Routes of America

Cherwell
Flora Thompson - The Writer from Juniper Hill North Oxfordshire. Flora Jane Thompson (5 December 1876 - 21 May 1947) was an English novelist and poet famous for her semi-autobiographical trilogy about the English countryside, Lark Rise to Candleford.

She was born in Juniper Hill in North Oxfordshire, the eldest of six children of Albert and Emma Timms, a stonemason and nursemaid respectively. Her favourite brother, Edwin, was killed at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Flora was educated at Cottisford and worked in Post Offices in south-east England until marrying John William Thompson in 1903, with whom she had two sons (the younger, Peter, later lost at sea in 1941) and a daughter.

After winning an essay competition in 1911, she wrote extensively, publishing short stories and magazine and newspaper articles. She was a keen self-taught naturalist and many of her nature articles were anthologised in 1986.
Her most famous works are the Lark Rise to Candleford trilogy, which she sent as essays to Oxford University Press in 1938 and were published soon after. She wrote a sequel Heatherley which was published posthumously. The books are a fictionalised, if autobiographical, social history of rural English life in the late 19th and early 20th century and are now considered minor classics. Flora Thompson died in 1947 in Brixham, Devon.

Horsham

Main link with America in the Horsham area was with William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania. This remarkable man spent most of his life living in nearby Warminghurst, near Ashington, West Sussex. He helped found the Quaker Blue Idol Meeting House at Coolham in 1680. When he sailed to America to set up his state of Pennsylvania, 16 people from Billingshurst made up part of the 100 settlers.

Lewes

Lewes, East Sussex was home to Tom Paine from 1768 to 1774. Paine moved to Lewes where he was employed as an excise officer. Paine became involved in local politics, serving on the town council and establishing a debating club in a local inn. It was in Lewes that Tom Paine formulated ideas that would have great impact on America and France.

Paine later emigrated to America and settled in Philadelphia where he became a journalist. Paine had several articles published including one advocating the abolition of slavery. In 1776 he published Common Sense, a pamphlet that attacked the British Monarchy and argued for American independence.

Paine played no role in American government after independence and in 1787 he returned to Britain. Paine continued to write on political issues and in 1791 published his most influential work, The Rights of Man. In the book Paine attacked hereditary government and argued for equal political rights.

In 1802 Paine moved back to America but another of his books, the Age of Reason, had upset a large number of people and he discovered that he had lost the popularity he had enjoyed during the War of Independence. Unable to return to Britain, Paine remained in America until his death in New York on 8th June 1809.

A two-week event is planned to commemorate the bi-centenary of Tom Paine's death, in Lewes, during July 2009.