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Newspaper Reports continued 24:-

Finally, a scatty but hilarious report concerned the farcical 1849 election of an unopposed Lord Lennox, the only candidate for the Rape of Bramber that year. Sparsely attended due to a bitter, northerly wind on that December day and conducted in East Street near the south-east entrance to the churchyard. It included Lennox, John Shelley (the deceased poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s brother), an ancient town crier who hardly had the strength to shout and a heckling, anti-Lennox, one-eyed fisherman waving a kipper! Wonderful stuff!

Newspaper Reports continued 23:-

Humour though did emerge from time to time. One report (1831) mentioned an Irishman who on passing the signboard of the Sussex Pad inn exclaimed ‘Sure now, I’ll be after getting me a pint of beer here for the honour of ould Ireland for it’s the only place in England that says Success to Pat!’ On another occasion (1842) a churchgoing woman not blessed with spelling and punctuation skills whose husband was going to sea passed a prayer for his wellbeing to the St. Mary’s vicar that read ‘A man going to see his wife desires the prayers of this congregation’ which when read out ‘set the congregation in all of a titter.’

Newspaper Reports continued 22:-

In 1826 a Shoreham oyster merchant demonstrated a great deal of ingenuity in solving one particular crime. Owner of one of the oyster beds in the river that had suffered a series of thefts of his stock he suspected a fellow trader. At low tide he wrote his name on a number of scraps of paper, inserted them between the half open shells that the oysters instantly closed. Next day he purchased and opened oysters from the suspected man, found the scraps with his name and the man was arrested. 

Newspaper Reports continued 21:-

Shoreham’s home-grown justice was also used for other offences. In 1799 the miller at Southwick windmill was prosecuted for selling flour deficient by 5lbs in the hundredweight. This so incensed the populace at Shoreham (to whom he apparently sold his flour) that they ‘exhibited the miller in effigy about the streets’ then burnt it on a bonfire. Another man was known to have ill-treated his wife (1848) so some 200 townsfolk paraded through town carrying an effigy of the offender on a pole ‘chanting some doggerel rhyme,’ marched to his house in the High Street, let off fireworks and burnt his effigy in front of him.

Newspaper Reports continued 20:- 

In 1853 following three break-ins to his Buckingham House residence and expecting another, Harry Colville Bridger had his servants lie in wait at night with guns. When the burglar returned for the fourth time he was shot dead – the court returned a verdict of justifiable homicide.