being sent to teach at the nearby Petit Seminaire de Narbonne.

THE SACRED HEART OF JESUS

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ike so much else in this story, it is conjecture as to when Saunière first came into contact with the cult of the Sacred Heart (Sacré-Coeur — the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Sacred Heart of Mary),3 which was strong in Narbonne.

One group Saunière would have been aware of, given his ardently-held antiRepublican beliefs, was the right-wing Integrist Cercle Catholique de Narbonne whose motto, according to Carcassonne police files, was In hoc signo vinces, (‘By this sign you will conquer him’ — the ‘sign’ being the cross and ‘him’ being the devil), the motto of Constantine the Great and later adopted by all manner of Catholic sects, both fringe and official, including the devotees of the cult of the influential and secretive Sacred Heart. There were two strands to the Sacred Heart: one was mainstream The Hiéron du Val d’ Or (continued)

Accord of 1929, signed by Pope Pius XII and Mussolini, which signalled the Church’s complicity with the political agenda of Italian fascism and, later, German Nazism. It also ended the group’s hopes for the restoration of the Habsburg dynasty. The Hiéron fell into a steady decline until 1938, by

devotional Catholic; the other an esoteric ultra-Traditional right-wing group that believed Christianity originated in Atlantis — the Hiéron du Val d’Or (‘The Sanctuary of the Golden Valley’) [see box, page 16], a cabal of right-wing esoteric Roman Catholic theocrats intimately associated with the cult of the Sacred Heart. The Hiéron’s objectives were, among other things, to promote the kingship of Christ (Christus Rex), the overthrow of the Republic and the restoration of Bourbon France under a Habsburg-led, Holy Roman Empire of Europe.

Saunière’s colleagues and close friends, the Abbé Boudet, an ‘antiquarian and Celticist’, and the bishop of Carcassonne were possibly members.

Church of St Mary Magdalene: Rennes- le-Château (© Puttnam & Wood)

érenger Saunière’s stay in Narbonne was short, and by July 1886 his suspension was lifted and he returned to Rennes-le-Château. Within months of his reinstatement, between the autumn of 1886 and the summer of 1887, the lifestyle of the ‘poor’ parish priest began to improve. These improvements were small to begin with, but increased steadily, year-on-year.

Over the next twenty years he was to spend a substantial amount of money, refurbishing his church and, between 1901 and 1905, extravagant personal building projects such as the Tour Magdala (a Gothic folly named after the town of Magdala. a well-to-do fishing village of the Sea of Galilee, and the birthplace of Mary Magdalene), and on his house, the Villa Béthanie with its beautifully laid-out gardens and terraces.

Saunière was not particularly ‘rich’ between 1886-1898, although by 1894 he had built a very modest house for

himself by the cemetery, over a water tank (the gutters on the roof collected the rainwater with which Sauniere watered his plants, flowers and vegetables).

The stories about Saunière paying for a new road up to the village and the provision of running water were pure invention. These improvements date from after Saunière’s death in 1917.

Initially, however, Saunière focused his attention on the restoration and refurbishment of his dilapidated church, which began in earnest in July 1887 with the installation of new stained glass windows at a cost of 1,350 Francs (the bill for which was not finally settled until 1900). At the same time he also had the windows of his villa decorated with what was to become the recurring iconic theme of his ministry — the Sacred Heart. A new altar was also commissioned and installed on 27 July 1887, for which he paid 700 Francs.4 There was nothing mysterious about where this money came from: it

which time it had effectively ceased to exist. But it didn’t disappear completely; its ideas continued through the writings of surviving hard-line Sarachaganites, particularly Paul Le Cour, seen by many as the Baron’s spiritual heir. Le Cour, an important figure in twentieth century French astrology, had founded a successor

group to the Hiéron as early as 1926 — the Societé d’Etudies Atlanteennes — whose publication, Atlantis in 1927 continued the work of the Hiéron. Le Cour’s last book was published in 1955, the year before the formation of the Priory of Sion, and dealt with the recurring Hiéron and Sarachaga theme of Atlantis.

B

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BOOK REVIEWS — PSEUDOHISTORY — (The Code War)

Our Lady of Lourdes: erected by Bérenger Saunière in 1891 (© Puttnam & Wood)

was from Mme Marie Cavailhé, one of the first of the priest’s many wealthy patrons.

PILLAR OF THE COMMUNITY

T

he crucial date in the story is June 1891, when Saunière unveiled a statue of Our Lady of Lourdes5 at Rennes-le-Château. Among the guests at the ceremony was Saunière’s ecclesiastical superior, Monseignor Billard, the bishop of Carcassonne, who is reported to have looked upon him as a son. The bishop had recently inherited 1,200,000 Francs from a wealthy widow, Madame Rose Denise Marguerite Victorine Sabatier de Coursan, so it may be that he contributed towards the cost of this statue. The wealthy bishop was also in the process of purchasing the nearby church of Notre-Dame de Marceille, near Limoux (purchased 1893), and had brought with him to the unveiling a Lazarist6 priest from that church.

This is where the facts of the story begin to mingle with the total fictions fabricated sixty years later, in the mid1950s, by a Baron Munchausen character by the name of Noël Corbu.

Corbu, had been bequeathed Saunière’s estate by his housekeeper, 18

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Marie Dénarnaud, in exchange for looking after her in her old age. A small amount of money may have changed hands, but any price paid no doubt reflected the Corbu’s undertaking to provide accommodation for Marie for the rest of her life. Their agreement is signed and dated 22 July 1946.

When the old lady died in 1953, Corbu turned the Villa Béthanie into a hotel/restaurant called the Hôtel de la Tour. All the stories relating to Saunière’s treasure originate from this one source; they were tales spun by Corbu aimed at attracting customers to his restaurant. It is possible, however, that Saunière may have discovered some precious objects in his church, but certainly by 1891 he had run out of money and was in debt, allegedly borrowing money from villagers, including his housekeeper; the alternative possibility, however, is that Marie Dénarnaud was acting as his banker, a conduit for monies from wealthy sponsors. Certainly, all the land and buildings were in Marie’s name and when he made his will in 1906 whe was the sole beneficiary.

It was Pierre Plantard in the 1960s who invented the fiction that Saunière had discovered four ‘ancient’ parchments inside a hollowed-out church pillar in 1891. These parchments were genealogies and documents which appeared to be linked with a previous incumbent of the Church of Mary Magdalene, Abbé Bigou.

There has been much controversy as to whether or not the pillar inside which the documents were allegedly found was genuine. Paul Smith, who runs the priory-of-sion.com web site, believes it is an 1891 copy of an original Carolingian pillar in Narbonne museum with similar sculpted artwork, and commissioned as part of Saunière’s shrine to Our Lady of Lourdes. He points out that there is no evidence that the pillar existed prior to that date.

However, most professional and university archeologists who have

studied the pillar, including Bill Putnam, a former principal lecturer in archaeology and Professor Charles Thomas, the world expert on the subject, all agree it is Carolingian, not Visigothic. Rennes authority Bill Putnam states the pillar survived from a church of that date, though nothing in the structure of the present church is earlier that the 11th century.

The example in Narbonne Museum is a different thing altogether; it is a flat panel from a different architectural context, but sharing the style and the use of a processional cross in the design.

Whoever rebuilt the church last before Bérenger Saunière, found it lying around and used it to support the altar table. Saunière used the pillar for his statue, but was so ignorant about its meaning that he used it upside down.

The alpha and omega are the wrong way up. The Narbonne stone, on the other hand, is a complete design; the Rennes example is incomplete as Saunière sawed it off at the bottom. In its original use it was part of a column, with several other sections fitted together by mortise and tenon. It is possible that Saunière employed a stone mason to sharpen up the weathered design, but to the experts there is absolutely no doubt that the pillar is genuine. It has been on display in the Saunière museum in Rennes-leChâteau since 1993, and has a mortise

Mlle Marie Dénarnaud: Saunière’s housekeeper b.1868 — d.23/1/1953

BOOK REVIEWS — PSEUDOHISTORY — (The Code War)

hole in the top, but this is nowhere near big enough to have contained documents.

Of the four parchments allegedly found inside the pillar, two were genealogies: one supposedly dating from 1244 and the other from 1644; the other two documents supposedly dated from the 1780s and written by a previous incumbent of Rennes-leChâteau, the Abbé Antoine Bigou.

They were in fact artefacts fabricated in the mid-1960s by Philippe de Chérisey in collaboration with the previously mentioned Pierre Athanase Marie Plantard, a self-deluding fantasist who had known Corbu and who claimed to be directly descended from the Merovingian king Dagobert II (although it must be stressed that at no time did Plantard claim to be descended from Christ; this leap of the imagination was entirely the work of the three authors of The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail).

