Memories of the May Brothers

Extracted from an unpublished memoir 'Memories of Southwold 1920 - 1939" by the late John B Harris. The Harrises owned Summer House on Constitution Hill and spent every September there. John Harris wrote these recollections of childhood holidays in his old age and we quote from them with the kind permission of his widow, Mary Harris. Our clarifications are in square brackets.

"... each day and for nearly all the holiday we walked to the beach, always to Sam May's, just beyond Gun Hill, which was seen as socially superior. There had been a old Sam May who had died in the early 1920s [1923] whose epitaph in the churchyard caused a rumpus. It read:

His anchor was his Holy Word,
His rudder blooming hope.
His love of God his main topsail,
And faith his sailing rope.

It doesn't seem very offensive today.

The beach was now run by three brothers, Sam [Samuel Charles Brabben May] who sat in a boat keeping an eye on bathers, Jack [Robert John Brabben May] who looked after the bathing huts and took the money, 6d (sixpence) per bathe, and Dick [Richard Stephen May], very silent, who kept things clean and tidy. [Richard was, in fact, deaf] There was also an old John May [the proprietor, Robert John May], heavily clothed and wearing sea boots. He used to stomp around, gently farting.

The attraction of Sam May's was the diving raft, a flat pontoon, twenty feet square, with two sets of dteps for divers. It was on a cable leading out to a buoy with a pulley so that the raft could be pulled in or out to suit the state of the tide. There was a pill-box on the beach which was demolished around 1926..."