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ANN FUREDI

If you have lived here for a while, you’ll probably have been struck – as I am – by how subtly the town changes. Shops shut and open, their purpose changes following broader social trends.

When I first started as a volunteer in the Fleur bookshop, it was at 1a Gatefield Lane. Then just one cramped room heaving with books that were not always easy to get to despite the best efforts of Wendy, the boss, to impose order. It had its own micro-climate: whatever the weather outside, it was cold in the shop. The back office, where we received and sorted donations, was damp and often (to put it politely) smelt as though a tom-cat had spent the night there.

When it was suggested that we move to our current location on Preston Street, where the Visitor Information Centre had been next to the museum, there was a rebellion. Volunteers resigned, we joked about chaining ourselves to the beams and complained loudly and unceasingly to the board of trustees … before deciding, reluctantly, to make the best of it, deeply resenting the loss of what we knew and loved.

When we heard that the old shop was to become a café and bread shop we were incredulous. How on earth was that going to work?!

Fast forward to now … The bookshop is light, spacious and maintains a comfortable temperature (most of time) while retaining the spirit of eccentric wackiness expressed in Peter Quince’s newsletter writings. Its new position makes it easier to collaborate with the museum (which the bookshop exists to fund) and its visibility lures in visitors who trek into town from the station. Last year the bookshop raised more than £40,000 – all from a collection of donated books sold by volunteers.

Our old book-cave has been transformed into Grain and Hearth, a beautiful bakery- café that has become a brunch destination, which often has queues of folk, some of whom from a distance seem more N1 than ME13. But when your dog stops to greet their dogs, you find they’re just as Faversham as those at the rather more traditional but equally lovely Cosgroves on the corner.

The Mayor of Faversham, Josh Rowlands, made an interesting point at Christmas when he said that those of us who worry about Faversham changing forget that Faversham changes people more than we change it.

I think there is something spookily special about the town that makes this true. I think it’s why a lot of us return to Faversham after leaving. I think it’s why it acts as a magnet for those who want a particular kind of life and community that I believe the Faversham Society represents.

We now have 820 members and more than 70 regular volunteers – and this year seems to be a good time to have a push to grow the numbers of both. People often ask me what we do – and I find myself explaining what we are. We are a community within a community. We are a community of people who love what Faversham is – a town with an amazing history and with a future that can be built on the appreciation of this.

My focus this year will be about growing what we are. Let’s try to increase our number by promoting what we are and what we stand for. Download a membership form and please use it to recruit a neighbour, a friend. Most of all, have a brilliant 2025. Let’s all make the year count.

CONTACT ANN

Open Faversham returns

HAROLD GOODWIN

When we launched Open Faversham in 2023 we had hoped that there would be many opportunities for children and young people, Faversham’s rich heritage has to be actively inherited by future generations if it is to continue and evolve.

All forms of heritage – lived, built, and natural – have to be actively adopted and engaged with by the next generation, if the heritage is to be maintained and to continue to evolve for the benefit of future generations. There were fewer activities for children and young people in 2024 than there were in 2023.

After much thought and discussion, not least with our town council, we have decided to move Open Faversham to the summer half term, 24 May to 1 June.

The Open Faversham website is now live and you can begin to list activities and events. These can be things you already have planned or which you can organise to be part of this nine-day celebration of our town’s rich community life and that of the nearby villages, which will highlight: music, art, drama, built and natural heritage, our history, community organisations, sport, food and beverages, and industry and employment.

Full details about how to be included in Open Faversham and the deadlines are on the website below.

This year is the 200th anniversary of the birth of the railways in the UK and that will be one of this year’s themes. Faversham has a rich, if under-appreciated railway heritage and we have been discussing opportunities with the Railway Heritage Trust for the engine sheds to the east of Faversham station.

Herea re some possible themes for 2025

• Community needs – homelessness, health and social care
• Railway heritage
• Food and beverages. We hope that St Mary of Charity will organise the Pudding Club again and that local producers will join in a one-day food festival
• Maps, parish boundaries and unitarisation
• Nature, wildlife and rewilding

The content of the Open Faversham is determined by those who take part. It is a genuine community festival.

One of the advantages of being involved with Open Faversham is that because of the collaborative marketing involved you can reach a much bigger audience, not least through every letterbox in the town. I am looking forward to Open Faversham again this year, I hope you are too. Join us!

https://openfaversham.info/about-open-faversham/

Museum update

LEIGH ALLISON

The museum is closed now until the February half-term. Our regular opening hours are 11am to 3pm, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, plus the first Sunday in the month when the antiques market is on.

When we reopen this year, we’d love to have some additional helpers to talk to our visitors. You don’t need to be an expert. Just friendly, welcoming and enthusiastic about our beautiful town. So, if you have a few hours to spare, please get in touch with me at the address below.

volunteer@favershamsociety.org

Shipyard on the front line

LEIGH ALLISON

The Seafox, a naval transport vessel, was launched at Faversham in 1946

Pollock’s shipyard on the creek was one of Faversham’s most important industries employing more than 100 people for most of its existence from 1918 to 1970.

