I was sitting at a kitchen table in Sheffield with my friend (and the producer of my new album) Andy Bell. It was a washed out late summer day in-between the various lockdowns we had all been weathering in 2020. The rain was falling heavy on the garden and a squally breeze was ruffling the flower beds. I had come up to spend some time with him and generally talk about how we were going to get people into the album (which is called ‘Clifftown’ by the way and was born out of a desire I had for some years to articulate my experiences in my hometown, the seaside suburbia that is Southend-on-Sea).
“You should make a podcast about all the stories and characters” Andy said, or something to that effect. He’d visited me numerous times and knew how colourful an area it was. Inside I recoiled - the thought of interviewing people I knew about the things that went unsaid between us felt like prying, or worse making something grandiose out of the ordinary. But, I said I would try. I drove home days later plotting how I could pull this off…and then thought became research and I sent a few emails to people and some of these turned into interviews and then it happened, The Clifftown Podcast.
I wracked my brains for themes and ideas that wouldn’t be too obvious that would be interesting not just for me but others too. I kept circling back to the hidden histories and tall tales I had heard growing up here, romantic tales of smugglers and fleeing royalty and the grittier (but equally compelling) tales we heard from the old boys that used to prop up the bar in the Grand Hotel, stories of petty criminals trying to kill cows near Hadleigh Castle in order to sell the meat illegally but being so drunk they ended up shooting crossbow bolts into a tractor mistaking it for a sleeping Frisian. I’m obsessed with finding traces of past lives so this topic felt like a good place to start - I felt comfortable with what I was talking about and it seemed apt to start at a point where the place existed but I did not.
Brian Denny was an obvious choice for my first podcasting attempt. A naturally affable and warm man Brian is great for stories and local lore. Over the years we had regularly met to walk around the more desolate places of the county including the Dengie Peninsula (the site of one of the oldest largely intact churches in England, St Peter’s by the Wall in Bradwell-on-Sea, built in the 690s by the patron saint of Essex, St. Cedd) and the shores near Canewdon trying to picture the Battle of Ashingdon, which took place nearby and where King Cnut was victorious over the Saxon king, Edmund Ironside.
For the interview we met up in more anodyne surroundings on the edge of the suburban Highlands Estate in Leigh on Sea. We started talking straight away about the common myths of these parts - the highwayman Cutter Lynch and the Sea Witch Sarah Moore. In the podcast I gloss over the myth of Cutter Lynch simply because the wind ruined the quality of the recording. So, maybe it’s good summarise it here -
There’s a block of flats from the 1970s on the main London Road called Lapwater Court. In 1750 it was the site of a dilapidated and expansive residence called Leigh Park House. It was bought by a mysterious Mr Gilbert Craddock who subsequently visited the site and ordered renovations to take place. Towards the end of the renovations the local workmen were expecting, as was local custom, to receive ale from Mr Craddock for their work. Mr Craddock stated in no uncertain terms that if they wanted to drink rather than get their work finished they could ‘lap water’ from a nearby horse pond. His new house was dubbed locally as ‘Lapwater Hall’ and carries that moniker to this day. And what about Mr Craddock? Well, in some sort of karmic fate he was discovered to be the infamous highwayman Cutter Lynch who gave his earless horse, Brown Meg, prosthetic wax ears when holding up stage coaches to disguise his very unique and recognisable horse. He was shot by the Bow Street Runners near the house and died of blood loss and possible drowning in shallow water thick with reeds. [Source: ‘Legends of Leigh’ by Sheila Pitt-Stanley 1989, who gives a much more thrilling account]
In the podcast Brian mentions a few times the character Goldspring Thompson in relation to the Nore Mutiny of 1797. Goldspring had supposedly escaped the mutiny when events looked like turning against the mutineers and I suppose he saw what retributions might be meted out to him and others if he stayed on board. His story of jumping overboard and hiding out in the reeds probably survives because he lived such a long life, dying in 1875, and no doubt he told his tale many times in the local pubs of the old town.

