I was browsing the Internet Archive on my computer for references to Crawley Down (there are over 4,000) when I came across a book written by a Sussex author, Edward John Bedford. It was entitled Nature Photography for Beginners and was published in 1909. Bedford had been born in Lewes in 1865 and was a talented artist from an early age. He had attended Lewes School of Art and subsequently taught art in Brighton and Eastbourne. He was particularly interested in photography, recording buildings and events in Sussex. He pioneered techniques for photographing moving trains and also became expert in taking pictures of plants and birds.
It was the last of these that had the connection with Crawley Down. In 1907 Bedford had given a lecture to the Selborne Society, a group in Hampshire honouring Gilbert White, the author of the 1789 book The Natural History of Selborne and devoted to natural history subjects. The talk was entitled ‘Bird Architecture’ during the course of which he mentioned a robin he had photographed in a schoolroom in Crawley Down. He elaborated on this in his book.
As we all know, robins are inquisitive birds and show little fear of humans. Whenever I am doing some gardening a robin will always appear and sit on a branch or a fence to keep an eye on me. So it was that the children at Crawley Down Elementary School used to feed scraps of their packed lunches to a robin in the school playground. Eventually it became so tame that it followed the children back into class and would sit on the metal rods that were part of the structure of the schoolroom roof and chirrup, much to the children’s amusement. The schoolmaster, who at that time was Mr Starr, began to find small numbers of dead leaves littering the floor and it was realised that the robin had been building a nest in the folds of a curtain, previously used to divide the room, that had been gathered over one of the ceiling tie bars. Of course, there must have been more than one robin, but as they all look alike to us humans and probably only one robin was ever seen at any one time, it was assumed that it was the same one. It was decided to leave the nest undisturbed and in due course the chicks were hatched and fledged. And all of this was going on while the children’s lessons were taking place day after day. Edward Bedford came to the school and photographed the nest.
Having successfully raised their family the robins (was it the same pair? I suspect male robins are promiscuous) began to build a new nest, this time in one of the book shelves at the side of the classroom. Again the nest was not disturbed and again a brood was raised and fledged. Remarkably, in the same year, the robins built a third nest in another curtain, presumably this time during the school holiday, for sadly this was not discovered until the curtain was taken down and the eggs fell out.
Apart from being a charming story of the interaction of people and the wildlife around them, the photographs that Edward Bedford took reveal a glimpse of Crawley Down’s school more than a century ago. When I first arrived to teach at Crawley Down, in April of 1973, the same school room was being used as two infants classrooms. The curtain dividing it, seen in the photograph, had been replaced by a wooden partition, which was removed when, that autumn, the infants moved to Burleigh School and the classrooms became the Juniors’ school hall.