Gypsy and Traveller Stopping Places
Droveways and other paths journeying across the South Downs would have been used by people in Gypsy and Traveller communities for 100s of years.
​
The Hilden Family was one of the families who stayed at this Stopping Place.
A newspaper column in the Eastbourne Gazette on 18th August 1886 describes the author meeting a Gypsy family who had “pitched their camp very cunningly in a dell on the Downs…One day last week I went to Beachy Head in a char-a-banc. As we were rising the last hill, I noticed a pony browsing on the side of the hollow on the right… Two or three turns in the bush brought us to the first wigwam… it was simply a piece of canvas stretched over a few uprights.”
In 1949, Hubert Visick, an orthodontist in Eastbourne wrote about some of the Gypsy people he met in Sussex in the Sussex County Magazine. Two of those were Odger Hilden and Agnes Lee who, around 1900, were living at a stopping place in Eastbourne. The location was described as being “half way up the hill after leaving Old Eastbourne, the road skirts a thin beech wood… If we take a rough cart track just above the [wood] to our right, we shall soon come out on the rim of a great green bowl hollowed out of the side of the Downs. This is known as Cherry Garden Hollow. In a short distance, the track widens out into a level grassy floor…once upon a time there must have been a small chalk pit here. Now underfoot and all around is deliciously scented Downland turf; there are bushes and stunted trees to break the wind and upon which to hang washing. But, best of all, there is an abundance of firewood to be picked up in the wood just below…. The ground falls away so steeply that you experience the sensation of being parted from earth and all its troubles.” Odger and Agnes probably lived in a bender tent and were hawkers when they were at this stopping place.
They were also expecting their first child and Hubert wrote how they had made this chalkpit their home and had a number of good friends locally. “The lady from the Tally Ho! (a pub just down the road) had constituted herself chief adviser and friend for the coming event [the birth of their child] … She used to come up every day with some dainty to tempt the appetite. George, the old shepherd, going off on his daily round, never failed to stop and leave a beer bottle full of milk, and sometimes a bit of cake.” When their child John Henry Hilden was born, he was christened at St Marys Church, Old Town.
We know of another family from the Gypsy and Traveller community who stayed at a stopping place in the Crumbles area of Eastbourne.
Mary Ann Beeney was born in Biddenden, Kent in 1855 and her parents, Absalom and Priscilla later had four more children – Ruth, Celia, Samuel and George - whilst travelling around the Kent and Sussex area. In 1871, the Beeney family had stopped in their caravan in Tunbridge Wells with the Wheeler Family and another Beeney family, likely Mary’s Uncle.
​
Mary Anne Beeney married Joseph Rowland at St Mary’s Church, Eastbourne in 1879. He was a hawker, as was his father Thomas and Mary Ann’s father Absalom.
​
Joseph was baptised in Kent in 1857, though the 1871 census records his place of birth as Eastbourne and living with his mother Margaret in a Show Cart in Caterham, Surrey.
Mary Ann and Joseph Rowland had been back to the Tunbridge Wells area where their daughter Margaret was born in 1881 before coming to Eastbourne again to stop in their caravan at the Crumbles, Eastbourne. They are both recorded as licenced hawkers.
Also with them is their adopted daughter Mathilda who is listed as being born in the East Indies. Their son Absalom was born in Eastbourne in 1883 and by 1891, they were stopping at Poors Common, Christchurch, Hampshire alongside other families from the Gypsy and Traveller communities including the Barnes family, the Greenwood family and the Willett family. Ten years later, we find the Rowland family in Brighton at a stopping place near the Bear Inn on Lewes Road with many other families. By 1911, Mary Ann and Joseph are living in Nursery Road, Tunbridge Wells next to their daughter Margaret, who by this time had married Christopher Brazil and had three children.
​
They stayed in Nursery Road until they died, Mary Ann in 1923 aged 67 and Joseph in 1929, aged 73.
Mary Ann Rowland’s obituary was published in the Kent & Sussex Courier on Friday 27 April 1923 “A familiar and much respected figure of High Brooms passed away on Friday… She came from a well known Welsh travelling family… The family travelled the country as showmen, horse and furniture dealers, and 46 years ago, settled down in caravans in Nursery Road. At that time, the High Brooms district was largely forest and woodland. For 46 years, the occupants of the caravans pursued their own peculiar calling, maintaining the happiest relations with all in High Brooms, and Mrs Rowland earned esteem and respect by her friendly disposition, unfailing kindness and habitual generosity… [Mary Ann] had toured all parts of England and had visited Wales, the Isle of Wight and Ireland. She is said to have had many adventurous experiences, was twice run over by a caravan, once by a motor lorry and once by a motor car. She was a distant relative of Joseph Beckett, the boxer, and looked after him when he was a lad. In a Kentish hop garden, she once found a little girl, Mathilda Carter, whom she brought up as one of her own family.”