Brian Denny curated The Working River Compilation Which features a selection of traditional and modern Folk songs.
Thinking about the richness of these old stories about mutineers and highwayman around the old town of Leigh-on-Sea seem understandable to me when you think that nearly all of these tales derive from the late eighteenth century or nineteenth century; old enough to be mythic but young enough to be part of an oral tradition passed down through 4 or 5 generations. Southend did not really exist in any extensive sense at this time, only growing in the later nineteenth century as the train line expanded eastwards from London and Leigh was the hub for boats from across the world. I think this explains the reason there are less tales of high adventure from Southend itself.
The John Constable tale that forms mine and Brian’s quest in the podcast was one I had known for some time but there had been little attention on it. Constable had painted the nearby Hadleigh Castle, first in 1814 when he sketched it and then the actual painting in 1829. The Sketch resides in the Tate Gallery, London while you would have to visit the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Conneticut to see the finished painting. I had read in several references that John had stayed with his uncle Thomas in Leigh-on-Sea when he came to make the sketches.

John Constable’s ‘Hadleigh Castle’ (1829) and how the castle looks on a hot summer’s day.
This didn’t seem far fetched at all so the hope was that finding some remains of the original Juniper’s Cottage would give us some spiritual closeness to it all. The day we chose to visit was in early December and without my gloves it became painful holding the recorder to capture our journey. You may be able to hear me gasping a bit as we walk and talk, it was that cold. I should have taken my warmer jacket.
Juniper’s Cottage doesn’t exist any more and Brian later discovered through his research that it was mostly demolished in 1952 but you can see the rough shape of the building still. I tried to get a photo of the building that day and then subsequent days but it was always so busy and in winter lockdown it felt a place to steer away from. I managed to get the shot on the left in a very cold and bitter early January evening while to the right you can see how it looked, most likely in the 1930s or 40s. It was named after Joe Juniper who turned it into a fishmongers and tearoom some time in the nineteenth century.


People in Leigh are very proud of these stories and there’s lots more of them. The pirate’s grave at St. Clement’s Church, the near death of Henry IV as he crossed the Thames to Leigh from the Isle of Sheppey during a storm and the oyster wars with the men of Kent in the early eighteenth century. These are not stories that define national identity or inform this island’s greater heritage, it’s parochial and light but what it does show is that there is a desire to keep these small events in the lives of those who lived here a couple of hundred years ago alive today and to keep a thread to an older, perhaps less cluttered, era in an area that is continually being developed and added to as the need for housing to accommodate the growing overspill of communities from London grows. The Government’s ‘Estuary 2050’ scheme plans to significantly develop this part of the Thames shore (and others) for housing and economic growth.
This desire for a personal and local history that can be publicly owned and recounted by the community was very evident in the Joscelyne’s Beach story which I discussed with poets Jo Overfield and Ray Morgan. I worked in an independent bookshop in 2000 and remember Arthur Joscelyne’s daughter coming into the shop with the book. We sold lots and people would come in for years afterwards wanting copies. Those who bought it knew Arthur or his family and always wanted to impart to me their own experiences and memories of the beach and the area.

I collected a lot of stories that way, listening to people in the bookshop and some made their way into my songs. For example, there was one elderly couple who came in with their son, Michael (who must have been in his fifties and suffered various health issues). They would recount stories about using the Medway Queen, a pleasure boat over in Kent and heading over to Margate from Southend Pier. Michael’s father was drowned in World War II. I thought this incredibly sad and I recall they said something about the Captain in charge being a man called Boutwood. Having just looked it up I wonder whether his father died on the HMS Fantome which was mined in 1942 off Bizerte. It was this story that inspired my song ‘Night Water’ from the album, ‘The Water or the Wave’.
Sadly booksellers in Leigh-on-Sea have dwindled in recent years, although Leigh Gallery Books is a must for your secondhand needs. The personal and hidden histories remain however and there’s still more to uncover. With Clifftown I suppose I have laid my own little history down by these silver waters, maybe to be retold by the next person along.

This was an important episode of the series for me, I mean this was what it was all about - music! The episode took a long time to pull together simply because COVID restrictions made it really hard to meet people to interview. The Jazz Centre UK was a key target for my research but as it is almost entirely run by volunteers, who were rightly at home during the pandemic, it proved difficult to make initial contact. Of course when I did they were immensely welcoming and helpful. The Centre is housed in the old Southend Library building in Victoria Avenue (now the Beecroft Art Gallery) and I would have loved to have met up with Mark Kass and Digby Fairweather amongst that wonderful archive, capturing the echo of the building on my recorder. But regardless, I was pleased I could add the story of Mike Taylor to the episode because, although pub rock is synonymous with Southend, just like the town, there is more to it than simply that.
I could have gone a few different routes with these notes. I could have written more
about the historical Southend music scene, maybe touched upon Peter Green’s
association or bands like Procol Harem (who originated in Southend but took off
long before the 70s pub rock scene covered in the episode) or, as one friend suggested, uncover the busy underground scenes happening right now including the jazz improvisational orchestras. Instead I wanted to focus on a theme that struck me while interviewing Zoe Howe about Dr Feelgood and in the process work in some of my memories of playing in the town, a homage to the scene that I knew and adored and to which I owe a lot.

