Autograph to Lynda Leventon from Tony Hancock, who stayed at the Bay Hotel in Pevensey Bay.
The daughter of the landlord of the Bay Hotel in Pevensey Bay from 1952-1971, Lynda Leventon, has written to us today (9 August) to say that she has discovered a series of personal autographs and dedications to her that were signed by famous people who stayed at the Bay Hotel in the 1950s and 1960s.
Her mother and father, Muriel and Stan Love, were landlords to the Bay Hotel from 1952-1971. As a child, Lynda has many happy memories of her time at the hotel.
She has already scanned the guest register of the Bay Hotel in the 1950s-1960s, which is cherished by her family, to offer us a list of names of famous people who stayed at the hotel. We published parts of the guest register in 2018.
In her message to Bay Life today Lynda says,”forgot about this when I e-mailed you signatures from The Bay Hotel register..:
Each of the personal autographs dedicated to Lynda includes figures from the worlds of music, comedy, radio, TV and national public life. We will publish each of the autographs over the next few weeks.
We begin with the lad himself, Tony Hancock, a seminal figure in the history of radio and TV comedy in this country in the 195s and 1960s.
Working with scripts from Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, Hancock’s Half Hour lasted for seven years and over a hundred episodes in its radio form, and, from 1956, ran concurrently with an equally successful BBC television series with the same name.
The show starred Hancock as “Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock”, living in the shabby “23 Railway Cuttings” in East Cheam.
During the run of his BBC radio and television series, Hancock became an enormous star in Britain. Wiki records that “Like few others, he was able to clear the streets while families gathered together to listen to the eagerly awaited episodes”.
Tony Hancock is regarded as one of the most important comedy figures on British Radio and TV in the twentieth century.
The Bay Hotel in Pevensey Bay is currently undergoing major renovation, which will see the hotel returned to the former glory of 1898 when the establishment was founded here in what came to be known at the time as a ‘health resort’.
The hotel attracted all new kinds of people in what came to be a booming industry for local seaside locations across the country at the start of the Edwardian era.
