Cover - Viva Lewes

Eve Garnett
David Jarman visits the family from One End Street
Eve Garnett was born near Worcester in January,
1900. After a peripatetic childhood she studied Art at
Chelsea Polytechnic and the Royal Academy Schools.
Her connection with Lewes only began in the 1930s
when her parents moved to Kingston Ridge, but she
lived in and around Lewes for the best part of fifty
years. While staying in a guest house in the High
Street she prepared the illustrations for the charming
Puffin edition of R L Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of
Verses. After a time in St Anne’s Crescent she bought,
in 1960, 12 Keere Street where she stayed for twentyeight
years. She died in 1991.
The Family from One End Street is a children’s book
first published in 1937, with her own illustrations.
The adventures of Mr Ruggles, a dustman, his washerwoman
wife and their seven children have proved
enduringly popular and the book is still in print. Further
adventures appeared in 1956 and Holiday at the
Dew Drop Inn in 1962, but these sequels were less
successful and Eve Garnett was sufficiently shrewd
to realise that the Ruggles household had, perhaps,
delighted us enough.
The setting is Otwell-on-the-Ouse. A map decorating
the endpapers of early clothbound editions makes
it clear that Otwell is based on Lewes. The layout
of the streets is different but the prison on the road
leading west out of town, the castle with its attendant
bowling green and car park, the railway line to
London in close proximity to the river are all very
familiar. Which Lewes street is the model for One
End Street? An illustration in the text is reminiscent
of Sun Street. Keere Street has been suggested and
St. Swithun’s Terrace has its adherents not least because
it actually is one-ended. All of which makes
it disappointing to read the text of a talk given by
Eve Garnett on one of her many trips to New Zealand
visiting her lifelong friend Lettice Loughnan to
whom, incidentally, A Family from One End Street
is dedicated.
‘I have been asked hundreds of times – is One End
Street real? Yes, it is – that is the street itself. It is in
a small fishing village in Devon near where I used to
live as a child.’
Some critics chide Eve Garnett for having a patronising
attitude to the poor which is, I think, unfair.
Others make extravagant claims for the book as a
social document; one going so far as to describe it as
‘a shot in the battle against slums,’ which is simply
deranged.
In fact it has polarised opinion right from the start.
Despite competition from The Hobbit, also published
in 1937, it won the Library Association Carnegie
Medal. Yet several publishers rejected it, one
declaring it unsuitable reading for children. Not a
view shared by Joseph Goebbels who chose ’The
Family from One End Street’ as a reading book for
German schools. V
W W W. V I V A L E W E S . C O M
L I t E r A r y L E W E S
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