About the Sussex Retold: Oral History Project

Sussex Retold is a project based at the University of Sussex. Its aim is to bring together multiple stories about the region, drawing on arts, crafts, music and folklore. Recent work with Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft has involved collecting a new set of oral history interviews with people associated with Ditchling and its different communities.

Some of the interviews were conducted with craftspeople and artists connected with the historic Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic, which was founded in 1921. Weaver and dyer Jenny KilBride, daughter of Valentine KilBride, describes the Guild’s truth-to-materials ethos: ‘They moved from the material outwards’, not ‘forcing’ materials to ‘do things they don’t naturally do’. Anton Pruden, grandson of silversmith Dunstan Pruden, emphasises the relevance today of the way the Guild put work at the centre of their lives, rather than using it as a means of ‘buying leisure’.

Participants were asked to select an object at the museum that was meaningful to their understanding of Ditchling. Calligrapher and writer Ewan Clayton spoke of the writing desk of Edward Johnston (designer of the Underground typeface), which has a huge ink spill inside it. Author and illustrator John Vernon Lord described Guild sculptor and letter-cutter Joseph Cribb’s collection of butterflies. Janet Cragg, of the Ditchling History Project, selected both Cribb’s tools and also a shepherd’s crook owned by local shepherd Jim Fowler. Connecting them was a commitment to ‘making’: ‘Ditchling had blacksmiths and people making things before even the craftspeople came.’

Efforts were made to tell the stories of undersung villagers. The work that Joanna Bourne put into founding Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft with her sister, the weaver Hilary Bourne, was highlighted. A new photograph of Barbara Allen, who worked with Hilary but of whom little is known, was found by writer and researcher Jane Traies. New stories are told about better-known figures too; for instance, Liz Hankins, whose mother was assistant to weaver Tadek Beutlich, describes how it felt to look over the wall into painter Frank Brangwyn’s garden, with its intriguing astrolabe, as a child. Stories of community endeavours were told too, such as the scrubbing away of whitewash with toothbrushes to reveal a David Jones mural. Gardener Liz Pope described collaborating with dyers on making a new dye garden for the museum, creating in that space a ‘rainbow’ of different yellows.

Some participants lent their expertise to revealing new stories about objects at the museum. Textile conservator Zenzie Tinker considered whether a colourful patchwork jacket by Amy Sawyer was fashioned to fit ‘her unique shape’: it seems to have been made to accommodate the weakening of one of her arms. Curator Tony Kalume spoke of his interest in decolonising approaches to the arts and crafts, bringing knowledge of letter-forms made outside Europe to thinking about fonts. Textile artist Omeima Mudawi-Rowlings reflected on the importance of travel to Bourne and Allen: ‘I think travelling and learning and being exposed to and educating yourself to a broader range of methods and cultures is imperative in your development, so big hats off to them.’

A sense of the variety of creative lives at Ditchling is captured by the oral histories as a whole. There could be a historical reason for this variety. Lucie Broadbent Smith, a great niece of the Bourne sisters, considered the effects of Ditchling not having a single ‘Lord of the Manor’ who imposed his ideas on the villagers. She said: ‘Ditchling is a place where you can be who you want to be. You don’t have to be the same as somebody else. You don’t have to have the same opinion.’ A plurality of perspectives are presented in It Takes a Village at Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft (5 July 2025 – 1 February 2026). This, and future exhibitions, will draw on oral histories gathered as part of Sussex Retold.

Listen to oral histories and explore the Sussex Retold project.

The Sussex Retold project has been supported by the Faculty of Media Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex and by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Impact Acceleration Account. Collaborators (with Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft) are: Dr Sam Carroll (interviewer), Professor Margaretta Jolly and Dr Hope Wolf.