Published 12 July 2001

Poltergeist?
LOCAL history enthusiast Derrick Lawson, of Lynwood, Folkestone, is thinking of presenting his uncle's skates, bought in the town in 1913, to the town museum.

His extrovert uncle Harold Scowen, who served with the personnel of the Airship Patrol at Capel airfield in the First World War, was once a champion roller skater, Derrick told me, performing acrobatic stunts and somersaults just as the young roller-bladers do today.

"Before my uncle joined the Royal Naval Air Service in 1916 he used these skates many times on the old roller rink on the sea front and, with his sister Cissy, won many prizes there - so much so the manager barred them from all competitions!" he said.

Derrick, who used to work at Ashford Railway Works, says his first recollection of meeting his uncle was during a visit to Plymouth in 1943 when Harold 'Cock' Scowen showed him the old pair of roller skates he bought in Folkestone 30 years before.

"One day these will be yours!" said Harold. And later, shortly before he died, his daughter, Barbara Scowen, told Derrick "Take them back to Folkestone with you. Father would like that very much." Derrick Scowen was then 17 or 18.

Derrick's grandmother Beatrice Scowen (nee Cockerton) was Harold's mother.

After service in the Royal Naval Air Service at Capel, when he was concerned with scout balloons used for hunting enemy submarines in the Channel, Harold Scowen was posted to another air ship station at Tregantle, in Cornwall.

"Since you have featured my uncle in Memories a couple of times recently," said Derrick, "I thought readers might like to see the all-metal skates so I have taken a picture of them.

"Uncle never returned to Folkestone to live after demobilisation at the end of the First War.
He married a Cornish girl and settled in the West Country."

Derrick also showed me his late Uncle Horace Buchan's picture of a bus he drove to Margate in 1925. His uncle is in the driver's seat. "I wonder if any reader knows whereabouts the photograph was taken?" said Derrick (tel: 242141.)

"My uncle worked for the charabanc owners for many years until he died in 1926," he said.

Incidentally Derrick's father Ernest Lawson was born in 69 Dover Street, a property now demolished, which was steeped in the smuggling history of Folkestone.

"That house was definitely haunted. The 17th Century property sat on a mysterious network of tunnels known to riddle the Fishmarket area and these were uncovered when the property was eventually demolished in the 1950s as part of the redevelopment of the area," said Derrick.

Smugglers’ tunnels

The tunnels are thought to have been directly connected with smuggling incidents described in the old Folkestone book "Smugglers and Smuggling Days" published around 1883 and reprinted in 1967. This was written by John English the one-time editor and owner of the old Folkestone Express newspaper which came to an abrupt end when an adjoining property was bombed in the Second World War and the offices and printing works were destroyed.

As to the "haunting" of the Dover Street house and poltergeist activity, which have been highlighted in Memories before. Derrick told me how his father, Ernest, at the age of 13, was about to start work on the railway.

"The night before he was due to report to Dover Priory Station he packed some clothes in a case, which he placed under his bed.

"The following morning the case was open and
)
the contents strewn over the room!

"His parents told him not to worry because it was 'just the ghost playing about'!"

And that was not an isolated incident, insists Derrick, who first visited the house in the early 1930s when he was about six. He says the same sort of thing happened at regular intervals in subsequent years, but the family just grew to accept it. It sounds very much like poltergeist activity.

"One Christmas, when nearly all the family were present, vases on the old Victorian style mantelpiece and heavy brass fire irons in the fender moved, but nobody was worried - it was just the ghost at work!"
Small wonder then, that Derrick firmly believes in ghosts and loves to hear of any local "haunt-ings."

When he was 11 years old he noticed the old fireclay kitchen sink of the house was hinged to the wall and, puzzled about this, asked his grandmother about it.

She explained that at one time smugglers lived in the house, said Derrick. Beneath that sink was a trapdoor leading to an underground passage which led a long way under the town. "Twice my grandfather, with his dog, explored the passage," said Derrick "but he never found where it led. He was driven back by the damp and cold!"
ABOVE: Derrick Lawson's uncle Harold Scowen. TOP: The skates the junior champion roller skater wore; and, RIGHT: Horace Buchan at the wheel of an outing charabanc, probably pictured in Thanet in 1925.
 

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