... to Mrs. Bessie Bray, who celebrated her 90th birthday on Monday. Among the guests at a party arranged by Jeffery Waters in New Winchelsea Road were Mrs. Bray's daughter-in-law Sheila, grandchildren Ian and Cheryl and three great-grandchildren, as well as her sister Mrs. Winnie Igglesden, who at 86 came all the way from Winchester for the party. Another guest was Mrs. Bray's neighbour Miss Carrie Philpott, who will herself be 90 next month. Mrs. Bray is a member of two old Rye families, the Axells and the Jarretts, and has lived in Rye all her life except when her late husband Walter was chauffeur to a family in Hendon. When they returned to Rye he was a driver for the East Kent bus company, and later they lived at the Ypres Castle Inn where Mr. Bray was the landlord, before retiring to Mrs. Bray's present home in Fishmarket Road.
... to two Junior members of the Rye Nursing Cadet Division of St. John Ambulance Brigade, Natasha Mitchell, 94, of Pottingfield Road, and Claire Beamish, 104, of Udimore Road. Both produced collages for a national St. John Junior Craft Competition entitled "St. John in other countries"; Natasha's showed an Australian scene, while Claire illustrated the work of the Jerusalem eye hospital. The three best entries from each county went up to London for the final judging, and the whole of Sussex was represented by the two Rye entries and one from Willingdon. When the results were announced, Natasha's cork-hung Australian with kangaroo had won her a runner-up prize of a stereo cassette player, and Claire was awarded a consolation prize of a cube radio.
Boys and girls can join the St. John cadets once they are 8; the boys meet on Thursdays and the girls on Fridays, both at the Conduit Hill HQ at 7. New members are most welcome; just come along on the appropriate evening - and you too may end up a winner in a national competition, quite apart from learning skills which will be useful for a lifetime.
We are very pleased indeed to report that Boots have taken to heart the plight of people who couldn't collect prescriptions during their lunch-hours (GAZETTE no. 174). The problem was that both the town's pharmacists took their mid-day break from 1 to 2 (when Horrells is shut but Boots is open), and nowadays prescriptions can't be given out, nor can certain other medicines be purchased, unless a pharmacist is present in the shop.
Boots' manager and pharmacist Peter Milburn discussed the difficulty with his head office, and has now produced a solution which will be a big help to people in local businesses who can only shop during their own mid-day break. Mr. Milburn now goes to lunch at 1.15 (until 2.15), so that prescriptions, etc., can be collected at the start of the usual lunch-hour. Good for Boots - and, we hope, good for business too.
You may not believe this, but recently Rye's Deputy Mayor Frank Palmer was up a cliff in Dorset with comedy actress Victoria Wood! The BBC were filming an incident for a forthcoming show which called for Miss Wood to be anchored halfway up a sea-cliff, and because she is a valuable property they (and she) had to be quite sure she was anchored safely. Frank Palmer used to do this sort of thing when he was an instructor for police training courses, and he had the job passed on to him by a friend; he and Irene went down to Swanage the previous day to inspect the lie of the land, taking with them all the necessary tackle (Miss Wood is a lady of comfortable build). Next day he got her up there, he kept her firmly in place - theoretically clinging to the cliff, but in fact well secured - and in due course he got her down again and everyone went home. The producer has promised to tell him when the episode is going out - but "Blink, and you'll probably miss it anyway" says Frank cynically.
2.
