Story Category: Legacy

This is a legacy story from an earlier version of our website. It may contain some formatting issues and broken links.

For the month of April, the Booth encourages you to look out for the Goldcrest, Regulus regulus, in your garden, in the park (if you’re exercising at an appropriate distance from others), or even the view from the window of your flat.

UK conservation status: Green

The goldcrest, along with the firecrest (Regulus ignicapilla), is our smallest bird and at only 8.5cm it is half a centimetre smaller than the wren. Aristotle describes it as ‘…just a little bigger than a locust, its crest is the colour of sun shining through mist…’.

The Goldcrest start to breed in late April in the UK. This is a good time of year to see this tiny bird, before it can hide behind the green leaves of later spring and summer. The crest is yellow in the female and orange with yellow edging in the male. They are often seen with long-tailed tits, moving from tree to tree as they feed on small insects. They have a plump and rounded body, which Mr Booth’s taxidermists seemed to have missed in their specimens.

Why not come and have a look at the Booth Museum specimens once we reopen and compare them with any you’ve managed to photograph (or our sample images).

Reference: Leroi, A. M. (2014) The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science, London, Bloomsbury.

All photos (c) Lee Ismail

Kerrie Curzon, Collections Assistant and Lee Ismail, Curator of Natural Sciences

This is a legacy story from an earlier version of our website. It may contain some formatting issues and broken links.

In 2009 I was the Adult Learning Officer for the Adult Event Programme creating and running public events across Royal Pavilion & Museums. This was one of 62 events programmed in 2009.

This picture was taken in the foyer of Brighton Museum & Art Gallery on Sunday 30 August 2009 and shows a group of jazz musicians including the eminent Bobby Wellins on saxophone.

The event supported Brighton Museum’s summer exhibition The American Scene: Prints from Hopper to Pollock, works from the British Museum’s American prints collection that toured selected museums in the UK in 2008 and 2009 finishing at Brighton. The exhibition attracted huge public interest wherever it was shown.

Here at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery a series of events were programmed to enhance the visitor experience of The American Scene including an American-themed family activity day on Saturday 4^th July with jive dancing workshops and print-making. The event programme for adults included a course of study days looking at American culture in the 20^th century: Flappers to Art Deco, the Great American Movie and American literature with poetry readings in the exhibition galleries. However, music was always going to play an important part in the event programme for this exhibition and I was delighted to engage this trio of jazz musicians who are seen playing here on the day the exhibition closed.

Bobby Wellins was born Robert Coull Wellins in Glasgow Scotland in 1936. His father was Max Wellins, a saxophonist, and his mother Sally Coull, a singer. The couple performed with the Sammy Miller Show Band. After his first music lessons at home Bobby studied harmony at Chichester College of Further Education, and clarinet at the RAF School of Music in Uxbridge, west London. The 1950s and 1960s were a heyday for Wellins with the jazz scene booming at clubs like The Flamingo, Ronnie Scott’s and the Nucleus Club, his “jazz university”. Wellins also made a living by his music playing on US ocean-going liners between 1959 and 1961 when cruises were strictly for the wealthy glamourous set. Wellins was most famous for a single, exquisite improvised solo on Starless and Bible Black, from the pianist Stan Tracey’s 1965 classic Under Milk Wood, his playing described as “a tenor saxophone passage of birdlike warbles, mournful hoots softly blown into deep spaces, fragmentary motifs that would briefly consolidate into hints of a songlike theme.”

Wellins left London and settled on the south coast and was always active; teaching at the West Sussex Institute of Higher Education in Chichester, performing as soloist in Charlie Watts’s eclectic improv-to-swing orchestra and playing and recording with big bands and solo into the 1990s and beyond. In 2013, Wellins was the subject of the documentary film Dreams Are Free, shown at the Brighton, Chichester and London film festivals that year.

Bobby Wellins was married and had two daughters. He died on 27 October 2016 aged 80.

