Church Cottages
“It is hard to realise that we shall never again see Sam’s shuffling form moving along the village street,” read an entry in the parish magazine of April 1953. The piece was an obituary of Sam Yates, a much-loved village postman who lived at 4 Church Cottages – the row of small dwellings next to the church lychgate.
The obituary called Yates “one of the last characters of old Shoreham” and recorded his devoted service to the church (where he was famous for singing off-key) plus village clubs and sports teams, including the cricket club where he would take to the field in braces and hobnailed boots. A large and fairly noisy man, he brooked little nonsense on his post round. “If your gate wasn’t open it was kicked open,” the artist Franklin White recalled in an interview. Yates was in his early thirties when he was wounded and captured at the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and spent time in a prisoner of war camp. His cottage is now called “Sam’s Cottage”. |
No 1 Church Cottages, right next to the church, was the home of Samuel Cheeseman, a key figure behind the creation of the Cross on the Hill; he is profiled in our People section. And at No 3 lived Percy Stevens, yet another stalwart supporter of the church. Like Cheeseman, he became sexton and church clerk – in his case for more than 20 years – and did gardening for the vicars and Lady Dunsany. He was a village special constable in the Second World War and died at the age of 81 in 1968.
Church Cottages have 18th-century brick fronts and timber-framed interiors. Parts of Nos 1 and 2 may go back to the 1500s. The picture here is a recently acquired glass slide that appears to show the cottages in the early years of the 20th century. The dilapidated cottage nearest the camera may have disappeared by the time of the First World War. This was a period when a number of houses in the village were in a very poor state of repair. |