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January 1960 November 1967 April 1981

In 1981, as part of the pipeline Esso built to carry products from Fawley to Purfleet via Gatwick airport, a trench was dug across Thursley Common. The article below describes the project. From Esso Magazine Number 188 Summer 1981

These walks were created in 2008 and may not now be accurate!

This pamphlet was published by the Nature Conservancy Council: And this by English Nature: PDF of contents below: reference to fires at Thursley SSSI on pages 10 and 11 From Nature Conservation Review Volume 2, 19 77 From Nature Line, Spring 1992

With thanks to Sean Edwards and Jill Fry. Also includes Excavation of Two Mounds on Thursley Common in 1959 Hydon's Ball section and simplified list of strata: 5 Sandstone 6 Large Paludina 7 Sandstone h1e Weald Clay h2a Atherfield Clay h2b Hythe Beds h2c Sandgate Beds These 3D models were made by Sean Edwards in the 1960's and built on a 2' x 1' plywood base, with polystyrene contour layers cut with a craft knife, the steps filled with plaster of Paris, smoothed by hand and painted with acrylic paint. Unfortunately only black and white photographs now exist and the models, borrowed by the 'Fight the Red Route' A3 group, have never re-appeard. The circular pin-head on the Puttenham (Sandgate) beds marks the position of the Three Horseshoes. This article was written in July 1981 by Jill Fry, BSc, as a result of the Esso Pipeline installation across Thursley Common: Soil Profiles Exposed in pipeline Trench July 1981 The article is reproduced in full in the PDF below. Unfortunately the annotated slides no longer exist. PDF of contents is below:

Only photographs of this event plus Mr Lowe, Thursley Taxi Driver

Heath View, now known as "Acorns", in the early 1900s. The stamp on the postcard is dated 1905 or 1908. It is situated on the Old Portsmouth Road. The Edwards family lived there. Jim Edwards was the local rate collector for the parish and collected the rates on his bicycle. The parish extended right over to Haslemere so he pedalled quite far! Jim's brother, Freddy , was quite a local character. He lived at Cosford Mill with his sister and before the first World War worked in the City for a German bank. During the war he didn't have a job because of the hostilities and he never worked again. Cosford Mill was condemned and he moved into a shed at Heath View but went to the mill during the day. He then bought a piece of woodland near Horn Cottage and it was alsways known as Freddy's property. Another lodger at Heath View was Louis Pecskai who was by origin and birth, a Hungarian. He had been born in Fiume when it was part of Austro-Hungary but he looked more like an Italian. Mary Bennett remembers him as a much jollier Napoleon. By nationality he was passionately British and insisted on serving in the Home Guard. Louis Pecskai had been a child prodigy as a youth, Court Violinist to Queen Margarite of Italy, and he remained a violinsit of very high standing, with honorary fellowships of both Trinity College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music, at each of which he had taught and had some reputation in London Chamber Music. He suddenly married a pupil called Bertha who was young enough to be his daughter and they built themselves, first Truxford and then Racks Close (now Cotton House). When pupils fell off during the Second World War, and his own health started to fail, the Pecskais left Racks Close and moved to Smallbrook Farm, lent to him by Sir Bruce Thomas, and there he died in 1944. Two postcards published in the 1920s From Wikipedia: Luigi Pecskai ( Fiume Veneto , July 21 , 1880 - Thursley , February 24 , 1944 ), also known as Louis Pécskai , was an Italian violinist of Hungarian origin.     In the Royal Academy of Budapest, he studied with teachers Baldini and Jenő Hubay . He made his debut in Fiume as an infant in 1886, and then appeared successively in London, Rome, Florence, Ancona, Turin, Budapest, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Venice, Milan, Padua, Graz, and in the principal towns of Italy, Hungary , Switzerland and England, the country in which he was going to die.

This photograph, inspired by the school photographs of his youth, was Peter Anderson's idea (he lived in Brook Cottage, opposite the road to Smallbrook, at the time) and 2000 was the perfect time.

Thursley History Society recently made a small contribution to the fund established to save the Rural Life Living Museum. Just over £150,000 was raised and the museum has been saved from closure. https://rural-life.org.uk/ This is the beginning of a notification from the Rural Life Living Museum: From Wikipedia:

