Thundersley has an identity crisis, and it goes back a long way.

Although it has a fine old church of its own, it lacks an obvious centre, or focal point, and people who live there will often give their address as Benfleet, or Rayleigh, or Hadleigh.

“The place is a bit of a sprawl and the boundaries are not too clear n the ground,” says local historian Robert Hallmann, who can now claim to be the greatest living expert on Thundersley.

“In Tudor times, its administration was divided between Rochford Hundred and Barstable Hundred. When England was threatened by the Spanish Armada, and local men were signing up for the defence force, they didn’t knowwhere to go to sign up. Rochford or Barstable? They had to petition the magistrate to tell them.”

The moral of the story is clear. “If Thundersley has a split personality, that is maybe hardly surprising,” Robert says.

Yet Robert finds Thundersley so interesting he has devoted years of his life to writing the book of the town. Schizophrenic or not, Thundersley has a rich history in its own right. Robert says: “When I began to look into the bygones of this quiet and out-of-the-way place, I found it wasn’t always so quiet. It has attracted Celts and Romans and Saxons, religious martyrs, peculiar people, writers, artists, actors, chess players, even speed car racers, motorbike manufacturers and gun magazine makers. And they were just the good guys.”

There are many chapters to Thundersley’s story, and the topsy-turvey process by which the book came to be written has provided yet another one.

“It began years ago,” says Robert, who is the author of a range of local history books. “I was shown a collection of 250 old pictures, collected by a local undertaker, Derek Barber. It was Derek’s hobby. He would go to people’s houses – obviously, as an undertaker, he had a lot of contacts locally – and photograph their old photos.

“This collection was going to form the basis of a book on Thundersley, published by Phillimore – which, back then, was run by Rebecca Harris, now our MP. Then, sadly, Derek had a stroke, and lost a lot of his memory. He was no longer able to identify the pictures. When I showed him the photos, he would point to his head and say: ‘It’s all in there, but I can’t get at it’.

“Since then, I’ve spent a huge amount of time trying to identify the pictures. Then Phillimore was sold up, and the book rather dropped by the wayside.”

Somehow, it seems a typical Thundersley narrative.

Then came the formation of the Hadleigh and Thundersley Community Archive. Among its ventures, the archive began to commission books. Robert’s Thundersley project was brought back from cold storage.

Robert’s narrative ranges from prehistory – when geological uppheavals threwup the unusual, flat sarsen and pudding stones found along the ridge – through pagan, medieval and Tudor history. Some of the most colourful snippets belong to the 20th century, when Thundersley’s still sparsely populated landscape was used for early motoring trials, and the place was colonised by the Christian sect known, for good reason, as the Peculiar People.

Among the fruitful sources contacted by Robert was Bernard Cornwall, creator of the Sharpe novels. The best-selling author was brought up in Thundersley by foster parents who were members of the Peculiar People. “My father was a builder who praised God and covered the Essex countryside with bungalows,”

Cornwall recalled, on the radio programme Desert Island Discs.

Cornwall unloaded other memories when he talked to Robert. “The Peculiar People were against war, and refused to fight. So as an act or rebellion, he used to play war games,”

says Robert.

“He learned to tie a string of lies together to cover his tracks, or he would have been very severely punished. It taught him a lot about putting a plot together.”

Thundersley’s appearance of anonymous sprawl is superficial. That is one clear lesson that emerges from this book. “Start to explore the place and youwill find lots of clues to its past,” says Robert.

History is buried there, alright, in some cases literally.

In 1927, a group of builders (Cornwall’s father possibly among them) were working on a site in Kenneth Road. The ground suddenly opened up beneath them. Revealed were a set of ancient archways. It was almost certainly the long-lost site of King John’s famous hunting lodge.

But the builders were more concerned with erecting bungalows in a hurry, and the site was quickly filled in. That, perhaps, is the story of Thundersley in a nutshell.

ý Robert Hallmann will be signing copies of his book tomorrow at Hadleigh library in the morning, and St Michael’s church fete in the afternoon.

Thundersley and Daws Heath: AHistory is published by Hadleigh and Thundersley Community Archive at £14.99.