In the Second World War it played a vital part building a wide range of small vessels for the government but there were frequent tensions with the Admiralty and plenty of other problems to tax Marshall Pollock, the young managing director.

War brought change, including women working in the yard, and considerable profit, but by 1960 the firm was struggling to stay in business.

The Faversham Society is privileged to announce that Henry Cleary has agreed to give a talk, On the Maritime Front line: The role of Pollock’s Shipyard in the Second World War, at Faversham Guildhall at 7pm on Tuesday, 11 February.

Henry, who recently gave a talk at Chatham Historic Dockyard, has been researching the shipyard using the Faversham Society archives and the remarkable archive of Pollock’s papers held by the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and only now being made accessible.

Tickets must be booked, either via our website or at the Visitor Information Centre at 12 Market Place. They are free to Faversham Society members and cost £5 for non-members.

History can be truly horrible – and children love it that way

NEIL TONGE

Over 20 years of teaching history and several years as an adviser and inspector have taught me one thing about children – they are monsters! They wallow in the gory, squeamish, bloodchilling and spilling of nasty and brutish incidents of the past.

When asking a class who would be willing to carry out a grisly execution or to volunteer for a gruesome death, I am met with a forest of hands. It was from such experience that Horrible Histories were born. The series of books soon became standard fare for the general reader, for schools, a television series and attracted a host of imitators.

Having once discovered this well-known secret of children’s capacity for the dark side of history, the subject couldn’t be put back in the box of gentle pursuits and interests. Indeed, after coming to live in Faversham several years later it did not take me long to relish the seamy side of the town’s history.

What, I thought, could be more enticing to the horrible historian to be wallow in the foul murder of an ex-mayor, horrific First World War explosions, a rogue pirate and the cruel and infamous hanging of three women as witches?

My first toe in the bloodied water was to explore with Davington schoolchildren the terrible disaster at the explosives works at Uplees in April, 1916, which killed 115 men. Sergeant Rawles enlisted them in the Faversham Pals battalion after which they were put through a gruelling training exercise, which included learning grenade-throwing (bean bags provided a safe substitute).

Once they’d proved competent “killers”, they were unleashed on the Western Front (the Alexander Centre, in fact) after their passing-out parade. Other children were recruited into the munitions industry at the Oare Gunpowder Works Country Park. Before they entered the works premises however, they were examined for illicit materials. Several items were found on them. Back at school they conducted a board of inquiry to determine responsibility for the disaster.

After completing this project the next one seemed to flow seamlessly from the great explosion. Two schools took up the challenge of finding out about the first Remembrance of 1922.

The children were organised as representatives of countries in 1914. Gym mats, roughly, very roughly, were organised into a map of Europe. Supplied with information from briefing sheets the children had to determine who were their friends and who were their enemies and from this basis to form alliances.

The project highlight was a talk by Philip Neame, whose father, also Philip, won a Victoria Cross in the First World War. Pupils also visited the graves of servicemen in the Love Lane cemetery. Research on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website revealed more details of the fallen.

In the third project, two further schools explored crime and punishment in Faversham from Tudor times to the present. Of course, in such circumstance, it was impossible to resist investigating the murder of Thomas Arden. Performing arts students from Canterbury College took on the role of the characters involved in the crime. The children cross-examined each of suspects in their role as history detectives.

Once certain suspects were found guilty or had knowledge of the murder, the question of suitable punishment came to the fore. The children did not hold back. All the refined forms of torture and grisly endings they could conjure up were suggested.

On the children ploughed through the 19th century – including transportation and reform schools –until they arrived at the Kent Police Museum at the town police station and tried on some police uniforms.

I then went on a slight deviation to Rochester where two schools in the city investigated poor Thomas Roose, the cook, who was accused of poisoning the Bishop of Rochester’s guests in 1531. Two died whilst other rushed for the privy. The case was embroiled in conspiracy. The bishop, John Fisher, had been a fierce critic of Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon to allow his marriage to Anne Boleyn and so rumours began to fly. Could the Boleyns have been involved in the crime – or indeed Henry himself? Henry scotched the rumours quickly. Poisoning, he declared was treason, and therefore no trial was necessary. Roose was found guilty and suffered a spell on the rack.

Interestingly but not surprising the Rochester children thought torture was quite reasonable for revealing the truth. Remember, I did say, they were monsters.

Roose’s ending was truly horrible. Henry VIII, with a cruel paranoid sense of irony pronounced that he would “cook the cook” and the poor man was boiled to death at Smithfield.

And to the future? One project is in the offing: Faversham on the Front Line 1939-45, starting shortly.

