It's fitting that the simple inscription P. Hessel concealed the gender of this grave's inhabitant, since the remarkable Phoebe is renowned for a spectacularly impressive feat of disguise. The headstone above is a newly cut one to replace the smaller one just behind it in this picture.

 

Born at Stepney, London, in 1713. Pheobe had a varied career, having fallen in love when only fifteen with samuel Golding, a private in Kirk's Lamb's, she dressed herself as a man, enlisted in the 5th Regiment of Foot in the British Army and followed him to the west Indies. She served there for five years, and afterwards at Gibraltar, never disclosing her sex until her lover was wounded and sent to Plymouth, when she told the General's wife, and was allowed to follow and nurse him.She herself was wounded at the Battle of Fontenoy where she received a bayonet wound in her arm.

 

On leaving hospital Golding married her, and they lived, I hope happily, together for twenty years. For years she kept a stall near the gardens which Brighton calls the Steine, and she was known to everybody in the fashionable years of the town.

When Golding died, Pheobe married Hessel. In her old age she became an important Brighton character, and attracting the notice of the Prince was provided by him with a pension of eighteen pounds a year, and the epithet " a jolly good fellow." It was also the Prince's money which paid the stone cutter. When visited by a curious student of human nature as she lay on her death-bed, Pheobe talked much of the past, and seemed proud of her having kept her secret when in the army. "But I told it to he ground," she added; "I dug a hole that would hold a gallon and whispered it there."

 

Pheobe kept all her faculties to the last, and right to the end she sold her apples to the gentry by the sea, returned repartees with extraordinary verve and contempt for false delicacy, and knew as much about the quality of Brighton ale and liquor as if she were a soldier in earnest.

 

Phoebe Hessel is famous not only in Brighton but in military history and ancient records, for she was 108 when she died on December the 12th, 1821. She saw the reigns of all the Georges. Her extraordinary story brought her a pension from the king and a place in Tennyson's poems.

 

She comes into Tennyson because without her his poem Rizpah would probably not have been written.

It was Phoebe Hessel who led to the conviction of a man called Rooke for highway robbery. His body hung on the gibbet high on the South Downs, and after a stormy night his poor mother would steal away in the dark, climb up the Downs to the gibbet, and pick up the fragments of the body as they fell. She buried them in Old Shoreham churchyard.

 

Another redoubtable Brighton character is buried nearby: Martha Gunn, most famous of the original female bathing attendants, the 'dippers'.   She began her beach duties in 1750 and continued performing them until shortly before her death in 1815 at the age of 89.

 

 

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In the churchyard of St.Nicholas at the top of Church Street

 

 

 

 

 

 

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