Free Channel Shore by Tom Fort Page B

have a Museum of Sex, despite the singer/songwriter Robyn Hitchcock – characterised by his record label as a ‘psychedelic troubadour’ – saying it does. But it does have a conventional museum in its Martello Tower, which boasts prehistoric tool fragments, a mock Victorian school-room, a collection of domestic appliances and ancient TVs and radios, plus some history about the ‘colourful’ Seaford Shags.
    You find that colourful is an adjective much favoured by the heritage people to describe activities that in another age would be termed vicious and criminal. The Shags were wreckers, a gang organised to loot ships that came to grief in Seaford Bay and Cuckmere Haven. Their most infamous exploit occurred in December 1809, when a flotilla of merchant ships under the protection of a Royal Navy sloop, the
Harlequin
, were driven into Seaford Bay and onto the beach by a south-westerly gale. Distress guns and rockets were fired and the shore was soon crowded with rescuers, onlookers and the Shags.
    The ensuing drama and scandal received national coverage. One report read: ‘Most [of those present] were disposed to render every assistance in their power, but among them were some so lost to nature and her charities as to be bent on no other object than plundering the unlucky sufferers.’ And not just the sufferers; Mr Hamilton, the Collector of Customs at Newhaven, took off his greatcoat and boots to help in the rescue, and came back to find them filched.
    All seven grounded vessels were shattered to pieces. Thepassengers and crew on the
Harlequin
were rescued, but thirty-one seamen from the merchant ships were drowned. The Shags fastened on victims dead and alive like vultures, until the local militia were called out to put a stop to their depredations.
    Seaford was once a port of some significance as a ‘limb’ of the Cinque Port of Hastings. It stood at the mouth of the Ouse, which gave access well inland, and had a sheltered harbour to the front. But some time in the sixteenth century it ceased trading after a succession of storms broke through the shingle bar protecting the harbour, and the river found a new exit to the west, near the village of Meeching, later renamed Newhaven. Subsequently the migration of shingle forced the river mouth east again, to the hamlet of Bishopstone. In 1761 three local corn merchants installed a mill there powered by the incoming and ebbing tide.
    The mill was taken over in 1803 by a man of lowly birth and remarkable enterprise, William Catt. In Lower’s
Worthies of Sussex
Catt is introduced with this fine sonorous sentence: ‘If it be desirable to possess a practical belief that under Providence a man is rather the master of the circumstances which surround him than a slave, a small space in the history of Sussex may properly be allotted to the late William Catt, who from a very humble position rose to considerable commercial eminence and whose memory still lives on in the grateful recollection of his children, of his old servants and of his faithful friends.’
    Catt greatly expanded the scale of the operation at Bishopstone. He excavated a second millpond and increased the number of millstones powered by the wheels from five pairsto sixteen. They worked whenever there was enough tide flow to drive them, grinding 1500 sacks of flour a week to be transported by barge to Newhaven or up the Ouse. A thriving village grew up around the mills; Catt himself lived in a fine mansion where his one recreation was the cultivation of pears.
    He died in 1853, and the business did not survive him for long. It was too exposed to the elements and to competition in the industrialising world. In 1876 a storm flooded the village and badly damaged the mills. Silting and the shifting of shingle made it increasingly difficult for barges to get in and out. The mill was demolished in 1901, although people continued to live in the settlement around it until the outbreak of the Second World War.
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