Seaford's treasure trove
Jeremy Lewis
As I move at distressing speed through the outer suburbs of middle age, I find that — in certain walks of life at least --- I increasingly relish the local and the amateur at the expense of the national and the professional. I view the professional theatre with the gravest suspicion, yet I cheerfully take my place on one of those dreadful canvas and metal chairs favoured by village halls and school prize-givings to watch a production of one of Ibsen's gloomier masterpieces in which the parts are played by bustling commuters and their lady wives — and this despite (or, more Precisely, only partly because of) those embarrassing interludes when the leading lady looks completely blank and has to be Prompted in a loud whisper from the Wings, or a door jams at a critical moment, causing the scenery to sway .in the most alarming manner before it is eventually Opened from within to an audible grunt of rage.
And although I'd hesitate to extend my liking for the local into the world of — say
grand opera, I'd sooner stay at home and, like a Victorian paterfamilias, listen to the strummings of a competent amateur Pianist than battle my way up the Queen Elizabeth Hall and take my place among 'Sows of stern-looking Music Lovers, sens- ibly reserving their coughs for the interval and frowning diabolically at the rustling of After Eights (and quite right too, of course).
Such thoughts were recently inspired by an afternoon spent poking round quite the most enjoyable and entertaining museum I have visited in years. But first a word about its setting. As generation upon generation of prep school boys will remember, Sea- ford is a windswept seaside resort halfway between Eastbourne and Brighton. Despite its setting in the Downs, even the town's keenest admirers, of whom I am one, would be hard-pushed to describe it as a place of beauty: bungalows abound, and the prevailing impression is one of rust- streaked concrete, peeling stucco, and giant pneumatic hammers constantly re- pairing the storm-lashed promenade. When I first knew Seaford in the early 1950s, it was largely populated by cane- swishing prep school masters in egg-stained tweeds, retired tea-planters with a taste for golf, and heavy-jowled maiden aunts wear- ing pork pie hats and demob suits and (I like to think) puffing away on pipes and enormous cigars in the privacy of their heavily hydrangea'd gardens. Over the years the social composition of the town has altered somewhat, and the Seafordian of today tends to be a Brighton-based supermarket manager or that indispens- able South Coast denizen, the retired tobacconist. Even so, the locals remain as ruddy-faced and as hearty as ever: large- boned elderly ladies in towelling bath- robes can still be spotted stumping down to the sea at all months of the year, casting contemptuous glances at those unwilling to go swimming in late November or early March ('Do you men ever swim to New- haven?' a muscular septuagenarian once asked my father and me, before setting out for a distant lighthouse at a slow but determined breast-stroke).
It goes without saying that Seafordians indulged in an orgy of destruction in the Sixties and Seventies. Seaford was never over-endowed with buildings of beauty, but during those fateful years the locals lashed out right and left, razing 18th century and early Victorian buildings with ferocious gusto and replacing them with dreary slabs of the kind that are routinely and rightly denounced in the right-minded 1980s. Saddest of all was the sudden disappearance of Seaford's celebrated prep schools, most of which had been estab- lished in the early years of the century, when sensible parents and games-loving schoolmasters set great store on the character-forming properties of sun and sea. For 60 years or so these schools were an integral part of Seaford life, providing employment for school matrons and ex- majors and clogging the streets on Sundays as crocodiles of boys and girls converged on the Parish Church for the special schools' service, at which the Vicar of Seaford would frequently interrupt his sermon or the reading of prayers to transfix an inattentive nose-picker with a beetle- browed stare or call for silence in a voice of thunder.
Twenty years ago, the schools began to disappear, like mighty dinosaurs creeping off to die: parents in Esher or Tunbridge Wells tended instead to send their children to local schools as weekly boarders or day boys or girls; headmasters and governing bodies were made gratifyingly aware of the property value of the many acres of land they were sitting on; blackboards and canes and rolls of honour were committed to the flames, and the games fields that had been so distinctive a feature of the town were covered with desirable residences. Particularly melancholy was the disappear- ance of the buildings themselves: Edwar- dian prep schools, like golf clubs, embody English institutional architecture at its best, and Seaford in its heyday was chock-a- block with white mullioned windows, over- hung balconies with curious fire-escapes attached, dormer windows with sheets hung out to dry, belfries, clock towers and crunching gravel drives.
Like the rest of us, Seafordians have been seized with a sudden remorse for the damage they've done since the war, and are making belated attempts not only to cling on to what little remains but to pep up the quality of their own contributions: as elsewhere in the country, many of the new buildings are surprisingly good to look at, with roofs back in fashion, brick supplant- ing concrete, and decorative twists (includ- ing clip-on Tudor beams) making a wel- come reappearance. This feeling of 'regret for a world that is vanishing over a horizon of hedgeless fields and parking lots man- ifests itself nationally in the form of Rural Nostalgia, with shrewd publishers reissuing the memoirs of long-forgotten poachers and evocative volumes of ancient photo- graphs, and tradesmen of other varieties doing a brisk business in wholemeal bread, rocking chairs and factory-fresh home- made jam; at a more parochial level, it will often take the form of the local museum, staffed by ladies of the WI variety, selling corn dollies, hand-made bookmarks and locally produced guide books, and filled with eager visitors anxious to take a stroll down Memory Lane.
Which brings me at last to the admirable museum that Mr Jakens — a retired electrician with a passion for Seaford life and lore — has established in the rejuven- ated Martello Tower at the Seaford Head end of the promenade. Like all the best museums, Mr Jakens's is an orderly jum- ble, crammed to overflowing with aged typewriters, ration books, pub signs, scenes of Victorian Seaford, mayoral
trowels, gas masks and imposing portraits of local dignitaries in their robes of office; give him an inch, and the enterprising Mr Jakens will fill it with a packet of Quaker Oats circa 1947 or a copy of Men Only, for he knows — or at least I'm sure he knows — that the truly magic museum has more than a touch of the Old Curiosity Shop, and wisely eschews the cunning lighting, discreet positioning and patronising ex- planatory notices favoured by more soph- isticated 'professional' museum keepers. Not surprisingly, the museum is particular- ly strong on electrical gadgets, and has a formidable collection of bakelite wireless iets and televisions from the distant 1960s — and it's the objects from the recent past, from the post-war years that have a par- ticular, melancholy fascination. In Mr Jakens's treasure trove a world we have lost flickers fitfully to life: only the prep schools are under-represented, left to lin- ger on in the memory of ageing ex-inmates and octogenarian Latin masters, waiting to take their places in the Great Common Room in the Sky.
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