Not many Rye residents become legends in their lifetime, but Mrs. Guinivere Wellington, who died last Wednesday - on the 65th anniversary of her wedding - was one of them. Mrs. Wellington was 89. She and her husband came to Rye when he retired from business in 1954, because they liked the place; he died three years later, and for the next thirty years Mrs. Wellington moved house. It was her hobby and interest to buy a house, do it up, live there for just a few months and then sell it and start again; sometimes she came back again to a house she had lived in earlier, sometimes to another further down the same street - occasionally she left Rye, but never for long. There seems to be no record of her total number of moves, but the most recent one was only a couple of years ago, to Wish Ward. Mrs. Wellington was not quite as active physically as she used to be, but she was still in full possession of all her faculties and quite able to look after herself until she was taken suddenly ill on Tuesday evening and died in hospital early next morning. The funeral has taken place. Mrs. Wellington is survived by her son, who retired to Bexhill to be near her, one daughter in America, and one in Australia who happened to be here on holiday when her mother died; she also leaves two grandsons and a grand-daughter.
Mrs. Grace Polhill, of The Link, died in hospital on 2 September. A widow, Mrs. Polhill was 75. The funeral takes place tomorrow at Hastings Crematorium at noon.
The current issue of the Sussex Police newspaper "Patrol" contains a long and very interesting article by Sgt. Mike Rumble of Training HQ at Lewes, using material researched by Assistant Chief Constable John Dibley, about the early days of Rye Borough Police. Under the startling headline "Gangs knock out an entire police force" he relates how both members of the Rye force were felled by rival bonfire gangs in the 1880s - though his version differs slightly from that of Leopold Vidler, who records the death of Parker Butcher from injuries received when he was thrown into the burning boat in 1876. The then Constable, James Bourne - who succeeded Superintent Butcher - was ACC Dibley's great-uncle. Superintendent Bourne also suffered at the hands of the Rye mob, and was eventually retired at the age of 46 on a pension of £52 a year in 1891 - by which time the Borough Police Force had been amalgamated into the East Sussex Constabulary, and the new police station in Church Square had been purchased, house and land for L600. The article makes fascinating reading; several copies of "Patrol" are available at the Library.
Another startling headline we saw recently was "Sport, Art and Drama in Rye Festival Week" - art and drama, yes, but sport...? Ah, but this headlined the front-page lead in the Sussex Express on 10 August 1951, and referred to the Rye Festival of Britain Week, when "the weather improved after Monday to allow some of the many outdoor events to take place". Among them was the production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the Magdala House garden, and Amy Breeds sent us a copy of the paper. It reads as if the reporter - probably the very popular "Mac" - was on holiday and didn't actually attend the performance, since the account consists primarily of four appreciative adjectives and a full cast list; there is no hint of the troubles which beset the production, except that the appropriately-named Ernest Irving is down as playing both the juvenile male leads!
Other outdoor diversions, on the Salts, included various sporting contests (the Chamber of Commerce cup was won by a team from Rye Firemen under Fireman G. Fletcher, with Station Officer F. Bourn in charge), an archery display and a sheepdog demonstration, "with intermissions by Rye Town Prize Band". Community hymn-singing in the Congregational Church had been conducted by Jim Foster. How many of his choir were singing with Ryesingers in St. Mary's to mark the start of our Rye Festival Week, 35 years later?
(Correspondence about the production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is now closed!)
3.
... at Playden Church on Saturday for Hilary Kent and New Zealander Ian Watkins. Hilary has been working in London as a secretary since she left Thomas Peacocke School; her mother moved to Wittersham when she gave up-the Peace & Plenty at Playden. The two little bridesmaids - who took the job very seriously, said Mrs. Kent - were both nieces of the bride:. Chantal Auberson and Sarah Kent, aged 4 and 6i and dressed in white with pink sashes. Hilary wore an Edwardian-style dress. The reception was at Mary Mason's Tearoom, with Claude Auberson in charge of the catering. The honeymoon is being spent on a Greek island, and Hilary and Ian will be living in Cairo, where both have jobs already lined up.
