A printable PDF version of this newsletter can be downloaded from HERE

You may have read about the town of culture competition launched by the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, which aims to boost local pride and showcase towns with “unique stories’”.

It runs alongside the City of Culture contest (most recently won by Bradford) and thousands of towns are expected to take part since the prize is well worth winning: the winner receives £3 million to invest in local projects and two runners-up will win £250,000 each.

The first title will be awarded in 2028 when the winning town will start a year-long programme of cultural celebrations.

Obviously, the sack of gold and the prospect of a year of festivities is not the only thing driving this. It’s about social cohesion; bringing residents together to consider what their town means to them, what they understand to be the culture of their town and how they wish to elevate and celebrate it.

Naturally, we are in! Why would Faversham not be? To say that Faversham is a town of culture is an understatement; the casual visitor might observe that we are a town obsessed with our cultural history – from the abbey to the Skate Boys. And so, on a miserable February Wednesday night, we joined a workshop hosted by Creek Creative to join a discussion about how we might put together a proposal.

Needless to say, much of the discussion focused on what comes to mind when we think of Faversham’s culture and so what unites and divides the town. I reckon every such meeting in every town has or will turn to this since whether you live in Northstowe in Cambridgeshire (the largest newest new town since Milton Keynes) or Colchester in Essex (the oldest recorded town in Britain), you will have cultural clashes centred on wealth, age, values and beliefs. And this will be the case regardless of how “diverse” or “homogeneous” the town appears.

The vicar of Faversham, the Rev Simon Rowlands, gave a pithy example of the difficulty of pinning down the town’s culture: Gatefield Lane, which runs from Preston Street, across Newton Road to St Mary’s Road and now forms part of the east-west walking path across town to the Rec.

As Simon pointed out, here we have a stretch of path that is home to the traditional Faversham Club, as well as a “destination” cash-free coffee shop, which (when the weather hasn’t been as miserable as it is lately) is a magnet for young mums in fashionable thermal robes with cutely dressed infants in off-road buggies and bearded hipsters in beanies.

To me, it’s a source of amazement as well as a source of good coffee and amazing sausage rolls. It used to be the Faversham Society bookshop!

But, as Simon explained, the residents’ concern is the challenge of the different culture. This is the one of the teens in their hoodies or baseball caps who show off their wheelie skills in Preston Street before cutting down Gatefield Lane, banging the cottage windows and kicking doors in
 an attempt to do what? Show off? intimidate?

And then there’s the lane litter war. Older residents go out of their way to pick it up while the kids seem to drop it performatively as a wind-up. Even the guys employed to empty the bins admit they can’t solve the problem. It’s not about more bins; it’s about behaviour.

So, while we are thinking of how we can best promote our capital-lettered Culture, Tradition and Values as we will need to do for our bid, as we project the Faversham as we want it to be for a celebratory year in 2028, we also need to be mindful of the diversity of the culture, tradition and values that are impacting us in small ways now.

I thought I had finished the series about William Gibbs and Faversham’s lost Anglo-Saxon treasures, but no.

I am grateful to Catherine Lee, who organises the Faversham Society’s walks, for drawing my attention to newspaper cuttings from 1856 and 1871 she had found in the course of her own research.

The cuttings come two local newspapers – the Faversham Mercury and the Faversham Gazette, which both evolved into the Faversham Times. Correspondents often hid under pseudonyms, so you have a letter from “A Lover of Order”, regarding inappropriate bellringing; a letter from “A Rate Payer” about the poor rate; and a letter from “A townsman” on the change to the site of the railway station.

The directors of the East Kent Railway Company were accused in July, 1856, of breaking faith with the town after pledging to build Faversham station in Kings Field itself, linked by a new road up from Market Place. They then changed their mind and wanted to move the site to the east side of Preston Street. The railway company informed the mayor that it had proved impossible to buy the land at a price which “the interests of the shareholders would justify”. The final decision rested with the commissioners of pavement.

In May, 1871, the Mercury published a letter from John Brent, three times mayor of Canterbury and honorary curator at the Beaney museum, about the Gibbs Collection. He pointed out that it included 70 or 80 fibulae or brooches which, although none surpassed the Kingston brooch, exhibited wonderful artistic skill.

He also said the Anglo-Saxon graves uncovered were near or intermingled with a Roman cemetery, which is apparently not unusual. In the Gibbs collection there was a remarkable bronze vase with a highly decorated handle, which Gibbs believed to represent Satan, Eve and the forbidden fruit. Brent recalled seeing the item, described in the catalogue as a “Jug (No 1295-70)” a few days after it was found in 1869 with some other items, and believed Gibbs paid in total £11 for them!

At 1.20pm on 2 April, 1916, during the terrible carnage of the First World War, a massive explosion ripped through the explosives works on the Uplees marshes west of Faversham.

This was no sabotage; nor was it caused by enemy action. An immense store of 200 tons of TNT had detonated accidentally when some empty sacks caught fire. A series of smaller detonations followed. In all, 108 men died.

On 18 and 25 March, Dr Martin Watts will guide the audience at the Alexander Centre, Faversham, through the causes and consequences of the most terrible disaster in the history of the explosives industry.