My memory of the day is the delight on the faces of those who came to hear Bobby Wellins and the jazz trio, some older people expressing their joy at hearing the music of their youth in such pleasant and welcoming surroundings. The trio played in the museum foyer yet the evocative uplifting jazz sound drifted through open doors and up through the museum galleries giving pleasure to all visitors that late summer day.

Paula Wrightson, Venue Officer Preston Manor

This is a legacy story from an earlier version of our website. It may contain some formatting issues and broken links.

Today’s 100 Pioneering Women of Sussex blog post is written by guest blogger, Amy Zamarripa Solis and highlights the incredible story of Sarah Forbes Bonetta.

Whenever I pass St Nicholas Church, Brighton climbing up the hilly Dyke Road from the town centre, I always think of Sarah Forbes Bonetta, the famous slave princess and goddaughter of Queen Victoria. She married in this unlikely seaside church in August 1862.Not very big or grand this church, not as Victorian as one would think, but looking at it with modern eyes, it seems rather humble. And yet, according to Bert Williams MBE D Lit., co-founder of Brighton & Hove Black History, when she got married there were so many people in attendance that she couldn’t get through the door to walk to the altar.

Sarah Forbes Bonetta, (Sarah Davies), 1862, taken by Camille Silvy

In the height of summer 1862, a wedding party like no other strode through Brighton. 10 carriages of white and African high society people made its ways to the church.

Captain Frederick Forbes, on the other hand, was impressed, as he documented in his journal:

“I have only to add a few particulars about my extraordinary present ‘the African Child’ – one of the captives of this dreadful slave-hunt was this interesting girl. It is usual to reserve the best born for the high behest of royalty and the immolation on the tombs of the decease nobility. For one of these ends she has been detained at court for two years, proving, by her not having been sold to slave dealers, that she was of good family. She is a perfect genius; she now speaks English well, and has a great talent for music. She has won the affections, but with few exceptions, of all who have known her. She is far in advance of any white child of her age, in aptness of learning, and strength of mind and affection”.

There is a deep sadness and hidden trauma in the eyes of Sarah Forbes Bonetta in every photo I have seen of her. Omoba Aina, as she was born, or Sally, as Queen Victoria nicknamed her. She was named after her rescuers ship, HMS Bonetta.

Sarah was born in 1843, a West African Egbado princess of the Yoruba people. At age five her village was attacked and her parents killed. Shortly before she was due to be sacrificed in the court of King Ghezo, she was saved by a British Captain, Captain Frederick E. Forbes of the Royal Navy who suggested she be offered as a present to Queen Victoria.

 Transported to England, Sarah lived at first with Captain Forbes’s family. On 9 November, she was taken to Windsor Castle and received by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The Queen was so impressed with Sarah that she paid for her education and met with her on several occasions, even writing about her in her journal.

Sarah was plagued by fragile health. In 1851 she returned to Africa to attend the Female Institution in Freetown, Sierra Leone. At 12 years old, Queen Victoria commanded that Sarah return to England and was placed under the charge of Mr and Mrs Schon at Chatham.

Growing up, Sarah spent a lot of time visiting Queen Victoria and their household at Windsor Castle and was close friends with her daughter Princess Alice. Queen Victoria was impressed with Sarah’s natural regal manner and her academic abilities and knowledge of literature, art and music.

by Camille Silvy, albumen print, 15 September 1862

In a very modern way, Sarah had a career, training as a teacher so that was one thing she enjoyed. But the Queen made sure she understood that she must marry in order to be maintained in the manner in which she was accustomed.

An appropriate suitor was found: Captain James Pinson Labulo Davies, a wealthy Yoruba businessman. Of course she had to marry someone who was African like her. Sarah refused and was sent to live in Brighton, with two elderly ladies whose house she described as a “desolate little pig sty”. Unhappy with the situation, Sarah felt she had not choice but to accept the offer.

