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24 Old Memories of East-Bourne. [Chap. II.
drawing in existence (if any copies of it are in existence now) of Beachy Head as a whole is a lithograph published at East-Bourne about 1852, and drawn by S. R. Smith, a Master at the Gables School. I remember it well, but now possess no copy of it. A pen-and-ink sketch of the last surviving Charles (the one alluded to by Mr. Stokes) taken (I know not by whom) in 1851, forms one of my Plates, and I should say that it was very true to nature.
I must now go back to the Old Town and make a fresh start along another route into the New Town starting from the Lamb Inn. This is known to be one of the oldest places of entertainment in the county and at the beginning of the 19th Century, when East-Bourne and the neighbourhood was alive with soldiers, it was at the Lamb Inn that the fashionable balls took place which have been often written about. In my early days the landlord was a man named George Picknell, a brother of the distinguished Sussex cricketer, Thomas Picknell. The large room, such as it was, and is, which had been used for festive purposes was also until long after the middle of the century the only room for public meetings in the Parish. In May 1852, a certain Dr. Darling came there to give a lecture on such occult subjects as spirit-rapping, table-turning and mesmerism. During the proceedings a tremendous thunderstorm occurred of such violence as to frighten the audience and many others who were not in the audience. The common people looked upon Dr. Darling as an emissary of the Devil, the science (save the mark!) upheld by him as Satanic, and the storm as a Divine manifestation to the same effect.
It was in the roadway opposite the Lamb that the non-agricultural portion of the East-Bourne Fair was always held annually on October 11, old Michaelmas Day. In 1849 I remember that the stalls and booths extended a long way up Church Street, adjacent to the Churchyard wall, past the Church Tower as far as Bay Pond ; but the last time I visited the Fair in a recent year the stalls had dwindled to two, and now they have disappeared altogether. The agricultural part of the |
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