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In The Folklore of Sussex by Jacqueline Simpson (Batsford, 1973) an instance is recounted of Rough Music in Copthorne in the early 1950s. If you look up Rough Music in Wikipedia you will see the same instance referred to and discover that it was an expression of community displeasure when someone had outraged public decency. In this case, and in essence, a family was being ‘rough musicked’ because the father had hit the child of a neighbour. The case had been dismissed in court but the local people felt that the man had got away with it. On several successive Saturday nights the villagers paraded past the offender’s house banging cans and generally causing a lot of noise. Eventually the family at fault moved away.
Back in 1987 the late Patience Waller, then an elderly resident of Snow Hill, gave me her own account of an instance of Rough Music that she witnessed there in the early 1930s. Patience would have been a young teenager at the time. This is what she remembered:
“In the early 1930s the owner of Smuggler’s Cottage, Snow Hill had made himself very unpopular due to very unneighbourly behaviour towards three families living nearby.
He had an old gypsy living in one of his fields, & he employed this old man to cement up the overflow from the drainage system in one house, which if not discovered would have been very unpleasant.
Another neighbour, living at Goodwins, was having a hard tennis court made in her garden. She had obtained the Council’s permission to have the hard core, sand etc. delivered on to the side of the road for a few days before it was used. This however did not please Mr Raynor, & he employed his gypsy friend to scatter it all over the road in the night.
What really upset the village was his behaviour towards Miss East. She was a most delightful old lady, in her seventies, who looked after Mr Rowden, the tailor, who lived & worked in the house, now called ‘Tailors’.
A rough lane led to this cottage between high hedges, with a five-barred gate & a kissing gate and style to the footpath. The gate could be opened to allow deliveries to be made when necessary.
Mr Raynor decided that this gate should be padlocked, & he would not have it unlocked on any pretext. So next time Miss East needed coal, it had to be dumped on the side of the road & at the end of the lane. From there Miss East collected it scuttle by scuttle, a very lengthy and laborious business for an old lady.
Some of the locals decided this had gone too far & that Mr Raynor should learn just how unpopular he had made himself. They decided to give him Rough Music.
For three consecutive evenings about 50 people collected 100 yards from his house with every sort of old tin, saucepan, dustbin lid, or metal object, & they marched up & down outside his house banging anything they could get hold of for 20 minutes, & then threw all the utensils into his garden.
The Police put in an appearance but provided everyone kept on the move, & kept to the time limit there was no reason for them to interfere.
I cannot remember if it went on for 20 minutes or for one hour but I know that the timing was important. It had the desired effect & we had no more petty harassments from our unpopular neighbour.”
William Anthony Raynor had purchased Smuggler’s Cottage in about 1925. A tragic coda to this account appeared in the Daily Mirror of the 12th October 1940.