A former railway platelayer, Ernest grew the plants and tended the displays at Lewes station from around 1911. Ernest was born in Lewes in 1870. He’d worked as a platelayer and was a gardener by the...

Special train for Newhaven dockworkers during the First World War It ran daily from Brighton, picking up at Lewes. It was known locally as the Lousy Lou. By Jenny Flood and Keith Grieves for Newhaven ...

PASTRY CHEF ON NEWHAVEN-DIEPPE FERRIES Ho Chi Minh reminisced that in 1913 he worked as a pastry cook on the Newhaven–Dieppe ferry. An unlikely pastry chef from the French colony of Vietnam (or Fren...

  6 JUNE – 31 JULY 1944 89 troop trains, 112 ammunition trains arrived at Newhaven for transportation to France During World War II after almost 6 years of war with Germany, and 4 years sin...

FIRST GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY On 15 May 1855 gold bars and coins were stolen from a London-Paris train, in part when approaching Redhill. Two of the perpetrators were sentenced to 14 years penal transport...

ALICE MAUD STONE 1899-1943 Dormansland resident TICKET OFFICE CLERK During WWI Alice was an engineer’s forewoman in Lingfield. She was killed in 1943 when a bomb was dropped on a cinema in East Grin...

EDWIN MIGHELL 1883-1937 Porter at Oxted Station SUFFRAGIST BOMB IN STATION TOILET A day after suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst was jailed in 1913 Edwin found an improvised bomb had gone off overnight Bo...

A. A. MILNE 1882-1956 Lived and wrote in Hartfield AUTHOR OF WINNIE-THE-POOH Happy childhood holidays in Sussex began on the train. As a grown-up he bought a house here and devised Poohsticks with his...

FREDERICK HUNT 1901-1977 SIGNALMAN & PORTER AT UCKFIELD The son of an Eastbourne dustman born in 1901, Frederick was working as a barman at the King’s Arms Hotel on Seaside, Eastbourne in 1921 b...