Three weeks ago I wrote of the illustrator 'Phiz' ending his days in Brighton. He was one of fourteen children, though probably adopted himself , and had twelve children with his wife, Susannah. Their eldest child, Edgar Athelstane, wrote of his Croydon childhood, 'Some friends of ours who lived at the other end of town had eighteen children. We frequently spent the afternoon with them, to prevent them feeling lonely.'
Two of Edgar's four sisters established a kindergarten at 8, Clarendon Villas, Hove. Eric Gill was one of their pupils. When Phiz's tombstone in the extra-mural cemetory in Lewes Road was restored in the 1990s Gill's great niece, Helen Mary Skelton, cut the letters in the slate panel inserted into the marble.
An enjoyable and decorously subversive account of an artistic community similar to Gill's is provided by Elizabeth Taylor's novel 'The Wedding Group' (1968). The author's family lived near Gill's community at Pigotts and Elizabeth had a youthful love affair with Donald Potter who was apprenticed to Gill in 1931 and died three years ago, aged 102. Gill disapproved of the romance.
In the novel the Gill equivalent is Harry Bretton but the central character is Cressy, one of the many grandchildren. Tentatively rebelling against the community's unmaterialistic philosophy, Cressy 'dreamed of Wimpy Bars... and fashionable clothes that would fall apart before she tired of them.'
This supplies my tenuous link with Lewes. Elizabeth Taylor was born in Reading. The man who opened in Reading one of the earliest Wimpy Bars in this country was described thus in his 2001 Daily Telegraph obituary, 'Weekends saw him hard at work on the griddle with his wife serving behind the bar.' His wife, now alas widow, lives in Lewes.