Viva Brighton Issue #36 February 2016

its and bobs
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Secrets of the pavilion:
“Plenty of hidden doors and secret passages…”
With public tours of the Royal Pavilion’s basement
and tunnel imminent, it is worth looking at how
the building, with its many deceptive features and
hidden passageways, has been used in fiction. In
2012 it was the setting for a section of the gruesome
and gripping thriller Not Dead Yet, by Peter
James. I had great fun showing him around the
palace and behind the scenes, trying to find suitable
places to commit crimes or hide bodies.
It was then brought to my attention that half a
century earlier another author, Malcolm Saville,
must have asked for a private research tour of the
Pavilion, with the aim of writing a detective story
for children. He published The Long Passage, a story
partly set in the Pavilion, its gardens, the Lanes
and other parts of Brighton, in 1954, when he was
at the pinnacle of his career as a writer and was
about to move from Hertfordshire to Barcombe,
near Lewes. The book was the third in the socalled
‘Buckingham Series’.
Malcolm Saville was born in Hastings in 1901 and
wrote more than 90 children’s books between 1943
and his death in 1982, many of them set in the
Romney Marsh borders of Kent and Sussex. Now
relatively little known, he was in his time a hugely
popular author, who encouraged his young readers
to write to him and famously responded to most
letters personally. His love for Kent and Sussex is
obvious in his work. In the foreword to The Long
Passage he gushes about ‘lively, sunny Brighton’
and ‘the gorgeous, fantastic Royal Pavilion’. He
tickles his readers’ curiosity by mentioning that
‘When you go to Brighton you will be able to go
round the Pavilion as Simon and Sarah did in this
story and see the same treasures. You might even
see the outlines of one of the walls of the secret
door through which they slipped to escape their
old enemy.’ I won’t give too much of the story
away, but it involves a precious antique miniature,
a chase through twittens in the Lanes, a tour of the
Royal Pavilion (during which the children are told
off by a ‘self-appointed guide’ for ‘failing to take
advantage of the knowledge of their elders’) and a
grand finale in the tunnel leading from the palace
to the Dome.
The dustjacket for the hardback first edition
(Evans Brothers Ltd, London) is a glorious example
of mid-20th century colourful book design,
showing the three teenage protagonists in the
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