PD Smith

For me the high­point of my career as a pho­tog­ra­ph­er (work­ing as Peter Haas) was being able to work with my father on the book Writ­ers in Sus­sex. We spent months tramp­ing up and down the high­ways and byways of Sus­sex pho­tograph­ing the for­mer homes of the county’s most impor­tant writ­ers.

We vis­it­ed and pho­tographed over 40 hous­es for the book. Par­tic­u­lar­ly mem­o­rable were those asso­ci­at­ed with HG Wells (Uppark), Vir­ginia Woolf (Asham House, Bed­ding­ham, and the more famous Monk’s House, Rod­mell), and Ezra Pound (Stone Cot­tage at Cole­man Hatch).

Pound’s cot­tage is on the back cov­er of our book; that’s Kipling’s state­ly pile, Bateman’s, on the front – a nice con­trast.

Pound rent­ed Stone Cot­tage with WB Yeats in 1913 and men­tions it in the Pisan Can­tos:

“So that I recalled the noise in the chim­ney
As it were, the wind in the chim­ney
but was in real­i­ty Uncle William
down­stairs com­pos­ing
at Stone Cot­tage in Sus­sex by the waste moor
(or what­ev­er) and the hol­ly bush…
well those days are gone for­ev­er.”

As my father not­ed: “The hol­ly bush is still in the back gar­den, and the waste moor of Ash­down For­est just over the gar­den hedge.” Bernard con­tin­ued research­ing as well as lec­tur­ing on the sub­ject for many years after­wards and was always delight­ed to find a fresh lit­er­ary con­nec­tion with the coun­ty in which he lived.

Play­wright Christo­pher Fry, who lived at East Dean in the Sus­sex Downs, was kind enough to write a per­son­al and evoca­tive fore­word to our book. I have scanned the orig­i­nal, writ­ten by Fry on his ancient type­writer, and you can down­load and read it here (PDF).

This is one of my favourite phtographs from the book – Uppark, South Hart­ing. Wells’s moth­er was house­keep­er at this sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry man­sion and for a time the young Wells enjoyed unof­fi­cial access to the library here.

You can now see all the pho­tographs I took for the book (and a few more) on Flickr. I have also writ­ten a piece about research­ing the book and vis­it­ing writ­ers’ hous­es which you can read here.

You can also read a piece I wrote to mark the thir­ti­eth anniver­sary of the pub­li­ca­tion of Writ­ers in Sus­sex here.

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