Harry’s Ramblings. Masks
by Harry Pope Here in the UK we have all become used to wearing masks in public and in shops, but what is the criteria for them to be...
Harry’s Ramblings. Cashless Society
by Harry Pope We went to Brighton marina recently, sharing a pizza on the restaurant terrace. It was delightful, sitting in the spring sunshine, and at the end I...
Eastbourne 1930 Holiday
by Harry Pope I recently bought some photos at auction, showing holiday snaps of a family visiting Eastbourne in 1930. They are a fascinating insight into the period, typically...
Harry’s Ramblings; Royal coffins
by Harry Pope After the sad news of the passing of the Duke of Edinburgh, I thought I would share some information with you. Even though the Royal Family...
Harry’s Ramblings. Dreaming
by Harry Pope I dream a lot, almost every night. For example, last night I was back in my old house, and the mother-in-law was alive. Yup, it was...
Harry’s Ramblings. Cruise News
by Harry Pope This is more of an insiders background to the current cruise market. The first section concerns Italian residents with a desire to go cruising. The MSC...
Harry’s Favourite Article of the Year. Speaking on a cruise ship
by Harry Pope This is my favourite article from 2020. This has been quite a good year for me, unlike a lot of others, and started with a 14-day...
Boxing Day travel then and now
by Harry Pope Looking through some old photos reminded me of how travel was in the 1950s. We lived in North Cheam, which is in south London, not that...
Harry’s Ramblings Paris in 1957
by Harry Pope My mum won £150 on the football pools in 1957, so treated the family to a week’s holiday in Paris. She was so proud when she...
Eastbourne’s Sad Seafront
by Harry Pope First, a bit of basic history. The area was unwanted until the early 1850s, when the railway came to the town. It is between Hastings...
What’s Up Cat App
by Harry Pope There is a new app called MeowTalk that has a specific function. It converts the noises that cats make into human comprehension. To put it simply,...
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....