An impressive clearance has been effected in the past week by the contractors preparing for the railway car-park beside the market. Great mountains of broken-up tarmac and concrete and earth are piled up waiting (one of the JCB team told us) to be taken away, rather than used for levelling the sloping site. The trees have gone, giving a surprising view through to the Sports Hall; a funeral pyre encouraged by dollops of oil last Tuesday sent thick black smoke into every open window in the area... The two big blocks of concrete were still there on Monday - awaiting the onslaught of pneumatic drills rather than the rumoured explosives. The diggers have turned up nothing interesting at all - no bodies, no hoards of stolen silver or IRA weaponry - just "an awful lot of rubbish" they said. And the little yellow 2CV which had been left for months in one of the old cattle-pens is not buried under one of the heaps of debris; its owner came and took it away just in time.
All the various agreements between the supermarket developers, British Rail, Rother, the bus company, the Cattle Market Company (and probably several more) were exchanged on Monday afternoon, John Walker of Ward Construction tells us, so work on the project can now start officially. The name of the company which will expect to be selling baked beans there by Christmas 1987 is likely to be revealed in a fortnight's time.
Rye Town Council accounts, now available for public inspection prior to audit, are mostly fairly technical and not perhaps of enormous interest to any but the most conscientious ratepayer. But readers may not realise the level at which the Model operates nowadays.
Made some ten years ago as a private venture by Joy and Ted Harland and originally housed in the Market Hall, the Rye Town Model was bought by the Town Council for £3,000. The accounts show the operating figures for 1985/6. Admission fees last summer came to £13,756, with sales and other income bringing total receipts to £15,631. Running expenses were £9,172; they include, as well as stationery and cleaning materials, publications (purchased for resale), advertising, repairs, a generously notional rent of just £10 to John Alsford for the premises, a VAT bill of E1,420, and £4,375 in salaries. This means a profit for last year of £6,459. But this does not allow for the time spent by Town Hall staff on Model matters, nor of course for a commercial rent somewhere along the tourist trail with its attendant rates and electricity bill, so the Council is proposing to tuck away these theoretical extra running costs of £3,000 for future use. The use of the remaining £3,459 is to be discussed during the autumn.
Two years ago BBC computer experts came to study the control system with a view to improving it. They went away chastened; the original job done by Ted Harland and Peter Westaby had been so far ahead of its time that even now they could not improve on it, and could only match it at great expense. So Mr. Harland and Mr. Westaby remain valued consultants to the Town Council; they are probably the only people who really understand how the whole system works!
No record is kept of the actual numbers who visit the Model each summer; but the Town Clerk tells us that 25,000 would be a very conservative estimate.
4.
"I am not the sort of person who organises Festivals", Anne Wood told us last December when it was announced at the Festival Council's AGM that she was to be in charge of the 1986 Festival Week. Clearly, she was absolutely wrong about this; last week's events prove her a very successful organiser indeed. quite apart from all the preliminary work, she has popped up in all the right places (plus some unexpected ones - chasing up a footpump for the orchestra leader's slow puncture on Saturday, for instance) looking cool, calm and collected all the time! She would, of course, be the first to say how much she owes to the rest of the committee, who can have had very little time for their usual jobs last week - even moving chairs takes a very long time.
Audiences for all three of the much-enjoyed classical concerts were larger than last year; but only a handful of people turned up for the pop concert on the first Saturday, and Hokum Hotshots began so late that those who stuck it out didn't get home till midnight. Kenny Ball, of course, was an enormous success, and we venture to say that the GAZETTE-sponsored Eastbourne Silver Band had a very appreciative audience on Sunday, all sitting in the sun tapping their feet in the Gungarden. (The Wurlitzer concert had to be cancelled when Nigel Spooner found he was booked to play for a wedding in Hastings that afternoon.)
Both films had projector trouble - sorted out, on the Thursday, by Bill Nelham son Chris who happened to be in the audience; but there were no problems on the Friday evening when a full house at the Community Centre basked in Instant Sunshine. The three London doctors and Times journalist gave us old favourites and some new ones, and we were reminded yet again that hearing the group on the wireless is simply not comparable with seeing them in action - British body-language at its best! Michael Pennington's Chekhov programme was said to be excellent, and poetry-lovers will have appreciated the readings by Wendy Cope and Oliver Reynolds.