Tony Kelly, of Bedford Farm, gave a talk in the village hall in October 2024 about his extraordinary feat. The text and the ppt below are condensations of his talk which was appreciated by the packed audience. From Thursley Village Facebook page: Climbing Mount Everest, 8848m, in 2003 The highest point on Earth. A summary of Tony Kelly’s story   The presentation will cover the lead up to the climb and our summit bids. I’ll also touch on some history of the mountain, as in 2024 its 100yrs since the famous 1924 Mallory and Irvine Expedition (and the mystery of did they summit or not). Their route was on the North side of Mount Everest and we are attempting the same North side route from Tibet. We are attempting the north route because its technically much harder than the south and consequently climbed much less. Back then around 1200 people had summited Mount Everest but only approx. 200 of them from the North side. It's worth dwelling on George Mallory and Sandy Irvine briefly. Mallory’s body was eventually found on the North Face in 1999 with torso bruising indicating a serious fall whilst roped. The remains of his mid layer jumper were still visible supplied by W Paine, 72 High Street, Godalming. Yes, he was a local. Originally from the north west but settled in Godalming as a teacher at Charterhouse and married Ruth, a Godalming girl. Sandy Irvine’s remains were only found in September this year, 2024, on the north face directly below but much further down than Mallory’s body indicating they were almost certainly roped together when they fell. I will also bring to the talk a section of telegraph wire, used for Advanced Base Camp communications in 1924, that I found on the East Rongbuk glacier in 2000. I was with Graham Hoyland at the time (he was on our 2000 expedition) who had been responsible for the search that found George Mallory in 1999. Graham was the great great grandson of Howard Somervell who was on the 1924 expedition with Mallory and Irvine. So where did it all begin for me? After hiking in the UK through my 20’s I got introduced to rock climbing and quickly progressed to rock, ice and mountaineering in the Alps. After 10 years of multiple annual trips to the Alps, I was looking for a bigger challenge and met the internationally renowned expedition leader, Russell Brice, in a bar in Chamonix. My friend and mountain guide, Mark Seaton, was able to reassure Russell I was technically more than competent to join him but we didn’t know how my body would react to extreme altitude. In 1999 I went with Russell Brice to Cho Oyu, the 6th highest mountain in the world at 8,188m to find out if I was ok at altitude. As a test it went well. The weather was brutal. In the end we didn’t make a summit attempt because of extreme snow conditions but I was the only member of the expedition, westerner or sherpa, to reach the expeditions high point of 7,900m and I did it solo. Mt Everest was on! I had mentioned, summit bids, plural. In 2000 we took an expedition to Mount Everest to climb the North side from Tibet. After 2 months on the mountain we made 2 attempts on the summit. The first one was aborted at 7900 metres due to atrocious weather conditions and massive snow loading. That first attempt had high attrition and resulted in 6 of the 7 climbing members pulling the plug. Consequently, on the 2nd attempt, it was only myself, 3 professional mountain guides and 3 sherpa’s that made the attempt. At camp 2, 7500m, our tents got avalanched overnight and buried. It became a matter of survival, avoiding carbon dioxide asphyxiation overnight by punching holes through the snow and ice over the tents and the following day using a quite dangerous technique to deliberately trigger avalanches to clear the massive snow load in front of us to be able to down climb. To cap it off in our exhausted state when we pulled off the mountain a melt water lake had broken out of the East Rongbuk Glacier and we had to build a raft out of barrels and wood to ferry the 20 expedition members and 10 tonnes of equipment out! I’m reminded of the definition of an Adventure: “an undertaking with an uncertain outcome”! So the 2003 Expedition was “Unfinished Business”. We returned to Kathmandu, Nepal, in late March and after assembling some 11 tonnes of equipment and “shopping” in the local markets for 2 months plus of provisions for 17 team members we made our way via Lhasa, Tibet to Mount Everest basecamp at 5200m and set about the expedition proper. High altitude climbing is a combination of technical competence, mountaineering experience and a “head game”. It’s a marathon not a sprint. You’re going to spend months in daily calorie deficit, physically and mentally stressed by the environment and the challenge. -50 deg C and 150mph winds are regular features. You’ll spend a lot of time climbing at 10/10ths of your ability and experience but to be successful you will have to spend some time at 11/10ths or worse and make the judgement call on when to take those risks and how long to stay exposed. Tenacity, stamina and will power will count for a lot. On arrival at basecamp team members blood oxygen levels of mid 70% were not unusual. That would be an A&E visit back home at sea level. Acclimatisation to get the blood oxy levels into the 90%’s takes weeks as you teach your body to produce more red blood cells to cope with the ¼ of sea level oxygen availability we’ll have to deal with higher up the mountain. Acclimatisation starts in base camp knocking off 6000m peaks to warm up and then moving up the glacier to work on the mountain. The route will take a month and half of preparation work putting in fixed rope and installing and provisioning four high camps. We’ll be going up and down visiting and revisiting these camps. This will mean we will effectively climb the height of Mount Everest several times in the process before we even consider a summit attempt. The north side route is not only technically more difficult than the south side by it is much longer. Its 22km from Basecamp to Advanced