Photo Credit: Carol Mills
A few yards into Southfields Road on the left-hand side, beside the street name sign, is a small metal plate mounted at the base of the wall embossed with BCS. This plate marks the spot where the licensed bath chairmen would have plied for hire.
George Meek – A Bath Chairman
George Meek (1868–1921) was a kind of real life, Eastbourne version of Frank Owen, the working-class hero of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists written by Robert Tressell from 1906 to 1910 in Hastings, just 19 miles along the coast east of Eastbourne. George Meek was a key figure in encouraging socialist ideas in the town. He was one of these bath chairmen in our town, a poorly paid, insecure job, reliant on the tourist trade and good weather. He lived on the edge of poverty throughout his life. His two younger brothers, Joe and Arthur, were temporarily sent to the workhouse at times when his mother had difficulty care for them due to poverty. We will be returning to life as a bath chairman later in the walk.
During Meek’s lifetime, there were very few accounts of working-class life in Britain written by working class people. There were a number of factual surveys (including, of course, Engels’ Condition of the Working Class in Britain, published in 1845 There were also several personal accounts, e.g. Robert Tressell’s novel, mentioned above, and Jack London’s People of the Abyss. Meek was encouraged and supported to write about his own experience under the mentorship of H.G. Wells, whom he had met during one of his “walk abouts” looking for work. Meek’s autobiography1 was a great achievement considering he only received brief and inconsistent schooling. He was alone amongst all these writers in that he was from a working-class background and remained in poor circumstances throughout his life.
This extract gives a flavour of what life was like for a bath-chair man:
“If you would know the horror of black despair, go out with a bath chair day after day, with the chair-owner or landlord worrying you for rent, food needed at home, and get nothing. Stare till your eyes ache; pray with aching heart to a God whom you ultimately curse for his deafness. And this not for a few weeks, but year after year.”
George Meek, quoted by Bill Coxall and Clive Griggs in their biography of him.
If you were to walk to the end of Southlands Road and on up the hill along The Goffs and ahead onto Church Street, you would see a part of an old wall on the left where Vicarage Road and Letheren Place meet Church Street. This is the last remains of the Workhouse. You may be interested in the Eastbourne Society ‘s Heritage Walk of this area (there are a total of nine Eastbourne walks in the series.