Although alluded to in a previous Priory of Sion document in 1965, the parchments appeared for the first time in Gérard de Sède’s book L’Or de Rennes, published in 1967. Neither the parchments nor copies of them are in the Bibliothèque Nationale, as claimed

by Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code.

They are listed among Les Dossiers

Altar support: The ‘pillar’ in which Saunière allegedly discovered the four parchments while restoring the church.

It was originally the main altar support.

Saunière used it, upside down, to support his statue of Our Lady of Lourdes, and gave it a new base with the carved inscription MISSION 1891.

Secrets in the Bibliothèque National, information which was lodged by the perpetrators of the fraud themselves, Plantard and de Chérisey. The originals were acquired by author Jean-Luc Chaumeil in the late 1970s when he was writing his book, Le Trésor du Triangle d’Or. Written in Latin, they contained obvious coded references to the resting place of the Merovingian king ‘Dagobert the Second’, ‘Sion’, and ‘Treasure’, intended to serve the selfseeking ends of the author and his associates.

According to Noël Corbu, the only source on the matter, Saunière took the parchments to Paris to have them examined by experts. There is no independent evidence, however, that Saunière ever visited Paris, with or without parchments; nor was there ever any alleged written report by these experts as to the authenticity or meaning of any parchments.

THE TREASURE OF RENNES

T

he story of the ‘treasure of Rennes-le-Château’ spread after Sauniere’s death. There is no evidence that this was a belief during his lifetime; it only acquired currency after he died.

The priest’s wealthy lifestyle, coupled with reports of excavations of crypts in

Parallel: Panel with similar carvings (note the suspended Greek letters alpha and omega) in Narbonne Archeological Museum.

the church and in the graveyard, added credibility to the rumours. No doubt about it, ‘the priest had discovered buried treasure7 — Visigothic, Templar, or Cathar — in or near the church’.

Consequently, the village was invaded by gangs of shovel-wielding treasureseekers from all over the country, digging holes everywhere, including in the graveyard. Rennes-le-Château became the French Klondike. The problem became so serious that the local council was forced to pass a by-law forbidding such activity.

Adding fuel to the gossip was the fact that Saunière’s refurbished church was a place of pilgrimage, especially for wealthy visitors. Illustrious strangers were allegedly arriving in the village from across France and elsewhere in Europe. It was later claimed that at least one member of the Habsburg family, Archduke Johann von Habsburg, a cousin of Franz-Joseph, the AustroHungarian Emperor visited Rennes, but the claims that evidence for this exist in Couiza police files are total nonsense.

The real source of Saunière’s wealth, the illicit sale of masses (the overwhelming majority of which were never celebrated) and donations extracted from credulous and generous supporters of the cult of the Sacred Heart, the Hiéron du Val d’Or and all

Parallel: Panel with similar carvings (note the suspended Greek letters alpha and omega) in Narbonne Archeological Museum.

Parallel: Panel with similar carvings (note the suspended Greek letters alpha and omega) in Narbonne Archeological Museum.

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BOOK REVIEWS — PSEUDOHISTORY — (The Code War)

manner of other anti-Republican Catholic bodies.

Bérenger Saunière by this time had become well-skilled in soliciting donations; it was, after all, considered a sacred duty to give to the Church. Apart from refurbishing his church, Saunière claimed he intended to create a community for the elderly and infirm priests of the diocese

MASS HYSTERIA

M

eanwhile, all was not well within the Parish Board of the Church of Mary Magdalene. In 1892 the treasurer resigned from the Conseil, claiming that the duties of his post were ‘contrary to his beliefs’. What could he have meant?

The probable explanation is that he had discovered and objected to Saunière’s increasingly lucrative sideline — trafficking8 in masses. This consisted in writing personal letters to anyone who might be interested in having a mass said for the bereaved, the ill, or simply prayers for a special event or a loved one. He also placed small adverts in the national and international Catholic press. In other words — simony!

The book-keeper’s job was given to Guillaume Dénarnaud, probably a much more biddable relation of Marie 9

Terribilis est locus iste: Church porch of St Mary Magdalene, Rennes-le-Château. (© Puttnam & Wood)

20

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Dénarnaud, the priest’s young housekeeper, confidante, and conduit for payments.

This then was the source of Saunière’s unexplained wealth. Although he may have found some valuable objects in 1886, the key to Saunière’s fortune, from 1898 onwards was, firstly, soliciting masses among the gullible and vulnerable through advertisements and, secondly, requesting donations from equally ingenuous wealthy donors possibly hooked on the stories of Rennes’ possible antidiluvian connections and the Royalist movement to restore the Habsburgs and the Bourbons to the thrones of Europe.

From 1892 onwards, hardly a day passed when Saunière did not receive large numbers of postal orders. Some were sent to him directly in Renne while others, made out in the name of his housekeeper, Marie Dénarnaud, went to a post box in nearby Couiza. The priest’s records discovered by Rene Déscadeillas show these postal orders came not only from France, but from Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Many of these requests came from religious communities as well as individuals.10 The priest’s mass books between July 1892 and September 1896 show he received payment, on average, for around 450 masses a month, for which he charged between 1.50 Francs and 2.00 Francs a time. Between October 1896 and 1906 the average rose to well over 500 a month, which meant he was supposed to saying 6,000 masses per year. These later ones he charged at a rate of between 3 Francs and 5 Francs.

The total figure, between 1892 and 1915 has been estimated at a minimum of 100,000 masses. The figures peaked in in 1898, and it was subsequently that Saunière made major contributions to the refurbishing of the Church.

This is both a physical and liturgical impossibility. He would have had to have spent 24 hours a day saying mass.

Priests only have the right to say mass an absolute maximum of three times a day, that is, around 90 masses a month, so

Altar of the Church of St. Mary Magdalene (© Puttnam & Wood)

there is no way he could ever have met even a fraction of his obligations. He admits this in his diary entry of 9 January 1894 by drawing a line through the fifth column in his mass book indicating that the mass had been said with a dramatic note: ‘Stopped there’.

He was then ten months behind in the masses for which he had been paid. The line he drew in his mass book was a line drawn under his own integrity as a man and a priest.

THIS PLACE IS TERRIBLE?

B

y the late 1890s, with most of the refurbishment completed, the church of Mary Magdalene was now

Station of the Cross VI: Christ allegedly being smuggled away by moonlight (© Puttnam & Wood)

BOOK REVIEWS — PSEUDOHISTORY — (The Code War)

(and is11) an impressive building. Above the entrance was carved the sinistersounding motto Terribilis est locus iste (‘This place is venerable’) — a quotation from the mass for the dedication of a church (Genesis 28.17).

In the porch stood an unusual holy water stoup, unusual in that it is borne by a figure of the devil, supposedly representing the vanquishing of the French Republic. The demonic stoup bears the initials BS, the man who bought it in 1898, Bérenger Saunière, and the Sacred Heart inscription Par ce signe tu le vaincras (In hoc signo vinces — ‘‘by this sign you will conquer him’).

The baptismal font depicts the baptism of Christ and, supposedly, symbolises the restoration of the French monarchy.

According to the Rennes mythmakers of the 1960s and 1970s, Station XIV of the Stations of the Cross in the Church depicts Christ’s body being smuggled out of the tomb under a full moon.

In fact, Saunière purchased all the Stations of the Cross and most of his other religious gewgaws for his church from the Giscard Company of Toulouse, who were reputable suppliers of religious statuary. These objects are

He stoups to conquer: Holy Water font purchased by Saunier in 1898. (© Puttnam & Wood)

listed in their catalogue of the time and are not unique.

On the base of the high altar is a vividly colourful painting of Saint Mary Magdalene at prayer in a cave. The Magdalene was Christ’s alleged partner and the one who ‘discovered’ his tomb was empty. The image was inspired by the 11th century legends of Mary Magdelene in the Burgundian town of Vezelay, whose church claimed to have her relics, and Les Saintes Maries sur Mer. The imagery of the Sacred Heart is everywhere in the church and grounds of Rennes-le-Château. A statue of the Sacred Heart dominates the front of Saunière’s architect-designed house, the Villa Béthanie, while another stood in his private oratory. The stained glass fanlight above his front door also carried a Sacred Heart image. In front of the church a stone cross — a Calvary — commemorates its reconsecration in 1897 by Monseigneur Billard, bishop of Carcassonne. Carved on its pedestal is the inscription: Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat, Christus AOMPS defendit) (‘Christ victorious, Christ reigns, Christ rules, Christ defends’). This inscription is also carved on the obelisk of Pope Sixtus the 5th in front of St. Peter’s in Rome. AOMPS is the acronym for Ab Omni Malo Plebem Suam defendat (‘defends his people from all evil’). It actually has the Latin subjunctive defendat — ‘may he defend’). Henry Lincoln claimed it stood for Antiquus Ordo Mysticuseque Prioritatus Sionis!). The phrase ‘Christus vincit...’ was also a popular 19th century motet in praise of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and the first line of the French coronation anthem.

