The club was founded by Hugh Bentley and a group of friends back in 1959 at a site in Sayers Common. In 1971 they relocated to Scaynes Hill. Confusingly neither sites are much near Brighton!
In it’s heyday the club had around 200 members and enjoyed a large number of holiday visitors, many from Europe. The club seemed to be particularly popular with naturists from the Netherlands.
The club had member’s chalets, spaces for tents and caravans, a nice sunbathing lawn and a good pool with a water splash. The only thing really missing were games courts but this didn’t really seem to matter. It was an oasis of tranquility, a place to escape the real world and relax.
However around 1996 the writing was possibly on the wall along with the decline of the whole British naturist movement which is a subject in it’s self. The membership was falling with an elderly demographic and the club was unattractive and unwelcoming to younger people and particularly single males.
In 2003 Hugh Bentley put the club up for sale and eventually it was sold to a couple with several other business ventures of an adult nature. For a while they made some pretense of running it as a naturist club but soon dropped that and it became a venue for swingers parties.
The new owners may have believed they could do whatever they wanted in the depths of the countryside but they soon alienated their neighbours who, fed up with the disturbance of vehicles vacating at 2 o’clock in the morning, hired a private detective to gather evidence for a prosecution. The police raided the club and discovering money had been changing hands successfully prosecuted one of the owners. Then the council discovered a large building had been erected without planning consent and served an enforcement order. The club closed, a sad and ignominious end to an establishment that had brought much happiness over the years to many people.
If you visit the site today there are several very large houses on the site, somebody somewhere made some money. I cannot help thinking Hugh Bentley was conned. I also believe it could have continued as a naturist venue had the right people been allowed to take it over. Hugh Bentley took the money and ran ignoring so many others who had contributed to the club over the years. My overwhelming feeling is sadness for times past and for what might have been.
The BSC’s original site in Sayers Common became the Apollo Sun Club when the club relocated to it’s last home in Scaynes Hill.
I remember reading an article by the late Phil Vallack where he mentions visiting Apollo shortly after it opened and witnessing how the departing BSC members had smashed anything useful before leaving. He said this vandalism by naturists against other naturists had a profound effect on him.
I must note that I have no way of knowing if this is true or if his interpretation is the correct one.