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ANN FUREDI

I was asked recently if I thought it was a problem that most Faversham Society members were, shall we say, “rather mature”. Should we not be doing more to involve more young people?

It’s an issue I have mixed feelings about.

Yes, we absolutely we should try to build our membership, reaching out to every part of the town. But it’s hardly surprising that our members are what they are.

Usually, it’s as we get older that we start to think more our family and our history. It’s often only when we have grown up that we feel the security and home-ness that roots provide. When we’re younger, the “bigger-picture” draws our vision away from the smallness of town life.

And it’s we older folk who have the time … time to volunteer, time to organise.

So, yes, we absolutely want to get young people involved in the Faversham Society – but I don’t think we need to be at all apologetic about our demographic. Not everything needs to be about the young.

We have a lifetime of experience to draw on and put to use and we’re not dead yet.

In other news … Many thanks to everyone who has thrown their personal support behind our collective support for the Old Grammar School’s fight to prevent the renaming of The Shooting Meadow Path. Our on-line petition is pushing towards 750 signatures in addition to lots of paper statements. An appeal has been lodged with the local government ombudsman and we’re hoping common sense and respect for local opinion will prevail.

CONTACT ANN

Clean up the war memorial

HAROLD GOODWIN

The Faversham Society, along with many others in the town, successfully opposed moving the memorial cross to the “new” memorial garden in Stone Street. Thank goodness we were successful.

Surely, no one could consider the memorial garden, as it now is, a fitting memorial to those that Faversham lost in war. We should feel shame for allowing the war memorial to be in this state.

The War Memorial Garden Committee, the composition of which has always been opaque, said in its appeal to the Planning Inspectorate in 2023 that it had achieved “substantial improvement of the garden adjacent to the existing site of the memorial resulting in the pleasant and sensitive area that exists today, and which is felt to be an appropriate sanctuary and area of remembrance.”

The committee claimed in its evidence that it had created a place with “respectful and empathetic surroundings.”

This is clearly not the case. I am led to believe that funds remain in the accounts of the War Memorial Garden Committee. Can the committee be compelled to clean up the tablets of names of which they were so proud?

Fleur museum reopens

LEIGH ALLISON

After a huge clean-up following our building works, the museum is now able to open again. Thanks to our volunteers for all their hard work in getting things straight.

The museum will now be open on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 11am to 3pm. We will also be open on the first Sunday of the month when the antiques market is on. We’re busy with school visits, which are proving very popular and would also love to open more days. If you can spare some time to help then please contact us at the address below

volunteer@favershamsociety.org

Mysterious statues’ fate

FABIO SURACE

In 1972 a scuba diver, Stefano Mariottini, spotted an arm protruding from the seabed in Riace Marina, Calabria, southern Italy. He had just discovered two full-sized Greek bronze statues of naked and bearded warriors, dating from 460-430 BC.

These remarkable statues, known as the Bronzes of Riace were crafted using lost-wax casting, a complex technique, and are are remarkably have a thickness of only 7.5 and 8.5 millimetres.

Daniele Castrizio, a professor of numismatics at the University of Messina in Sicily, will be giving a talk about them at Faversham Guildhall from 6.30pm on Tuesday, 25 March.

Their intricate details have captivated scholars and art enthusiasts alike. Recent chemical analyses and restorations have provided invaluable insights into their origins and original vibrant polychromy. Professor Castrizio has spent the past decade uncovering the clues of these statues.

Join us to explore the bronzes’ captivating journey, tracing their path from Greece to Rome and finally to Calabria. This is a unique opportunity you don’t want to miss! See page 10. Sign up at the Visitor Information Centre at 12 Market Place or email me at the address below.

fabiosurace@hotmail.com

A confusion of footpaths

LAURENCE YOUNG

Ann Furedi’s passionate and eloquent defence of local place names and her related denunciation of Swale Council and the town council (From the chair, March 2025) appears to result from her having been given incorrect information.

There is no evidence that the path from St Mary of Charity to Abbey Place has ever had a formal or informal name and the same applies to the footpath across the Shooting Meadows (now Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School’s playing fields).

Some time ago a respected Abbey Street resident noted the footpath between the church and Abbey Place was unnamed and suggested to town councillors that should be rectified. Councillors agreed and Swale endorsed their choice of name for it, Queen Matilda Place.

Neither council has proposed giving a name to the path across the playing fields. Shooting Meadows is the traditional local and historic name of the playing fields (not the path across them). Nobody has suggested this popular usage should change or should stop.

Editor’s note: Laurence, Young, who is co-editor of Arthur Percival’s Faversham Streets and Places, published in 2017, has provided Faversham Town Council with a statement about the historical and social background to the footpaths. See the link below:

tinyurl.com/bdh43e66

Liberal welcome for suffragists

LEIGH ALLISON

About 50 people at the Assembly Rooms enjoyed Jennifer Godfrey’s fascinating talk about suffragettes in Kent.