Following their wedding in 1862, the couple lived briefly in Brighton’s Seven Dials at 17 Clifton Hill. They then moved to Lagos and had three children: Victoria Davies was born in 1863, followed by Arthur Davies in 1871 and Stella Davies in 1873. The first born was named after Queen Victoria, who was given an annuity by the Queen and continued to visit the royal household throughout her life.

Sarah died on 15 August 1880 in the city of Funchal, the capital of Madeira Island, a Portuguese island in the Atlantic ocean. Her husband erected a granite obelisk-shaped monument more than eight feet high in her memory at Ijon in Western Lagos, where he had started a cocoa farm.

 The inscription on the obelisk reads:

IN MEMORY OF PRINCESS SARAH FORBES BONETTA

WIFE OF THE HON J.P.L. DAVIES WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE AT MADEIRA AUGUST 15TH 1880

AGED 37 YEARS

Sources:

https://www.black-history.org.uk/19th-century/sarah-forbes-bonetta-1843-1880/

Royal Pavilion & Museums collections, Brighton Gazette August 1862.

https://www.rct.uk/collection/themes/trails/black-and-asian-history-and-victorian-britain/sarah-forbes-bonetta-and-family

About the author:

Amy Zamarripa Solis

 Amy Zamarripa Solis is a producer, writer and artist from Austin, Texas. She is Director of This Too Is Real, an arts production and management company, specialising in arts, culture, heritage and diversity. She also runs Writing Our Legacy, a literature organisation set up in 2012, focused on supporting Black and ethnic minority writers and writing in Sussex and South East of England. Her latest projects include Constructed Geographies, a touring exhibition of Sussex visual artists (2018-19), Hidden Sussex anthology (Writing Our Legacy, 2019) and No Place Like Home, an exploration into childhood home and its loss, starting with her own Mexican-American community in Austin Texas, ¡La Cultura No Se Vende! (Our Culture is Not For Sale!), told through short stories, film and archive material.

 She is Co-Chair of Disability Arts Online and on the Boards of AudioActive and New Writing South.

https://www.thistooisreal.co.uk/

Writing Our Legacy

Writing Our Legacy is an organisation whose aim is to raise awareness of the contributions of Black and Ethnic Minority (BME) writers, poets, playwrights and authors born, living or connected to Sussex and the South East. We employ Mosaic charity’s definition of Black to be ‘Black people’ and ‘mixed-parentage people’ including all those people whose ancestral origins are African, Asian, Caribbean, Chinese, Middle Eastern, North African, Romany, the indigenous peoples of the South Pacific islands, the American continents, Australia and New Zealand. We run events across Sussex and the South East that showcase emerging and established BME writers and provide professional development and networking opportunities.

http://writingourlegacy.org.uk

This is a legacy story from an earlier version of our website. It may contain some formatting issues and broken links.

In 2009 I was the Adult Learning Officer for the Adult Event Programme creating and running public events across Royal Pavilion & Museums. This was one of 62 events that were programmed in 2009.

This historical fencing demonstration took place on the weekend of the 3 & 4 October 2009 and was a display of sword fencing over the ages linked to a Regency-themed living history event taking place inside the Royal Pavilion. Called ‘For King & Country’ it was created by Past Pleasures, the UK’s foremost living history company.

The people in the pictures are members of the Sussex Sword Academy based in Brighton. They are demonstrating various techniques used in the past in duels and warfare. These skills are demonstrated as a martial art and not to be confused with stage or sport fighting. This means they really were fighting with swords, with genuinely clashing fast-moving blades.

The Sussex Sword Academy made historically accurate fencing masks specially to wear at the demonstration in keeping with the historic setting of the Royal Pavilion, which that year was undergoing restoration work. The swordsmen and swordswomen are dressed in white Regency style shirts and black breeches. Note the ribbons worn at the knees, the colour of which will have been chosen by the individual.

