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Pease Pottage
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Famous Pease Pottage

Anthony Burgess

In the third of Anthony Burgess’s Enderby novels, The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby’s End, published in 1974, we find the obscure British poet, F. X. Enderby, at an American university, giving a lecture on minor Elizabethan dramatists. Forgetting what he had intended to say, he invents the character of Gervase Whitelady, along with a full biography, which includes the mention of Pease Pottage as Whitelady’s birthplace.

Doctor Who

In the well-known BBC TV series, Doctor Who, one of the doctor’s assistants came from Pease Pottage. The character was called Melanie Bush, she was played by Bonnie Langford, and she (the character, not the actor) lived at 36 Downview Crescent. There has never been a Downview Crescent in Pease Pottage, although without access to a time travel machine we cannot rule out the possibility of one in the future.

For a worryingly complete biography of the Melanie Bush character, see this Doctor Who fan’s website: https://www.tetrap.com/drwho/mel/. There are in fact a number of characters in Doctor Who who lived in Pease Pottage, according to the tardis.fandom.com wiki:

Melanie Bush first appeared in the series The Trial of a Time Lord, in November 1986. For information about this series and the making of it, see:

An updated version of an episode from this series in audio form, ‘The Wrong Doctors’, was released on CD in January 2013. Apparently Pease Pottage is being terrorised by an iguanodon, and the Mel Bush character is involved with the village’s amateur dramatics society. As it happens, the first iguanodon fossil was discovered about seven miles away in Whitemans Green, near Cuckfield, so it is quite possible that the animal roamed in what was to become, about 125 million years later, Pease Pottage. No evidence has yet been discovered of an amateur dramatics society in Pease Pottage.

Genevieve; Kenneth More; Max Faulkner; Douglas Bader

Pease Pottage is mentioned fleetingly in the 1953 film Genevieve, which is set during the annual London to Brighton Veteran Car Run that passes through the village. The film does not appear to include any actual footage of Pease Pottage; most of the rural location filming was done within a few miles of Pinewood Studios, Buckinghamshire.

One item of trivia not mentioned on the Internet Movie Database page for Genevieve is that the actor, Kenneth More, whose character Ambrose Claverhouse drove through the village twice, visited Pease Pottage himself about 20 years after making the film, to take part in a pro-celebrity golf event at the opening of Cottesmore Golf Club. The event also featured Max Faulkner, the winner of the Open Championship in 1951, and Douglas Bader, the World War Two fighter pilot whom More had played in the film Reach for the Sky three years after Genevieve.

The film Genevieve was named after one of the two veteran cars that starred in the film: a 1904 Darracq which has had an interesting history.

William Cobbett

Pease Pottage is referred to, though not by name, in Rural Rides by the writer and political reformer, William Cobbett, who visited the area in the early 1820s:

… CRAWLEY … go two miles along the road … to Brighton; then you turn to the right [at Pease Pottage] and go over six of the worst miles in England … The first two of these miserable miles go though the estate of Lord ERSKINE. It was a bare heath here and there, in the better parts of it, some scrubby birch. It has been, in part, planted with fir-trees, which are as ugly as the heath was; and, in short, it is a most villanous track.

The land occupied by Lord Erskine’s estate now includes Cottesmore school and golf club, as well as Buchan Country Park, which is actually very pleasant and not at all villanous.

Hilaire Belloc

Belloc’s The Four Men: A Farrago (1911) is a rambling account of a fictional five-day journey through Sussex by four characters: Grizzlebeard; a sailor; a poet; and Belloc himself. The third day of their journey takes them from St. Leonard’s Forest to Pease Pottage:

“You know all this?” said Grizzlebeard to me curiously, “then can you tell me why all these woods are called St. Leonard’s Forest?”

Myself. “Why, certainly; they are called St. Leonard’s Forest after St. Leonard.”

The Poet. “Are you so sure?”

Myself. “Without a doubt! For it is certain that St. Leonard lived here, and had a little hermitage in the days when poor men might go where they willed. And this hermitage was in that place to which I shall presently take you, from which it is possible to worship at once both our County, and God who made it.”

