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The newspaper articles and the documents, that appear below, came to me in no particular order, so, when I felt I had all that I was going to get, I put them together to produce the following history, I collected all that I could find at the East Sussex Record Office and all the newspaper articles held on film at Bexhill Library, that mentioned the Marsh Road, but there may be others still waiting to be found that will add to the story – I’ll leave that for others. For information, the reference number of the documents in the East Sussex Office is PR382-14-15 and the contents are given as “Proposal to stop up Old Barnhorn Lane to prevent gypsies camping there Jun 1936 - Oct 1937 - Correspondence with landowners, county and district councils, newspaper cuttings”.
For the benefit of this website, I transcribed most, if not all, of the documentation that I collected over the years and the reasons for this were manifold - in the case of records held at the East Sussex Record Office, in Lewes, I could do nothing else; it would have been far too expensive to purchase a clear photograph of each document that I needed - and, then, there would have been questions regarding copyright. It would have been far nicer to have been able to display images of the old, original documents but there were too many problems for that.
In the case of the newspaper articles, the quality of the images would have presented a different problem; one of clarity, of the ability to have been readable – these are scanned images of photocopies obtained via the old, much-used, dear-old, library printer, with its questionable ability to lighten and darken to an acceptable level for printing what was shown on the film reader screen. In turn, this was, obviously, dependent upon the quality of the filming of the old, original, archived newspaper and, in the first place, how well the newspaper, itself, had survived the years.
Then, again, in transcribing the documents, I stood a far better chance of understanding what those documents were telling me – the process took longer than obtaining photographs or such but was, in so many other ways, far better form what I was doing.
Finally, because I couldn’t show any images of the original documents, and, as I was transcribing them anyway, I tried to produce, as well as I was able, facsimiles of them using a word processor - this, I must confess, I did more because I wanted to than for any other reason! Where a logo was shown on a document, but was too time-consuming to try to reproduce by hand, I’ve put a ‘box’ with the word “Logo” inside – simple, and it may well be obvious but I thought I’d better explain!
A transcription of the correspondence can be seen by clicking on HERE.
