Tickner Edwardes

Reverend Edward Tickner Edwardes (1865–1944) was an English writer, beekeeper, medical officer and priest. He wrote one of the earliest accounts of hitchhiking in 1910 – ''Lift-luck on Southern Roads''. He served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the First World War, serving in Gallipoli and running a laboratory in Egypt. After the war, he was ordained as a priest in the Church of England and became the vicar of Burpham.

Life

Beekeeping and writing

Edwardes was an enthusiastic beekeeper and wrote many books about the subject. He was an active member of the Sussex Beekeepers' Association and attended their meetings regularly. He designed the 'Tickner Edwardes' beehive which took standard British frames but was heavily insulated, and the simplified Unit Hive for commercial beekeeping which had identical brood chambers and honey supers.

At that time he lived in the Red Cottage on the main street of Burpham. He also had another cottage as a literary retreat as he continued to write books and contribute to periodicals. His ''Lift-Luck on Southern Roads'' is thought to be the earliest published account of hitchhiking.

Edwardes wrote a novel ''Tansy'' about a shepherdess on the Sussex Downs. This was made into a silent film in 1921, directed by Cecil Hepworth, also titled ''Tansy''.

Military service

Edwardes was already an established writer and in his late forties at the outbreak of war. He served in the RAMC in Gallipoli and Egypt in The Great War. He ran a laboratory in Cairo and then when posted back to the UK, he served in the 1st London Sanitary Company and then the Anti-Malarial Research Laboratory at Sandwich. He started the war as a private but finished with a commission and the rank of Captain.

Clergyman

He was Rector of Folkington from 1925 to 1927 and Vicar of Burpham in West Sussex from 1927 until his retirement in 1935. He and his wife Kathleen had four children – a son and three daughters. His son, Edward, became an RAF pilot but died in a crash in Aden in 1928. Tickner himself died on 29 December 1944 and was buried in St Mary's Church in Burpham.

John Cowper Powys was a friend and neighbour in Burpham. He wrote: "Edwardes was a man of meticulous nicety in his literary art. I recollect being confounded by the elaborate craftsmanship with which he laboured; pondering on words, taking words up, as it were, and laying them down, just as he did with the materials of his hives!" Powys especially "liked the toughwood texture of his bodily presence ... His long nose, his opaque, ivory-parchment skin, his tree-root neck, his shy, nervous, wild-animal brown eyes ... He possessed that grave, solid, imperturbable reserve, that stiff pride, mixed with disarming spasms of humility, that have characterized so many of the old-fashioned interpreters of English piety."

Works

*''An Idler in the Wilds'' 1906
*''The Bee-master of Warrilow'' 1907
*''The Lore of the Honey-bee'' 1909
*''Lift-luck on Southern Roads'' 1910
*''Neighbourhood; a year's life in and about an English village'' 1911
*''Side-lights of Nature in Quill and Crayon'' 1912
*''The Honey-Star'' 1913
*''Tansy'' 1914
*''Bees As Rent Payers'' 1914
*''With the RAMC in Egypt'' 1918
*''The Seventh Wave '' 1922
*''Bee-Keeping For All: A Manual Of Honey-Craft'' 1923
*''Bee-Keeping Do's And Dont's'' 1925
*''Sunset Bride '' 1927
*''Life's Silver Lining '' 1927
*''A Country Calendar'' 1928
*''Eve, The Enemy'' 1931
*''A Downland Year'' 1939

References

External links

The Quest For England
– Richard Vobes searches for his grave

The Red Cottage
– one of three houses in Burpham in which Edwardes lived

{{DEFAULTSORT:Edwardes, Edward Tickner
1865 births
1944 deaths
British beekeepers
English Anglican priests
English writers
Royal Army Medical Corps officers