This theme that I talk about is the working, almost puritan, ethic of gigging and pushing your music regardless of the cost. It sounds dramatic but beneath the stadiums and city halls there are musicians working full time jobs while ceaselessly playing their own music in pubs and clubs, sometimes to indifference often to small but enraptured crowds. It is sometimes unfairly referred to as the ‘Toilet Circuit’. It’s hard work physically and mentally but the musicians you see will have an all consuming passion for it just the same.
Zoe mentions the drive Lee Brilleaux had for putting on exceptional all or nothing shows even during the decline in popularity of his group (Dr Feelgood). I’ve played countless shows to no- one, such as the time in Norwich my trio (all with heavy colds) dutifully played two forty five minute sets to five people; or the Monday night in Leeds where I had kicked around the East Ridings of Yorkshire all day to play to three or four. I am not ashamed to mention these, it’s part of the journey and is the reality. What is there on all occasions is passion and a community (no matter how small). As I refer to in the episode it was at the open mic nights (anywhere in the country but Southend for sure) where I met interesting diverse people and came into contact with life in all it’s beautiful complex mundanity.
My musical prehistory was unspectacular, excepting a few gigs at youth clubs and one flat battle of the bands in a local school (I recall they had touted the then pop star Billie Piper as a guest performer. She was a no show and at the last minute ushered in a perfume counter girl from a TV reality series that was big at the time called Lakesiders. Remember?), the mid 90s was spent designing record sleeves for the bands I was in with my friends rather than earnestly practicing.
The real magic moment for me was around 2003 when I returned home from living in Yorkshire. I was desperate to get back into the music scene and had clocked a small bar on a corner bend of the Broadway in Leigh-on-Sea called Reds. I saw it heaving with music and life one Tuesday night as I drove past. I felt a calling to be in that bar, not necessarily to be playing but to be part of whatever was going on there. It looked fun. I was nervous and unsure of myself as a performer but swore I would get in there and mingle soon.
Thus began some wonderful evenings where I cut my musical performing teeth as part of a calypso band called ‘The Calypso Kings’, mainly playing Growling Tiger and Cab Calloway tunes. It was there that I met some of the formative musical and personal relationships I still have today. Simon Gentry and Will Bray (who ran the night at Reds) would later start the legendary Pink Flamingo Club, which relocated to The Ship in the old town of Leigh-on-Sea where I played on a monthly basis for years. I also saw for the first time at Reds musicians who I still share stages with - Lance Baldock, Phillious Williams and Dave Woodcock. I would later spend three years as Lance’s lap steel guitarist in the band Cusack.

