Peoples Stories - Bevendean History Project
Colin and Margaret West’s Memories of Upper Bevendean Farm
There’s been quite a lot of flooding at Bodiam Close in recent years.
Colin: It’s funny you should say that they blame me for it. We used to get these summer storms especially after harvest when we just started cultivating the ground. We would get this torrential rain; everything went into the valley it cut out a trench 3 feet deep. We had a calf walk into the trench; you couldn’t see the calf when it was in the bottom. I didn’t know until fairly recently that initially there was no main drainage in Bevendean; it was all soakaways on the new estate. The rain used to come down, block up all the drains and then it would just carry on flooding going right down The Avenue. It came near to that in 1947, when we had a lot of snow which thawed on frozen ground, and it flooded the farmhouse which had a cellar in it.
A similar flood happened in the farmhouse when the Alcorn family lived there.
When the school opened my grandfather still lived in the farm house. He used to potter around the school, and they accepted him as part of the furniture, he got on very well with the first headmaster a chap named Webb. He went to Varndean, had it not been for the war he might well have been an Olympic runner he was that sort of class. Mr Webb was a nice chap I met him on a number of occasions.
There was a wartime kitchen in The Avenue near the main Lewes Road supplying a lot of the kindergarten schools, I went to Varndean and the senior’s dinners were cooked on the premises but the junior school dinners were all imported from the kitchen in The Avenue. The war was nearly over by the time I went to Varndean, in 1944 when the threat of invasion had gone, we did not need to use the air raid shelters. Hutching was the headmaster them. A lot of the teachers there came back from the services after the war. During the war a lot of the teachers were those who had retired but came back for the duration of the war.
When the Alcorn family left Lower Bevendean the land wasn’t sold was it who owned it?
The Council had bought Lower Bevendean Farm in 1913.
Colin: They also bought Upper Bevendean Farm in 1939. The Council bought up land all round Brighton to protect its own water supply. The council claimed they never had to purify the water because it filtered through the chalk. The land they bought came in very useful later when it was used for housing after the war. They bought the Chichester estate because the Pelham family lost 2 generations in a very short time and they did not have the money to pay the double death duties. They sold the land and Brighton Corporation bought all of it. The land was bought mainly for building the Coldean estate, and later the University it was bought very cheap. We’re talking now about the land of Stanmer, Balmer, Mary Farm and High Park Farm which were all training grounds during the war. Although Brighton owned the land they got repairs and payment from the government for the war damage.
Does the wartime history of the farm interest you? We had a trench in our back garden and a billet on the farm with about 20 or 30 London Scottish soldiers. The Queen came to visit them, the Queen Mother as she became. She saw the soldiers by the reservoir at the top of Warren Hill, Woodingdean she wouldn’t come down here it was too muddy on the road to the farm, but the troops were billeted on the farm, There were 3 other entrenchments with barbed wire all round, this curly barbed wire you have probably seen pictures of it.
The farm was busy during the war, there were 20 soldiers here. They were here because at that time invasion was almost certain, they were just waiting for the Germans to come across the Chanel but when the threat decreased they all moved away. When it came to D-Day they didn’t come back to us, they would have been too far away. We had aeroplanes shot down on the farm one in the Battle of Britain and one on D-Day they were both British. The first one that came down had a Polish pilot but when we got out there he’d disappeared, my brother and I were very upset. We didn’t have an air raid shelter just a big kitchen table and my mother made us both stay under there while the air fight was going on although we wanted to watch it. And then on D-Day a Spitfire got shot down and it turned out I recognised him. Margaret’s father came over on the grocer’s bike to see how he was and if he wanted anything to eat. He went home and brought back a boiled egg and something to eat. Little did he realise that I was going to become his son-in-law.
When the Americans lived in the village they used to go into Margaret’s parents shop because having a grocer’s shop they got cooked breakfast and some even had a bath I think then they went across to Newhaven. It was full of troops.
When the Queen visited the troops on the farm there was a big photograph in the Brighton and Hove Herald which must be somewhere. It must have been the early part of the war because the troops had disappeared once the threat of invasion had gone I suppose you’re looking at 1943 at the latest. Probably 1941 to 1943. I’m pretty certain that it’s in the Brighton and Hove Herald which has been extinct for some time.
(Brighton & Hove Herald on 31 May 1941 front page).
It was the Queen who came, the Queen Mother as we would have known her; I think it would have made front page news. I don’t know where else she might have visited on the day. I was 8 or 9 and what annoyed me was my mother wouldn’t let us go and see her, we saw it in the paper on the following Saturday and there was my cousin having his photograph taken. We couldn’t go; I was cross with my mother.