The buskers (Michael Prince and John Burgess) played very pleasantly on the steps of the Town Hall last Saturday, and there were clowns at Tilling Green; the previous Saturday, 28 children had enjoyed Julia Thomas's "Space Day" (brill and triff, one small boy reported over tea to his family) and Bunny Collyer filled an all-day demand for raku pots in the Gungarden.
Fringe events included an enjoyable evening at the Museum, a coffee morning in Church Square which raised £133 for the NSPCC, and the Local History exhibition at the Town Hall about which we wrote last week - a constant flow of visitors and locals enjoyed the varied exhibits, slides, the competition (won by Jeffery Waters) and the tiny working model of the Camber tram.
At the Town Hall party given by the Mayor at the start of Festival Week, a blaze of gold chains betrayed the presence of Top People from all levels of local government. The Festival Committee's party before the final concert was more domestic (though tradition demanded that the male members of the committee turn up in dinner-jackets). Anne Wood thanked Pother, ESCC, Rye Town Council and South East Arts for grants; firms and individuals for sponsorships, advertising and other help; Tony Bridgland and his staff for dealing with the box office; and Dawn Betts for handling the ads for the programme. Next year's Festival will be from 5 to 12 September. Anne will again be the organiser; thanking her, to loud applause, for this year, Francis Hadfield added that the committee is always looking for active new members...
As David Arscott promised, Radio Sussex did indeed take an interest in the Festival. Bron Burke, the committee's secretary, was interviewed on Sussex Scene, and Anne Wood on The 258 Alternative; and Bron's voice was heard giving details of each day's events in the course of the morning diary programmes.
Finally, if anyone has any good ideas or useful contacts for next year's Festival, Anne would like to know; but we really think she ought to have a week off before she starts on next year's programme!
5.
• Many people will be surprised to learn that Maurice and Margaret Blackman have retired, anyway temporarily. The new owners of Landgate Stores are Christine and Reg Emson, who come from Woldingham in Surrey where they had a village shop - which didn't deal in newspapers, so early rising is still something of a novelty. Mr. and Mrs. Blackman, who live in Udimore Road, are now appreciating a regular morning lie-in while they decide what to do next.
• Welcome to the transformation of Dawn Rose in Cinque Ports Street into Rye's newest fa ion shop - and welcome, too, to Sara Osborne as the latest recruit to the growing group of young women shopkeepers in the town. Sara acts as receptionist to her parents' Regent Motel next door, and access between the two means that she can combine the motel desk with selling an attractive range of mix-and-match separates, some fashionable leisure wear and very pretty underclothes, all for figures up to size 16. The shop is closed all day on Tuesdays.
• Liptons in the High Street will be closed all day on Monday (15th), though the staff will all be inside working like mad (and on Sunday as well) to transform it into a Presto shop for the formal opening by the Mayor at 9 am on Tuesday. Presto is the brand name for Argyll Foods (who bought up the Liptons - ex-Home and Colonial - chain some months ago, and have been replacing the Sunshine brands with their own-name goods since then), and on Tuesday all 84 shops in the big eastern region change over from Liptons to Presto. Rye's Manager Eric Spindler says that his shop will offer even better value under the Presto name, with opening offers, no-questions-asked money-back guarantee, and on certain items "the Presto Challenge" to find them cheaper elsewhere in the town.
• The mystery deepens about the ex-Dewhursts shop in the High Street; having been telling us all summer that the lease was sold and only awaiting final signatures, the Eastbourne agents have suddenly taken down the board advertising the lease for sale and replaced it with one offering the freehold! This looks like developing into another Rye Havana situation, though in an even more unfortunate place from the point of view of High Street trade. The sooner the deteriorating whitewash goes, the better; but will anything now open there before next Easter?
