PASTORAL LETTER     MAY 2012

By the time you read this St. George’s Day will have just gone.

A few years ago Ken Livingstone was asked why London made a big deal of St. Patrick and not St. George. Livingstone answered that St. Patrick was a historic personage whereas St. George was a corrupt Christian bishop.

He got that answer from Edward Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’.

Gibbon noticed that there was a Bishop George of Alexandria who had been murdered by the mob and noticed that there was a St. George who had, improbably, killed a dragon and, with the lazy elision to which thinkers of the Enlightenment were sometimes prone concluded that they were one and the same. We can’t blame Gibbon too much for his speculation; however, there are countless people over the course of antiquity, our knowledge of whom we can sum up in a couple of sentences. 

Retirement of the Rector

The Church of the Holy Cross is currently in an interregnum following the retirement of the Rector. The Parish Profile and Annual Report can be viewed by following the links below

Parish Annual report

Parish Profile

Applications and further details are available from the Archdeacon, Ven. Philip Jones, at   This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Nature Notes

Warm January, cold February, warm March, and now a cold April. The monthly exchange of temperatures seems to be continuing. Maybe we will have a warm May? However, we still need more rain in Sussex.

As I am writing there is a strong wind lashing cold rain against my study windows. The weather vane is showing almost directly north. I am wearing my Arctic grade jumper that I bought in Spitsbergen.

	Church Clock Restored – 10th November 2011.   Five months after the Clock was removed (on the 4th July 2011) for cleaning and overhauling, the mechanism was reinstated, and together with the repainted, and re-gilded, clock faces the town has its landmark timepiece back in action.
4th Jul 2011		12th Nov 2011

The clock was made in 1883 and although on the clock’s ‘setting dial’ it bears the name of a local man and the word Uckfield, it was, in fact, made by Thwaites and Reed of Clerkenwell in London.  It is typical of their design at that time and very similar to their clock in the Knightsbridge Barracks in London. The clock features dials that are unusually placed, being on the out-built mountings on the four sides of the spire.  Likewise the clock itself is also unusually mounted because it is above the bell-frame in the belfry and on a level with the base of the spire.