Viva Brighton Issue #46 December 2016

BITS AND BOBS
...............................
SPREAD THE WORD
Here’s Janine Maer in Havana, Cuba, reading
her copy of VB44 in front of a massive sign that
apparently read VIVA CUBA LIBRE!
She tells us that she loved touring the vibrant city
in a classic car, seeing the beautiful old buildings
and Afro-Cuban art in the Callejon de Hamel,
listening to salsa, eating dinner in a paladar - the
unofficial restaurants in the private homes of
hospitable locals - and, of course, drinking lots
of rum cocktails. Viva Cuba Libre! sounds like a
magazine we’d be willing to work for.
And that’s Jo
O’Reilly Westwood,
at the
gateway to Christiania
in Copenhagen,
searching
for hygge in the
homeland. She’s
not absolutely sure
that she found it,
or that she even
knew what she was
looking for, but she did meet some mighty colourful
characters along the way…
Keep spreading the word, and send your
holiday snaps to hello@vivamagazines.com
ON THE BUSES #20
CLEMENTINA BLACK (Routes 29 & 49)
A powerful advocate
for social
justice, Clementina
Black roared
around the country
in the 1880s,
exhorting women
to join unions to
fight for financial
reward and
equality. “Underpaid
wives of underpaid men bear upon their
shoulders a burden… too heavy for any human
creature,” she wrote. Clementina put forward
the first motion for equal pay for women at the
TUC in 1888; as Honorary Secretary of the
Women’s Trade Union, later President of the
Women’s Industrial Council, she was in a position
to do so.
Born at 58 Ship Street in 1854, Clementina
was the daughter of town clerk Peter Black and
portrait painter Maria Patten. She was 21 when
her mother died of ‘a rupture’ after lifting her
disabled husband, leaving Clementina to care
for him and her seven younger siblings (who included
mathematician Arthur Black and Russian
translator Constance Garnett). The family was
brilliantly educated at home in Brighton, and
spoke fluent French and German. Clementina
began to write, with the fictional A Sussex Idyll
published in 1877, but when she moved to London
to further a literary career, her focus altered.
Friendships with Fabian socialists, suffragettes
and the Marx family helped alert Clementina
to the plight of working women, and she hurled
herself into campaigns to open the eyes of middle-class
society who preferred not to see who
did their laundry or scrubbed their floors. We
owe her. Louise Schweitzer
Illustration by Joda, jonydaga.weebly.com
....23....