Then there was Tom Keenan, who regularly sang a staggering version of ‘Buckets of Rain’ by Bob Dylan. Tom, Will and myself would later form The Lucky Strikes with a journalist who attended the nights to watch, Dave Giles.
Reds was so incredibly important to my musical education and I can’t list all the bands and musicians who passed those doors. You looked out for everyone, went to each others gigs and always had a good time. Many of those musicians I haven’t seen for years and Reds itself is a gourmet burger restaurant now. But I had no time to cherish it in those days, I was soon off into the big smoke of London. First forays were with the band Cusack and we would often arrive home after 1.30am for a 6.30am start for work the next morning. Myself and Matt ‘Fudge Slices’ McGain would wobble about in the back of the small van with all the kit as Bryan Styles (who still drums with me) shot down the A13 or A127 towards home. It was hard graft taking guitars to the office at 8am, travelling to a show after the day work was done and then hitting the hay in the early hours...and you also had to put on the show of your life in between. The main ports of call were the boozers of east London. The West End and central London would always tout venues with legendary heritage and excepting the 12 Bar in Denmark Street the real music loving community I experienced was in Leytonstone at the What’s Cookin Club, which remains to this day one of the warmest and most supportive communities of music lovers I know.
After Reds the home for music for me was The Ship in Leigh-on-Sea. With a dedicated function room upstairs this unsupposing venue attracted musicians from all over the country and the walls were completely covered with framed posters of all the gigs that had occurred there. This was the home of the Pink Flamingo Club a monthly night which brought together a lot of local bands with out-of-towners. I will never forget the night my band The Lucky Strikes supported Alan Tyler and the Lost Sons of Littlefield (most of whom went on to form Danny and the Champions of the World) and The Redlands Palomino Company. I suddenly felt I was plugged into something for life. I recall standing in the car park outside the pub surrounded by cool London types with cased up Telecasters and plaid shirts. It was a affirmation of a lifetime for me. When the pub finally closed it’s doors a lot of the regular Pink Flamingo crowd rescued those framed pictures from the skip.
Throughout these years there was no corporate or structured music business in evidence other than people from provincial towns loading up vans and driving over the country to play and sharing their audiences. It was this that made the pub rock history, the Dr Feelgood story, so captivating for me and my peers. The thought that you could be yourself be ordinary but likewise have this camaraderie of the road, loud amps and a love for what you were doing was enthralling. It is perhaps a naive and young hope now I look back at me then but perhaps it’s just an essence that burns bright in those early years and one which you learn to temper, tame and direct as you grow older.
Half way through my interview with Iain Keenan of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) we paused for a coffee. We walked a short distance from the station house to Rebecca’s Cafe in the small parade of archway shops opposite the pier head. As the man was making our drinks Iain commented offhand that for a seaside town Southend’s community was not very connected to the sea. No-one looks outward much here.
I agreed with Iain on this statement. You get no strong sense of maritime history in Southend, it’s more about all the fun you can have on land. I think this occurs because Southend is a relatively new place and has never relied on the estuary for it’s food and livelihood, other than the beachside fun for day trippers. Southend was named in the middle ages because it was the ‘south end’ of Prittlewell, the Saxon village which is now simply a large crossroads to the north of the town and a suburb of Southend town centre. When Southend developed in the nineteenth century it, like many of its kind, became a destination resort for Londoners not a working fishing town. If you go further along the coast by a couple of miles, to Leigh-on-Sea, you get more of a sense of a maritime town. This is where Paul Gilson, the Dover Sole fisherman I interviewed for the episode lives and works. There are a few boat chandlers still and the cockle trade is still extent there but this too does not define Leigh as it once did. This is all now commuter town. I wonder with the pandemic and the potential for people to travel less to London less whether this area will change once more.
Iain had a wealth of information about other topics I didn’t include in the episode. I’m naturally curious and will route out any hidden story I can but I felt it important to focus on the modern day role of the RNLI. I wanted to give the listener a break from my own personal obsessions about the town.
One of the stories Ian told me was how the Palace Hotel, which is a grand white Victorian edifice that sits on the cliff overlooking the main seafront, was used to house wounded soldiers during the Second World War. He pondered openly about how those men had spent days, months even on boats and ships and when they were finally home they had to endure watching the sea while they recuperated. He supplied me this photo of men standing on one of the balconies. You can still see this balcony today and barely twenty metres from here, on the seafaring side of the hotel, Laurel and Hardy had their pictures taken….but that is another episode to come.

The Palace Hotel could tell a few stories I am sure. Since starting the podcast I have walked past it many times as directly behind it sits St John the Baptist’s Church where, in its graveyard, lay a number of people I will visit in forthcoming episodes. It overlooks the pier where I met Iain and where the Olympia, the building on the front cover of my album is. It’s this interconnectedness that calls me. This is but one piece of ground but layers and layers of human experience lie on top of each other. The buildings hold ghosts while the air forever changes.
The most enjoyable aspect of this episode for me was another of Iain’s discoveries, that of the Chapman Lighhouse. An isolated tripod lighthouse which, as Paul Gilson told me, protected boats from a submerged ‘sea cliff’ that could pitch a boat over. The solemn ringing of a bell across the desolate Canvey marsh was something straight out of ‘The Heart of Darkness’ or ‘Great Expectations’ (both of which start in the boggy ethereal Victoriana of the Thames Estuary). I relished looking into the lighthouse and there is a bonus episode out there on it, which I am very proud of. In a story I uncovered for the bonus episode there was the start reminder that the tides here can creep in and take a man unawares, the water gathering around you before you yourself know you have been cut off from the main land. Thankfully we have Iain and his colleagues at the RNLI to help us in those times of need.

