6th July 2014
UPDATE ON VILLAGE GREEN
The Friends of Speckled Wood Trust Chairman has been working with a leading historian to obtain the correct providence of the Village Green in Ore.
Pictured left Thomas Alderman and his wife Mary (Minnie)
On the 6 July 1923 Hastings
Council considered an “Offer of Land at Old London Road as an Open Space”. The offer
was made through Thorpe Meadows and Pearson, Havelock Road Hastings. It said that the owner of the piece of land
on the north side of Old London
Road adjoining the building formerly known as the Princess Cinema (Now the
Salvation Army) was prepared to offer the land as a free gift. It was
conditional on paying a fair and reasonable proportion for making up and
maintaining the 10ft roadway; to leave a passage or space not less than 3 feet
wide as a means of communication of adjacent properties and the council was
required to ‘preserve the land for ever as an open space’ and not do, or suffer
to be done, anything thereon which might become a nuisance or annoyance to the
neighbourhood. The best thanks of the Council was tendered to the owner for his
gift.
The following year the Committee,
at their meeting held on the 7th March 1924 considered a second
offer again made through Thorpe Meadows and Pearson who intimated that their
client, who gave the piece of land at Old London Road Ore to be used as an open
space, is prepared to offer a further portion of land at the rear of the before
mentioned piece, also to be used as an open space for the benefit of the
inhabitants of the District, and otherwise similar terms which appertained to
the previous gift.
The Town Clerk accidentally revealed
his name in a later report to the council that the benefactor was Thomas Mason.
Both he and later his daughter gave similar gifts anonymously to other towns in
the southeast. He was born 13 Jan 1859 in Southwark as Thomas Alexander Bear and inherited Bear and Sons
an international tobacco company, which later became part of the British
American Tobacco Co. He was an extremely wealthy and generous man and it
is not clear what his connection with Ore
was, or indeed why he changed his name when he was 29. Thomas
died in 1949, not that far away, at
The Finches, Wittersham, Kent were he spent his last years
with his son Eric.
Brian Lawes July 2014
The Trust want to thank everyone who came and joined this event and everyone who made it possible.
The Friends of Speckled Wood have been working with the Speckled Wood site to add more taxon and species to its database on iRecord. The iRecord site is run as part of the Sussex Wildlife Trust and feeds information direct into their own data resources. The Species now on this database now stand at 185 and the Trust is due to break 200 soon. The Trust Chairman has said that this is a major accomplishment for a small group of Volunteers. The Trust want the people to Rise up and demand their woodland is not turned into another useless housing project. The Public has been aware of the Rocklands Caravan site and have been asked why Speckled Wood. The fact is that the Speckled Wood site is just as important sharing much of the same wildlife and potential.
