Smuggling Seaford

Now before you go wild and attack the publisher of Town and County, let it be known he is very good about not interfering with his scribes’ copy, unless he absolutely has to.
So it was with a positive spring in my step that I handed in this story and hailed him with, ‘Hey, Chief. Here’s your story on shagging.’
Lois Lane, working purposefully in the corner, dropped her pencil, the print presses fell silent and a hundred pairs of eyes looked down the newsroom at me.
What? What have I said?
Then it occurred to me that these were journalists who of course knew every slang expression in the book.
Yes, the word ‘shag’ is given in the dictionary as meaning one who loves copious quantities of sex. But the real meaning is a glutton, gourmand or even a greedy guts.
In a roundabout way, it came to mean on the South Eastern coast of England in the 17th and 18th centuries a ‘cormorant’, the bird which was the common term for piracy and smuggling.
And there were no greater shags than the people of Seaford.
This beautiful little village, with a population including the surrounding countryside is a village of 23,000 and is as genteel a place as you can get.
It has a beautiful bay, with a long, bending beach, albeit mostly pebbles; it lies in the shadow of the Seven Sisters cliff range, the snowy white frontages of which welcomed back as many wartime pilots as the famed White Cliffs of Dover.
And its town centre reflects the small 19th century fishing village it became, even though military threats from abroad gave it membership of the exclusive Cinque Ports protection club.
So why are the inhabitants called shags?
Ahhh. You see, today’s sophisticated and civilised society of Seaford, was not always thus.
Their ancestors were Shags, or Cormorants. Accomplished and lethal smugglers.
During the 16th and 17th centuries, when the smuggling gangs of East Sussex were a law unto themselves, the good burghers of Seaford were accomplished in the fine art of smuggling.
Whenever a ship was wrecked in the bay, a not uncommon occurrence in those times, these not so ‘god fearing’ citizens could strip it of its cargo in no time flat, have it ashore and on the road to market before the authorities and especially the customs men, knew it had foundered.
Although my favourite source of history, word of mouth is the authority for their shady dealings, Seaforders were said to gather on the cliffs with lanterns and signal to passing vessels that their passage was safe, but really luring them onto the rocks so the ‘strippers’ could go to work.
The sea and the town have always been closely wrapped together in the history of the area and Seaford was once one of the busiest ports on the South Coast, frequent targets of pesky French marauders. Today it is one of the most attractive tourist spots in East Sussex.
A thriving trading centre in Medieval times, firstly Seaford fell afoul of the Hundred Years War, which began in 1337. The conflict was confusingly dubbed the Hundred years War with France because in good English tradition it actually lasted 116 years until 1434.
Several times the village was burned to the ground by these French raiders. On one famous occasion the Lewes Prior was duped into taking his soldiers to Rottingdene, leaving Seaford and Lewes defenceless, and the intruders sailed around the coast, up the River Ouse and sacked Lewes itself, although fearless English bowmen, who were left to defend the monastery, did so bravely and with skill’.
Then Sir Nicholas Pelham courageously marched to the town, and bravely took on and beat the French in 1554 at Seaford.
A Norman family oversaw the rise and fall of Seaford as High Sheriff. William Levett owned many estates in the area, intermarried with the great and the good and at some point an extant seal shows that an ancestor John de Levitt was Lord of Firle.
The Ouse, so long a contributor to the prosperity of the town, bringing goods and iron from the Sussex hinterland, also went on to become its worst enemy.
In the 1500s, flooding was frequent and widespread, and in 1539 a cutting was dug to allow the waters to take a different path shifting the port to Newhaven, keeping Seaford dry, but moving its importance as a port to its sister township.
So a hundred years later, the shaggers were born and carried on the illicit smuggling trade to well into the 19th century.
But Seaford was occupied well before then. A Hill Fort and Bowl Barrow, (burial site) suggests that there were dwellers there in the Bronze Age of 2500 BC, through to the Iron Age of 1000 BC. The fort was so sophisticated for its time, Roman pottery suggests the invaders of a later age also had residential centres there.
The coming of the railway brought Seaford out of its slump in 1864 and has proved as loyal a friend as the Ouse, some 800 years before.
Seaford became a seaside resort, featuring the start of the cliff walks along the Seven Sisters and a magnificent view from a towering bluff, Seaford Head, which looms over the town.
The trains also brought commuters, at first to Eastbourne and Brighton and later on of course, City workers in London.
Seaford was also a town of ‘eggheads’. Well not so much eggheads, although it turned out many illustrious people from its schools.
Between the late 1800s and 1960s, the town had dozens of private and state schools so that ‘crocodiles’, that’s children walking in an orderly file, were a common feature of the town. One street had a sign warning motorist there were seven schools within a mile.
The list of notables from Seaford Schools reads like a panorama of English life.
Sir Anthony Blunt, artist, keeper of the Queen’s pictures and a notorious Soviet Spy went to school there, as did actor Nigel Davenport. Comedian Dickie Henderson was a pupil along with
Dame Penelope Keith. Mind you in those days, girls and boys were kept very, very separate, so it isn’t likely they were in the same class. Another noted actress Margaret Rutherford listened for the school bell and so did astronaut Piers Sellers.
The names of residents, past and present, are dotted with noted people. Winston Churchill’s wife Clementine lived there, so did stunt rider
Eddie Kidd and top cricketer Colin Wells.
The list goes on and since grocery lists aren’t part of the T&C package, I’ll desist.
There are some very decent restaurants worth vissiting in Seaford and some charming historic villages with amazing pubs.
So, shall I venture out tonight for a meal and a bit of a fling after a hard week? If I do, my greatest fear is that no one will remember to simply address me with the formal word for a resident of Seaford. But I bet they will all remember what to call a man whose a smuggler, bon vivant and a man about town. Greedy guts? No, I bet they’ll remember the real term for someone from Seaford and that is a ………. Bite my tongue.