 "Jill" was derelict but with a grant from East Sussex County Council it was restored and opened for visitors.In his memoirs, "My Life and Soft Times", (1971), he defended St Cyprians, the school he had arrived at in 1915, from critics like Gavin Maxwell, and George Orwell who had attacked it in his polemic "Such, Such Were the Joys".Notwithstanding, Longhurst's mention of being made to eat up a bowl of porridge into which he had been sick has been described as 'an own goal'.