Blue Plaques Trail
West St Leonards
62. Queen Victoria
Crown House, 57 Marina
See number 56
63. Thomas Carlyle
117 Marina
64. St Mary – Bulverhythe
Bexleigh Avenue
St Mary Bulverhythe is a church, now commemorated with a plaque at Bexleigh Avenue on Bexhill Road. The church was built as alternative chapel to St Mary in the Castle on Pelham Crescent for those who lived at Bulverhythe.
65. Sir Henry Rider Haggard
North Lodge, Maze Hill
Born on 22nd June 1856 in Norfolk and educated at Ipswich Grammar School, he went to Natal in 1875 until 1879 and he subsequently served on the East African Commission and also on agricultural committees in London.
Haggard was married in 1880 to a Norfolk heiress: Marian Louisa Margitson. He studies law at Lincoln’s Inn and was called to the bar in 1884, however writing was to prove to be his greatest passion and it was to writing that his attention turned. His first novel ‘Cetywayo and his White Neighbours’ was published in 1882. He was knighted in 1912 and subsequently awarded the K.B.E in 1919.
He first bought North Lodge, Maze Hill in 1917 and was to spend every winter there until 1923. He used the room above the archway as his writing room. Haggard was known to be a close friend of Rudyard Kipling who lived nearby at Burwash and they frequently exchanged visits, constructively criticising one another’s writing.
He died on 14th May 1925.
66. Herbert Spencer
5 The Mount
British philosopher and sociologist, Herbert Spencer was a major figure in the intellectual life of the Victorian era. He was one of the principal proponents of evolutionary theory and a key rival for Darwin.
He lived in St Leonards for a short period during the Victorian era, taking residence at The Mount for most of this time. Herbert was strongly influenced by the individualism and the anti-establishment and anti-clerical views of his father, and this certainly proved popular with readers of his work. During his lifetime, Spencer sold one million copies of his books were sold across the world.
Spencer's health significantly deteriorated in the last two decades of his life, and he died in relative seclusion, following a long illness, on December 8, 1903.
68. Sheila Kaye Smith
9 Dane Road
Sheila Kaye Smith as born in Sussex and set all of her novels there. The author was born in St Leonards and spent most of her life in Sussex. She lived for many years, at Northiam not far from St Leonards.
Her fiction was noted for its religious preoccupations. In 1924 she married Theodore Penrose Fry, an Anglican Clergyman.
It is said that Kaye Smith knew from an early age that she wanted to be a successful novelist and live alone in the countryside; she eventually achieved both of these goals.
During her lifetime she wrote a number of successful works, and one of her most popular novels, Joanna Godden was made in to a film in 1947, called The Loves of Joanna Godden.
Sheila Kaye Smith was one of Sussex’s most famous residents; she died in the county in January 1956.
71. Captain John Foote V.C.
Westerleigh School, Hollington Park Road
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