• At the Rother planning meeting on 4 September, only three Rye application were on the list. The plans for conversion into shops and housing, for the old Colebrooke warehouse behind the Ship Inn on Strand Quay, were approved subject to conditions about design details, etc. The alterations to 4 Wish Ward were also approved; Biddy Cole, whose brother owns it, tells us that its present appearance is not original but the result of hasty wartime repairs after a bomb next door, and after more than 40 years these are now beginning to show their age. The extension to Udimore Road (the uphill one of the pair of cottages at the foot of the hill) was finally turned down.
• This week's list shows just one Rye application, from the Gatehouse Restaurant in Tower Street, whose proprietors are asking permission to put up a 4' x 3' advertising sign on the side wall of the building. This adjoins the Landgate Arch, and unlike the frontage is an ancient stone wall with (as well as two first-floor windows) a small window at ground level, a blocked window at the top, and a further blocked arch below the main windows which does not appear on the drawing accompanying the application. The two blocked features would seem to be contemporary with the wall. The advertising sign, similar to the one by the street door, would go in the centre, between the windows. As well as the door sign, the restaurant already has two lettered canopy blinds and a (lit) hanging sign which is perfectly visible to people coming under the Landgate. Is this, perhaps, sufficient?
Rother's next planning meeting is at the end of the month as usual, on 25 September.
6.
• On Monday, Rye Camera Club celebrates the start of the winter season with an opportunity for members to show their favourite slides taken over the past year. This long-established club for photographers at all levels of experience meets on the first and third Mondays of each month at the FE Centre at 7.30. At present it has about 35 members; the annual subscription is L4, and the winter programme shows an attractive mix of talks and competitions, both internal and with other local clubs. Members can show their work in slide or print form - indeed, says Peter Chillingworth, you don't have to have a camera at all; if you are simply interested in the theory of photography, the Club will be very glad to welcome you, and there is plenty of opportunity to learn from more experienced members. (We liked the idea of the knock-out competition: two projectors show two slides at a time, and the judge eliminates one - the rest are run through again on the same basis until the final choice of two produces a winner.)
• An interesting range of Further Education classes for adults is on offer this month. Enrolment is on Tuesday from 7 to 9 at the FE Centre. People interested will mostly have got hold of the booklet which gives details of all the classes - copies are obtainable at the Library and FE Centre - and we can't possibly list them all here anyway. A minimum attendance of 15 student- is required for a class to continue, and some classes are bound to be non- starters or to fail almost at once. We will list, in a couple of weeks' time, those which have places available and are likely to continue. The booklet also gives details of Flexistudy home tuition in History, English Literature and Sociology for those unable to attend regular weekly classes. There is, too, a list of "Saturday Specials" - one-off events, mostly in craft subjects.
• The first lecture in Rye Museum Association's winter series is bound to be popular, since the speaker is architect Ralph Wood of Le Fevre Wood & Royle. He will be talking about "Open Air Museums" - with the intention of broadening his audience's outlook about museums in general, he says. As well as the museum at Singleton, Ralph will include Avoncroft in the Midlands, the industrial museum at Beamish, St. Sagan's in Wales, the Exeter Maritime Museum and others - there will, of course, be slides. The lecture is at the FE Centre on Thursday, 19 September, at 7.30, and non-members are welcome.
The Easton Rooms, the gallery in the High Street, celebrates its 21st birthday this year with a Festival exhibition of 21 paintings, each by a different artist, which "reflects the broad scope of painting that has been shown at the gallery over the years by international, national and local talents".
This is a prestige show; the pictures are impressive, and so are the prices - many would be rather too big to find space in Rye's little houses even if Rye's little bank balances would permit it. But we did like Louis Turpin's goldfish pool, and David Crew's sea-green view of the Hastings net sheds. Upstairs, Fred Cuming has a large and (for him) surprisingly colourful impression of a - his? - studio; downstairs, Angela Braven's flower study is rather more sombre than much of her work. (John Ward's reclining nude looked as if she would be fun to know even when she had got dressed!)
