specialists in local books and authors inc. Hardy & Fowles

ELECTRIC LYME
by Martin Roundell Greene

Electric Lyme is the story of a little English town getting to grips with the twentieth century. It begins in a horse-drawn gas-lit age of gentlemen and servants. On 1st June 1909 Mayor Sam Harris switched a golden switch and 'the new illuminant' appeared in the streets of the town. The large crowd 'cheered lustily' and then sang God Save the King. Lyme Regis had become the first town in Dorset with electricity.
Forty years later the story ends in the brave new world of the post-war Welfare State. On the eve of electricity nationalisation, the council held a farewell dinner for its electricity workers at The Three Cups Hotel. From tomorrow they would belong to SWEB. In between lie social and technical revolutions, the Depression and two world wars.
The thread that holds Electric Lyme together is the spread of the town's own home-made electricity supply. The bigger picture is a civic and social history. It includes stately homes and slums, the workhouse and the waterworks, municipal pride and the municipal dump. The mayor doles out rough justice (chastisement for the young, hard labour for others), the council finds work for the unemployed ('preference to be given to married men'), and the medical officer of health reports on illegitimacy, flushing lavatories, eugenic sterilisation of the mentally unfit and flowers in council house gardens. There is patriotism, skulduggery and, if you look hard enough, even a hint of sex.
Through all this runs the steady spread of electricity. First a few telephones and dim, unreliable lights appear: expensive lamps in expensive homes and streetlights tumed off when the moon is bright to save the ratepayers' pennies. Then the cinema, wireless and electric iron arrive. Cars now have compulsory rear lights and electric windscreen wipers. Ordinary families are gradually persuaded to connect up. On the horizon are council houses, built ready-wired for electricity. The chairman of the council's electricity committee acquires the first privately-owned fridge in town. In newspapers there are advertisements for electric washing machines and wedding presents.
Electric Lyme is the story of our grandparents' generation: their values and changing lives; how they lived and thought. It is also the largely untold story of how electricity - that silent servant on which now we entirely depend - arrived in our lives
The fact that Electric Lyme is set in Lyme Regis is pure chance. With variations, the same tale unfolded in a thousand other towns across the land.