Mid Sussex Times April 6 1979

Exciting excursions into local history

"If you keep your eyes open it's surprising what you can find."

That's what Miss Maisie Wright tells people, who come to her local history classes.

By 'local' history she means local history anywhere. She finds that many of the students at the local authority further education classes are young people who have moved to a new area and want to know more about it. Even when there's a new and often characterless housing estate, something was there before.

Miss Wright read history at Cambridge, but it wasn't until 1969, when she retired from her position as principal social worker at Saint Francis Hospital, Haywards Heath, that she had the chance to indulge her interest. Now history has become her hobby.

She first came to Cuckfield in 1933 when she was helping to write the memoirs of a retired missionary, and she moved there from Haywards Heath in 1953.

Her home is an attractive old timber framed cottage in South Street. The date above the door reads "1722" but it seems likely that the back of the house is much older.

As one time secretary to the Cuckfield Society, she arranged lectures on the history of the village and, in 1971, she wrote a short history of Cuckfield. No earth shattering events have taken place, there are no famous battles, for instance – but she feels that the story of Cuckfield is a story of people through the ages; the way they lived, their families and their houses.

"Discovering a piece of history is as exciting as uncovering buried treasure," she says.

It is this interest in our forebears that she puts across to her students, and her enthusiasm has proved contagious.

One young woman for instance, new to the area, made a study of Great Hayward the old Manor house of Haywards Heath. Another student became interested in the fire dogs at his local pub, following a talk on the old iron industry. An elderly man who had once been gardener to a large estate had a valuable contribution to make during a discussion on the English country house.

The local authority has asked the Cuckfield neighbourhood Council and the Cuckfield Society to organise some material belonging to the old museum. Over the years Cuckfield residents have collected and donated artefacts connected with the village and its past life – they have old farm implements, the original whipping post and bells which were hung around the necks of oxen while they were ploughing.

It's hoped that the museum will open to the public later this year at the Queens Hall in the High Street. Miss Wright would like to see on show photocopies of Cuckfield archives – some documents dating back to the 16th century. The originals are in the care of the West Sussex record office at Chichester.

Miss Wright is also a member of the Ramblers’ Association and has a great interest in foot paths and their preservation. People, she says, have no idea so many footpaths exist.

To put the matter right she produced a series of walks around Cuckfield, which was published in the Mid Sussex times last year.

Much of a time these days has taken up with research for a book she's writing on five 18th-century Sussex diarists.

One of them, a fish farmer called Thomas Marchant, lived at Little Park, Hurstpierpoint, and it's interesting, she says, to see that the fishpond is still there.

Visitors, some of them from overseas, keen to trace their family history, find their way to Miss Wright's cottage. With few of us spending most of our life in the same place, as many people did until the First World War, she thinks that in one way or another we are all looking for our roots.