Left (top left): Jennifer Godfrey with Emmeline Pankhurst as a backdrop.
Right (bottom right): Society trustee Jane Secker wearing a suffragettes’ hat and sash, introduced her.

We learnt of the activities of the militant suffragettes and some of the terrible treatment they received at the hands of the authorities, but also ordinary people who opposed them as they tried to drum up support for their cause. 

There were also more peaceful suffragists who took part in a countrywide rally in 1913. As part of this Women’s Suffrage Pilgrimage to London, “after an enormous and very successful meeting in Faversham the pilgrims were entertained to supper by the Liberal Club”. So, they clearly had a more welcome reception here!

The first meeting of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) here in Faversham was held at the Minor Hall of the Faversham Institute in January, 1914.

Votes for all women (over the age of 21) were not granted until 1928.

Jennifer is the author of two books, Suffragettes of Kent and Secret Missions of the Suffragettes, which include lots of details about the activities of these brave women. These are both now on sale in the Visitor Information Centre at 12 Market Place.

Don’t forget that talks are free to Faversham Society members. If you have something relevant to Faversham that you’d like to tell us about, please get in touch with me at the address below.

membership@favershamsociety.org

HAROLD GOODWIN

Following the success of Open Faversham in 2023 and 2024, we expect it to be even bigger and better in 2025! Open Faversham is now firmly established as an annual opportunity to celebrate our town’s cultural and natural heritage. For 2025, it will take place earlier than before, over nine days from 24 May to 1 June, when we will share our natural and cultural heritage with friends, family, and visitors.

Many activities and events have been offered for children of school age and younger and this year, we hope to offer even more.

The programme for this year is shaping up well. At the heart of the town in St Mary of Charity Parish Church, we shall look back at Faversham’s experience as we reflect on the end of the 1939-45 conflict 80 years ago. In the second part of the week, the focus will be on the 200th anniversary of the passenger railway in Britain and on Faversham’s railway heritage.

The Community Land Trust will be consulting people about the restoration of the engine sheds east of the station and what uses they might be put to. We are planning a new Faversham railway heritage walk. The exhibitions will include images projected on the big screen, maps and memorabilia.

Kent Archaeological Society is planning a dig on the creekside. Seeing them at work and hearing what they find will be interesting.

If you have events or activities that week or you are planning something, go to our website (see below) to find out more and become part of Open Faversham.

The deadline for inclusion in the printed brochure, which will be delivered to every household in Faversham, is 6 April to allow a letterbox drop to all the homes in the town and parish councils in the villages. The programme will also appear on the Visit Swale and Visit Kent websites. If you have ideas or plan to organise an event or two, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

STEPHEN RAYNER

The big four banks – Lloyds, Barclays, NatWest and HSBC (formerly the Midland) – have fled the town despite their customers’ wishes that they should stay. Only the Nationwide (formerly a building society) remains.

This is not the first time that “progress” was forced upon customers and this letter from 30 January, 1960, may be seen as the beginning of the end for the old-style banks. The manager H. C. Howes (I think) wrote from 8 Market Place (now Ward & Partners): “As from today, the book-keeping of this office will be mechanised and in future you will receive a typewritten statement in place for hand-written statement of account. We feel sure you will welcome this change.”

We doubt that customers did, but what would they have thought if the bank branch shut, leaving customers at the peril of online banking or customer care on a crackly phone line several continents away?

This letter is part of the archive from the John Coulter estate that is being collated and donated to the society.

CHRISTIAN HØGSBJERG

Marika Sherwood, who died at her home in Oare on 16 February aged 87, was a pioneering researcher of the African diaspora in general and of black British history in particular.

Marika was born in Hungary in 1937 to a Jewish family, many of whom were killed during the Holocaust, experiences which made her into a lifelong opponent of not just antisemitism but all forms of racism and oppression – including that of the Palestinian people. She emigrated with surviving members of her family to Australia in 1948, and lived for periods in New Guinea, New York and Sicily before ultimately making the UK her home.

During the mid-1960s while working as a teacher in London, Marika saw how institutional racism failed young black boys, in particular, and was frustrated by the lack of any black history on the school curriculum. While a supplementary schools movement emerged among the West Indian community in response, Marika began what would become a lifetime project campaigning to introduce the black presence in British history on to school, college and university curriculums.

Her weapons in this struggle were a passionate commitment to anti-racist education, tenacious and tireless skills as a dedicated archival researcher, and the methodology of C. L. R. James, Eric Williams and Walter Rodney. She was not alone in this project – one thinks of the work of Peter Fryer, author of Staying Power for example – and soon found allies when in 1991 she co-founded the Black and Asian Studies Association with Hakim Adi and others, becoming editor of its newsletter.

Her own research expanded from the West Indian contribution in Britain during the Second World War in Many Struggles (1985), to recovering the history of Pan-Africanism in Britain, and then to the wider global dimensions of black history. One notable intervention came with After Abolition: Britain and the Slave Trade since 1807 (2007), which drew attention to the huge profits that British merchants and bankers still managed to make from slavery and the slave trade until at least the 1880s. Marika’s discussion of what she called “the realities behind the well-promoted image of an altruistic and anti-slavery Britain” powerfully challenged nationalist mythology during the bicentenary of abolition.