Interestingly, at the ceremony of reconsecration, Saunière ended his speech explaining where he got his money — he’d already spent 27,000 Francs on the church and the presbytery (manse): ‘For all this, Monseigneur, I owe a little to my parishioners, much to my economies, and much to the dedication and generosity of certain souls who are strangers to this parish.’

La Tour Magdala (1901-1902): Saunière’s library:

GOD’S FRAUD SQUAD

S

aunière’s fraud began to catch up with him in 1902. The trigger was the death of his mentor, friend, benefactor and protector, the old Bishop of Carcassonne, Monseigneur Paul-Félix Billard. Before he died, Billard had been investigated and suspended from his ecclesiastical duties for trafficking in masses, malfeasance and other financial irregularities. He was replaced by Monseigneur Paul Félix Beuvain de Beauséjour, a less pliant and more proRepublican cleric who summoned Saunière repeatedly to appear before a bishop’s court at Carcassonne to explain his financial affairs and answer the charge of mass trafficking. Thus began a long drawn-out legal battle between Saunière and his superiors.

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BOOK REVIEWS — PSEUDOHISTORY — (The Code War)

Ecclesiastical scrutiny and the costs of his extravagant lifestyle and estate building activities meant Saunière began to feel the pinch financially. The market for masses had collapsed, and his legal battle with his new ecclesiastical superiors was fast using up what little savings remained.

This turn in his fortunes coincided with a change in the leadership of the Hiéron du Val d’Or, which was taken over in 1902 by the more sensible Georges and Marthe de Noillat, on the death of the movement’s colourful founder, Baron Alexis de Sarachaga.

The Noillats shifted the focus of the Hiéron’s activities away from the political to the more spiritual. The pilgrimage business did, however, continue, albeit on a reduced scale, up to Saunière’s death in 1917.

I’VE GOT A LITTLE LIST...

B

y 1909 Bishop Beuvain de Beauséjour had had enough and replaced Saunière as priest at Rennesle-Château, transferring him to Coustouges. Saunière, however, refused to leave Rennes and was supported by the mayor and the Parish Council, who wrote to the bishop saying that no other priest would be welcome, and that should anyone other than Saunière be sent to the parish they would be denied access to the presbytery.

In May 1910, the ecclesiastical court began investigating Saunière’s financial affairs during his 25 years at Rennnesle-Château. The charges against him were: trafficking in masses; disobeying his bishop by soliciting fees for masses beyond the diocese, in spite of the bishop’s orders to the contrary; and submitting exaggerated and unjustified claims for unsaid masses.* Saunière was summoned to appear before the ecclesiastical court on 16 July, but failed to attend and was suspended from the priesthood for a month. He was also ordered to return all the money he had received for the unsaid masses. This was an impossible task, especially as he had stopped 22

THE HASTINGS TRAWLER|April ‘06

keeping records 16-years earlier, in January 1894.

He was summoned again on 23 August, but this time he managed to have the hearing deferred until 15 October, when he was represented by his lawyer, Canon Huguet. Saunièr finally presented himself at court on 5 November and was ordered to undertake spiritual exercises in a monastery for 10 days, and to return to appear before the bishop within a month, this time with the appropriate documents and records relating to his financial activities over the years.

Saunière did confess to ‘trafficking in masses’and also provided the court with a list of names of people he claimed were his benefactors.12 These included his former mentor, the late bishop of Carcassonne, a community of Carthusian monks and the Comtesse de Chambord, the widow of Henri Comte de Chambord, the Bourbon pretender to the French throne and a senior member of the Hiéron. The Comtess, incidentally, who lived in Narbonne, died in 1886, while Saunière was in exile there. The total sum came to 193,000 Francs. This figure may have been exaggerated by Saunière to divert attention away from the money he earned from selling masses. In fact, there had been an earlier governmental investigation in 1905 into the financial affairs of the bishopric of Carcassonne, following the previous bishop’s suspension in 1898.

The charges against Monseigneur Billard were that he had administered his diocesan assets ‘in the most irregular fashion’, and had ‘contracted staggering and completely unjustified debts’.

Saunière was unable to provide the court with all the invoices and receipts for all the work done at Rennes-leChâteau. According to the Report of the Commission charged by His Lordship the Bishop of Carcassone with the investigation of Monsieur Sauniere’s accounts, dated 4 October 1911, the priest was only able to account for a mere 36,000 Francs.

DEFROCKED

O

n 5 December 1910 a report appeared in La semaine Religeuse de Carcassonne that Bérenger Saunière, having been suspended from the priesthood, was no longer permitted to say masses. But the priest couldn’t help himself. Less than two months later, on 1 February 1911, the bishop of Carcassonne publicly rebuked Saunière for continuing to advertise masses for sale, and forbade him from administering further sacraments.

Again, Saunière ignored the bishop and continued to sell massses at 1 Franc a time.

On 5 December 1911, the Carcassonne bishopric finally ran out of patience and delivered a third and final judgment on Saunière, citing a long list of indictments against the priest, including disobeying his bishop. He was suspended for three months pending the repayment of the money he had taken for unsaid masses. Broke and unable to repay his debts, the suspension became effectively permanent.

By 1913, having spent a small fortune on legal fees and overspending on the Villa Béthanie and the Tour Magdala (for which we have no detailed accounts), any savings Saunière had appears to have run out. Heavily in debt he applied to the Crédit Foncier de France for a loan; all they were prepared to offer him was a mere 6,000 Francs against his properties, which they valued at 18,000 Francs.

The First World War dramatically improved the market for Masses and in spite of his suspension (suspens a divinis), Saunière continued selling these until his death in 1917; it was his only source of income and this was now severely restricted as a result of the war. Although his priestly suspension was lifted at the moment of his death in January 1917, his obituary in the Semaine Religieuse de Carcassonne (27 January 1917) makes no reference to his calling. His estate was so cash-poor that it took six months for his housekeeper, Marie Dénarnaud — to whom he bequeathed everything —

BOOK REVIEWS — PSEUDOHISTORY — (The Code War)

to pay for his funeral expenses.

Marie Dénarnaud died 36 years later, in 1953, at the age of 85, having earlier bequeathed her entire estate, including Saunière’s archives, to the Corbus who had looked after her since 1946.

Two years later, at Easter 1955, Corbu opened the Villa Béthanie as a restaurant and sought to attract clients by exploiting the tales of Saunière’s mysterious treasure, and giving talks on the priest to fascinated customers, stating as fact the rumours of the priest having discovered treasure. These talks formed the basis for Corbu’s five-page unpublished manuscript deposited in the Archives de l’Aude in Carcassonne entitled Essai Historique sur Rennes-leChâteau. This is possibly a transcript of a tape recording he made for guests at his restaurant

...THE FANTASIST...

T

he myth of Rennes-le-Château began properly in January 1956 with the publication of an interview with Noël Corbu in La Dépêche du Midi. Under a banner headline worthy of today’s Sun or Daily Sport, ‘La Fableuse Découverte du Curé aux Milliards de Rennes-le-Château’, journalist Albert Salamon reported that according to Corbu, Saunière had indeed discovered treasure in the church. The story ran for three days (12, 13 and 14 January 1956) and was picked up by the national press. It also led to the first official archeological dig, in 1959, by Professor Jacques Cholet — who found nothing.

One of those who read Corbu’s account of the mysterious Bérenger Saunière was a fantasist, ‘psychic’ and confidence trickster by the name of Pierre Athanase Marie Plantard, a 36year Parisian — a former Petainist and an ultra-Traditional Catholic obsessed with Freemasonry and Jewish world conspiracy. Plantard had spent four months in jail after the Liberation; six months between 1953 and 1954 for ‘breach of trust’ in relation to some property crime, and 12 months between

1956 and 1957 for ‘corruption of minors’.

Fascinated by the priest’s story, Plantard contrived to build a relationship with Corbu and they soon became friends, with Plantard absorbing everything he could from Corbu about the priest’s story.

Five months after Salamon’s newspaper articles, Pierre Plantard, then living in the Annemasse in the French Haute Savoie, registered an association called the Prieuré de Sion (the Priory of Sion). Article 3 of the association’s statutes, as submitted to the authorities on 5 May 1956, declared the Priory to be a Roman Catholic benevolent organisation, inspired by medieval orders of chivalry. Its aims included the establishment of a centre for study, prayer and contemplation on the Montagne de Sion, a local mountain in the French Alps from which the Priory took its name. There was, in fact, an enormous gulf between the published aims of the Priory and its actual practice.