For this note I have created a walking tour of the Hamlet Court Road, Westcliff-on-Sea, so you can enjoy the built heritage which Andy Atkinson of the Hamlet Court Conservation Forum showed me. Enjoy.
Location: Hamlet Court Road, Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, SS0 7DD
Directions: Ample parking at Hamlet Court Road car park, SS0 7UA. By train, the Westcliff-on-Sea train station is 50 minutes from London Fenchurch Street. Hamlet Court Road is a minute’s walk from the Southend side.
Duration: Less than a mile’s amble, approx. 45 minutes.
Start at the north end of Hamlet Court Road where the London Road runs. Start walking on the left hand pavement heading back towards the estuary and Westcliff train station. On the opposite side of the road to your right, above the shopfronts, are superb examples of Edwardian architecture (Edward VII). These are the best known heritage buildings of the area and create an elegant curve down into the road.
Continue walking and when possible cross the road to the right hand side of the pavement until you reach the intersection where St. John’s Road feeds into Hamlet Court Road from the left. On that corner, adjacent to the Post Office is a fine example of early 1900/turn of the century building that is highly decorated with white dentals and red brick. The turret is a regular feature for Southend properties of this period and the number of windows suggest the desire for optimum sea views. The style of the building reflects London and other city architecture of the period suggesting a high status or prestige area within the town.
Opposite this building on the side you are standing and above the shopfronts is highly decorated Romanesque embellishments from the Edwardian period. Looking slightly tired now you are still able to see the high decoration and dormer windows.

Staying on the same side of the road walk to the corner of Anerley Road and again look to the opposite side of the street where you will see the unique Havens Building. Designed in the early/mid 1930s this building is currently listed and represents one of the first open floor department stores in the country modelled on Heals of Tottenham Court Road. Hamlet Court Road was known as the ‘Bond Street of the east’ during its inception, showing it’s importance to the region but also in relation to London. This is confirmed further with the knowledge that the original train station was going to be called ‘Kensington-on-Sea’ rather than Westcliff-on-Sea.
Havens is covered in glazed terracotta tiles called faience and was a department store until 2017. It still retains it’s original decoration, double height glazing, including bushels of leaves falling down the columns. The canopy over the windows is suspected to be not original

Continuing down the road you will notice the Thames estuary coming into view as the road widens at the junction where the Savers shop is. The widening is due to the original Edwardian houses having front gardens that would have taken up the wide pavement you see now. You can still see these houses above the shop fronts leading from the ‘Ramen + Chill’ restaurant onwards. These houses are situated on the southern corner of St. Helen’s Road leading down. The Savers shop is housed in a new build which was designed to replicate the original Art Deco building, which burnt down in a fire.

Cross to the left hand side of the road so that you are on the corner of St. Helen’s Road and walk past the Shagoor Indian restaurant and stand outside the Tara Thai restaurant next door. Look to the opposite side of the street to view a recently renovated Edwardian building which boasts one of the finest examples of that era’s shopfronts in the country containing curved glass and wooden framing. This is truly a special property to view and cherish.

Continue to the Hamlet Court Pub on the corner of Canewdon Road and face the opposite side of the street. Here, above the shopfronts, are examples of 1930s properties, some of the later buildings to be erected in Hamlet Court Road. This was the site of the the Hamlet Court or Hamlet House, which in the nineteenth century sat in sculpted gardens. The property was once home to Victorian poet Robert Buchanan who lived there during the 1870s, writing poems and plays which were popular in the West End during the 1880s. Buchanan wrote to a friend saying that there was no ‘no finer place to be when spring becomes a certainty’.
Other famous residents of Hamlet Court included Edwin Arnold, another poet who also became the Editor in Chief of the Daily Telegraph in the later nineteenth century and Sir Philip Cunliffe-Owen, the curator of the South Kensington Museum and a grand exhibition organiser of the Victorian age. Harriet Jay, sister in law to Robert Buchanan and Victorian polymath in her own right mentions the Hamlet Court in her biography of Buchanan from 1903 mentioning that it was ‘a paradise for the poet to dream in’. She laments the loss of ‘Lover’s Lane’ (an avenue created by ancient elm trees) and the meadows around the Court in the same book. The Court was demolished in 1929.