Marika’s brilliance shone particularly brightly in her biographical portraits of black fighters, including neglected aspects of the life and work of Kwame Nkrumah, Claudia Jones and Malcolm X. She also made pathbreaking contributions recovering the lives of a host of little-known figures including the Trinidadian Pan-Africanist Henry Sylvester Williams, the Guyanese labour organiser Ernest Bowen and the Nigerian pastor Daniels Ekarte.

After moving to Kent she also began inevitably researching black history in the county. “I did it because the people I spoke with seemed to think that there had never been black families living in east Kent, but when I researched it I found people from the colonies had settled in the area since the 16th century,” she later recalled. In 2012 she published Albert Makaula-White, an African Farmer in Kent 19041937, following this up with her last work, published earlier this year, An African Family in Kent: The African Makaula-White Family in East Kent.

Her own comradeship with figures such as C. L. R. James and Peter Blackman – as well as her own socialist politics, shaped by the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 – meant her writings were passionate and often polemical pieces designed to educate and inspire action. Indeed, and perhaps most remarkably of all, she managed everything with limited institutional support, a senior research fellowship at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London. The reputation and respect she established worldwide as a leading authority on black British history and as a profoundly kind and generous mentor who encouraged and supported so many younger researchers in this field meant she was honoured in 2022 with an honorary doctorate from the University of Chichester.

Marika leaves an extraordinary and inspiring legacy of scholarship and activism – our condolences, sympathy and solidarity to her son Craig and her wider family.

CATHERINE LEE

As the days lengthen and spring beckons, we’re looking forward to starting our 2025 “Walking with History” guided town walks season on 5 April. We hope to see you all!

Walks will run every Saturday morning throughout the summer from April to October with the sole exception of Hop Festival weekend in August. We depart from the Visitor Information Centre at 12 Market Place at 10.30am and finish between noon and 12.30. We will additionally be running walks on the three springtime Bank Holiday Mondays: Easter Monday, 21 April, and 5 and 26 May.

Don’t forget that there is no charge for Faversham Society members so why not take advantage of this membership benefit and join a walk with us this year? Even long-term residents can discover something new – or learn to see things differently. One of our guests said last year after his walk: “I have lived in Faversham for getting on for 40 years and yesterday saw it in a new light.”

We also run pre-booked walks for groups of 10 or more people on other days and at other times, so if you happen to belong to other societies and organisations that are arranging summer outings, suggest a “Walking with History” tour of Faversham to them. All inquiries can be sent to me, Catherine Lee, the walks co-ordinator, at the address below.

We have an exciting programme of themed walks lined up for the summer evenings, so watch this space for further announcements and bring your friends along.

favershamtownwalks@gmail.com

PAUL MOORBATH

More treasures have been found in the Faversham Society attic: first editions of novels by Thomas Hardy and Anthony Trollope. Some have the label of the Faversham Institute Special Library with the name of the manager, Fred Jackman.

The Return of the Native, by Hardy, was originally published in monthly instalments from January to December, 1878, in Belgravia, a London illustrated magazine published monthly. Then it was published in book form by Smith, Elder & Co in three volumes.

Only 1,000 copies were printed. It includes some new chapter titles and the title page has a new frontispiece with a sketch map drawn by Hardy of Egdon Heath, the scene of the story. This first edition, with its original brown cloth binding with a double frame line on the rear cover, had a sad ending but – by popular demand – this was changed in later editions to include a happy marriage.

The title page has a minor error – a missing quotation mark after “A Pair of Blue Eyes”.

Other Hardy first editions found in the attic include Hand of Ethelberta (1876), also published by Smith, Elder & Co, and Laodicean: or The Castle of the De Stancys. A story of Today (1881), published by Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington. Hardy was ill while writing this novel and was confined to bed and dictated most of the novel to his wife.

In addition, we have a curious first edition by Anthony Trollope: Dr Wortle’s School (1881) published by Chapman and Hall. It is in two volumes, bound in grey cloth with the title and author in black. The title, however, is printed on the back cover, leaving the front blank. According to the standard book collector’s reference work, printing the title on the back is “very curious” and is “unparalleled in the nineteenth century”.

There are two more Trollope first editions: Cousin Henry (1879) published by Chapman and Hall and The Fixed Period (1882), published by Blackwood.

The books bear the label of Faversham Institute Special Library. The Faversham Institute Journal for October, 1876, contains an article announcing the Special Library, which was separate from the General Library, had opened on 1 June, and contained works of fiction only. The annual subscription was ten shillings and sixpence and the annual subscription for the reading room was four shillings. A committee chose books and there were reports in the Institute journal listing recent acquisitions and the amount spent. There were comments such as the budget was “smaller than we could wish”.