The display soon drew the attention of passers-by who stopped in amazement at such a rare sight. Members of the public had the opportunity to hear commentary on the proceedings by the fencing masters.

The Sussex Sword Academy also hosted a lecture-display in the Pavilion’s Music Room on a low stage. The fencing masters talked audiences through Regency fencing techniques with students of the academy providing demonstrations of correct body posture, moves and sword work.

I remember the weekend as exhilarating and sometimes nerve-wracking, especially after all the preparation necessary to keep the event safe with those blades flying around. Sword-reach was carefully assessed in the Music Room in respect to the precious glass chandeliers hanging low in the room. Thankfully, the weather was mild and dry all weekend.

Paula Wrightson, Venue Officer Preston Manor

This is a legacy story from an earlier version of our website. It may contain some formatting issues and broken links.

The British Gypsy could be viewed as the stranger within, or as German Sociologist Georg Simmel described, a ‘Stranger in society from elsewhere’: a people who settled among other inhabitants, though were treated with suspicion and ignorance as they represented an exotic other that was difficult for many to understand.

To address such ignorance the Queer the Pier (QTP) curation team wanted to utilise Brighton Museum & Art Gallery’s ‘Gipsy Fortune Telling Machine’ in the exhibition. As Community Curator leading research and content for queer Roma inclusion, I collaborated with internationally acclaimed Roma artist Delaine Le Bas, academic Dr Lucie Fremlova, LGBTIQ+ Artists and workshop participants. Applying the theoretical framework of intersectionality; understanding that as both queer and part of the Roma, Gypsy and Traveller community, the participants created responses that challenge stereotypes and discrimination across these interconnected social categories.

I had the privilege to work on this project due to my own Romany heritage. My great-grandmother, Rhoda Wells (1897-1982) was a Romany Gypsy living in the New Forest, Hampshire. She met and eventually married my great-grandfather, Ralph Cuttriss Hinkins (1882-1952), when he and his father, my great, great-grandfather, Francis Robert ‘Frank’ Hinkins (1852-1934) befriended the Gypsy families. They spent many years periodically travelling with the Gypsies across the South of England. Many of the Hinkins clan were appalled by Frank and Ralph. It resulted in a distancing within family circles.

Frank was a photographer and illustrator. In 1915, father and son published, Romany Life: experienced and observed during many years of friendly intercourse with the Gypsies under the nom de plume Frank Cuttris. This book is still available in paperback, published by Echo Library.

The Keep holds three lantern slides attributed to Frank all circa 1915 of portraits of travelling people.

Decolonisation of objects in museums is imperative to inclusion. The LGBTIQ+ Roma, Gypsy and Traveller workshop collaboration sort to re-interpret the museum’s problematic Victorian ‘Gipsy Fortune Telling Machine’. The object perpetuated a stereotype of Roma culture through the stylisation of the machine’s human figure and the misspelling of ‘Gipsy’ with and ‘i’, not a ‘y’. Reaching out to a continually persecuted community, participants were welcome into a safe space within the museum to produce drawn and written responses to the machine. A theme emerged of colourful images reflecting the Romani flag, the Rainbow flag and the use of positive language. Romani – the Roma language has filtered through Cockney English and Polari (which was adopted into gay subculture to secretly communicate). Familiar words; clobber (clothes), minge (vagina) and chavi (child/friend, now used as derogative) originate from Romani, Cant or Argot languages.

Developing ideas from the workshop, Delaine Le Bas created beautiful contemporary fortune cards with positive messages (£1 in the slot, a card is yours). In her words, ‘Fortune Telling is an intimate form of communication between people, it requires close contact physically and mentally in its true form.’ She continues, ‘for me in particular coming from such a demonised community I refuse to respond in a negative way.’

Queer the Pier exhibition. Brighton Museum & Art Gallery. Fortune Telling Card by Delaine Le Bas. Photograph by Lisa Hinkins.

