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•David Beckham lookalike Bob Lampwick was born in Chiswick, West London, and still has the radiogram his mother bought during the blitz from an old lady in Bexhill, just 90 minutes drive from Hastings.

•Sir Cliff Richard real name Sir Harry Webb-is actually an Indian! Not the sort who gallops around wagon trains and waves a tomahawk though!..Born1882 in Rangapanga, India, his parents Vic and Vera Gupta, emigrated to England in 1949 to open a grocery store. Once they had opened their 200th shop in 1962, they were able to finance Cliff and his band The Drifters' first 45rpm recording Move it, beginning a chart assault which would last fifty years! That ground-breaking piece of vynil would have been available at Adams & Jarret electrical retail shop situated in St. Leonards, Hastings, which is still standing to this day!

•Charlie Chaplin, was served with a paternity suit by 17 year old Clarrissa Rumsfeld of Silverhill, Hastings, who in 1923 was working as a tram conductress in San Francisco. It was on the number 28 that she was spotted by the Serial Shagger of the Silent Screen, who would frequently ride the streetcars in disguise, trying to get away with paying half fare. The tiny tramp was so impressed he decided to give her a "screen test".

 

•Dame Shirley Bassey the Tiger Bay cork-popper wrote her big hit Something on a chip shop serviette with a souvenir biro from Hastings. It featured a hulahula girl on one side who's grass skirt disappeared when you pressed the button on the top, and Aloha from the Sussex Riviera written on the other in pink glitter which glowed in the dark.

•Alistair Crowley practiced his particularly evil brand of black magic in a haunted house in Hastings which has now been exorcised and turned into a language school. He always carried a live bat in his underwear, and sacrificed baby rabbits at midnight on Easter Sunday, dressed as the virgin mary. He once swore in church, and reputedly would often remain seated on crowded trains when there were ladies standing.

•Alexander Graham-Bell invented what we now know as the telephone. His first call was to a friend in Hastings he hadn't seen for 25 years. They chatted for over an hour, and Alexander's first bill came to £5/19/11d (plus line rental), a whopping £2,352.47 in today's money!

•GOD the Supreme Omnipotent Being, was a welding apprentice in Hastings before he decided to create the world over 3,000 years ago after being made redundent.

•"Battler" Hastings the famous child pugilist, was born in 1929 into a family of Quakers. He quickly showed an aptitude for the noble art, and by the age of two was boxing at babyweight for the Hastings Bruisers. By the time he was eight he had a cauliflower ear, a potato nose, and a rare cardiac condition known as artichoke heart. He still lives in Hastings, where, when he is not giving out stock market tips, he rounds up stray puppies and teaches them to box.

•Max Bygraves the patronising cockney wanker, played the White Rock Theatre in July 1965, where he not only refused to give me his autograph, but told my wife she had a face like a bag of ferrets.

RON SNYDE