The 1930s buildings now standing are referred to as reduced Art Deco and show unique features of waterfalls cascading from openings in the parapet wall down the central pilaster columns. There is also green roman clay tile coping on the parapet, which references the Art Deco building Sunray House around the corner in Canewdon Road.
As you are standing outside the Hamlet Court Pub look diagonal to you on the opposite corner where you will see a row of Edwardian buildings bookended by a magnificent former bank building built in a style known as ‘bank baroque’. Featuring a turret crowned by a cupola this is an exuberant building demonstrating the common practice of banks in the Edwardian period creating ostentatious and highly decorated buildings.

Turn left into Canewdon Road down the side of the Hamlet Court pub and walk to Preston Road. You will notice the road is lined with elm trees, some of the first and last remaining original features of this Edwardian suburban planning. The road contains many fine examples of Edwardian arts and crafts movement properties. The brickwork and wooden edging of some of these properties is beautiful. Number 35 Preston Road you will find an incredibly rare example of architectural design from Herbet Fuller Clark, an arts and crafts architect most famously know for designing the magnificent Black Friar pub in London. This property in Preston Road is one of the very few other properties he designed. It’s a unique and arresting.

Return to Canewdon Road and walk back up to the Hamlet Court Road and over into the other side of Canewdon Road. Walk past the ‘Bank Baroque’ building on your left and directly behind it on Canewdon Road you will find a fine example of the Art Deco building known as Sunray House with it’s curved windows and distinctive ‘Crittall’ window frame design.

Continue walking down Canewdon Road until you reach the corner of Ditton Court Road. If you look right you will see a fine example of very early grass and tree lined verges, built in 1904. It has been speculated that these are some of the very earliest street layout designs in Southend and not only inspired layout in Thorpe Bay and Westleigh but also inspired the eminent Victorian town planner, Sir Raymond Unwin, to use some of these ideas in his own designs, most significantly in Hampstead Garden Suburb. The belief is that Unwin, who also designed Ozone Cottage in nearby Pembury Road, was close to the Victorian developers of the area and owners of the railway line, Lord Brassey and his sons. It could be speculated that Unwin was inspired by the layout of Ditton Court Road for his own designs published in the seminal 1909 book ‘Town Planning in Practice’. If you look left you will see some of the original holly bushes remain, set at three foot intervals. These would have been chosen for the ease in sculpting and maintaining.


Turn right and walk up Ditton Court Road until you reach a magnificent brick building with small windows. This would have been built by local craftsmen and inspired by designers such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh. It is an incredible piece of architecture.
This brings you to the end of the tour and you may wish to refresh yourself at the Hamlet Court pub or try the superb coffee and homemade cake at Frank & Luna’s on Canewdon Road.
M G Boulter 2021.