The Priory, or rather Plantard, published a magazine called Circuit (an acronym for Chivalry of Catholic Rules and Institution of Independent Traditionalist Union). In essence it was a Traditionalist Catholic pressure group, and much of its activity focused on denouncing local property developers. It ceased to function five months later when Plantard was convicted in 1956 for ‘child corruption’.

In 1960 Plantard re-emerged onto the public stage at the height of the European settler uprising in Algeria, (between Barricades Week in January 1960 and the trial of 16 of its leaders in December that same year), relaunching Circuit13 as its mouthpiece, this time targeting the military with the sub-title: The Cultural Periodical of the French Forces Federation.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

B

y 1964 Plantard had taken Corbu’s history of Rennes-leChâteau and tales of Bérenger Saunière and woven them with other myths and

legends into a storyline worthy of J R Tolkien, or at least J K Rowling. The eight-year old Priory of Sion had suddenly acquired a pedigree dating back at least 900 years to Godfrey de Bouillon, the Duke of Lower Lorraine, the first King of Jerusalem. Its implicit aims appear to be the establishment of a theocratic United States of Europe with a descendant of Jesus as its priest-king, and with the actual business of government being managed by the Priory of Sion.

Plantard, now secretary-general of the Priory of Sion, had reinvented himself as Pierre Plantard de St. Clair, a direct descendent of the Merovingian King Dagobert II (although he never claimed any connection with Jesus. This strand was introduced by Lincoln, Baigent and Leigh in The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail). His adoption of the St. Clair14 name took place in 1975 following an interview with writer Jean-Luc Chaumeil in the magazine L’Eyre d’Aquarius. The St. Clair connection derived from the fact that the St. Clairs of Rosslyn, near Edinburgh in Scotland, were descendants of Baron Henri St.

Pierre Athanase Marie Plantard: b.18/3/1920 — d.3/2/2000 In 1993 Judge Thierry, the French Examining Magistrate investigating the financial scandals surrounding President Mitterand and his connections with Roger Patrice Pelat,* questioned Pierre Plantard under oath about Pelat’s alleged connection with the Priory of Sion (Plantard had claimed he was the current Grand Master. Apparently nearly everyone in modern French and European politics has some connection or other with people supposedly linked with the Priory of Sion). Plantard confessed to the judge that the Priory of Sion was a total fantasy, and was dismissed with a warning. He subsequently disappeared from view and never again attempted to revive the Priory of Sion.

Plantard spent the remaining seven years of his life in seclusion in Perpignan, Barcelona and Paris, where he died on 3 February 2000.

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BOOK REVIEWS — PSEUDOHISTORY — (The Code War)

Clair of Roslin, one of the original Knights Templar and, allegedly, of Merovingian descent. They are also reputed to be the ‘hereditary grand masters of Scottish Freemasonry’, not that such a title ever existed in Scottish Rite Freemasonry.

With his artist friend Philippe de Chérisey, a surrealist with a sense of the absurd and an eye for the main chance, Plantard wrote up his research on Rennes-le-Château and Bérenger Sunière in 1964, but his manuscript was rejected by all the main French publishing houses Not one to give up easily, Plantard next approached another conspiracy aficionado by the name of Gérard de Sède, a successful author in the field of esoterica with whom he had collaborated in 1962 on the historical potboiler entitled Les Templiers sont parmi nous (‘The Templars are among us’), and asked if he would collaborate with him in writing a book on Rennesle-Château and Saunière.

As a published author with a track record in the field, de Séde had considerably more credibility in the publishing world and among the bookbuying public than Plantard.

This time there would be clear evidence to support his story. Plantard commissioned Philippe de Chérisey to manufacture various pieces of evidence to support his fabrication about Saunière’s treasure and his claim to be a direct descendant of Dagobert II. These artefacts included a gravestone, and the four forged documents which the priest had allegedly found inside the ‘hollow Visigothic pillar’, including the fictitious genealogies supporting Plantard’s claim to the French throne.

The book finally appeared in 1967 under de Séde’s name, entitled L’Or de Rennes. Their gamble paid off and the book became an enormous best-seller in France, selling hundreds of thousands of copies.

But, unfortunately for Plantard and Philippe de Chérisey there is no honour among pseudo-historians and, after the book appeared, Gérard de Sède reneged 24

THE HASTINGS TRAWLER|April ‘06

on his contractual agreement to share the royalties with his two collaborators, who responded by denouncing the parchments — the unique selling point of de Sède’s book — as forgeries.

...THE FICTION WRITER...

P

lantard’s fiction of Rennes-leChâteau, the Abbé Saunière, was now heavily embellished with the addition of the mysterious Priory of Sion and its fantasy list of illustrious past Grand Masters, from the crusader Godfrey de Bouillon in 1099 through Leonardo de Vinci to Jean Cocteau in 1963. It was next picked up by a writer called Henry Lincoln.

Lincoln’s real name was Henry Soskin, a television scriptwriter who had worked on Dr Who and Emergency Ward 10. He had also appeared in The Avengers and Man in a Suitcase, and had co-scripted the screenplay to the 1968 Boris Karloff film The Curse of the Crimson Altar, so he recognised a good storyline when one came along.

On Good Friday, 3 March 1971, BBC2’s Chronicle programme broadcast a documentary, The Lost Treasure of Jerusalem, which drew heavily on Gérard de Sède’s book Le Trésor Maudit de Rennes-le-Château. It was the first of three Chronicle documentaries: The Priest, the Painter and the Devil (1974) and The Shadow of the Templars (1979). In 1971 Lincoln ended his first film with the words: ‘Something extraordinary is waiting to be found... and in the not too distant future it will be.’

DE SÉDE DEBUNKED

S

omething was discovered, but Lincoln chose to ignore it. In 1974 French writer René Déscadeillas published his book on Rennes-leChâteau, Mythologie du trésor de Rennes: Histoire Veritable de L’Abbé Saunière, Curé de Rennes-le-Chêteau (The Mythology of the Treasure of Rennes), which debunked de Sède’s thesis, providing irrefutable documentary

Dr Who?: Henry Soskin, aka Henry Lincoln

proof of the source of Saunière’s conspicuous expenditure. It exposed the conspiracy theories surrounding Rennes-le-Château as a nonsense, ranking alongside mysteries such as the Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis, Erich von Daniken’s ancient astronauts and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Drawing on Saunière’s diaries, mass books and personal notebooks, Déscadeillas showed beyond doubt that the priest had amassed his wealth entirely from the sale of masses and donations.

In spite of this evidence, in 1982 Henry Lincoln co-authored The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail with novelist Richard Leigh and esotericist Michael Baigent. It was Baigent, apparently, who pushed the thesis that Christ’s bloodline had survived in the Rennes-le-Château region and was linked to the Priory of Sion. The implication was that this was the ‘secret treasure’ upon which Saunière had stumbled.

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was an enormous publishing success, selling hundreds of thousands of copies, and spawning a massive literature of pseudohistorical works of ‘non-fiction’ and fiction in every major language, all reinforcing each other’s myths. The authors followed it up four years later in 1986 with a sequel, The Messianic Legacy, which also became a best-seller.

The best-known of these spin-offs, however, is Dan Brown’s ubiquitous The Da Vinci Code which has been on the Times best-seller list for three years, and has sold around 4 million copies in the UK to date, at least 1700 of these in Hastings alone: 1200 in Ottakars and

BOOK REVIEWS — PSEUDOHISTORY — (The Code War)T

500 in Olio Books. This, in turn, has spawned a publishing frenzy of fictional and factional spin-offs, including at least a couple of computer games and a Hollywood movie to be released on 19 May starring Tom Hanks and Sir Ian McKellan, with at least 5 film tie-ins.

Another is Kate Morse’s Labyrinth, which has won Richard and Judy’s ‘Best Read’ award and has sold over 70,000 copies since last summer.

The only discordant note in the saga is the plagiarism case recently brought (an rejected by the High Court) against The Da Vinci Code’s publisher by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, two of the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, for alleged breach of copyright. If successful, a slice of the pie from the film’s profits would have been quite substantial. Henry Lincoln is reportedly ‘very ill’ and was not involved in this legal action (but not too ill to lead another group to Rennes-leChâteau from 19 to 27 September 2006 at £1,400 per head).

Why, then, are such irrational ideas effective — and why do they attract such a massive audience? Isn’t this, after all, just another story? Perhaps there is a Gresham’s Law of the Brain which explains why irrational ideas always drive out rational ones. One thing is certain however, the acceptability of these paranoic and nonsensical ramblings to the public is reflected in the sheer volume of sales of these books.

