SUSSEX LIVES:

FROM JOHN FREELAND TO RUDYARD KIPLING

Long before Kipling bought it for his family home, the National Trust property Batemans was owned by one of my distant ancestors, John Freeland. 

John Freeland left money for a Bread Charity. His brother Henry, gamekeeper to the infamous Webster family, apparently fathered a couple of baseborn Henrys on his travels between the Webster estates in Battle, Robertsbridge, Bodiam and East Grinstead. Parson William Levett made cannon; Thomas Brassey built railways; Hilaire Belloc wrote books and poems. Picking up from their stories, this talk attempts a personalised look at life in the County around that time – the period ‘from John Freeland to Rudyard Kipling’.