Viva Brighton Issue 34 December 2015

its and bobs
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cup heroes whitehawk
on the buses
#8 eleanor marx (Routes 12A, 25)
Whitehawk FC, who only a few years ago were
playing in the depths of the Sussex County League,
are only 90 minutes away from being in the Third
Round draw of the FA Cup, which could mean a
mouth-watering tie against the likes of Manchester
United, Chelsea, or indeed local ‘rivals’ Brighton
and Hove Albion.
The Hawks, who are as we go to press fourth in the
Conference South (in effect the southern section
of the sixth tier), beat Lincoln City 5-3 in an absolute
thriller at the Enclosed Ground in the First
Round on November 8th, having battled their way
through the qualifying rounds earlier in the season.
They drew Dagenham and Redbridge away
in the Second Round, in a game to be played on
December 6th. ‘The Daggers’ are in League Two,
two tiers above Whitehawk, but are there for the
taking as they lie bottom of the table.
Photo by JJ Waller, himself a proud Whitehawk Ultra
Illustration by Joda, jonydaga.weebly.com
Is there a Christmas-related
name on Brighton’s
buses? They used to have
Santa, but their website
says ‘name no longer displayed’,
and he doesn’t
have much of a Brighton
connection anyway. The
best I could do was Eleanor Marx, whose father,
Karl, looked a bit like Santa. Our editor thought we
could get away with this, if we did a fourth-wallbreaking
intro about how dumb an idea it was.
Eleanor Marx was an important activist and writer
in her own right, but her Brighton connection
doesn’t sound very promising, at first. She spent
six months here, in 1873. Then again, it was evidently
an important six months.
In 1871, there’d been an unsuccessful uprising in
France, the ‘Paris Commune’. Eleanor, who was
still a teenager, got involved with helping Communard
refugees in Britain. Then she started
dating one of them, Hippolyte Lissagaray, to her
family’s disapproval. This sparked ‘a phase of long
struggle’ against Karl’s dominance, her biographer
Rachel Holmes writes. In early 1873, ‘in an attempt
to quell the tension, Marx took Eleanor to
Brighton for a fortnight.’
This attempt failed: Eleanor decided to stay here,
and Karl went home furious. She got a teaching
job, worked hard, and hung out with Lissagaray
when he visited on weekends. Eventually, under
pressure from her parents, she returned to the
family home, having ‘lost the battle in her first war
of independence’. But this headstrong bid for freedom,
at that time, at her age, and ‘without her own
money or formal education’, Holmes argues, ‘was
no small thing’. SR
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