IMAGE CREDIT: From the album: Lynda Leventon, Bay Hotel 1954-1971
Stan and Muriel Love, centre, Lynda (now Leventon)
Local researchers looking at the history of radio comedy in Pevensey Bay, are anticipating with excitement the next stage in their investigations
They are waiting to see the roll call of famous names that were written into the guest book of the Bay Hotel.
Links between Pevensey Bay and the Goon Show are relatively well known. The famous fifties radio show is littered with references to Pevensey Bay and one episode is even titled the Pevensey Bay Disaster.
Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan were both known to be regular visitors to Pevensey Bay in the fifties.
Recently, the discovery that Tony Hancock was also here and stayed at the Bay Hotel in the fifties, has excited more interest. Of particular interest was the story of a long lost script, written for Tony Hancock by scriptwriter for the Goons, Larry Stephens in 1952.
Julie Warren, who is cousin to Larry Stephens, is writing a book about his life titled Glarnies, Green Berets & Goons: The Life and Legacy of Larry Stephens.
What Julie Warren discovered in the script with the location setting bore an uncanny resemblance to elements of Pevensey Bay.
An extract of her new book about the Goons writer, Larry Stephens, is to be published in the next edition of the Pevensey Bay Journal.
In a blogpost to accompany the book she says “In July 1952, Larry Stephens approached BBC Producer, Peter Eton, with a suggestion: he had come up with an idea for a comedy series, entitled Vacant Lot, to star Tony Hancock as a blundering and pompous auctioneer and estate agent, in a fictional seaside town called Churdley Bay.
“I have always wondered if Churdley Bay was based on anywhere in particular. Hancock biographers mention Eton taking Larry and Tony on a recce to Seaford and that Vacant Lot’s setting was therefore this Sussex coastal town but I have been unable to find any evidence of such a trip.
“I did, however, come across a letter written by Larry to Eton in which he mentions borrowing a guide book and describes the section on Seaford as one of the funniest things he has ever read. No doubt elements from the guide book made it into Vacant Lot but a recent announcement may have thrown up another strong contender for Churdley Bay’s location.
“A pilot arts and literature festival is taking place at Pevensey Bay during the summer of 2018. A ‘Memories from the 1950s’ exhibition will be held at the Bay Hotel and the hotel’s registers from those years will be put on display. Some notable guests are known to have stayed there, among them Tony Hancock;
“Churdley Bay and Pevensey Bay certainly share some features: both have a Martello tower and a shingle beach, for example. What’s more, a former owner of the Royal Hotel in the fictional Churdley Bay is called Mr Pevensey”.
The anticipation is mounting in Pevensey Bay amongst organisers of the pilot festival. Will more famous people be discovered from the annals of radio comedy in this country among the guests of the Bay Hotel?
In particular, will the name Larry Stephens appear, even perhaps sitting alongside the name of Tony Hancock in the guest register?
If this were to be the case, the weight of evidence emerging would give credence to the possibility that ‘Vacant Lot’ was partly planned as an idea here in Pevensey Bay.
The script, as Julie Warren points out, has been described by the BBC as the first time that the term ‘situation comedy’ was employed to promote a programme in the country as part of a broadcast promotion..
Is there already enough evidence to suggest that Pevensey Bay can boldly screw a plaque to the wall that says “PEVENSEY BAY: A Proud Part of the Birth of Situation Comedy in this Country”?
Talking to Bay Life (23 March), Lynda Leventon whose mother and father, Stan and Muriel Love, were the landlords of the Bay Hotel between 1954 and 1974, told us that ‘the guest register for the Bay Hotel exists from 1920, and the binding has been restored at some cost as a book by my sister on behalf of the family”.
Organisers of the pilot Pevensey arts and literature festival in the summer are particularly interested in the period 1950-59 and who might be on the guest register of the Bay Hotel.
Photographs of the Bay Hotel register between 1950-59 are to be published by Bay Life next week.
Will this precious hotel guest record of the life and times of the Bay Hotel in the 1950s reveal another undiscovered aspect of the history of radio comedy in this country?
A photographic record of the guest register of the Bay Hotel between 1950-59 is being undertaken on Tuesday 27 March. We hope to be in a position to publish the record of the pages of the register on Wednesday March 28.
Bay Life would like to thank Lynda Leventon and her family for all their help in piecing together this remarkable story about the place of Pevensey Bay in the story of the birth of situation comedy in this country.