Basecamp. From ABC we must establish camp 1 at 7050m, camp 2 7500m, camp 3 7900m and camp 4 at 8300m and fully stock them. That includes lugging oxygen bottles (about 6kg each) up which we will use (3 each) from camp 3 7900m onwards. The climbing is a mix of technical ice climbing and massive snow slopes, rock sections of scrambling and massively technical vertical rock climbing at 8600m on the 2nd Step (this is the crux of the climb). Having got the infrastructure of the route set up we had to retreat to base camp because of a massive storm. It wiped out a significant portion of our camps on the mountain ripping tents stocked with personal kit, food and oxygen off the mountain and depositing it on the glacier below. When we went back up to ABC we had to find the debris on the glacier and icewall, extract it from crevasses, uncover the snow buried ropes, rebuild the camps and route. (when l say “we” went back to recover things it was actually only 2 of the 7 client climbers (Trynt and myself) together with sherpas). We then set about a summit attempt in late May. Two of the seven climbers pulled out sick. The rest of us pushed on. Five climbers with sherpa partners and a mountain guide. Herman, the guide, was focused on Zedi, Matt and Gernot. Sue and Chung were sick. Myself and my sherpa partner, Dorje, were operating pretty much independently. It’s typically a six-day push, four days up and two off. Leaving camp 4, 8300m, at circa 10pm/11pm to climb through the night. Intending to reach the three steps on the north east ridge by dawn. But we experienced some delays en route due to some slower expeditions blocking the route in front of us. It wasn’t busy like photo’s you may have seen of the south side but this was 2003, the 50th anniversary of the 1953 success, there were a few more climbers than normal and its the nature of the route on the north that is much more constraining. I got further delayed by having to rescue a climbing colleague (Zedi) who made a massive error and found himself hanging on the rope at the 2nd Step, 8600m, swinging over the north face of Mount Everest with a mile of fresh air between his legs. It cost me, and Dorje my sherpa partner, a lot of excess oxygen usage fighting to save him. We got him back in and back enroute. It took Dorje and I a while to sort ourselves out and get going again. The others, including Zedi, who I had rescued, were ahead and summited, albeit late (having breached the turnaround time limit we had all agreed to). I calculated I was about to run out of oxygen probably on top and that would risk death. I made an incredibly difficult decision to turn back 48metres from the top which would have taken another 1.5hrs! I radioed Russell to advise and we turned back. On descent I did actually run out of oxygen around 8500m but we still had to get down so Dorje and I pressed on without. We also had to help rescue (again) the same guy I had recovered on the way up because now he had gone snow blind and couldn’t see to down climb. The climb was incredible but a massive blow to turn back so close. After getting back to Advanced Base Camp and feeling pretty low the next morning Russell came to my tent with a mug of yak milk tea and a large shot of whisky and told me to shut up and say nothing. He said everyone else is leaving, there’s a narrow weather window opening and I think you have it in you to go back! Basically he convinced me to attempt what no climber (professional or amateur) other than a small number of sherpa’s had ever attempted on Mount Everest and that was to climb the mountain twice in one season and I was going to try twice in two weeks! So nine days after returning to Advanced Base Camp Sue and Chung, my colleagues who had been sick on the first attempt and myself together with our sherpa climbing partners mounted what was to be my second attempt this season and my fourth summit attempt on Mount Everest. The weather was going to be challenging. We didn’t have the requisite four days up and two off. We had to wait out a storm in Camp 2 and then pushing very hard from camp 2 we missed out camp 3 by a continuous climbing push stopping very briefly at camp 4 (not for rest, food and sleep as normal) we picked up water and oxygen and continued climbing into a 33-hour continuous aggressive push right through the night to summit early in the morning, for me at 7:03am, May 31st. It had been amazing as every other expedition except ours had left the mountain so Sue, Chung and myself had the entire mountain to ourselves. This is unheard of and although we had climbed through a storm the summit day was blue sky with the curvature of the earths horizon visible for a 100miles. There were tears. Which immediately froze! Getting up is of course only half way. Getting off is essential and almost as hard as going up. In my case very hard having only nine days prior albeit but for 48metres been on the summit. It becomes a massive head game. Your body is screaming for rest telling you its done in and there’s nothing not even fumes left in the tank. You want to stop. But if you stop and rest there is a very high chance you’ll slip into dozing followed by hypoxia and then hypothermia and death. So keep moving. I made it back to camp 1 at 7050m and rested for the night before descent to ABC the following day. 2003 was the 50th anniversary of the 1953 successful first summit by Hilary and Tensing via the South side Route and associated with that anniversary the Nepali Mountaineering Association were at the 2003 Kendal Mountain Film Festival awarding medals for significant achievement on Mount Everest. I was on stage in the company of Chris Bonington and Doug Scott (1st brit), Stephen Venables (1st brit no Oxy) and others including Mike Westmacott and George Band members of the 1953 expedition. I was awarded a Gold Medal with the citation from the NMA president: “an outstanding rescue, wise turn around at 48m, subsequent success after only nine days and in aggressive style, extraordinary & exemplary mountaineering”

