Malcolm Pratt served Winchelsea Corporation as Honory Town Clerk between 1984 and 2012, having previously served for more than twenty years as clerk of the town's Parish Council. He is the author of two books about the town's history: Winchelsea, A Port of Stranded Pride and Winchelsea, The Tale of a Medieval Town. His background is as a long-serving teacher of English and Drama in several schools in East Sussex before he retired as Deputy Head of the William Parker School in Hastings. In the Queen's Birthday Honours List of 2010, Malcolm was awarded the MBE 'for services to the community in Winchelsea and to heritage in East Sussex'.
Publications
Winchelsea: a Port of Stranded Pride, by Malcolm Pratt, published 3 October 1998 (282 pp., published by the author, ISBN-10: 0953241106 & ISBN-13: 9780953241101) accessible at: W.S.R.O. [Lib 13872] & The Keep [LIB/503101] & West Sussex Libraries & East Sussex Libraries
Winchelsea: The Tale of a Medieval Town Principally Telling the Story of the Ancient Town from the Earliest Times Until 1800, by Malcolm Pratt, published 2005 (288 pp., published by the author, ISBN-10: 0953241114 & ISBN-13: 9780953241118) accessible at: The Keep [LIB/503099] & West Sussex Libraries & East Sussex Libraries
Winchelsea Poor Law Records, 1790-1841, edited by Malcolm Pratt, published 1 April 2013 (vol. 94, xxxvi + 380 pp., Sussex Record Society, ISBN-10: 0854450769 & ISBN-13: 9780854450763) accessible at: W.S.R.O. [Lib 18291] & The Keep [LIB/500471][Lib/507890] & West Sussex Libraries & East Sussex Libraries View Online
Abstract:"The poor are ever with us" is a common phrase, but one that usually evokes images of an amorphous, anonymous mass. Rarely do we get beyond grim registers yielding stark statistics on people, money, food and clothing. Yet through the use of an amazing and unusual collection of letters, this volume puts stories. faces and individual identities to the poor of Winchelsea of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In doing so, it also conjures up the life of this small town at that time, the work of its inhabitants and the duties of those in authority who took responsibility for the poor. In particular, it highlights the dedicated and highly efficient work of one man, Charles Arnett, the master of the workhouse and the only salaried official, as he struggled for five years to both care for the poor and balance the books. Here are stories for all times as people moved in and out of employment, suffered from rising food prices, coped with how life could suddenly be changed by ill-health, and the constant struggles of maintaining families - all against a backdrop of limited and inadequate housing. This volume yields a multi-faceted set of stories drawn not only from the points of view of those in authority and their various registers, but also from the heartrending letters of the poor.
Review by Christopher Whittick in Sussex Past & Present no. 131, December 2013:In the popular imagination, by the 18th century little but fields of waving corn survived on the spot where once King Edward's burgesses of New Winchelsea had plied one of the country's foremost wine trades: the combined efforts of silting, French aggression and the rise of Rye had reduced it to a shadow of its former grandeur. But as ever, the reality is more complicated, and more nuanced. Life inevitably went on in Winchelsea after its decline but the more depressed it became, its status as both a parliamentary borough and an exempt jurisdiction, combined with an influx of troops during the Napoleonic Wars, paradoxically ensured the preservation of an archive, almost unparalleled in East Sussex, which chronicles the lives of its poorest inhabitants.
In 1683, the Poor Rate had produced a return of £20 3s 9d; even by 1782, the Overseers were prepared to spend £175 a year to outsource poor relief to a private contractor. It was the abandonment of that experiment in 1792 - a decade later the rate was required to produce £1229 - which gave rise to most of the documents edited by Malcolm Pratt in the excellent, if at times harrowing book.
The quantity and richness of the archive has determined the author to present his material not chronologically or thematically but by case, which makes the book one to be read, not merely consulted. The material ranges de alto in basso - from the story of the former parish overseer John Eagles, eventually hanged at Newgate for the theft of a banknote in 1827, to the demand of Edward Brignell of Ivychurch for appropriate clothing for Mary Relfe, taken on as a farm servant a month earlier at a shilling a week; 'otherwise I shall send her back again'.
Unlike Thomas Turner's diary, whose detailed narrative of his implementation of the Poor Law has so much to tell us about ordinary lives half a century before, these are not merely writings about the poor - many are penned by the poor themselves. As almost all the cases show, the line between literate prosperity and destitution was often a narrow one, over which whole families could be pushed in a matter of weeks by the unpredictable vagaries of unemployment, the weather and bad health.
The author has dedicated the volume to the memory of Roy Hunnisett, who continued to cultivate his Sussex roots as he rose to become one of the foremost scholar-archivists of his generation. His wise counsel as a member of council and latterly as a literary director, coupled with his own editorial endeavour, contributed to a renaissance in the quality of the Sussex Record Society's output. His role as mentor, acknowledged by the author, was also formative at the start of my own career almost 40 years ago, and one to which I am equally proud to pay tribute.
With this volume Malcolm Pratt, a former town clerk of Winchelsea with two histories of the Port of Stranded Pride to his name, has done more than credit to his outstanding material, and to the efforts of his predecessors to preserve it.
In 1683, the Poor Rate had produced a return of £20 3s 9d; even by 1782, the Overseers were prepared to spend £175 a year to outsource poor relief to a private contractor. It was the abandonment of that experiment in 1792 - a decade later the rate was required to produce £1229 - which gave rise to most of the documents edited by Malcolm Pratt in the excellent, if at times harrowing book.
The quantity and richness of the archive has determined the author to present his material not chronologically or thematically but by case, which makes the book one to be read, not merely consulted. The material ranges de alto in basso - from the story of the former parish overseer John Eagles, eventually hanged at Newgate for the theft of a banknote in 1827, to the demand of Edward Brignell of Ivychurch for appropriate clothing for Mary Relfe, taken on as a farm servant a month earlier at a shilling a week; 'otherwise I shall send her back again'.
Unlike Thomas Turner's diary, whose detailed narrative of his implementation of the Poor Law has so much to tell us about ordinary lives half a century before, these are not merely writings about the poor - many are penned by the poor themselves. As almost all the cases show, the line between literate prosperity and destitution was often a narrow one, over which whole families could be pushed in a matter of weeks by the unpredictable vagaries of unemployment, the weather and bad health.
The author has dedicated the volume to the memory of Roy Hunnisett, who continued to cultivate his Sussex roots as he rose to become one of the foremost scholar-archivists of his generation. His wise counsel as a member of council and latterly as a literary director, coupled with his own editorial endeavour, contributed to a renaissance in the quality of the Sussex Record Society's output. His role as mentor, acknowledged by the author, was also formative at the start of my own career almost 40 years ago, and one to which I am equally proud to pay tribute.
With this volume Malcolm Pratt, a former town clerk of Winchelsea with two histories of the Port of Stranded Pride to his name, has done more than credit to his outstanding material, and to the efforts of his predecessors to preserve it.