Sidney Miles gives Kelsey
The eventual hall did not begin on the turkey-farm site. In Chalk Road stood a small brick garage occupied by Sidney Miles, who had served in the Navy and retired to Ifold. He called his modest home Kelsey. His friend Rosie Nicholds had lost her husband and needed help with her small farm in Poundfield Lane, so Sidney moved there and gave Kelsey to the Gardening Club.
Bayley records two stages by which the fundraising and the building became part of the wider residents’ organisation. The proceeds of the whist drives were brought into the Ifold Freeholders Residents Association, and when the Gardening Club and the association later amalgamated, the little Chalk Road building became available for general meetings. Sidney Miles’s private name for his home was retained.
An army hut enlarges the meeting place
The brick garage could not accommodate the growing number of residents for long. A large shed was bought from a resident who was leaving Ifold and added to the Chalk Road premises. The building had originally been an army hut used to house soldiers at the wartime searchlight position near Gatehouse, so a structure left from the military occupation of the district became part of the post-war community centre.
The extra space allowed many more people to attend meetings, while Kelsey became increasingly useful for activities beyond the Freeholders association. The hall grew by adaptation rather than by a single building scheme: first Sidney Miles’s garage, then the former army hut, with the name Kelsey applied to the enlarged premises.
A growing settlement needs a larger hall
During the 1950s the number of permanent houses increased sharply. In 1956 residents at Ifold and Durfold Wood received notices requiring unofficial buildings to be removed unless proper plans were approved, and the residents’ organisation sought legal advice from a Queen’s Counsel. Bayley remembered that the challenge failed and that land and properties then changed hands while new houses appeared across the settlement.
The larger population placed more demands on Kelsey. Catholic Mass was held there on Sunday mornings, with a priest travelling from Billingshurst, while Amy Lucas and her sister, members of the Covenanters, ran Sunday school during the afternoon. Meetings occupied other days and evenings. The original buildings had become too small for the number of uses now competing for space.
The asbestos-clad Kelsey Hall
Residents decided to build a larger hall on the Chalk Road site. Money was raised by what Bayley described as all kinds of means; the old garage and sheds were pulled down and an asbestos-clad hall replaced them. This was a new stage in Kelsey’s history: the village was no longer simply adapting Sidney Miles’s garage and a surplus military hut, but had erected a larger building specifically for community use.
For several years the hall also contained a weekly lending library. Petworth Rural District Council’s library department changed the books regularly, privately owned volumes supplemented the stock, and two local women ran the service without payment. Flower shows, which had long been part of Ifold life, benefited from the greater floor space because exhibits could be laid out properly.
1959: parish business comes to Kelsey
By 1959 Kelsey was established enough to host formal local-government business. The old civil parish boundary still divided the growing Ifold Wood Estate between Loxwood and Plaistow, and representations asked West Sussex County Council to place the whole estate within Plaistow parish. The county council arranged a public inquiry at Kelsey Hall for 2.30 p.m. on Tuesday 3 November 1959.
The hearing gave the hall a role beyond clubs and fundraising. Residents who had used the premises for whist drives, road meetings, church services and social events now attended a county inquiry concerned with the administrative boundary of the settlement itself.
Players, Keep Fit and a crowded programme
The Ifold Players formed in 1961, with Mrs K. Tutt remembered as a founder member. Their first production was staged at North Hall in 1962, where local critics gave the company a favourable reception, and for a period the Players presented two productions each year. Rehearsals and preparations added another regular activity to the programme surrounding Kelsey.
In the same year Mrs E. Leaver of The Ride was persuaded to begin Keep Fit classes. Connie Bayley remembered the classes as lively occasions, and they were still running in 1985. Alongside the library, church services, Sunday school, association meetings and flower shows, the classes demonstrate how heavily the hall was being used by the 1960s.
A permanent hall in 1978
Continual use and the limits of the asbestos building eventually became impossible to ignore. The roof leaked, repairs were needed repeatedly and residents began raising money for a permanent replacement. Bayley records hard work locally together with efforts to find charitable trusts prepared to contribute towards the cost.
The new Kelsey Hall was completed in 1978. It stood on the Chalk Road site after thirty years of fundraising and successive buildings, and it retained the name first given by Sidney Miles to his small brick garage.