The talks starts at 7.30pm and tickets are available from the address below.

thealex.org.uk/event/the-great-faversham-explosion-1916

Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School was founded by a charter from Queen Elizabeth I which was sealed on 14 July, 1576.

To commemorate 450th anniversary a talk has been arranged jointly by the school, its former pupils’ association, the Faversham Elizabethans, and Faversham Charters. It will take place on Monday, 13 July, in the school assembly hall where the charter is housed.

The talk is being given by Dr Sheila Sweetinburgh, special associate lecturer in medieval and early modern studies at the University of Kent, who will talk about the importance of the charter and its impact over the past four and a half centuries.

Doors open at 6.30 pm with an opportunity to view the charter and have light refreshments before the talk at 7pm.

Tickets cost £5, withs a 50 per cent discount if you quote FavershamSociety. Book here

The musical Marsh Family, from Faversham, who captured a worldwide audience during the pandemic, will be playing at the Old Brewery Store in Conduit Street on 15 April. The event has been switched from the Alexander Centre while the Gatefield Hall is being rebuilt after the fire on New Year’s Eve.

Their music spans genres, delivering a distinctive mix of heart, humour, and hope. Expect rich vocal harmonies, inventive parody songs, and constantly changing instruments and styles.

www.ticketsource.co.uk/thealex

While carrying out research for The Invisible Women of Faversham, a forthcoming book initiated by Griselda Mussett, I stumbled upon a fascinating speech on women’s liberation, given in Faversham in July, 1912, and reported in the Faversham and North East Kent News.

I had spent some time looking into the 1912 pilgrimage organised by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), a feat of organisation in which 50,000 women set off from around the country to convene on Hyde Park for a peaceful protest on 26 July that year. The NUWSS was the non-militant branch of the suffrage movement founded by Millicent Fawcett in 1897, a contrast to the better-known and more radical Women’s Social and Political Union – the suffragettes – founded by Emmeline Pankhurst.

In Kent, Miss Lynette Griffiths-Jones of the NUWSS was the organiser for northern route of the march. The pilgrims set off from Westgate-on-Sea on 30 June and passed through Birchington, Herne Bay and Tankerton. From Canterbury, they marched on, after a cathedral service, through Boughton and arrived in Faversham the next day.

Miss Griffiths-Jones gave speeches along the route and it was while searching the local newspapers I discovered an almost verbatim account of the speech she gave in Court Street, Faversham. Her words raise so many pertinent issues that resonate even today – equal pay for women, women as MPs, workers’ rights and wages, childhood mortality rates and women in the armed forces.

She was reported to speak “very ably for about three-quarters of an hour” and dealt with the view that women should not meddle with politics by referring to a Lancashire woman who had said: “I never meddled with politics till politics meddled with me.”

Politics, she added, “were more and more entering the domain of the home” and women’s work, traditionally done at home, had changed: more women were now going out to work in factories. This meant that they were being affected by legislation although they had no voice.

Women, she said, were not in competition with men, but some employers were laying off men so they could employ women and pay them less. If women were able to do the same work as men, they should be paid the same and gave the example of the Great Western Railway, which “dispensed with paying men 21 shillings a week to clean carriages and employed women on 15 shillings a week”. This was not right and if women had the vote, they could put pressure on parliament to outlaw it. But women had no power to change this and even a female factory owner in the north of England had been unable to lobby her MP to take up her cause and had to get the male employees to intervene!

Miss Griffiths-Jones spoke of the value of trade unions that had helped to secure workers’ rights for men and discussed how women were now organising themselves. She denied that most women did not want the vote, pointing to how more than 1,000 women a month were joining the NUWSS.

She stressed that most women were not militant but women of all ages and classes, single and married, wanted the vote. They wanted better housing, better temperance laws, better wages. And the claim that women with the vote would “fight men” was nonsense: women wanted to fight with men, not against them.

Miss Griffiths-Jones told the Court Street audience that women were proving they could do jobs as equals to men: as doctors, inspectors, mayors, “and of course queens were women”. Women also played equally important roles in the time of war and showed “splendid bravery” at home.

The Faversham News records that her speech was well received in the town. This was in contrast to a few days later when the pilgrims were in Sittingbourne and the speaker had to put up with “some banter and horseplay’” although thankfully “they were not molested”.

The Faversham report appears to be the only verbatim account of Miss Griffith-Jones’s speeches in a local newspaper, suggesting to me that there was much sympathy for the cause in the town.

I also noted that on 31 January, 1914, the Faversham Mercury reported on a meeting of the newly formed Faversham branch of the NUWSS to be held the following Wednesday at the Faversham Institute. I was pleased to read that Miss Griffiths-Jones would return to Faversham to speak again. In the first annual report of the NUWSS Kentish Federation, Sir Granville Wheler, the MP for Faversham, supported the extension of the franchise to women on a property or occupation basis: women with money or property.

To find out more about the women’s pilgrimage I highly recommend Jane Robinson’s book Hearts and Minds (2018), the story of the women’s pilgrimage