In the summer of 1932, a curious advertisement appeared in the pages of the British press. ‘A Moonlight Walk!’ it announced, ‘over the South Downs to witness sunrise from Chanctonbury Ring’.
The author of the notice was S. P. B. Mais ‘of Wireless fame’. Little remembered now, he was a leading public figure of his generation. The author of over two hundred books, Mais was also a familiar voice over the airwaves. He wrote on everything from food cultivation to ecclesiastical architecture but was most renowned for travel writing in which he extolled the virtues of the English landscape and, especially, the Sussex Downs.
A passion for the Sussex Downs
Few may have written so extensively and with such enthusiasm about Sussex but Mais was an adopted son rather than a native of the county. Born in 1885, Stuart Petre Brodie Mais (Petre to his friends) grew up in the Derbyshire Peak District. Educated at Oxford, he worked first as a schoolmaster and then as a Fleet Street journalist before becoming a freelancer. He lived for a time in Hove and then between 1927 and 1932 in the knapped flint splendour of The Hall at Southwick Green.
‘The Sussex Downs will always remain for me the most sacred ground in the world,’ Mais wrote. ‘On those smooth turfed tops I shout and sing, the sea-breeze blowing through my hair and into my lungs, the larks singing hilariously, madly and gaily overhead, the wild thyme beneath my feet’. It was a passion he wanted to share.
In early 1932 the BBC commissioned Mais to make the radio series This Unknown Island. He travelled extensively across the country, reporting enticingly of the wonders of English tourist resorts. The programme made him a household name. Mais came to be known as ‘the ambassador the countryside’.
See the Sunrise
That celebrity led Mais to take out the advertisement in the national press. ‘Experience the novel thrill of watching a summer dawn from the first streaks of the full sunrise!’ he proclaimed to readers. Plans were made with the Southern Railway to transport those who took up the invitation on a specially chartered train that left Victoria Station shortly after midnight on Saturday 16 July for Steyning. From there Mais would lead the ramblers on foot to Chanctonbury Ring to witness the wonder of a new day.
The railway planned for four hundred people to lace up their walking boots for the hillside hike. Around 1300 showed up.
Why were so many willing to sacrifice the comfort of a warm bed for a torchlit ramble through the countryside? Mais had tapped into a mood among a British public seeking solace and salvation from urban lives afflicted by overcrowding, environmental damage and economic depression.
A movement that looked to the traditions of the great outdoors had first taken shape in the late nineteenth century. By the interwar era it has gained unprecedented popularity. Ramblers wandered far from their everyday lives in factories and offices, others revived folk cultures threatened with extinction. Naturism also had its devotees although the English climate made it less appealing than on the European Continent.
The Sussex Downs became a focal point for many seeking spiritual regeneration. From utopian dreamers who founded alternative communities to conservationist societies, the chalk ridge inspired a longing for way of life seemingly lost to modernisation. At the centre of that vision stood the ancient hill fort of Chanctonbury Ring. Its iconic crown of beech trees had long held a mystical allure to artists and writers. Mais too had succumbed to its enchantment.
The Spell Broken
The ramblers therefore made their way up Chanctonbury Hill hopeful that the sun would bestow them with its restorative power. But the natural world turned out to be less obliging than they believed. Although it was July the night proved unseasonably cold. By the time the hikers had reached the hilltop clouds obscured the sunrise. There was little to do but empty the snack boxes purchased for a shilling on the train and return home.
Had Mais marched more than a thousand people up a hill only to lead them down again with nothing to show for their effort?
Conserving the Downs
In a basic sense, yes. For all the folly of that night, Mais had nonetheless stirred something in the popular imagination. The Southern Railway and other train operators went on to run more tours for ramblers across the country.
Mais also enhanced a romantic impression of the Sussex Downs as a symbol of English national identity that must be preserved from encroaching urbanisation. ‘So far as I can see there is nothing to prevent the landowner from cutting down Chanctonbury’s beech-clump’, he warned, ‘and in its place creating a sky-scraping roundhouse’. In encouraging public enthusiasm for the countryside, Mais was a pioneer of the conservationist ethos that eventually led to the creation of the South Downs National Park. Those who walk to the Ring today may feel his spirit by their side. But please remember to check the weather forecast first.
Contributed by Clive Webb, Professor of History at the University of Sussex.
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