False Memories and the Bombing of the Swan Hotel

Have you ever recalled a childhood event only to realise it didn’t happen, or perhaps it happened to someone else? If so, you're not alone.

I've always been fascinated by social history. Over the years, I’ve collected hundreds of first memories and embarked on a 15-year project visiting care homes across the UK to capture the lives of people living with dementia before their stories are lost due to the illness or a lack of someone willing to listen.

I was taken aback when some charity directors questioned why I was investing so much time listening to people with dementia. “What’s the point? People with dementia invent stories”, they said, or “There’s nothing new to learn from it.” I was truly shocked.

During my dementia project, I met remarkable people, including the first woman on TV, a catwalk model who knew Picasso, a hundred-year-old cowboy, and a gunner on one of the ships that sank the Bismarck. Whether their stories were all 100% accurate wasn’t my main concern. You can read some of them here: Dementia Stories

On Sunday, May 23, 1943, on a beautiful spring day, a group of SG10 Luftwaffe aircraft flying from their base in Northern France launched a ‘tip and run’ raid on the seaside town of Hastings. The bombing resulted in the deaths of 25 people, most of whom were customers at the Swan Hotel, just yards from my house.

Recently, I stumbled upon an old photograph of the bombsite. The details intrigued me; the men standing in the churchyard and climbing on walls were all wearing suits, and the figures digging through the rubble were gathered around a man who appeared to be kneeling. Was he calling to someone buried beneath the debris? I had read that one man and his dog were pulled alive from the wreckage; could this have been the moment of his rescue?

I found myself wondering about the man who survived: Who was he? What was he doing there? How did he manage to survive? Had anyone captured his story? I asked on a local history website if anyone knew his name, but no one had any information. Someone jokingly suggested that the dog's name was Lucky.

I checked newspaper records from right after the bombing but found nothing. In fact, the first mention of a man and his dog being rescued didn’t show up until a book was published 50 years later. Was it simply an urban myth?

When I moved into my current house, I shared some photos of the flooded cellar - once a coach house for the ancient Swan Hotel - on Facebook. To my surprise, someone replied that he used to play in my cellar as a child. He mentioned that his dad renovated the house next door and claimed to have seen horse tackle hanging on hooks in the cellar walls. Another person commented that people had sheltered in the cellar when the pub was bombed.

It didn’t take long for me to realise that these stories couldn't be true - the cellars had been sealed since 1944. No one could get in until a previous owner of my house smashed through her floor and lowered a ladder in the mid-1990s. There was no horse tackle; the cellars had been emptied in 1890 and used as a beer store for 60 years. There was no physical connection between the cellar and the pub that was bombed, so it would have been impossible for anyone to have sheltered there, though it would have made an excellent bomb shelter.

One of the strangest comments came from someone who claimed that his grandfather had been in the pub when it was bombed, and that when his body was found, the skin had been dyed black by escaping gas. This seemed unlikely, so I checked the list of fatalities and couldn’t find the name. When I pointed this out, he was furious: “My grandfather died. How dare you?”

To prove his point, he shared a picture of a dark-skinned man walking down the high street; he was likely just a chimney sweep, covered in soot. “I thought he died”, I wrote. He immediately deleted the picture but insisted on his story, suggesting that his grandfather must have been an undocumented fatality.

So, were all these people lying? Or perhaps, when they were children, someone told them a story about the Swan Hotel or showed them a photograph of the bombsite, and they believed it, even though it was impossible?

Dementia or not, we all forget, we exaggerate, our memories change over time and the stories we tell get passed down through generations.

P.S. About my first memories project, I’d love to hear yours.