Suggestion from Laura Murphy at the WayfinderWoman Your Stories In Song event at The Grove theatre in Eastbourne in November 2024. When Laura mentioned this, 2 of the others attending said they remembered him too. Milton Hide wrote a quick chorus of a song with the help of the audience, calling him ‘Roundabout Jack as we didn’t know his name, and then worked this up into a song which will be published soon.
There was a man always standing on the Worthing roundabout who waved at everyone who drove past with a cheery smile on his face. I think he might have had a moustache? He wore a boater, a striped jacket and had pristine white gloves. He had a traditional black bike and a Union Jack. We would drive along the south coast road to see my mum in Portsmouth and the children and ourselves would always look out for him and wave back. It was something we looked out for and if he wasn’t there we would be disappointed. It’d be a game for the kids to help stop them getting hired or fractious on a long drive. And then he wasn’t there. We never knew his name or what happened to him but he made a lasting impression on us.
During our research we found this facebook page dedicated to Horace Albert Duke who seems to be the unknown man on the roundabout. https://www.facebook.com/HoraceDukeBB/?locale=en_GB and another one here https://www.facebook.com/BurlingtonBernie/
Born 2nd June 1923, he worked at a spectacle factory in Worthing, lived in Lancing, he died in 1995. It seems he travelled to New York frequently and there is suggestion that he worked as a pantry steward on ship.
Press cutting found on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/BurlingtonBernie/photos/pb.100060081557948.-2207520000/497644763930235/?type=3
Here’s the first public performance of the song Roundabout Jack by Milton Hide/