The farm boundaries are the Woodingdean boundary, Falmer road until you get almost to the brow of the hill and there’s a bridle path and follow that bridle path round not quite exactly down to Birdham road, Bevendean Crescent and then zigzag around Lower Bevendean, taking in Heath Hill farm until you get back to the reservoir at Woodingdean. You can see most of the farm from the road; the annoying thing was that my neighbours could all see what I was doing. Chuckle!! The farm is still 600 acres, that’s what the landlord says, you’re lucky if you can find 550 to 580, there’s a certain amount of waste ground having the old firing range and gorse and things like that. You’ve got grass; the ground came right down to the back of The Avenue where the prefabs used to be. All that grass on that steep side down to there. You can’t do anything with that we would like to but we had trouble with cattle and motorbikes. It would be a lovely place to put cattle in the winter with the shelter down there, because the rest of the farm is so open, down there would be quite pleasant and nice for them.
The farm used to be arable and cattle. We had a dairy herd, but it went about 10 years ago. We had a milk round around in Woodingdean and all parts of Brighton. My father had a milk round during the war that was a horse and cart round. I don’t think there are any dairy farms in Sussex now, it is a bit sad. Plumpton College is the nearest farm I know of that has still got cows in this area I wouldn’t know where to go if you went westward or eastwards I haven’t a clue. Milk is so cheap, there isn’t any profit. The example I always use is when I was a kid I went running round helping the milkman to deliver milk and my job on a Saturday morning was to collect the money, milk was 4½d a pint and bread was 4½d a loaf not wrapped and not sliced. Milk wasn’t pasteurised then, just raw milk our children were all brought up on raw milk.
The crops now are wheat, barley and oilseed rape with grass silage besides grazing. The silage is just for feeding cattle; I don’t know how many Stewart has got he hasn’t got as many as I had. He’s got beef cattle now. I think his son Scott has a few chickens and a few pigs he fattens up and sells to a butcher but not on any grand scale. There was a time when we had a lot of pigs as well we used to sell them to Walls up in London. Stewart has got a few cattle but he hasn’t got the dairy herd now. There are some sheep which come and go as other farmers want extra pasture.
Is Lower Bevendean church closed? Yes, it’s used as a village hall and there’s a second hall next to it and sometimes both buildings are let out. It’s owned by the parish of Moulsecoomb.
Is there a community in Lower Bevendean? There is but it’s very small and a bit fragmented. There’s the Becca building which is down on the farm green about where the farmhouse was. That’s a children’s centre. We went there earlier this year because they wanted to know about the farm, a lot of the people who were there and the children didn’t know it had been a farm. They run a preschool group with about 20 youngsters. They wanted pictures of the farm which we were able to show them. They invited us to go to a day when they had small animals coming for the children. There were sheep, small pigs, donkeys, ducks and geese. The children were able to handle them.
We used to have children mainly from Woodingdean schools come down to the farm and they hadn’t realised that things like cows were so big so they were half frightened of them, when seen in close-up. There’s the old joke that someone found a lot of milk bottles and thought they had come from a cow’s nest. I knew one of the councillors, going back a long time, who asked if we could take a pony to school. My daughter who was still at school then took her Shetland pony into St Luke’s School Brighton right into the classroom. It was a bit risky but it all went well, they loved it. I don’t know if they’d be insured to do it now or not. A school visit with kids coming down to the farm would be a bit risky now; would it be covered for any accidents?
The farm has altered quite a lot since the war. The big barns weren’t there then. The corn barn etc. was put up well after the war. There was nothing there before that, except some tin sheds they were the old cow stalls back in father’s time. We put up the milking parlour, but we started off milking the cows in the fields.
I used to have to milk a cow by hand before I went to school; I was never any good at it anyway it used to take me ages. I would have rather gone to school than milk the cow.
There were several dew ponds over the hills for the sheep. Dew ponds wouldn’t keep many cattle going but sheep don’t drink as much. There’s a reservoir going up north eastwards from the Scout hut at Lower Bevendean and there is a dew pond which was done up 5 or 10 years ago as it had gone completely and was not holding water and there’s another one over near Moulsecoomb that is a concrete one.
There was one chalk pit; we used to call it the firing range because they used to use it for that. It was to the south of the farmhouse on the bank. They didn’t have great big Lorries going in and out of there. It was near where the factories are now.
Do you remember cattle running round the school? They used to get out if someone left the gate open by the Scout hut.
Upper Bevendean Farm in 2014 from the dew pond by track to Falmer
Philip West remembers the black lamb 'Satan'.
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