Stuart Christie I would like to thank Paul Smith and Bill Putnam for providing me with the benefit of their comprehensive research on Rennes-le-Château and the Abbé Saunière. Paul Smith’s web site www.priory-ofsion.com is the essential starting point for anyone interested in pursuing the subject further. I must also highy recommend ‘The Treasure of Rennes le-Château: a mystery solved’ (ISBN 0-7509-4216-9) by Bill Putnam and John Edwin Wood (Sutton Publishing — sales@sutton-publishing.co.uk — www.suttonpublishing.co.uk) Stuart Christie is the author of :‘Granny Made Me An Anarchist’ (ISBN 0743263561), Scribner - Simon & Schuster, paperback, £7.99 and ‘Stefano delle Chiaie; Portrait of a ‘Black Terrorist’ (ISBN 0946222096), dealing with NATO’s Gladio ‘stay-behind’ network and the role of neo-fascists and the Italian Confidential Affairs Bureau in the ‘Strategy of Tension’ which dominated Italian politics between 1960 and 1983’ ‘We, the anarchists! A study of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) 1927-1937’ (ISBN 1901172066).

NOTES: 1) Integrists hold that only a belief in God and submission to the Vicar of Christ can restrain mankind and secure the social order. Everything that undermines faith, such as science, reason, and a belief in the goodness of man, is the enemy. Their demonic spokesmen include: Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, Kant, Leibniz, Rousseau, Hegel, Adam Smith, Proudhon, Bakunin and Karl Marx. Science and rationalist philosophy lead only to grief. They are the scourge of everything non-Catholic since the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution.

Republicanism, Freemasonry and Protestantism are their particular bugbears, as is anything that denies the authority of Rome. The spectre of revolutionary socialism haunting Europe at the end of the 19th century was part of the same gigantic conspiracy of the dark directorate targeting Christian civilization.

2) Although the Republicans won by a majority of 182 seats in this election, the 73 seats won by the Royalist party within the Union of the Right panicked Republican politicians into introducing the Law of Exile, legislation expelling all senior members of the French Royal family from France. Intervention by the Roman Catholic Church was so flagrant in the 1885 elections that it marked the beginning of a bitter 25year conflict that led, in 1905, to the separation of the Church and State in France.

3) The Sacred Heart of Jesus is the paramount devotional symbol for the Jesuit Order, which was consecrated to the Sacred Heart in 1872.

4) To put the amount of 700 Francs into some sort of context, the Conseil de Fabrique’s accounts for the previous financial year, April 1886 to April 1887, show that the Church’s revenue rose by 145.40 Francs, from 239.60 to 385 Francs. But by 1888 the Church of Mary Magdalene’s income had risen almost five-fold to 1914.80 Francs, before returning to slightly below its original level by 1893.

5) Our Lady of Lourdes was at the time a symbol of anti-Republicanism, the annual pilgrimage to Lourdes having become an overt militant Catholic protest against godless Republicanism. She was also seen by Catholics such as Pere Emmanuel d’Alzon, the founder of the Assumptionist Order, as symbolising the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy.

6) Possibly RP Mercier. The Lazarists, founded by St Vincent de Paul in 1625 and modelled on the Jesuits, are a congregation of proselytising secular priests who have taken religious vows. They are similar in many ways to Opus Dei, and have been suppressed and expelled from a number of countries because of their zealotry.

7) After Saunière’s death in 1917, speculation grew even more fantastic, with the source of the priest’s wealth ranging from trafficking in Spanish gold ingots to spying for Germany. A theory also circulated that he had been paid vast sums of money by the Roman Catholic Church to buy his silence on a secret that would have seriously damaged the church. The most imaginative claim, however, was that he had located the grave of the ‘exiled’ Christ. (See also Note 10) 8) Trafficking is defined as a form of spiritual fraud in which requests to say mass are solicited for payment — but without honouring the requests. Parish priests living in poor communities were badly paid and, in order to survive, would petition the secretariat of their local diocese to permit them to say a certain number of masses. These masses were requested either by religious congregations or by private individuals who sent money in return. Bérenger Saunière felt that the secretariat of the Diocese of Carcassonne was favouring other priests at his expense and decided to go it alone. In effect, he turned it into a major confidence trick, one in which he proved himself to be a real master.

9) Simony is the ecclesiastical crime and personal sin of paying for offices or positions in the hierarchy of a church. It is named after Simon Magus, who appears in the Acts of the Apostles 8:18-24, offering the disciples payment for the power to perform miracles.

The linking of temporal and spiritual authority in the middle ages caused endless problems with simony and accusations of simony. Secular rulers headhunted the educated and centrally-organised clergy to play central roles in their administrations, and often treated their spiritual positions as adjuncts to their secular administrative roles.

Canon law outlawed as simony not only the sale of offices, but the sale of spiritual authority: tithes, taking fees for confession, absolution, marriage or burial, and the concealment of mortal sin or the reconcilement of an impenitent for the sake of gain. Exactly what was or was not simony was strenuously litigated. As one commentator notes, the widespread practice of simony is best illustrated by the number of reported ecclesiastical decisions as to what is, or is not, simony.

Simony did serious harm to the moral standing of the Roman Catholic Church. In his Inferno, Dante Alighieri condemns simonists to the eighth circle of hell, where he encounters Pope Nicholas III (12771280) buried upside down, the soles of his feet burning with some oily substance. Nicholas goes on to predict the damnation of both Pope Boniface VIII (12941305), the Pope in office at the time the Divine Comedy is set, and Pope Clement V (1342-1352), his successor, for simony. Centuries later, less devout writers, such as Niccolò Machiavelli and Erasmus, condemned the practice, while Blaise Pascal attacked the casuistic defences offered by those accused of simony in his Lettres Provinciales.

The Church of England also struggled with the practice after its separation from the Catholic Church.

English law recognized simony as an offence, but treated it as merely an ecclesiastical matter, rather than a crime, for which the punishment was forfeiture of the office or any advantage from the offence and severance of any patronage relationship with the person who bestowed the office.

10) The source of Saunière’s wealth was confirmed in 1925, eight years after the priest’s death, in a deposition by a Mr Espeut from Perpignan: ‘I wish to state that at no time did the Abbé Saunière find any treasure. You see, I was born in Espéraza and my family was friendly with the Denarnauds. In 1925, when I was 14 years old, I was a regular visitor to Marie Dénarnaud who was then living in pitiable circumstances. I did my harmony lessons on the organ in her parlour… More importantly, while I was there, I read all the priest’s correspondence with his ecclesiastical lawyer at the time of the trial and it was clear to me that the Abbé Saunière’s entire estate was built on the illicit sale of masses. He placed countless small ads in the international Catholic press, many of which I read. I also read some of the thousands of replies he received. I should also add that I too believed in the treasure.

Between the age of 15 and 20, I searched everywhere within a 500 metre radius of the Villa and the Tour Magdala and not once did I find the slightest evidence of any hidden treasure. I am making this statement out of a respect for the truth.’

11) My interest in Rennes-le-Château began during a visit to Carcassonne, and Perpignan in the mid-1970s.

I had been researching the WWII escape and evasion networks and seeing friends, members of the Ponzan Group (part of which was the Pat O’Leary network) — veterans of the 26th Division (formerly the Durruti Column) of the Spanish Republican Army, the Spanish Maquis and anti-Francoist Resistance networks, and the Ninth Company of General Leclerc’s Second French Armoured Division, the fighters who liberated southwestern France — including Paris. They took me on a

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PICTURE GALLERY

‘Lightning at Hastings : 9.30 pm, June 6, 1904: (Judges) Notes: continued from page

the Judge read out the sentence handed down by the Court...The Judge read out a list of indictments against Sauniere, one of which stated the following: “CONSIDERING that Abbé Bérenger Saunière admits to having requested and obtained a considerable number of Masses, without contesting the figures given by the Official Prosecutor.”’.

tour of the area where they operated during the occupation, and border crossing points used by the antiFrancoist guerrillas until 1963. One of the places we visited was Rennes-le-Château, not because it had anything to do with the Liberation, but because it was a pretty Provençal village with an interesting parish church decorated in rather questionable Baroque taste. What fascinated me most were the devices at the head of some of the graves. These were not simple crosses or images depicting the crucifixion, as you would find in most cemeteries, they were ornately p;ainted statuettes of the Immaculate Heart of the Virgin Mary (Mary with a blazing heart surrounded by a crown of thorns) holding the Christ Child, standing before a cross. Others depicted Christ the King standing before the cross..

13) There is no connection here that I am aware of, but the extreme right-wing Roman Catholic organisation La Cité Catholique was particularly strong among French army officers of the Fifth Bureau of the General Staff, the psychological warfare unit which in January 1961 formed the core of the French terrorist settler organisation, the Organisation de l’armée secrèt (OAS).

During ‘Barricades Week’ (24-31 January, 1960)24 people were killed and almost 300 seriously injured..

