Viva Lewes Issue #112 January 2016

its and BObs
A lewes worthy’s sad demise gideon mantell
Around 1840, things weren’t going well for
Lewes’ great dinosaur hunter, Gideon
Mantell. Previously a country doctor,
he’d tried and failed to set up a practice
in fashionable Brighton. In 1838
he’d had to sell his fossil collection.
‘His wife and elder son left him the
next year and his favourite daughter,
Hannah Matilda, died of tuberculosis in
1840,’ biographer Dennis Dean has noted.
There followed ‘months of despair’.
He was also suffering increasingly from spine
problems. He partly blamed the country doctor’s
lifestyle – lots of riding and walking and stooping
over patients’ beds. Later, in London, he’d
exhausted himself tending to a demanding-butwealthy
patient, while also dealing with ‘my sweet
girl’s malady, which required careful dressing night
and morning, often occupying an hour, and which
I would not transfer to a nurse’. And then
there was his carriage accident in 1841.
‘His fortitude in relation to the pains,
spasms and neuralgia was impressive,’
according to biographer Edmund
Critchley, ‘though nothing like as remarkable
as his activity and enormous
output of books and lectures during
that period.’ However, he ‘became increasingly
dependent’ on painkillers, and
died in 1852, aged 62, apparently from an accidental
overdose.
Mantell had said that, if his spine turned out to
be medically interesting, it should be donated to
the Hunterian Museum, at the Royal College of
Surgeons. This is odd, as its curator at the time was
his great rival, Richard Owen. The spine remained
there until around 1969, when, according to one
source, it was destroyed ‘due to lack of space’. SR
ghost pubs: #15 The Grape Vine Inn, South Parade
The Grape Vine started its days in the 1840s
as the ‘Tunnel Arms’. The railway had come to
Lewes in 1846, and the entrance to the tunnel
which runs under Lewes High Street was placed
at South Parade, so the Tunnel Arms seemed an
apt name for a new beer shop. However, by 1853
its name had been changed to the ‘Grape Vine’,
with one room selling beer, and another selling
groceries. Horace Head ran it from 1879 until
1892, and, despite having his greenhouse smashed
by a woman he had barred, appears to have been
a well-respected landlord. However, after Horace
had left, the Grape Vine seemed to go downhill. It had seven landlords over the following six years, and
was attracting a ‘very rough element’. Landlord Frank Woolven was heavily fined in 1904 for permitting
drunkenness, and fined again just a few months later. It is perhaps unsurprising that the Grape Vine was
another victim of the great Lewes pub cull of 1907. This photo (kindly supplied by John Davey) shows the
Grape Vine around the time of its closure. The building was later demolished. However, it is nice to see
that the modern house which stands in its place is called… ‘The Grapevine’. Mat Homewood
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