Bicycling twin sisters ignored their critics

Young Clara and Nelly were destined to make their mark on the locality.

Widowed early in life, Mrs Hall was a formidable lady. She bought the twins bicycles when they were in their teens.

The good folks in nearby Groombridge regarded this with some misgiving.

As far as they were concerned, it was most unladylike and made no bones about telling Mrs Hall what they thought.

In response, the angry widow wrote in her diary: 'If MY children prefer to ride to heaven on their bicycles instead of making the journey on foot, that is THEIR affair.'

Writing 60 years later in the January, 1954 Sussex County Magazine, Nelly's grandson, Gordon Langley Hall, relates that, in retaliation to the criticism, Mrs Hall called in the dressmaker and together they designed special riding habits for the girls.

The skirts reached to the girls' feet. Accessories included boater hats, white scarves and white gloves.

During the 1890s, Clara and Nelly, indifferent to the controversy they caused, were familiar figures to be seen, riding their bicycles in Groombridge and then in Cade Street, Heathfield, where the family later moved.

They thought nothing of riding their solid-tyred bicycles to Lewes and back on a summer's evening.

They had never been allowed to work for a living.

The only income they ever earned was by renting their still rare bicycles out at 6d a time in the evenings.

The twins had a fairytale ending to their spinsterhood. They married the Ticehurst brothers of Cade Street in 1901; Clara to George in the summer and Nelly to Archie in the autumn.

Two sisters married to two brothers!

The Express reported that Nelly at her marriage wore the veil that her

mother used at her wedding so many years before.

SUE and Peter Atkins, who live like Rattie on the side of the river at Lewes, want to know what has happened to a gentle elderly couple known to them only as 'the swan feeders'.

Said Sue: 'We live on the river bank nearly opposite the Pells and every day for the last 10 years we have watched this couple walk along the other side of the river, struggling through mud and undaunted by the weather, to feed the swans.

'Despite their age, they seemed to do it all the year round.

'We used to exchange friendly waves and the usual comment or two on the weather.

'Then late last summer we realised they no longer appeared on their daily walk. Who are they? What has happened to them? We really miss them.'

Sue can be contacted at River House, Church Lane, Lewes; telephone 476230.

AN old man declared his intention to eat his aged pig after it finally died.

Some time after, a friend met him and asked if he had indeed eaten the animal.

To which he replied: 'Yes, I et im. It took me a year to do it, but I et im.'

Also from Tony Wales' A Sussex Garland:

In the Sussex way, someone very dishonest was described as ' big a liar as Old Tom Pepper, and he was thrown out of Hell for lying!'