A tribute to David Arscott (1942-2024): The Man on the Corner in Lewes

For the past three years, David could be seen either gardening or leaning on his spade by the fruit trees talking to one of the hundreds of people who stopped for a chat through the railings. He never said no to passing the time of day with a Lewesian.

He and his wife Jill settled in Lewes in 1988, living in four houses round the town and bringing up three children there. The old Railway Inn, with its corner garden, was what he called their ‘forever home’.

He was hurrying back to it after a game of his much-loved tennis when he died, on a bench in the Priory grounds, within sight of the Downs and of the Dripping Pan. It couldn’t have been more appropriate for a man who wrote more than 40 books about Sussex and was a proud Rook for 25 years.

David was known for his garden and his books, but for a long time he was also a voice of Sussex. After many years as a newspaper journalist in London, Dorset and Caracas, Venezuela, David joined Radio Brighton in the mid-seventies, settling at Albourne, where he and his first wife brought up their four children.

His daily programmes for the station, which later became Radio Sussex, were speech-based. David referred to the style as a local Radio 4, bringing guests into the studio and interviewing them. He always said that famous interviewees on a promotional tour of radio studios were rarely as interesting as the rest of us with a passion or a good story to tell.

In later years, while David enjoyed writing all those books on Sussex, many more light national histories and some fiction, he still maintained that the Radio Sussex job was the best he had ever had. He enjoyed not only the conversations, but the seat-of-the-pants part of local radio, operating the studio controls at the same time as presenting, taking unprocessed phone-in calls and doing outside broadcasts from the radio van around the county.

Local radio styles changed, with speech giving way to more and more DJ chatter and music, and David left the BBC in 1991, the year he and Jill were married and living in St John’s Hill in the Pells. There he plunged himself into writing more books, sharing the childcare and giving talks all round the county.

An English Literature graduate of Hertford College, Oxford, he had always read a great deal and in the months before he died had read the writer Edith Wharton for the first time, with typical thoroughness working through all her novels in a few weeks. He’d just embarked on a course about the Russian writer Platonov with the Lewes branch of the U3A, of which he was an enthusiastic fan. A life of books, Brahms, Sussex, writing and gardening made his retirement a very happy one.

The last book he wrote was about the Sussex poet Hilaire Belloc, a companion volume to an earlier book on Kipling. Many will remember his reading the verses and other writings of Sussex authors, sometimes with Jill, at talks round the county.

The newly published Lewes Town Council book Grown in Lewes includes David’s account of how he took on the dark wilderness behind those railings on Friars’ Walk, chopped, dug and planted until there was a small meadow with fruit trees as well as a pond and flower-beds he constructed himself. A visiting grass snake in the second summer of the garden was a joy to him, as were the dunnocks and wrens glimpsed around the old goat willow near the footpath.

David wanted townspeople to enjoy the garden. The infant hedge is made of thorns, so there will always be a view to be had. Occasionally passers-by would lament that the initial clearance had accidentally swept away the rose that used to run up the willow. The last gift of the man on the corner will be seen in the next summer or two. David gave his meadow its last cut in the late autumn and planted a rambling rector rose under the goat willow. It will thrive and Lewes will enjoy it.

David Arscott leaves his wife, seven children and ten grandchildren.

Grown in Lewes is published by Lewes Town Council ([email protected])