Saying which I took them along the side road which starts from Pease Pottage (and in those days the old inn was there), but before doing so I asked them severally whether they had any curse on them which forbade them to drink ale of a morning.

This all three of them denied, so we went into the Swan (which in those days I say again was the old inn), and we drank ale, as St. Leonard himself was used to do, round about nine or ten o’clock of an autumn morning. For he was born in these parts, and never went out of the County except once to Germany, when he would convert the heathen there; of whom, returning, he said that if it should please God he would rather be off to hell to convert devils, but that anyhow he was tired of wandering, and there-upon set up his hermitage in the place to which I was now leading my companions.

For when we had gone about a mile by the road I knew, we came to that place where the wood upon the left ends sharply upon that height and suddenly beneath one’s feet the whole County lies revealed.

There, a day’s march away to the south, stood the rank of the Downs.

(Hilaire Belloc, The Four Men: A Farrago, pp.78-80)

Some Like it Hot

Some Like It Hot, the 1959 film starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, has a tenuous link to Pease Pottage.

The film doesn’t refer to Pease Pottage specifically, but it does take its title from the old nursery rhyme which mentions the dish, pease pottage:

Pease pottage hot, pease pottage cold,
pease pottage in the pot, nine days old.
Some like it hot, some like it cold,
some like it in the pot, nine days old.

Some Like It Hot is a remake of Fanfaren der Liebe (‘Fanfares of Love’), a German-language film from 1951 which was filmed in Bavaria and is unlikely to have even the slightest connection to Pease Pottage.

Western Lights

The name ‘Pease Pottage’ features in the Western Lights series of fantasy and mystery novels by the polymathic Dr Jeffrey E. Barlough: veterinarian, research scientist, painter and writer.

This fictional Pease Pottage is located not in the south of England but on the west coast of north America. It was defined in the author’s website as a

Remote village on the high moorland in Broadshire. It was outside the Pied Horse here that Harry Banister came to meet Professor Tiggs and his party.

Woodhurst

Woodhurst is an impressive country house a few hundred yards south of where The Grapes public house and the old turnpike once stood. Its claim to fame is that it had reputedly once been owned by Margot Fonteyn and used by her as a dancing school. Fonteyn had a dancing school in Reigate, but evidence of any connection with Woodhurst has proved elusive.

Nevertheless, Woodhurst is an interesting building with an interesting history. During the First World War it was used as a convalescent home for wounded soldiers. Around the time of the Second World War, Woodhurst served as a base for Canadian troops and was occupied by J.W. Benson Ltd, a London-based company best known for making clocks and watches but which assisted the war effort by making instruments for aircraft, at a location out of reach of the bombs aimed at London. Between 1948 and 1970, Woodhurst became an annexe of the South London Hospital for Women and Children.

Old photographs of Woodhurst can be found at:

The main Woodhurst building fell into disrepair but was restored in 2011:

To the left, a large white building surrounded by scaffolding, and to its right a new brick building

The main building is unoccupied at the time of writing, more than a decade after its restoration. The new building on the right side of the above photograph is occupied by Ullswater Cottage Care Centre. There are some impressive photographs of the restored building and grounds in this PDF document (7.8 MB): https://propertylinkassets.estatesgazette.com/images/20220701/1-105314317.pdf.

Famous Pease Pottage?

To be honest, ever since Pease Pottage first appeared on a map in 1723, the village has had no serious connection with anything or anyone of any real importance. Very little has happened here in the last three centuries.

Queen Victoria passed through the village in 1837, and no doubt numerous celebrities and people of genuine importance have driven along the M23 or A23 and chuckled at the amusing name on the road signs. But no international treaties have been signed in Pease Pottage. No ground-breaking scientific discoveries have been made here. No prime ministers, popes, exiled dictators, or Nobel Prize-winners have lived here, as far as we are aware. No World Cups or other sporting trophies have been won in any of the village’s non-existent stadiums. No terrorist incidents or natural disasters have yet taken place here.

Very little happens in Pease Pottage. That’s why the majority of the items on this page are to do with works of fiction.