So keep an eye out for those small folk who may be on the bloody trail of Faversham’s past.

Lady Macbeth or victim?

LAURENCE YOUNG

Alice Arden has long been seen as Faversham’s own Lady Macbeth – ruthless, self-centred and manipulative. But G. D. Harper’s latest novel Arden presents a new, more sympathetic view of arguably the most infamous woman in the town’s history.

In its introduction and explanatory notes, Mr Harper emphasises his book is a novel and not meant to be historically accurate to the last jot. However, extensive research (following a chance visit to a bookshop in Canterbury) suggested to him that Alice was as much a misguided and naïve person as she was a co-conspirator to murder – although she was undoubtedly that as well. He develops his premise convincingly.

Using primary sources, such as the Faversham Wardmote Books and Holinshed’s Chronicles, and later studies such as the late Patricia Hyde’s 1995 in-depth study Thomas Arden in Faversham, Mr Harper tells Alice’s story from girlhood in Cambridgeshire to her life in Faversham and barbaric execution in 1551. Embellished with fictional and inferred detail, it sets out along the way the familiar Arden tale of corruption, intrigue and murder, with all its extraordinary features – not least the Arden-approved affair between Alice and his chief servant, Tom Mosby, and the epic and incompetent blundering of the assassins.

Alongside that, Mr Harper runs a parallel narrative about William Shakespeare’s early career some 40 or so years after Alice’s death. Bringing out the playwright’s connections with the wider Arden family, the town of Faversham and Alice’s story, he forges a set of associations to suggest not only was Shakespeare the prime author of the play Arden of Faversham, but it was his early work with the play that set him on the path to literary immortality.

This narrative is sprinkled with details of Tudor Stratford-upon-Avon and London’s burgeoning Elizabethan theatreland, with cameo appearances by known characters such as Ben Jonson and Richard Burbage.

Successfully running two related stories side by side, each written in the first person, is a difficult literary feat to pull off, but the author does so with some aplomb, keeping the progress of one in light synchronisation with the other. And the conundrum of how an executed woman delivers a personal account of her deeds and misdeeds is deftly resolved with a last-minute twist in the tale.

For the dedicated pedant, the book’s dialogue occasionally jars, with relative newly minted words and 21st-century phrases sitting in 16th-century-style speech patterns (use of “blow hard” is at least a couple of hundred years adrift).

And, for the probable entertainment of the local nitpicker, its Faversham topography sometimes goes awry (the poisoner William Blackbourne’s home is described as in “Davington, an unsavoury part of Faversham”, yet the book’s map shows it hard by the site of Davington Court, a leading manor house of the time).

Overall though, Mr Harper sets a sound scene for his work, enabling the reader to negotiate his or her way comfortably around both the locations and society in which the book is embedded. The author makes clear his book is a work of fiction, if based on historical events.

That said, his research assembles an array of related facts and acquaintanceships, and perhaps more than coincidentally timed events, to undergird both his hypotheses (Alice Arden somewhat more victim than villain than previously held and Shakespeare was indeed the mind behind the play).

That all seems to set the stage for an academic historian to pick up matters for further review. In particular, testing through scholarly investigation the connections set out in the book between Shakespeare and Arden of Faversham might help put to bed the “did he, didn’t he” question that has dogged play and playwright for centuries.

Meanwhile, for those with an interest in Faversham history, or who just like the historical murder-mystery genre, the book’s fast-moving pace and original perceptions make this an enjoyable and on occasion thought-provoking read.

All in all, a novel with much to commend it to society members.

Arden: The Astonishing Untold Story of Shakespeare’s First Play, by G. D. Harper, is published by Ginger Cat

How murals were painted

JANE SECKER

Graham Upton, who was commissioned to design and produce two murals that now brighten the subway between The Mall and Preston Street will be giving a free talk for Faversham Society members at Faversham Guildhall at 7pm on Tuesday, 21 January.

Graham worked with young people at schools and collected ideas from the Faversham Society over the design of the murals, which were produced with spray paint. They depict the places that mean most to townspeople including: the Guildhall, St Mary’s Church, the Creek, Shepherd Neame brewery, the swimming pool and cinema and Ossie’s fish and chips!

Vintage book sale

WENDY CLARKE

Most Christmas shopping lists call out for something different but inexpensive. Whether you need a seasonal thank you for a child’s teacher or Scout leader, a stocking-filler for the friend who has everything, or a token of appreciation for the neighbour who feeds the cat and waters the plants while you’re away … the gift of a guided walk of Faversham is perfect!

Our walks have been recommended for visitors and locals alike and as a way of helping even long-term townspeople to see their town through fresh eyes. What a great way to share your love of Faversham with friends.

Vouchers cost £5 and can be exchanged for a place on any of the walks taking place in the 2025 season. Vouchers are available in the Visitor Information Centre at 12 Market Place from and next year’s schedule will be on our website in the New Year.