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Welcome to my Website! Here you will
find details of all my books published to date. They are social
histories based in and around Hastings, England. Letters from
Lavender Cottage, Letters to Hannah, Court in the Act, The Long
Road from Lavender Cottage, Host Families Wanted, The Slow Turning
Tide, Austerity Diary from Lavender Cottage and Victory's Children,
Hastings 1945 - 2010, Letters to a Part time Barmaid. They can
all be purchased online via PayPal or ordered by post directly
from me.
Of my social histories Joanna Lumley said.
“I can’t put Victoria Seymour’s books down. They’re just
delightful and enthralling, a part of history which, unless she
had preserved it, might have blown away, like sand in the desert.”
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If you enjoy WWII history on the home front and the secret
pleasure of reading someone's private letters, then Letters
From Lavender Cottage- Hastings in WWII and Austerity is for
you.
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Letters to Hannah looks at WWII on the Home Front
through the eyes of those who lived in Hastings
and South East England, from September 1939 to December
1945. It also enlarges on the historical background
covered in its companion book, Letters from Lavender
Cottage.
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Court in the Act, which completes the trilogy, concentrates
on the work of the police force, the magistrates' and
other courts in WWII Hastings. As the effects of war took
hold, there was hardly any aspect of home front life that
was not controlled by some Government Act, Regulation
or Order, putting even more pressure on already overworked
police officers.
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The now famous occupant of Lavender Cottage, Emilie
Crane, returns, to let us back into her life and the daily
doings of her neighbours on the Ridge. What was the truth
about the supposed nudist colony opposite Lavender Cottage?
Was the guest house close by really a haven for left wing
agitators and a bolt hole for the scandalous occultist,
Aleister Crowley?.
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For over half century Hastings has been host
to hundreds of thousands of young people from all
over the world. Host Families Wanted, the true story
of overseas English language students in Hastings,
is approached with the enthusiasm for detail that
my regular readers expect of me.
If you are a host family, have been, or are thinking
of becoming one, this book is for you.
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The Slow Turning Tide looks back to over a half
a century ago, when Hastings and St Leonards faced the
long task of recovering from WWII. Full of intriguing
detail the book features stories of Hastings citizens,
rebuilding their lives, homes and careers, marrying and
raising families, while enduring austerity and nine post-war
years of rationing and shortage of everything, including
houses
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In this diary the now famous Lavender Cottage occupant,
Miss Emilie Crane, reveals intimate details of her daily
life, giving us a picture of how one household managed
during the depths of the austerity period that followed
WWII.
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Victory’s Children, the last in her series of Hastings
wartime and post-war social histories, commemorates the
65th anniversary of the coming of peace in the summer
of 1945. The blitz spirit of “all being in it together”
had begun to evaporate before victory was declared; a
war-weary population was slowly realising the extent of
the austerity and hardships ahead
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A bundle of love letters, found at an auction in Hastings, tell
the true story of a 1950s postal courtship.
Their writer is Dunkirk survivor Maurice Nash who, fourteen
years after the historic evacuation, was working as builder,
travelling around England repairing and rebuilding a still
broken country. The object of his shy affection was part
time barmaid Peggy Cockrill, who served behind the bar
of one of the many pubs in which Maurice found solace
in the lonely evenings.
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It gives me great pleasure to introduce my latest book, Looking Back on Hastings, which will trigger memories for all generations.
The famous and infamous of Hastings are once again under
the spotlight, local buildings are explored, and the town's
traditions and customs explained, in a compilation of
my articles from the Hastings Observer's nostalgia
feature, Looking Back, which has been described
as a "potted history of Hastings."
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| Copyright© Victoria Seymour 2015 |
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