I edited the accompanying free takeaway Zine that addresses stereotypes. It includes the following; “Gypsiness” is a term to describe the phenomenon of dissociation where over time Gypsy identity becomes abstracted and separated from the people themselves. Through images and literature, the dominant culture dictates the representation of a marginal group, in this case Gypsies. Stereotypes of Gypsy women have been perpetuated by figures such as Vita Sackville-West, who invented Romany ancestry for herself on her Spanish side of her family to explain her ‘bohemian behaviour,’ (lesbian lovers).

Academic Dr Lucie Fremlova’s post doctorial collaboration with LGBTIQ+ Roma Artists has produced powerful images that break down and challenge the dominant representation of queer Roma people. Photographs that were created during a one-week workshop in Brighton have been printed in the Zine. An image of one of the Roma artists by the Palace Pier’s ‘Zoltar Fortune Telling Machine,’ accompanies the text for the Victorian machine. It is a powerful reminder that stereotypes are still interlaced with contemporary arcade amusements.

Queer the Pier exhibition. Brighton Museum & Art Gallery. ‘Gipsy Fortune Telling Machine’ Royal Pavilion & Museums Collection. Photograph by Lisa Hinkins.

Delaine Le Bas pays tribute in the Zine to her Uncle Eddie who moved to Brighton in the mid 1960s with his partner Peter. She acknowledges that their lives had not been easy being Romani and gay, but Delaine states that Eddie and Peter taught her the importance of being yourself and that love should be unconditional.

City based organisation Friends, Families and Travellers a leading national charity that works on behalf of all Gypsies, Roma and Travellers, provided support and contacts for this project. This led to contact with Roma poet Lois Brookes-Jones who beautifully weaved Romani and English words into a poem expressing lesbian desire especially for the Zine.

It is my sincere hope that this project engagement with LGBTIQ+ Roma, Gypsies and Travellers will foster less suspicion and ignorance to ‘strangers within.’ Museum staff were fantastically supportive in encouraging an ignored community through its doors.

A thought; is it not ironic that a people so rich in its own creative arts, music and culture is never fully appreciated within the institutions that claim to be custodians of our material culture? Perhaps we have an opportunity now to re-address that.

Outreach: Friends, Family and Travellers   Traveller Pride

1 Kalwant Bhopal and Martin Myers, Insiders, outsiders and others: Gypsies and identity (Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2008)

Queer the Pier Online

Find out more about Queer the Pier on with our online resources:

• Keep an eye on this blog for updates on our progress
• Come to Brighton LGBTQ+ History Club for more inspirational stories from our community
• Also, be sure to post your queer memories on our twitter and Instagram pages with #queeronthepier!

Lisa Hinkins, MA Student, Museum Gallery Explainer and artist.

This is a legacy story from an earlier version of our website. It may contain some formatting issues and broken links.

Making activities are a big part of what we do at Hove Museum. As the museum is currently shut during the coronavirus lockdown, Louise Dennis shares some mosaic crafting activities that children can enjoy at home.

As you can’t visit Hove Museum this Spring to join in the usual arts and crafts, why don’t you enjoy some eco friendly craft ideas for all the family at home?

We have put together some handy steps and tips, using readily available materials, and have included some fun Easter resources for you to download too.

These activities are suitable for any age as your design can be as complicated or as simple as you want to make it. Very young children will enjoy the sticking, but will need help using scissors.

A small cardboard egg design made using homemade glue

You will need:

• A selection of cardboard and paper recycling – cereal boxes, pizza boxes, magazines, flyers etc.
• Clean, dry eggs shells if you want to use them in your mosaic
• Scissors
• Pencil
• Glue (or use flour and water paste)
• Your imagination!

Tweezers and/or cotton buds, a hole punch, tissue paper, sequins or other craft embellishments and coloured felt tip pens could be useful too, but are not essential.

To Make Flour and Water Glue

Mix 2 tbsp of flour with a little water to make a thick, sticky paste and spread it on – add your tiles and then let your work dry in a warm, dry place or carefully use a hairdryer.