Clifftown is a town of the edge, both in its physical geography and its mentality. A friend of mine once, in mock disdain, stated that no-one wanted to live or go to Southend because it was so out of the way. To be fair, in relation to the central bout of the country served by the A1 and various M roads, Southend is rightly on the edge. I felt this myself once very intensely when I walked down into the old town of Leigh-on-Sea the Monday after a hectic weekend in June when the Leigh Folk Festival had been in full swing. That Sunday the quays had been jammed with punters, drunkards and fun. On the Monday the road was bare, the estuary calm and standing on the edge of Bell Wharf I felt it was the last bastion of land before the rest of the world. The town had returned to its natural state.
Lonesomeness (not loneliness) seeps through this town and most likely a lot of provincial towns, seaside or otherwise. M John Harrison described seaside towns as ‘suicide towns’, not in the barest context of people taking their own lives but a slowing down of life, a calmness and routine, living by the sea and its timeless cycle of tide and time you are almost giving up the idea of motion and progression.
It is then, for me at least, a revelation when the wider world peeps in. This is no more apparent in Southend than in the national figures who have visited. Where a flash performance by say The Beatles or Chuck Berry can be boasted by any middling town from 1900 to the 1970s, the stories of Laurel & Hardy, Harry Houdini and Neil Young had an exchange. They did not just visit and perform as they would anywhere, they engaged and left a trail. In a romantic way you could say Southend effected them as much as they did the town.
I was lucky in this episode to find people who were experts in the subjects of my research. Roger Robinson and Stuart Burrell both had encyclopaedic knowledge of Laurel & Hardy and Houdini respectively. Neil Young was a lot harder to track down of course. I had originally read about his visit in Graham Nash’s autobiography ‘Weird Tales’. A friend of mine is a huge Neil Young fan to the extent he has been known to follow him across the world on tour. This friend knew and had contact with Neil Young’s friend, James Mazzeo, who is an artist who drew the zany front cover of Young’s Zuma record (my personal favourite of Neil’s). It was from James Mazzeo (via my friend) that I learnt more about the detail of Neil Young’s visit to the town and the Southend Airport story. If you haven’t listened to the episode I’ll briefly summarise here: Neil Young bought a 1930s Rolls Royce from the proceeds of his Wembley Stadium show with Crosby, Still and Nash. Young, Nash and some others (included Mazzeo) had the idea to drive the car across the Sahara Desert. The only airport to ship freight out to the continent was Southend. Supposedly the customs officer at Southend needed proof of personal finance in order to freight the car out, to which Neil responded by taking large wads of cash out of a bag and packing up on the desk. The officer quickly clarified that was proof enough.
The episode is not about celebrities. These people embody collectively the cinematic history, the birth of modern performance magic and arguably some of the greatest songs of the twentieth century. The episode is about how Clifftown, on the very edge, was brought into the deeper, bigger and worldlier stream of life. This in turn shows that even the lonesomest place is connected to the very essence of human endeavour. What it is about is an unremarkable town having a place, having a dialogue with the past and the future, knowing its place quietly in the undercurrent.
I am sitting in my flat which is where I have spent the majority of my time this past year following the outbreak of Covid-19 and it was an item in my flat that was the inspiration for the piece I am going to read for you now.
This is my oak apple. It forms when a gull wasp injects its larvae into a developing flower bud on the branch of an oak tree. The larvae’s secretions as they hungrily feed on the bud from the inside make the hard shell.

This particular oak apple sits on a window sill in the back room of my flat alongside a piece of the Berlin Wall my grandfather was given by a German colleague in the late eighties and a small soapstone statue of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, which I bought in the crypt gift shop of Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow when whiling away a summer afternoon in the city some years ago.
During the lockdown of early 2020 this oak apple caught my gaze every day as I sat at my desk desperately writing lyrics, songs, text, anything to show to this topsy turvy world that I could still be productive despite its best efforts to confine me to my rooms.
The oak apple is small and shiny like a musket ball you might dig up in some unremarkable field in the Midlands where men once died for ideas you can’t quite grasp today. I recall the summer’s day I came across this oak apple. I was thirteen and on a picnic with my mother. A horse softly rubbed against a wire fence nearby, a blinded horse, its eyes completely bandaged by a white cloth. We were sitting under an oak tree in the grounds of Hadleigh Castle, a ruin sitting on high ground overlooking the sweep of the Thames Estuary, the Nore and the sea reach where any ship heading east along its strait is not far from the English Channel and the rest of the world.
I can’t remember much more of that day other than I was happy enough to want to memorise it, capture its essence through artefact; something ephemeral to remember an ephemeral day by. The oak apple lodged in the dusty dry earth amongst the exposed roots of the tree fitted nicely.
It sat quiet in my coat pocket throughout the next twenty years of my life before being brought to the light of day again when I moved to my flat and placed it on the window sill, the finer points of the memory lost except for that blinded horse and the happiness.
I still visit Hadleigh Castle where the wasps made the oak apple all those years ago. The castle was once the pride of Hubert de Burgh Justiciar for Henry III, passing through Ebulo of Geneva’s hands when Hubert momentarily fell from favour and ending up centuries later as a gift from Henry VIII to his first queen Katherine of Aragon. A stag’s skull was found buried near one of the hearths in Victorian times, John Constable sketched then painted the remaining rounded tower in the early nineteenth century, the original hanging in a room somewhere in Connecticut, a room now darkened and left silent by the pandemic.
Hadleigh Castle is largely ruins now good for little climbing feet or illicit teenage smokes. A school friend often told me he would go there for devil worships but I suspect it was more swigging from beer cans and listening to Metallica on a Sanyo tape machine. He works in IT now. The stones of the once proud towers, save for one, have fallen along with the land towards the river, the stonework reappropriated by locals of times past for new buildings, the immediate area a palimpsest made from stone.
That remaining tower of Hadleigh Castle looks out onto a stretch of the Thames Estuary where the seventeen century ship The London lies sleeping under a constant tide. Sunk during an accidental explosion in 1665 its pinnacle of service was escorting King Charles II back into London from exile in 1660. King Charles’ restoration to the throne was commemorated on 29th May and was known as Oak Apple Day on account of him evading a parliamentary army in Shropshire during his escape by concealing himself high above the heads of the soldiers in an oak tree.