"An Alternative Art" at the Rye Art Gallery is an enchanting exhibition. Put together for the John Judkyn Memorial, it deals with "the non-academic tradition in America today" (not "the non-American tradition..." of the advance publicity, which didn't make sense in this context). Most of the work - pictures, models and embroidery - is nineteenth-century, but some is quite recent and doubtless the present-day painters are more conscious of the "primitive" style of their work than their predecessors were. But, self-conscious or not, the pictures are charming, and some have the same domestic appeal as the Louisa Parris watercolours on view here some time ago; they show us American small-town people going about their lives, depicted by their contemporaries with a fine disregard for art-school techniques. "Lake Wobegon" addicts will really love this show, which goes on until 5 October.
7.
• The Rye Flower Club's Open Day this year celebrated the Silver Jubilee of the Sussex Branch of the National Association of Flower Arranging Societies.
The show had no particular theme, but displayed the varied talents of the wide-ranging Club membership. One ingenious pyramid was designed to be taken apart and sold off in small bowlsful at the end of the day; and we particularly admired the matching pair of scarlet sprays which had been arranged by two different members working simultaneously, one on each. Even people who had not the time to go in could enjoy the flowers which decorated the entrance to the FE Centre Yard on Saturday.
• The press book this week records a type of theft new, as far as we know, to our area - a portable telephone worth £1,700 was stolen from an unattended car in Fairlight. Affluent motorists will have to be on their guard. Other local thefts are less impressive. A radio/cassette-player was stolen from a car parked in the town, and a £70 Staffordshire figure of a woman on a goat (really, that's what it says!) was stolen from an antique shop while the owner was getting something out of the window on Tuesday morning last week.
• With several competition finals yet to be played off before the end of the 1986 season, Rye Bowls Club members had plenty of excitement on Sunday afternoon, the official Finals Day. Competing for the George Shipton Shield (for members aged at least 65), Alf Igglesden of Ferry Road beat Richard Oliver of Lea Avenue - the second time he has won the Shield in four years. The ladies' singles Reg Chubb Plate went to Evelyn Brown of Stone (and the Hope Anchor), who beat Molly Care of Winchelsea Beach.
The Club played two away matches last week, losing narrowly to Hawkhurst on Wednesday but scoring "a splendid sixteen shot victory at Pett on Saturday afternoon, despite a strong comeback by the home club after a splendid tea", our correspondent tells us!
GAZETTE subscriptions are due by 26 September (earlier payment will be a big help to the office) for the next three months - twelve Wednesdays from 1 October to 17 December. We shall not print on 24 or 31 December, so the following twelve- week period will run from 7 January to 25 March.
Subscriptions are therefore £3.60 (cash only, please) for one quarter, OR £7.20 (cash or cheque, as you prefer) for the full half-year. Please put your name and pick-up point or delivery address on the envelope. The usual system of ticked copies (one tick for a quarterly payment, two for half-yearly) will operate over the next fortnight, and all receipts will go out on 1 October. Standing-order subscribers do nothing at all; their copies will be marked 'SO' next week, their accounts are debited £7 on 30 September, and they get no receipt unless they specifically ask for one. Postal subscriptions are only taken half- yearly except under special circumstances.
With an eye to administrative simplicity as well as slippery winter mornings we shall, from 1 October, restrict our 3i-hour delivery round to (waist-level) street-side letter-boxes where at all possible. Those affected will find slips attached to their copies; if they prefer not to renew in consequence, we shall quite understand. Pick-up points will be Cadborough Stores, Hazel's, Crafty, Spar, Freezer Centre, Penny Royal and Tuck Shoppe, who between them are kind enough to take in more than 160 copies at present.