Mosaic Collage Eggs

One of these eggs has been decorated using eggshells (some plain and some coloured with pen) as well as cardboard shapes. Eggshells are fun to use if a bit fiddly!

• To start, cut out your egg shape from recycled cardboard boxes (and a backing shape if you’re making it into a card – see template below). If you choose the coloured side of the box to stick your mosaic tiles on to this will mean you have a plain side at the back to write your Easter message on, if you’re making a card.
• Then cut up your cardboard or magazines into little pieces to make your mosaic tiles. It’s fun to gather all your colours into little piles. You could cut out pictures or text from your boxes as well as coloured shapes.

Notice the little coloured squares that can be found on cereal boxes and the ‘Wheatie’ pictures were fun to use too

As you do the sticking don’t worry if there are gaps as you can go back later and add in little bits if you need to

• Spread some glue onto your egg shape and then begin adding your paper or cardboard mosaic tiles. It works well to glue first and then fit the shape together as you go, a bit like doing a jigsaw, rather than arranging a complete design and gluing afterwards.

Once the glue is dry trim any overhanging tiles

• Once the glue is dry trim any overhanging tiles.

Here’s the finished egg! A spring scene

• When you’ve finished you can make a hole in the top to hang it up as a decoration or affix a backing piece of card to the back to make it stand up as a greetings card. Here’s the front and back of a different design. This egg shape has been made into a card that stands up.

Mosaic Picture Design

You don’t have to make an egg – how about making a picture or a bookmark?

Tips

• For this technique bold designs will work best, as you will need something that will translate easily into block shapes.
• Once you start sticking try not to worry too much about following your pencil drawing exactly.
• A design that places contrasting colours next to each other will work well.
• For patterns and abstracts try choosing colours and shapes as you go, fitting them together in any way that pleases you.
• The side panels of cereal boxes would make a good shape for a bookmark.
• Cotton buds are useful for spreading glue and a cotton bud with a little glue on it can be used to pick up and place tiles into your design.

Design an abstract pattern

Stage 1. Try using a circle, drawing around a glass or bowl, as the base for your design

Stage 2. Then add shapes, gluing wherever you fancy, fitting them together like a jigsaw.

The finished piece. The small circles were made using a holepunch on the cereal boxes

We hope you have fun doing these activities.

For more Easter fun, you can download the following activity sheets. 

With best wishes for Spring from everyone at Hove Museum and Art Gallery.

Louise Dennis, Hove Family Events Programmer

This is a legacy story from an earlier version of our website. It may contain some formatting issues and broken links.

The Royal Pavilion has long served as a source of inspiration. Whether you are an artist, writer or simply enjoy making a creative twist on a local landmark, its a palace of possibilities.

One of our members, Kit Connor, has shared two photographs he has created of the Royal Pavilion, combining his fondness for the building with a love of the Beatles.

Good Day Sunshine

Image credit: Kit Connor

Titled ‘Good Day Sunshine’, thsi photo references the Beatles’ ‘Good Morning Sunshine’, from their LP Revolver.

The Beatles link with Brighton is they performed at the Hippodrome Theatre three times in the 60s. They delivered two performances every night and were paid £850 the last time they performed.

Golden Slumbers

Image credit: Kit Connor

Golden Slumbers became famous for a second time with Elbow’s version for the John Lewis 2017 Christmas TV advert.

The two pictures bookend a perfect Brighton summer. Good Morning Sunshine captures a morning just like today, April sunshine. Golden Slumbers shows an autumnal afternoon, as the sun sets behind the Royal Pavilion.

If you are a Beatles’ fan, the titles also bookend their career: Good Morning Sunshine from Revolver (1966) and Golden Slumbers at the end of their career from Abbey Road (1969).

Have you been inspired by the Royal Pavilion?

If you have taken a photo of the Royal Pavilion that you are keen to share, post a comment using the form below and paste in the web address.

