life
ISLAND HISTORY
Bembridge - The Village
Following my plan to roam the Isle of Wight
and delve into the history of its towns and
villages and compare them with life today, I
visited Brighstone and then in April I went
to Bembridge, the Island’s easternmost
village.
It’s been recorded that in 1388 William
Russell, Lord of Yaverland, drained some of
the Brading marshes and made a causeway
from ‘Binbridge Isle’ or ‘Yar Isle’ to
Morton. Now a bridge spans the railway
line at Yarbridge and the river, the Eastern
Yar, flows through fields where the sea once
covered the land right through from Brading
Haven to Sandown Bay.
But the name Bembridge may have come
from an earlier bridge, a ‘beam-bridge’
before the causeway was built. And then
there’s another version naming the village
‘Bynnebrigg’ in the 14th century and
‘Bichebrigge’ in the 16th century, whilst
Sir John Oglander suggests the name was
a general term for all land lying east of the
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Article by June Elford
bridge connecting it with Brading.
Bembridge is twinned with Plédram in
Brittany. You see the sign near the airport
where John Britten and Desmond Norman
designed and built the famous ‘Islander’,
a light STOL aircraft used today by many
police forces in the country as a spotter
plane. In the village churchyard you’ll find
John Britten’s grave with an Islander plane
engraved on the headstone and in the past,
the airport has been used for enactments of
the famous Schneider Trophy Air Race.
Further on the road divides, one road going
through Steyne woods, described by the
Reverend E. Venerables in 1860 as “blue in
the spring with the bells of the Lungwort,”
and it’s here that you can still see the
original site of Steyne Wood Battery. It
was made in 1893 but the gun emplacement
was never used because the gun got stuck
at Steyne Corner. Also in the grounds
of Steyne Woods is the building Sir John
Thornycroft designed in 1910 to house a test
tank for research on the design of the hulls
of ships.
The other route to the village is via
Whitecliff, up Hillway and past the school
founded by John Howard Whitehouse in
1919. Whitehouse’s teaching was based on
the principles of John Ruskin, the painter,
and the school held the largest collection
of Ruskin’s work in the world until it was
closed in 1996 and became an activity centre
renamed Kingswood.
Mollie Downer lived in a cottage on
Hillway and was reputed to be a witch. She
was also in cahoots wiith smugglers’ gangs
so her re putation was already in shreds by
the time she died in 1835. Mollie willed her
home, ‘The Witch’s Cottage’, to the local
vicar, Sir Henry Thompson, who promptly
ordered the building and its contents to be
burned.
At Steyne Cross there’s a choice either to
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