12) The minutes of Sauniere’s 1910-1911 ecclesiastical trial before the Bishopric of Carcassonne are published in Jacques Riviere’s 1983 book, Le Fabuleux Trésor de Rennes-le-Château.: ‘On Saturday 5 November, at 10.00 am, the Bishop’s Court assembled at its habitual place of meeting. Abbé Bérenger Saunière was present before the court, accompanied by Dr Huguet, his attorney and counsel. Having asked this latter and the Official Prosecutor if had anything to add to their conclusions,

14) Between 1976 and 1983 I lived on the island of Sanday in Orkney, during which time I became friendly with Alisdair Rosslyn St. Clair, the younger brother of the heir to the St. Clair Baronetcy, a descendant of Prince Henry of Orkney — and a ‘remittance man’ (the ‘black sheep’ of the family). We played poker once a week. Alisdair, was a charming and intelligent companion, and a bit of a bohemian, slightly flaky with a surreal sense of humour, and clearly unaware of his

26

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‘divine’ (as opposed to his ‘royal’) ancestry’. He dressed in black, with a long Dracula-style cape, and told everyone he was a satanist. I should add that this was basically to wind up some of the more staid islanders. I lost contact with Alisdair after we left Orkney in 1983 and I didn’t hear anything more until April 1998, when he was found dead in his cell in the detention centre at Jerusalem’s Ben Gurion airport. He had been ‘strangled’ with his own shoelaces. Arrested on leaving the country, Israeli Customs officials had found 9,000 Deutschemarks in a false bottom of his briefcase and accused him of drug dealing. Apparently Alisdair ‘admitted’ to having smuggled in thousands of Ecstasy pills. This is not impossible as he was always short of money and had been living in Amsterdam since leaving Orkney. However, when his body was returned to his family in Scotland, it was discovered that his heart had been removed by the coroner (and not replaced), as was the hyoid bone at the base of his tongue, which could have revealed whether or not he had hanged himself or had been strangled. According to the Priory of Sion buffs, Alisdair, the ‘Merovingian claimant’, was killed in order to allow Thomas Plantard de St. Clair (Pierre Plantard’s son) to assume the throne of Jerusalem and the United States of Europe as the ‘priest-king in waiting’.

HASTINGS PEOPLE

‘We travel not for trafficking alone...’

by Joy Melville

NOVELIST,

POET, ESSAYIST, PUBLISHER AND DOCUMENTARY FILM-MAKER ARE ONLY A FEW OF THE

OCCUPATIONS AND SKILLS ACQUIRED OVER THE YEARS BY

HASTINGS AFICIONADO AND

RESIDENT

IAIN SINCLAIR. HIS BOOK, ‘DINING ON STONES’, IS AN ACCOUNT OF THE JOURNEY ALONG THE A13, OUT OF LONDON, WHICH LED HIM, ULTIMATELY, TO HASTINGS. JOY MELVILLE SPOKE TO HIM ABOUT HIS LIFE, WORK — AND WHY HASTINGS IS ‘HIS KIND OF TOWN’.

I

t took me an hour to walk from the underground to Iain Sinclair’s Victorian terraced house in Hackney, east London. It seemed appropriate to walk in the steps, as it were, of Sinclair as he has taken the book world by storm with his psycho-geographical approach to walking round London and its suburbs.

Yet he is not a Londoner by birth, being brought up in South Wales where his father was a GP in the mining town of Maesteg. He went to school at Cheltenham then at 18, he says, ‘I took myself up to London to go to a film school in Brixton. London was a great cultural magnet and as I was living in south London the Northern Line acted as a spine and led me through to the Everyman Cinema in Hampstead.’

It was there that the seeds of his later books were sown as he first started to walk about south London: Clapham, Balham, Tooting. ‘I explored on foot.

The river was the great thing, and the old Tate’. He then went to Trinity College, Dublin, for four years, before London reclaimed him. ‘I ended up in Hackney in the late 1960s in a communal house. Everything was cheap and cheerful’.

He was still a long way from being a successful author. ‘I never thought I would make any kind of living’, he says, ‘but I thought I could manage through filming. I ducked and dived and dabbled in documentary film projects and I was also teaching film to art students in Walthamstow.

‘I scratched through: it did not cost

much to live in those days. I wrote for various film projects, made a film about Allen Ginsberg when he came to London’s Round House which was sponsored by WDR TV (Cologne), and tried to get further documentaries commissioned. He married in 1967, ‘and these terraced houses were about to be swept away and going for a couple of thousand pounds. It made everything possible. After we moved here in 1969 I just took any labouring jobs, in parks, gardens, Truman’s brewery. I started to operate a small press, the Albion Village Press’. This published writers like Brian Catling and Chris Torrance, along with volumes of poetry by Sinclair himself and a book he wrote about Ginsberg and his associates.

It was a far cry from the massive chains of today. ‘I did not have a rep’, said Sinclair, ‘just physically carried the books around in a van, went round to bookshops up as far as Newcastle and went in and talked to somebody’. He regrets the gradual disappearance of the network of these small bookshops, swallowed by the chains. ‘There was one just devoted to poetry’, he says. He hopes, possibly through the internet, there will be a re-emergence. ‘So much now going on is on the fringe’.

It was his outdoor work which led him into the style of book he now writes. In the early 1970s he was a parks gardener in Limehouse and would cut the grass round Hawksmoor churches. ‘I got a curious sense that may be these churches link

up, a pattern across the city. I evolved the theory of leylines across the city and wrote my notes as a gardener combined with a particular sense of geography.

‘There was a lot of writing at the time on leylines, earthworks, and I was immersed in those books and applied it to the grunge of east London rather than the country. By the time I’d written Lights Out For the Territory, a record of journeys on foot around London based on these ideas, the term psycho-geography was being applied. It made a philosophy of conceptualising the city in a politically provocative way’.

His book of poetry, Lud Heat, in 1975 had this notion but it wasn’t until the mid-nineties that the term was applied to his work. When he wrote his deservedly acclaimed book, London Orbital, based on walking round the environs of the M25, he did the walks with a painter called Renchi Bicknell.

‘We’d start early in the morning’, he says, ‘stroll away, taking photos, talking to someone, poking about. A nice day’s excursion. Then I’d write it up the following morning while it was fresh in my head. It spurred me on.

We did 12 separate walks. Then I returned on my own and went over chunks of it to reinform myself.

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HASTINGS PEOPLE

His books are dazzlingly full of observation and inconsequential knowledge. How can one person squirrel away so much information?

‘It all came from the fruits of wandering and crazy reading about the places I’d been or the people I’d come across’, he says. ‘It was all on the hoof, I never used the British Library. I might come across a Francis Bacon exhibition then read about Edweard Muybridge [whose pioneering photographs influenced Bacon], and use it in a later book or be in the Isle of Wight and visit Julia Margaret Cameron’s house [the Victorian photographer] and read up about her. These things come back to haunt you. I find it a very nice form.

You are loaded up with something very rich and it allows you a certain amount of jumping around’.

Are his characters based on real people? ‘Generally speaking they are people I know’, he says, ‘but sometimes I’m just talking to myself.

The old definitions of fiction and non-fiction don’t really apply any more. I try to bring some of the techniques of fiction to the shaping of documentary evidence, new forms are beginning to emerge. I’ve just done this book on the poet John Clare walking, as he did, back to his home village in Northamptonshire. I wouldn’t consider it a biography, which I wouldn’t want to do. You go into a grey area’.

He is conscious, as he walks, of the growing number of new satellite villages and it saddens him. ‘They build these developments in unsuitable places, under electricity pylons, whereas there are acres of perfectly good property that could be restored’.

He wanted to be somewhere with a breathing space and he and his wife have now bought a flat in Hastings.

His writing concentrates so much on east London and Essex, did he not think of Southend? ‘I enjoyed writing about Southend’, he admitted. ‘There’s a sense of end28

THE HASTINGS TRAWLER|April ‘06

stop’. So why Hastings? ‘I walked round Whitstable, Margate, Deal, the whole way round the coast, and found that Hastings was my favourite place. I used to go there a great deal in my book-selling days.

I’d go round the shops for some chips, the whole bit. Hastings now feels like Hackney in the 1960s, elegant property fading and decaying, an interesting mix of population. It’s a good spot. You don’t know which way it’s going to go. I hope it doesn’t become another Brighton’.

He and his wife Anna may move permanently to Hastings but ‘at the moment it’s perfect to get a chance to have both worlds’. However it was confusing, going backwards and forwards nearly every week, and they did not want Hastings to be ‘just a switching-off place while London was energetic, we wanted them to go together’. So he and Anna decided to link their two worlds by walking from Hackney to Hastings. ‘We zigzagged about along the Thames to the Darent Valley, through Sevenoaks, Tunbridge — making our way through golf courses and dodging around reservoirs. It took about five days, but we weren’t going huge distances. After we’d done the walk, it laid it out in our heads’.