This is a legacy story from an earlier version of our website. It may contain some formatting issues and broken links.

As we all stay at home during the current lock down, we can’t look to the Pavilion Garden to enjoy the season’s finest plants and flowers in bloom.

So instead, our Garden Manager Robert will be sharing some garden tips for those making the most of the time at home.

Robert at work in the Royal Pavilion Garden

Here are a few gardening suggestions for April as people self isolate. Something for the garden and also personal spiritual and mental wellbeing too.

• Look at your garden, window box, courtyard every day. Spend time doing it, and use all the senses. Really study the flowers close up, smell the fresh air and flowers and listen to the sounds of birds singing.

• Look ahead to when this crisis period is over. Make plans for the garden. What you are going to plant and sow.

• Buy plants and seeds online. You may have seeds at home that you can start sowing in the greenhouse or window sill. Most seeds remain viable for many years.

• Dead head old flowers, Daffodils, Primroses etc.

• Split large clumps of herbaceous perennials into smaller clumps and replant elsewhere in the garden. eg. Asters, cranesbill geraniums, astrantia.
• Enjoy it! Share your garden and flower images, let us know how you’re getting on.

Robert Hill-Snook, Garden Manager

This is a legacy story from an earlier version of our website. It may contain some formatting issues and broken links.

Constance Garnett with her son, David, in the mid 1890s

Books are more important than ever during these strange times. They have the power to take us to another place at a time when we are all staying within our homes; they can open our eyes to different cultures and lives and they can offer comfort and distraction. Lovers of reading owe a debt to Brighton’s Constance Garnett (1861 – 1946), the first person to translate the work of iconic Russian novelists into English.

Born in 1861 in Ship Street, Constance was the younger sister of Clementina who was to become a Trade Union pioneer.  A lover of reading and pupil of Brighton and Hove High School pupil, Constance, earned a scholarship to study Latin and Greek at Cambridge and followed this with a career as a librarian in London’s East End.  In 1892 destiny intervened in the shape of a Russian exile called Volkhovsky whom she visited with her future husband, Edward Garnett, a reader for a publishing company.  Constance was captivated by the stories that the young revolutionary told her about life in Russia and some of the intriguing sounding work that was being done by its writers.  As most of these writers were inaccessible to English readers because they hadn’t been translated into English, Constance decided that she was simply going to have to learn Russian and translate them herself.  Armed with a dictionary and a grammar book, and all the while enduring a difficult pregnancy, Constance pulled off this feat, mastering the language to such an extent that she was soon making the works of writers such as Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Turgenev and Tolstoy available for English speakers for the first time.

Illustration from Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, by artist Leonid Pasternak

She wasn’t the first to tackle the almost one and a half thousand page long War and Peace, however.  That honour goes to Clara Bell in 1886.  But Constance was the first to translate it directly from Russian, Bell having worked from the French translation.  By 1894 Constance was leaving her young son and husband at home to make trips to Russia, sometimes of three months in length – no mean feat for a single woman traveller at the time – to meet the writers whose work she was translating.  On one occasion she battled the snow to have lunch with Tolstoy at his snowbound estate, Yasnaya Polyana, where he wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina.  She reported that his ‘piercing eyes seemed to look right through one and to make anything but perfect candour out of the question’.

Constance’s mission to bring works of Russian literature to a wider, English speaking audience for the sheer enjoyment of reading them was always forefront in her mind.  She ensured that her translations came out in inexpensive editions to ensure that as many as possible could afford them. By the time of her death in 1946 Constance had translated over 70 volumes of Russian literature and is considered a key figure in the introduction of Russian literature to the English speaking world.  The fact that Constance learned Russian so quickly and was able to translate so many different writers for the benefit, enjoyment and inspiration of millions of readers worldwide, is an achievement indeed.

Today, although there are some criticisms of her work now sounding a little demure for modern readers, most of Constance Garnett’s translations are still in print.