Finally, our usual half-yearly proviso: if the paper should suddenly have to cease publication (if, for instance, the Editor cuts it fine once too often on the traffic island...) outstanding subscription money would not be refunded but would eventually go to the RNLI. Subscriptions are only accepted on this basis.
We are most grateful to subscribers for their support over the past four years (the GAZETTE first appeared on 8 September 1982), and we look forward with pleasure to a continued happy relationship.
Coffee morning for Save the Children Fund, CC, 10.30
CSRF, slides "British Silver Coins", FEC, 11
RAF Association wine-and-cheese party (admission £2), TH,6.30
WI Group Home Economics Show, FEC, 3 (with produce stall)
Camera Club, members' slides, FEC, 7.30 (see page 6)
Adult education classes enrolment, FEC, 7 to 9 (see page 6)
Thrift Shop (handing-in only), Red Cross, 10.30 to 12.30 Community Lunch Group, Clinic, 1 (Ms. Pitts from the Adult Literacy Group at Hastings College)
Landgate WI, "Caring for your pet" (by a Rye vet), CC, 10.30
• The St. John Ambulance Brigade is running a series of Home Nursing lectures at the Conduit Hill HQ from 7.30 to 9 on Monday evenings; next week sees the
third in the course of ten (fee for the course, £10). The lecturer is the Division's Nursing Officer, Mrs. Smith SRN SCM, from Hastings.
• Peasmarsh School this term joins the select band of local primaries with ex-TPS pupils on their teaching staff: Rosemary Dickinson and Janice Gill have been at Northiam and Guestling respectively for a year, and now Beverley Moi has been appointed infant teacher at Peasmarsh.
• 14-year-old Peter Manktelow of Udimore Road is very pleased to have won a £35 atlas as a second prize in a competition run nationally for its young savers by the Anglia Building Society. His mother Susan couldn't tell us any more about this, since there was no formal presentation at the Rye office of the Society - he was simply handed the book over the counter by a cashier.
• Because of engineering work between Bexhill and St. Leonards on Sunday, trains on our line may be delayed; check before you travel if it matters. Saturday, of course, is the £4-anywhere offer on Network South-East which we previewed last week - keep your ticket, see next week's GAZETTE.
• Rye Fire Brigade are having a quiet time, dealing with the occasional combine fire but nothing more sensational than that (touch wood!). Ten days ago, the firemen (plus two footballer sons) played against a Rye Police team and won; it was a lovely afternoon, Sheila Bourn tells us, out on the field below Leasam Hill, and neither side was recalled by its bleepers.
• The Arthritis & Rheumatism Council is delighted to report that its street collection on Saturday raised £380 - £111 more than last year!
• Playden parishioners and Parish Council members on Saturday watched Ken Warren unveil a new "supplementary highway sign" at the top of Rye Hill; there is another at the other end of the village, and both record Playden's proud heritage as a Domesday village. Our MP took the opportunity to look at what was left of the exhibition in the church - which raised some £650 for parish funds.
• Rye WI members much enjoyed Mrs. Barbara Doughty's recent travel talk. The winner of the Group scrabble competition is Mrs. Hodgson; the game has been so popular that scrabble evenings for fun will start next week (the Broad Oak reader who was enquiring for a scrabble club might like to investigate this). Almost £200 was raised at the Summer Fayre. Winner of the Denman College bursary is Mrs. Margaret Owen.
THE RYE GAZETTE is registered as a newspaper with the Post Office, published by Mrs. Mary Owen, 2 Cyprus Place, Rye, East Sussex, TN31 7DR (0797 222303), and printed by Cinque Ports Stationers of Rye. News items for inclusion are always welcome - normal deadline Monday afternoon. The GAZETTE costs 30p weekly and is delivered to subscribers and pick-up points on Wednesday (subscription details for the new quarter appear on page 7 this week). A few spare copies and back numbers may be available at Cyprus Place. (Copyright Mary Owen 1986)