“Longshore Drift”, by David EP Dennis

Charles Dickens came to Hastings in 1861 to perform a public reading of A Christmas Carol in the Old Music Hall now called Yates’s Wine Lodge. This event is celebrated during the Hastings Literary Festival in the autumn as ‘Dickens Day’ during which, other aspects of Dickens’ life are highlighted. He saw poverty all around him in workhouses and factories and described them in harrowing detail in books such as Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations.

When he came to Hastings, he may well have walked on the sea front and watched the waves shooshing the shingle from Eastbourne to Hastings in a slow rolling movement that has never ceased since the beginning of the world. However, the first recorded use of the precise term was not written down until 1893 by someone unknown wizard of coastal geomorphology. It refers to the geological process by which sediments such as sand and gravel are transported along a coastline, parallel to the shore, due to the action of waves approaching at an angle.

The word ‘Long’ derives from the Old English word ‘lang’, meaning ‘having considerable linear extent.’ ‘Shore’ comes from the Old English ‘scora’, referring to the land adjacent to a large body of water. ‘Drift’ stems from the Old English ‘drifan’, meaning ‘to drive’ or ‘to force along,’ which evolved to denote movement caused by external forces.

But this article is not purely about shingle movement. Instead, it is about the drift of ideas along the shoreline from Eastbourne to Hastings.
Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818, in Trier, Prussia (now Germany). His great friend Friedrich Engels was born on 28 November 1820, in Barmen, Prussia (now Wuppertal, Germany). They first met on August 28, 1844, when Friedrich Engels visited Karl Marx in Paris, where Marx was living in exile. They spent ten days discussing philosophy, economics, and revolutionary politics, forming an instant intellectual and political bond. This meeting led to their first major joint works, ‘The Holy Family’ (1845), and later ‘The Communist Manifesto’ (1848).

Much later, Volume 1 of Das Kapital (Kritik der politischen Ökonomie – Critique of Political Economy) was published on 14 September 1867 in Hamburg, Germany. The book analysed capitalism’s structure, introducing key concepts like surplus value, class struggle, and commodity fetishism.
Marx and Engels both visited Sussex, coming to Eastbourne in the autumn of 1881 because Marx had bronchitis and pleurisy. In those days, the seaside with its alleged iodine atmosphere (really the smell of rotting seaweed) was recommended by physicians for its sea air and mild climate. Coming to the seaside was also an intellectual escape from the pressure of London.

Marx then died in 1883, but Engels continued to come to Eastbourne and other coastal towns to relax but also to continue to develop Marxist Theory. Engels died in London on 5th August 1895 aged seventy-four at his home at 122 Regent’s Park Road, Primrose Hill and, being a resolute atheist, he wanted to be cremated.

This growing movement away from churchyard internment had already become associated with radical, freethinkers and secularists. He had his wish at Woking Crematorium in Surrey, Britain’s first crematorium established in 1878. A large group of colleagues and friends attended this ceremony including Eleanor Marx who was Karl Marx’s daughter. There also were Eduard Bernstein, a leading socialist for the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), August Bebel, co-founder of the SPD, William Liebknecht who was a Marxist convert and friend of Engels. There were many other people there from the British Social Democratic Foundation (SDF).

Part of Engel’s time in Eastbourne had been spent walking on the beautiful landscape of Beachy Head with its massive chalk cliffs, downland scenery and iconic Belle Tout Lighthouse built in 1834. Following his wishes, most of the people who attended his cremation service at Woking then travelled to Eastbourne where Eleanor Marx and others in a simple secular ceremony cast his ashes into the westerly breeze – out over Beachy Head cliffs and down into the grey-blue sea where the longshore drift carried him ever so slowly towards Hastings.

With each angled wave, the tiny particles of Engels’ dust came along the coast, adding to patches of fine low tide sand as they settled in deep by Hastings Pier, opened in 1872. However, a large part of him continued through the English Channel and landed on the coasts of Europe, where they coated the feet of migratory birds – those wonderful swifts, swallows, cranes, and eagles that had come each year from Georgia.
When the birds returned each year to Georgia, tiny particles of Engels reached the Georgian shore of the Black Sea and some birds flew as far inland as Tbilisi, known then as Tiflis.

One day in 1898 a migratory bird landed on the shoulder of a 19-year-old student priest named Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili who attending Tiflis Theological Seminary. The bird flapped its wings and tiny particles of Engel’s flew up the young lad’s nose, infecting him with Marx and Engel’s ideas. He quickly changed his name to Stalin, meaning ‘steel-like’ and then proceeded to kill millions of people because he was a psychopath.
One year later, living in St Petersburg there was a law student named Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov who was sorrowful because his brother Alexander had been arrested and executed for planning the assassination of Tsar Alexander III. He heard about Marx and Engels from friends who had been watching migratory birds having dust baths and became infected with ideas. Then, when he moved to Samara on the Volga River, some 620 miles from Moscow, he gave himself the undercover name of Lenin, derived from the River Lena, to mask his revolutionary activities.

Stalin and Lenin first met in Tornio, Finland in 1905, during a time when Lenin was coordinating efforts for the 1905 revolution. At that time, Lenin had heard of Stalin’s efforts and his work with the revolutionary movement in Georgia, and they discussed the potential for coordinated action in the broader Russian revolution.

Meanwhile, the portion of Engel’s powdered remains that had embedded itself in the low tide sands of Hastings came into contact with the toes of a man called Robert Noonan, an Irish-born socialist who was walking on the shore in 1901. The dust of Engels caused him mystically to author his famous book The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, using the name Robert Tressel. This described poverty, exploitation, and harsh working conditions. By 1910 Tressel was ill, and poverty-stricken himself. He died of tuberculosis in Liverpool on his way to a better life in Canada in 1911.

However, before he left Hastings, he and others formed the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) – a Marxist group hoping to counteract the dominance of Tory capitalist ideology. The SDF in Hastings actively campaigned against local councillors who were perceived to be colluding with big businesses, particularly concerning utilities like gas and electricity. Their efforts sought to expose and challenge corruption, advocating for the rights and welfare of the working class.

Members organised public meetings, distributed literature, and engaged in discussions to raise awareness about socialist ideals. These activities aimed to educate the people of Hastings on issues of social justice, workers’ rights, and economic equality.
Nowadays we steer sharply away from the horrors of Stalin and even from the excessive revolutionary radicalism of Marx and Engels. However, we do wish for social improvement and a reduction in the gap between rich and poor – if you get my drift. •

David EP Dennis [external link] worked with the Royal Air Forces for 25 years and travelled to remote places like Ascension Island, the Falklands Islands, and Oman. He is also an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and writes about Medieval Times in England for Sea Road Creative Research [external link] and uses photography to champion nature conservation. He also collaborates with the Hastings Independent local newspaper [external link].