In his book Dining on Stones, Sinclair writes: ‘Hastings . . . was seductive. Arriving by car or by train, the same sudden hit: light. Shore and sky. Cliffs and steep streets, unexpected angles. Reflections in windows’. Casually, he tells us more: ‘Hastings had a tradition to uphold.

Photoshops. Cameras. Racks and racks and racks of rectangular views . . . Hastings was the operational base of postcard magnate Fred Judge . . .’

The town must pride itself that right now it is also an operational base of Iain Sinclair.

Joy Melville is a journalist and author. She has written for The Guardian, Financial Times and Sunday Times, and has had a range of health books published. Her biographies include 'The Mother of Oscar', 'Julia Margaret Cameron' and, out this Spring, 'Ellen Terry'.

FICTION

Sometimes it comes round again Hastings Pier: (Judges)

by Pauline Melville

T

his is boring.”

The taller of the two girls had straight shoulder-length hair the colour of marmalade. She wore jeans, a honey-brown bum-freezer leather jacket and kept flicking her hair back when the breeze blew strands of it across her face. She was scowling and digging at the grass with her foot. The second girl, a plump creature with short black hair and a wide mouth wore a denim jacket, a denim miniskirt frayed at the hem which revealed shamelessly fat thighs in fish-net tights and boots which were too tight.

She was staring straight ahead of her.

They stood near a Mr Flossee van that sold a choice of green or pink candyfloss.

Although it was only ten oclock in the morning, the car boot sale just outside Icklesham was well underway.

It was April. The sun shone. Wind had swept the blue sky clean except for two tiny clouds that gambolled over to one side. Ragged rows of cars were parked on the grass with their

bonnets glittering in the sun.

Whenever the wind dropped for a moment the cloying smell of trampled grass rose from the ground as people sauntered up and down examining the goods laid out on the ground or displayed on makeshift trestle tables. Vendors sat in chairs munching food, chatting or listening to music as they guarded their cardboard boxes of old videos, second-hand books, household ornaments, crockery, racks of secondhand clothes, electronic equipment, potted plants, gameboys and all the detritus of modern life.

“Do you want to look for a leather jacket like mine then or what?”

The short girl shrugged: “Ok.” The two girls sauntered over to where a pensioner was working her way through a rack of old blouses and jackets. The short girl looked through the clothes in a half-hearted way.

People shuffled and jostled each other as they moved past the stalls.

An elderly man pushing a woman with a neck-brace in a wheelchair was talking about his service in the merchant navy: “You see things were better organised then.”

The red-headed teenager viewed the scene with discontent as she chewed on a strand of her hair: “Are you fed up with this? Do you fancy going to Ashford?” She squinted into the sunlight. “We could go round the shops.”

“The dark haired girl puckered her pale pink lips as she considered the option: “I’m boracic. I’ve only got a fiver.”

“Just to look. Eye-shopping. We could hitch.”

“All right then.”

The weather in April is capricious.

The girls walked along the side of the road for about twenty minutes waving upturned thumbs whenever a car passed. No car stopped. The sky clouded over and the wind became bitterly cold. The air grew dark and a violent burst of hailstones began bouncing off the pavement. The girls shrieked and took cover in a disused dank concrete bus shelter that stank of urine.

“Phew.” The dark-haired girl held her nose.

“It’s freezing. Fucking Baltic.”

When the hailstones stopped rattling on the roof they moved further down the road lest motorists should think they were waiting for a bus. But then an icy horizontal rain swept over them.

The taller girl kept a lookout for vehicles with her arms folded across her chest. Her hair was now plastered to her head. The top half of her jeans were wet and clung to her thighs.

A tinny old red Renault with its windscreen wipers wagging frantically pulled up and the girls ran over to it and clambered in the back.

Edward Halberg, the driver, was a shy ugly man in his fifties. He wore glasses. His face was shrivelled with tension and a there was a large April ‘06 | THE HASTINGS TRAWLER

29

FICTION

sebacious cyst on his left cheek. He had pulled over because the lashing rain was making it difficult for him to see the road and had not expected the girls to jump in. The taller girl shook her wet hair out: “We’re going to Ashford. Can you take us? Oh please. Nobody has stopped for us except you.”

“I am going to Ashford as it happens. Yes.” He said stiffly.

Halberg worked at one of the last remaining sub-post offices in Hastings where he was unpopular with both colleagues and customers because of his inflexible administration of the rules. He was a man almost entirely shut up in himself. He had been married once to a brisk and faintly beautiful woman with no talent of any sort who went to flower arranging classes and then ran off with the teacher.

After that Halberg battened down his emotional hatches and cut himself off from everybody. He lived on his own in a flat over an electrical shop and kept to a strict rota of tv dinners in front of the television. Over the years he had developed an obsession with the Battle of Stalingrad. He had shelves full of books and videos on the subject and collected all the information he could about it. On Saturdays he drove to nearby towns to scour the second-hand bookshops to see if he could dig up more of the history. That was his purpose in going to Ashford.

Halberg started up the car. After they had been driving for about ten minutes the flame-haired girl, without warning, leaned forward towards the driving seat and said in a wild burst of mischief: “I’m taking my friend to the William Harvey Hospital in Ashford.

She’s dumb. She can’t speak and they’re going to give her speech therapy.”

In the overhead mirror Halberg caught a glimpse of the two faces in the back. The dark-haired girl’s mouth had dropped open and she 30

THE HASTINGS TRAWLER|April ‘06

was rolling her eyes at her friend. He felt uncomfortable. He did not know whether to believe them. Was it possible? The girl continued: “She can make sounds but she’s been dumb from birth.”

There was a snort from the back of the car.

Halberg felt confused and hurt.

Now he certainly did not believe them. The girls were clearly teasing him but he could not accuse them directly of lying. He drove on in silence through Rye and took the A28 to Ashford. Suddenly all the pain from his wife’s desertion and his years alone overwhelmed him. The muscles in his throat constricted and he was unable to swallow. Tears stung his eyes. He became by turns furious and desperately miserable.

“Where do you live?” asked the girl.

“Hastings.” He replied.

“So do we. Thanks for the lift anyway.” She sounded slightly apologetic. “We was freezing out there.”

Halberg was not a fast driver. The only sound was the hiss of overtaking cars on the wet road. He hesitated and then replied in his rather bossy voice: “Well it’s not as cold as it was in the Battle of Stalingrad I can assure you.

Did you know that in the winter of 1942 at Stalingrad thousands of German soldiers were dying of frostbite and cold in the blizzards? This weather here is nothing.” He waved a dismissive hand in the air. “The tanks and armoured vehicles all seized up and ground to a halt in snow drifts.

The Volga had frozen solid. Some of the German soldiers drank antifreeze. Many were reduced to stripping and smothering their naked bodies with engine-oil as a protection against the freezing conditions.” He sounded genuinely distressed.

There was the unmistakeable sound of exploding laughter from the back of the car. He looked in the overhead mirror. The girl with the

marmalade hair was rocking to and fro with tears of laughter streaming from her eyes. The friend was staring down at the floor with eyes wide open, her shoulders shaking and an odd fixed expression on her face.

Chastened and feeling like a fool he did not know what to do and so he did nothing. To his relief he began to see the “H” signs which meant he was nearing the hospital. He pulled up at the entrance to the hospital car park. The girls scrambled out.

Before she got out the dark-haired girl leaned forward giggling and planted a big soft kiss on the left side of his face, right on top of the large wen on his cheek. Her head knocked his spectacles sideways as she did so.

He caught the scent of her perfume.

As he drove away he saw them standing in the driveway of the hospital bent over and clutching each other.

That afternoon he did his usual round of bookshops and found a paperback copy of Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad. But he was distracted.

Once or twice he stroked the cheekbone where he had been kissed.

Quite soon people at the post office began to notice that Halberg had taken to wearing a pink shirt and combing his hair in a different way.

He found himself walking along the front at Hastings hoping to catch a glimpse of the dark-haired girl. He even ventured into the chemist’s shop and tried to find the perfume she had been wearing. Lily of the Valley, he thought. Sometimes, instead of trawling through the bookshops on a Saturday he drove out past Icklesham and stopped the car where he had first seen the two girls. There was never any sign of them. He developed a habit of talking to himself out loud: “Anything could happen.

Anything could happen,” he found himself saying.

Towards the end of the summer Halberg went for a walk along the pier. He had been shocked to receive

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Letters to the Editor A Library of the Sea From Dick Edwards, Hastings Dear Sir: Your February editorial dismissed our idea as irrational. That is a strange choice of words, so here is our rationale for your readers to draw their own conclusions.

