Harry’s Ramblings My Shame
by Harry Pope Have you ever done something that years later you say to yourself ‘wish I’d never done that?’ Well, there’s not much regret in my life, but...
Harry’s Ramblings Love Me Tender
by Harry Pope My wife thinks I can’t sing. She is right, but just sometimes I can hold a note sufficiently long to be able to entertain others as...
Harry’s Ramblings; Eastbourne Bombing in WW2
by Harry Pope 11,475 houses in Eastbourne during WW2 had some kind of damage from German bombing. This is from a town that had a population in 1939 of...
Harry’s Ramblings Television notoriety
by Harry Pope I have had three stabs at television fame, two almost successful, the third an abject failure. The first started with an advert in the London Evening...
Harry’s Ramblings Seafront Refreshment
by Harry Pope Eastbourne’s seafront is unique in the whole of the UK. Why? Because no commercial outlets are allowed on the seafront, due to it being owned since...
Harry’s Ramblings Fleeting Celebrities
by Harry Pope Mary Berry smiled at me. Just the once, mind you, but it was memorable. At the time I had no idea who she was, it was...
Harry’s Ramblings Cricket disaster
by Harry Pope When I was a lad in the 1950s, Sir Harry Secombe lived, like me, in Cheam. This is a suburb of Sutton on the northern border...
Harry’s Ramblings Facebook Forum
by Harry Pope I like Facebook, find it chatty and accessible, Twitter tends to be a little bit silly, and Linkedin is for professionals wanting to keep in contact....
Harry’s Ramblings My Oscar for Extra of the Year, by Harry Pope
by Harry Pope October 2010 marks the 10th anniversary of my starring role in the re-make of the Graham Greene novel; Brighton Rock. Wherever you look, I am popping...
Harry’s Ramblings. Hastings Car Parking and Other Pastimes, by Harry Pope
A lovely September day was the ideal time to spend in Hastings by the sea. We live in Eastbourne, which is only twenty miles away, but the car journey...
Eastbourne- the most bombed town on the South coast!
Eastbourne is mid-way between Brighton and Hastings, and during WW2 was initially of great strategic importance to the German high command. Sunday July 7th 1940 was the date of...
Harry’s Ramblings Queens Gardens Dumping Ground
by Harry Pope Have you ever had a settee dumped on the pavement outside your flat? We have. It happened late one Sunday afternoon a couple of years or...
Harry’s Ramblings What Are You Going To Dig Up Today
by Harry Pope For years people have been unearthing strange items in their back gardens. Just recently a man in West Yorkshire was digging in his back garden. The...
Harry’s Ramblings. Back Gardens
by Harry Pope When I was ten my back garden had a WW2 air raid shelter. We lived in a place called Ewell, in Surrey, not far from Epsom...
Harry’s Ramblings Victoria Place then and now
by Harry Pope Eastbourne before 1849 was a sleepy place with under 2,000 inhabitants, but then the railway came, and over the next thirty years it all changed. A...
Harry’s Ramblings The Mystery of Flight.
Now that there are fewer planes in the sky, it has made me ask the question, how do planes stay up there in that great expanse of sky. Yes,...
Harry’s Ramblings Buzz Orf, I’m a Bee
by Harry Pope Researchers have been listening to bees. Words I never thought I would see in print, let alone write them, but those at Nottingham Trent University sat...
Harry’s Ramblings. Tickets for my Hero
by Harry Pope When I was a lad I was a junior marshal for the British Automobile Racing Club. That meant that I went round to various circuits, mainly...
Harry’s Ramblings Tarte Tatin, Easy Peasy
My wife of 47 years went out for the day yesterday, so I said to her ‘don’t worry about dinner tonight, my love, I will cook it. Just leave...
Harry’s Ramblings. Strange Words
by Harry Pope I thought I would share these with you. The space between your eyebrows is called a gabella The way it smells after the rain is called...
Harry’s Ramblings Don’t buy that Limousine
by Harry Pope When I entered the funeral profession in 1977, the first vehicle I was allocated was a 1966 Austin Princess limousine. I hated that car, it was...
Harry’s Ramblings. Seaside Riots
by Harry Pope The Salvation Army responsible for riots in sedate south coast of England? Surely not, but yes, it did occur, against a background of temperance. In 1880...
Harry’s Ramblings What’s It Worth
by Harry Pope A couple of years ago a local Eastbourne lady was going to give items to a charity shop. Her friend said ‘try the auction instead.’ They...
Harry’s Ramblings Sacked from my Local Paper
by Harry Pope Early in 1965 I landed my dream job. Junior reporter on my local paper. I was 17, had passed ‘O’ level English Language and English Literature,...
Harry’s Ramblings Harry’s Ghost
by Harry Pope In 2004 we owned a mid-terraced three storey house in Eastbourne, on the Sussex coast. It had been a B&B since being built in 1892, but...
Harry’s Ramblings How Close Is The Moon
by Harry Pope We are still here, so the asteroid that hurtled past the earth recently far faster than I can possibly comprehend has missed us. Again. But it...
Harry’s Ramblings. Is There Anybody There?
by Harry Pope Recently there has been some publicity about strange radio wave signals arriving on earth that originate from………who knows where. For the last couple of hundred years...
Harry’s Ramblings. Soap Cameos
by Harry Pope Our future King, sipping what looks like whisky, in a television pub? Really, did we actually see that happen. Yup, it was in December 2000 when...
Harry’s Ramblings, Sherlock Holmes came to Eastbourne
by Harry Pope I had no idea of the number of famous people who have lived in Eastbourne, but there were a lot of them. Sherlock Holmes lived here....
Harry’s Ramblings. Cream On Top
by Harry Pope I don’t know about you, but when I eat a scone with cream and jam, I always place the jam first, then cream on top. This...
Harry’s Ramblings. How’s Your Bad Back
by Harry Pope I can’t understand why we have an obsession with dusting. If you dust, then there’s only going to be some more there tomorrow. I suppose it...
Harry’s Ramblings I Failed the Eleven Plus
by Harry Pope I was the school dunce. Education was lost on my immature brain, and in 1959 I was allocated a place at the Lord Howard of Effingham...
Harry’s Ramblings My Dad, the Unsung War Hero
by Harry Pope It wasn’t until he had had died in 1997 that I came to appreciate just what my dad had done during WW2. He didn’t talk about...
Harry’s Ramblings Pier Entertainment
by Harry Pope When Eastbourne’s pier was built in 1870, it was just a promenade out to sea, with no buildings. Unfortunately, the pier suffered severe damage on 1st...
Harry’s Ramblings; Bored? Look up a Ship
If you are really bored, Google in ‘shipping in the channel’. On the screen when you scroll down through the inevitable adverts is all about every ship in the...
Harry’s Ramblings Buying an Airplane
In the late 1980s I was working for the premier London funeral company in their overseas office. This meant that I was arranging repatriations to all over the world....
Harry’s Ramblings; web cameras
by Harry Pope There might be a travel ban, but you can still visit places via your computer. So far recently I have been to Venice, Vegas, Paris, and...
Harry’s Ramblings Burning the caravan
I experienced something in my first year in the funeral profession that I have never seen since, even though I am sure it must have occurred. It concerns...
Harry’s Ramblings Funeral Information
by Harry Pope I am writing this on Wednesday morning, 25th March, so by the time you read the situation may have changed, but I don’t think it will...
Harry’s Ramblings; Conspiracy Virus
by Harry Pope I like conspiracy theories, they are so easy to come up with, and impossible to disprove, so this article is perhaps based on some facts, but...