The Town Beehive

Fifty years ago, in 1975, a modest paperback appeared under the imprint of QueenSpark Books - a fledgling community press run from Brighton’s Queen’s Park. Its title, The Town Beehive: A Young Girl’s Lot in Brighton 1910-1934, announced its subject with quiet pride. The author, Daisy Noakes, had been born in Princes Road in 1910 and lived almost her entire life within walking distance of the seafront whose hum and hustle she immortalised.

QueenSpark’s founders had set out to publish the voices of working people, and Noakes was among their first and most enduring discoveries. She wrote with humour, precision and memory unclouded by nostalgia. Her words carried the weight of a life lived in modest rooms, in domestic service, and later among the deckchairs and boarding houses of interwar Brighton.

 The Town Beehive was followed by two further volumes, The Faded Rainbow and Street Noises, as well as radio and television appearances. She became a familiar presence on BBC Southern Counties Radio, interviewing fishermen and stallholders with the same unvarnished curiosity that animated her writing. Later she appeared in the BBC’s Out of the Doll’s House, a landmark account of women’s history, and was honoured by Sussex University for her contribution to local culture.

Noakes’s style was direct and her recall extraordinary. The sea, for Daisy, was both backdrop and lifeblood - the edge of the world against which Brighton’s fortunes rose and fell. She remembered the beach not as a picturesque resort but as a working stage, crowded with buskers, vendors, families, and barefoot children chasing coins through the shingle. Few writers of her generation - and certainly none from her background - recorded the soundscape of the town so closely, from pier bands and concert parties to the black minstrel troupes who sang at low tide.

What gives The Town Beehive its lasting warmth is Noakes’s unpretentious humanity. Her Brighton is not the Brighton of postcards or pleasure palaces, but of aching legs, shared cups of tea, and the kindness of sisters. It is a Brighton of ordinary lives, played out within sight and sound of the surf. More about Noakes can be read at My Brighton and Hove and Writing Lives.

The Town Beehive is free to read online at the Queenspark website. Here are two extracts/

‘One of the times we were all together was Armistice Day of the First World War. With young George in the pram, we all walked to Brighton Sea Front and along to the West Pier. Everyone seemed to be singing and dancing, and I remember soldiers and sailors in uniform, the worse for drink, staggering around. We then walked back through the town to New England Hill, and all went in a cafe, where Dad bought a large jug of tea and one cup which we took turns in drinking out of. I still remember to this day how my legs ached with walking, and longed to have a ride in the pram if only someone would carry George, but no, it did not happen.’ (The image below is an illustration by ChatGPT.)

‘The seafront had plenty of attractions. There were bands that played on the Pier, two concert Parties, the one near Black Rock was called Jack Shepherd’s Entertainers, the one near the West Pier was Ellson’s Entertainers.

At this one, talent contests were held on Saturday afternoons, but one was only eligible to compete if one had a paid seat. The cheapest was 6d. I had earned 5d. that morning, and after a lot of persuasion my sister Emily gave me the other 1d. if I would sing her favourite song at that moment: “God send you back to me”. She had been friendly with a South African wounded soldier, and he had gone home. So we walked there and back but happy because I won a Teddy Bear for first prize.

Black minstrels played their banjos at low tide on the sands, and would get the children to join in the choruses, I remember “Oh Moana” and the actions. People on the Pier would throw pennies down to the sands, and the boys would scramble for them. All sorts of vendors were on the beach with newspapers, Brighton Rock and the Whelk Stalls where one could buy a small plate of whelks, cockles, mussels or winkles, and one could leave the plate on the beach to be collected.’