I think my thirteen year old self would be amazed that this little oak apple survived my teens and twenties, kept me company through salad days, drought years the golden epochs of summer months and Christmas cheer. This oak apple serves more to me now than it did then, it is not just a simple reminder of a happy day with my mum but now, entering my fourth decade, it reminds me that we ourselves are ephemeral, we are merely here a moment and then gone. But this is not a sad lesson, perhaps we should think of it more as a cycle of things discovered, lost and discovered again. King Charles in his oak apple tree, escorted by a ship now drowned off the coast of Essex, overlooked by a castle where I discovered my own Oak Apple Day. Discovered, lost, discovered again.
I didn’t set out to make a grand survey of Southend-on-Sea when I started the Clifftown Podcast, it was simply a chance to tell some stories, local knowledge and talking points, which had crossed my path so many times growing up in the town and had inspired me as a song writer. As I close the series (for now) with this tenth episode it has played on my mind a lot about what I was doing, why I was doing it and how it had turned out. I steered very little the way the episodes flowed, I followed chance a lot of the time and let things reveal themselves.
I was really pleased Andrew Moore agreed to join me on my walk along the Broomway. He is a fantastic musician and songwriter. His comments about the ancient paths leading out to the Broomway, which were little more than wooden markers either standing crooked in the mud or laying down flat like some primeval railroad, seemed such a perfect encapsulation of the whole intent of the podcast that I put it in the episode. His observation was that most things in this town change and it’s almost impossible to memorialise it all, especially as most of what we experience is trivial or ‘every day’ in the historical sense.
Andrew marvelled at how a basic wooden structure which was pummelled by the tide twice a day for decades, if not centuries, could remain as a testament to ordinary activity, ordinary lives. Similarly ordinary is the more complex endeavours of the 1960s ring road by the town centre with its associated high rise flats - this soon would be lost to major redevelopment but unlike the wooden paths in Wakering, this urban landscape will be erased within months and beyond living memory, it will largely be forgotten.
This resonated with me and brought to mind a myriad of instances throughout the making of this podcast where I had found glimpses of a Southend past which had been forgotten and not deemed relevant anymore. De-Camden island in the bonus episode for this month is a great example of where a community and human activity thrived - it meant something to someone long ago - but now you can barely find a trace. Likewise, I think of the green orchards and magical country lanes of Hamlet Court Road described by Harriet Jay, which existed barely over a hundred years ago (Episode 4) or the theatres where Houdini and countless others entertained the population of this town (Episode 5), the modern day venues where I have enjoyed friendship and music, the crux of a life experience, are already disappearing and becoming something new. Is my past being collectively forgotten as we speak?
The reason for these histories not being given their space, their recognition, is in my view simply that they don’t sit within that great pantheon of national history. Also, they can’t be used by the local governments to entice community pride or incentivise tourism - what is there to show people? The Prittlewell Prince has his bling but a seventeenth century shoe? For the most, these are ordinary events, experiences, objects which meant something to someone some time but seemingly hold no bearing on how modern Southend goes about its business today.
For me this is not so. To understand how medieval people moved between the islands here, how Victorians consumed entertainment, how pub rock poked through into the pop charts, why a Lithuanian strong man chose to spend his last days here or the role of rural magic and cunning men, this all adds up to what the town is today and what it has chosen to cherish and what it has chosen to leave behind.
Southend is an ordinary place like anywhere is ordinary to the people who live it day in day out. It’s as fascinating and inspiring as you want it to be and this podcast, I hope, offers you that option to open the door to it. The Clifftown Podcast is a primer into ordinary becoming extraordinary - you can choose whether it’s important to you, whether it’s interesting or relevant to how you wish to live in the ordinary place where you live.