Southwater Local History Group -History Lite

As this issue covers the holiday months, we thought perhaps you might need a few books, whether to read on the beach or perhaps in a deckchair in your garden. West Sussex boasts a host of authors who have lived, loved and written about our county, both in fiction and fact. Here are just a few.

Let’s start with Georgette Heyer – a most prolific writer. Born in Wimbledon, after her marriage in 1925 she and her husband spent several years living in Tanganyika Territory and Macedonia before returning to England in 1929. On returning, they ran a sports shop in Horsham, first living in Colgate, then moving to Slinfold where she wrote her first crime novel “Footsteps in the Dark” and her best known historical novel, “Regency Buck”. Later the family moved to Brighton. Often setting a her stories in Sussex, Heyer released one romance novel and one thriller each year.

Famously, Hilaire Belloc, a great lover of Sussex, lived at Shipley Windmill, just down the road from Southwater. For a little light entertainment, dip into “The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts” or the “Cautionary Tales”, though he was of course a prolific writer and poet.

Older readers may remember being glued to the television some years ago when “The Forsyte Saga” was essential viewing each week; how many of you know that the author, John Galsworthy, lived for the last seven years of his life at Bury, loving the South Downs so much that he had his ashes scattered over them from an aeroplane! The creator of Sherlock Holmes also spent his last years in Sussex at Crowborough but he knew the Horsham area well as his sister Connie had married E W Hornung, himself the author of the “Raffles” books, and lived at West Grinstead Park. In addition his mother took a house almost opposite.

You’ll see it each time you go along the A272 from Buck Barn to Cowfold; it’s that imposing timber framed house called Bowshots!

For a local read then, go for “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire” in which our heroes catch the two o’clock train from Victoria Station en route to Lamberley, south of Horsham, on the trail of this fearsome beast!