This article written by Jackie Rickenberg was published in the Parish Magazine in October 2021 (see also separate entry for The Hindhead Murder 1786 - 1986 . The Unknown Sailor was an anonymous seafarer murdered in the Devil’s Punchbowl in September 1786, and buried in Thursley’s churchyard. His murderers were hanged in chains on Gibbet Hill, Hindhead the following year. In his book Who was the Sailor murdered at Hindhead 1786 (2000), Peter Moorey argues the case that the Unknown Sailor's identity was Edward Hardman, born in 1752 in Lambeth , London, although this has not been confirmed. The story goes thus: The sailor was visiting the Red Lion Inn at Thursley , as he was walking back from London to join his ship at Portsmouth on 24 September 1786. There, he met three other seafarers, James Marshall, Michael Casey and Edward Lonegon. He generously paid for their drinks and food and was last seen leaving for Hindhead Hill with them. The three seafarers murdered and robbed him and stripped him of his clothes. The three then made their way down the London to Portsmouth road (now the A3 ) and were arrested a few hours later trying to sell the murdered sailor's clothes at the Sun Inn in Rake . The Hampshire Chronicle, dated 2 October 1786, reads: Sunday last a shocking murder was committed by three sailors, on one of their companions, a seaman also, between Godalming and Hindhead. They nearly severed his head from his body, stripped him quite naked, and threw him into a valley, where he was providentially discovered, soon after the perpetration of the horrid crime, by some countrymen corning over Hind Head, who immediately gave the alarm, when the desperadoes were instantly pursued, and overtaken at the house of Mr. Adams, The Sun, at Rake. They were properly secured, and are since lodged in gaol, to take their trials at the next assizes for the county of Surrey. Six months later they were tried at Kingston assizes (the precursor of Crown Courts) and two days after that, on Saturday 7 April 1787, they were hanged in chains on a triple gibbet close to the scene of the crime in Hindhead. The blacksmith who made the chains and gibbet was Richard Court who is buried in Thursley churchyard and his headstone bears the inscription: ‘My Sledge and Hammer lie reclin’d, My Bellows too have lost their wind; My Fire is out, and Forge decay’s, And in the Dust my Vice is laid.’ The sailor was buried in our churchyard and the gravestone was paid for by the residents of the village. It reads: In memory of A generous but unfortunate Sailor Who was barbarously murder'd on Hindhead On September 24th 1786 By three Villains After he had liberally treated them And promised them his farther assistance On the road to Portsmouth. The Sailor's Stone at Gibbet Hill (in The Punchbowl) was erected by James Stillwell of nearby Cosford Mill soon after the murder. It was sited on the Old Coaching Road from London to Portsmouth close to the site of the murder. The inscription on the front of the stone reads: ERECTED In detestation of a barbarous Murder Committed here on an unknown Sailor On Sep, 24th 1786 By Edwd. Lonegon, Mich. Casey & Jas. Marshall Who were all taken the same day And hung in Chains near this place Whoso sheddeth Man's Blood by Man shall his Blood be shed: Genesis Chap 9 Ver 6 In 1851 Sir William Erle paid for the erection of a granite Celtic cross on Gibbet Hill on the site of the scaffold. He did this to dispel the fears and superstitions of local people and to raise their spirits. The cross has four Latin inscriptions around its base. They read: POST TENEBRAS LUX IN OBITU PAX IN LUCE SPES POST OBITUM SALUS which translate to "Light after darkness. Peace in passing away. Hope in light. Salvation after death." All monuments are standing to this day. St Michael and All Angels churchyard The murder of the unknown sailor has always attracted press coverage: Extract from The Daily Universal Register, 4 October As well as monographs and other literature: From the Francis Frith Collection:

The Ruins, now known as The Well House, with Mrs Fosberry, standing outside about 1914-1918. Frank and Elizabeth Keen lived at The Ruins from about 1920 to 1936. Their eldest son, Frank, when married lived in an annexe at The Ruins and their five children were born there. They included Alfred (Cocker) and Don who remained in the village. Frank and Elizabeth's eldest daughter, Nellie, married Bert Williams and continued to live with her father, their two children, David and Mary (Rapley) were also born at The Ruins. In about 1936 the house which had belonged to the Rushbrooke Estate was sold to a Mr Frost.