Update on Village Green

6th July 2014
UPDATE ON VILLAGE GREEN

The Friends of Speckled Wood Trust Chairman has been working with a leading historian to obtain the correct providence of the Village Green in Ore.

Pictured left Thomas Alderman and his wife Mary (Minnie)

On the 6 July 1923 Hastings Council considered an “Offer of Land at Old London Road as an Open Space”. The offer was made through Thorpe Meadows and Pearson, Havelock Road Hastings.  It said that the owner of the piece of land on the north side of Old London Road adjoining the building formerly known as the Princess Cinema (Now the Salvation Army) was prepared to offer the land as a free gift. It was conditional on paying a fair and reasonable proportion for making up and maintaining the 10ft roadway; to leave a passage or space not less than 3 feet wide as a means of communication of adjacent properties and the council was required to ‘preserve the land for ever as an open space’ and not do, or suffer to be done, anything thereon which might become a nuisance or annoyance to the neighbourhood. The best thanks of the Council was tendered to the owner for his gift.

The following year the Committee, at their meeting held on the 7^th March 1924 considered a second offer again made through Thorpe Meadows and Pearson who intimated that their client, who gave the piece of land at Old London Road Ore to be used as an open space, is prepared to offer a further portion of land at the rear of the before mentioned piece, also to be used as an open space for the benefit of the inhabitants of the District, and otherwise similar terms which appertained to the previous gift.

The Town Clerk accidentally revealed his name in a later report to the council that the benefactor was Thomas Mason. Both he and later his daughter gave similar gifts anonymously to other towns in the southeast. He was born 13 Jan 1859 in Southwark as Thomas Alexander Bear and inherited Bear and Sons an international tobacco company, which later became part of the British American Tobacco Co. He was an extremely wealthy and generous man and it is not clear what his connection with Ore was, or indeed why he changed his name when he was 29. Thomas died in 1949, not that far away, at The Finches, Wittersham, Kent were he spent his last years with his son Eric.

Brian Lawes July 2014