When you consider how much writers in the English speaking world were influenced by Russian writers – notably Chekhov who caused short story writers in particular to make an about turn when they discovered his short, to the point fiction – it can be said that Constance Garnett had a huge influence on literature in the twentieth century and on.  New Zealand writer, Katherine Mansfield, herself a giant of the short story in the twentieth century, made her appreciation known in a letter to Constance in 1921: ‘These books have changed our lives, no less.  What would it be like without them?’

Written by social historian, Louise Peskett.

This is a legacy story from an earlier version of our website. It may contain some formatting issues and broken links.

Anita Roddick, courtesy of the Chichester Observer.

In March 1976, 44 years ago today, Dame Anita Roddick (1942 – 2007) opened the first Body Shop in Brighton. Dame Anita Roddick needs no introduction. As well as founder of high street staple, the Body Shop, she was also an energetic human rights, social justice and environmental campaigner; she became a well-known and admired woman all around the world.

Born in Littlehampton, the daughter of Italian parents who ran a café, Dame Anita fitted a lot of things into her life before alighting on the Body Shop. She worked as an English teacher, worked and travelled in Europe, Africa and the Far East, and, at one point, even ran a B&B in her home town.

In March 1976 she opened the first Body Shop in Kensington Gardens, Brighton – today a blue plaque marks the very modest spot.  It was a gamble and she needed a bank loan to see the project through.  Dame Anita later joked that she chose to paint the shop dark green – later to become the Body Shop’s trademark – because this was the only shade that would cover the mould on the shop walls.  The company quickly struck a chord with the shopping public.  A champion of fair trade and ethical business practices, its line of simply packaged cruelty free products – many unisex-  were inexpensive and cool.  Products that hadn’t been tested on animals and didn’t contain animal products had previously been expensive, difficult to track down or not of the best quality.  The Body Shop’s standards were high and as anyone who has ever used coconut hairgel or Dewberry perfume can tell you, they also smelled great.

Fifteen years later, the little shop on a Brighton back street had mushroomed into 700 branches.  It showed how ethical consumerism didn’t have to stay small but could be a sharp and slickly run business, and challenged how other businesses should behave  The Body Shop’s success and subsequent presence on every town’s high street led other companies to look at their own shortcomings.  Trying to catch up, every shop from Boots to Tesco to Superdrug would soon be bringing out a cruelty free option for shampoos, soaps and other grooming products, although none of them quite caught up with the Body Shop’s cool factor. The Body Shop wore its campaigns on its sleeve.  Not only were its products cruelty free but they sourced from ground-level growers rather than commodity brokers and, in a move that was ahead of its time, did away with unnecessary packaging.  Messages were eye-catching and written loud and clear on eye catching posters in shop windows and on walls.  The Body Shop pushed these and other issues of ethical consumerism into the public – and shopping – arena.  Shoppers had never been so savvy and able to make such informed and responsible choices.  It set a pattern.

At Dame Anita’s helm, the company backed Amnesty International, Friends of the Earth, and the Big Issue. There was also Ruby, the size 16 doll, created to tackle stereotypes of female attractiveness, pushing this issue into debate.

By the end of the 20th century the company had 2000 outlets in 55 countries and was proving that profitable business and social conscience could go together.  Although many customers were disappointed by its sale to L’Oreal in 2006, Dame Anita made sure that the company’s ethics would be ring-fenced within the group and planned to channel the profits through the charitable Roddick Foundation.  In 2017, it was sold to the Brazilian cosmetics company, Natura.

Blue plaque for Anita Roddick on the site of the first Bodyshop in Kensingtom Gardens

Sadly Dame Anita died in 2007.  If the Body Shop, although still on many high streets around the world, has lost some of its initial radical edge, the ethics of responsible consumerism it pioneered are still going from strength to strength and it has inspired companies and consumers worldwide.

Written by social historian Louise Peskett. Image of Anita with thanks to Steve Robards