1) The Seafront Strategy commits Hastings Council and Seaspace to moving the amusements to the pier from the coach park. Our members would welcome this.

2) Seaspace and Hastings Council are determined to put a hotel, offices and more shops on Pelham beach. Our members are fiercely opposed to this, as are many individuals and groups across the town. Is The Hastings Trawler? No sound economic evidence has been presented that this would transform Hastings. For

instance, when Barclays Commercial Services moved out of Aquila House recently the space was taken over by Hastings Council. No new money or jobs were created. There is no evidence of significant demand for office space by the seafront.

3) We are asking for the concept to be seriously considered. Seaspace have an abysmal record of engaging with local people and will not allow any other ideas to be studied.

4) Our members’ ideas for a Library of the Sea include: —links to the new university centre to develop higher education courses; —a conventional book library specialising in works on the sea, but open to all; —a multi-function lecture theatre/

a letter telling him that his sub-post office was to close four weeks later.

He would miss the company and the routine. He feared the loneliness.

Thinking that a walk might do him good he decided to head for the pier.

The air was fresh. It had been raining and the plank walkways on the pier were wet. Beneath his feet the sea churned. He looked out over the choppy pewter waves towards the horizon. One or two boats rocked on the waves. As he walked briskly towards the Pavilion he glanced in the windows of the the woodenfronted craft shops.

His heart jumped when he saw the dark-haired girl in the distance. She was with a woman old enough to be her mother. They were leaning over the railings and the older woman was pointing at something in the water.

He hurried towards them although he had no idea what he might say when he reached them. He would think of something. He quickened his pace to a near run. The wind blustered around him blocking up his ears. All of a sudden he skidded

on the wet planks. His feet shot out from under him. His arms flew up in the air. There was an undeniably comic whirligig as the windmill of his arms and legs flailed in the air before he crashed to the ground. Several of the bystanders who witnessed it put their hands involuntarily over their mouths to stop themselves laughing.

“Are you all right?” The woman was leaning over him. Her daughter was not the girl he was looking for at all but another dark-haired teenager who stood beside her mother with a self-conscious smirk on her face.

He was unable to speak. He felt around for his glasses which had

cinema/ meeting room for up to 100 people; —a gallery of rotating displays of art works featuring Hastings past and present, and drawing on collections kept outside Hastings; —A multi-media set of interactive displays that demonstrate the sea and its many properties. The Science Museum uses holograms and other technologies to help people to learn. This could become a major tourist attraction throughout the year; —an eating space overlooking the beach.

5) HOTRA feels that these ideas would help create jobs. These ideas will be able to access funding streams that the hotel idea cannot reach.

The site next to the coach park will have parking nearby. The proposals for Pelham would force the closure of the car park for up to three years with a negative effect on existing businesses. The Library of the Sea would displace the amusements to the pier and have no negative impact. The Library of the Sea complements the existing

fallen off. The pain in his hip and elbow was excruciating. He lay his head back on the planks.

“Quick. Use your mobile to call an ambulance, Daisy.” Said the mother anxiously as she bent to put a scarf under his head.

“Are you fed up with this?” asked the orange-haired girl.

The short girl nodded. ©2006 Pauline Melville Pauline Melville is the author of ‘Shape-Shifter’ , a collection of short stories which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book) and the Guardian Fiction Prize. Her first novel, ‘The Ventriloquist’s Tale’ , won the Whitbread First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her most recent collection of stories is ‘The Migration of Ghosts’ .

April ‘06 | THE HASTINGS TRAWLER

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

museums and other activities along Rock a Nore Road. I know of no other Library of the Sea around the UK, so it could put Hastings on the international map. This idea has prompted a lot of interest across the town and is worthy of serious consideration.

Dick Edwards, Chairman, Old Town Residents’ Association Dragging religion into politics From Hasan Abu Nimah, St Leonards Dear Sir: Religion is increasingly being dragged into the swamp of politics. This has neither preserved religion as the source of spiritual strength people often need nor has it helped those who use it politically to extricate themselves from the consequences of their blunders and bad decisions.

After running out of excuses to justify a war that has become indefensible, the UK prime minister, Tony Blair, has decided to share the blame with God, if not blaming God for it altogether. “That decision has to be taken and has to be lived with, and in the end there is a judgement that — well, I think if you have faith about these things then you realise that judgement is made by other people,” Blair said in a recent interview, adding “If you believe in God it is made by God as well.”

President George Bush was more particular about God's responsibility for his major political decisions. In a BBC interview shown last October, and according to a former Palestinian deputy prime minister and information minister, “President Bush said to all of us: `I am driven by a mission from God. God would tell me `George go on and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan’. And I did. And then God would tell me `George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq’. And I did,’ and now,” Bush reportedly went on, “again, I feel God's words coming to me, `Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East. And, by God, I’m gonna do it.”

That is exactly what Palestinian Minister Nabil Shaath told the BBC. There are other examples of God being held responsible for individual acts, such as the murder of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, whose young Jewish assassin claimed to be acting on instructions from the Almighty. The entire ideology of creating a Jewish state in Palestine by displacing the Palestinian people is also based on biblical basis that Palestine was promised by God to the Jews.

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Many Israeli fanatics nowadays reject international law and UN resolutions based on the argument that God’s laws supersede anything thought up by a human being.

As true believers, we also hold that God does indeed judge all of us in the end, and we do believe that God’s will is the guiding force behind all our actions. But this should never be used as cover, indeed excuse, for our blunders and crimes, for whose commission we are entirely responsible. Otherwise, if it works that only God is responsible for all our actions, then there is no need for international law or any kind of order, and the whole concept of accountability in a democratic society breaks down.

By citing God as the ultimate judge of his actions, perhaps Blair is sincere, but the families of more than 100,000 dead Iraqis cannot wait for that. Nor can the families of British soldiers who are demanding that Blair explain how and why he decided to go to war against all the evidence that Iraq presented no threat.

If Blair believes that simple statements are sufficient to absolve him of earthly accountability, then could not Slobodan Milosevic, now dead, have made the same argument? If God will be the judge, why should the international community have gone to all the trouble and expense of trying him in an international tribunal?

After his death, why did the chief prosecutor say that Milosevic’s victims had been denied justice? And why put Saddam Hussein on trial if his victims can merely be asked to wait for the judgement of God? When terrorists and fanatic extremists sought to hide behind religion and to stir religious zeal in mobilising recruits for their missions, they were widely and rightly condemned. Religion, as Prince El Hassan bin Talal repeatedly asserts, should be elevated above politics, and it should indeed be kept separate from our earthly political sins.

We witnessed recently, with great alarm, how decades of constructive work in the field of interfaith relations and of building cultural and civilisational bridges between different peoples and followers of different faiths could crumble in the face of irresponsible provocation of some and the political opportunism of others; I am talking about the Danish cartoons which may have pushed us closer to a religiocultural conflict with no solutions.

This important lesson should be learnt and acted upon. Double standards have

already played a significant part in destroying international law, in precipitating conflict and vicious violence and in making the enormous fallacy of clash of civilisation look like a self-fulfilling prophecy. To infest religion now with the phenomenon of double standards is to destroy the last refuge that people have for spiritual sustenance and peaceful reflection.

Religion should not be allowed to serve as a convenient cover for the political acts of some, while others are condemned for doing exactly the same thing.

Ambassador Hasan Abu-Nima (former Permanent Representative of Jordan to the United Nations) Crowley? Harmless eccentric?

From Jake Arnott, London, EC1 Dear Sir: Your article on Aleister Crowley (Hastings Trawler, January 2006) and subsequent correspondence seems to take the line that Crowley was some kind of hero of the counterculture. Nothing can be further from the truth. His shoddy synthesis of arcane ‘knowledge’ and occult nonsense that served as his dubious creed had a very strong affinity with the extreme Right in the twentieth century. Writing to George Viereck, a Nazi propagandist in 1936, Crowley suggested that his infamous Book of the Law could be mentioned to Adolf Hitler as it could serve as ‘a suitable philosophical basis for Nazi principles’. In his annotations to Hitler Speaks, a book of the German leader’s table talk, the Great Beast comments: ‘after all these centuries of whining about the protection of the poor and lowly, it is about time we decided to protect the strong against the inferior’. This is the true meaning of his ‘Law of Thelema’. It is easy now to see Crowley as a harmless eccentric, spending his last days in your tranquil seaside town. The rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching towards Hastings to die. But behind the bohemianism, the sex, drugs and ludicrous ritual lurked something quite fascistic. Worth remembering when, as always, ‘the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity’.

Jake Arnott According to the local Tourist Office Hastings is currently being invaded by what they refer to as ‘Style Hounds’!