Memories of the ‘Fish ‘n’ Chip’ Felixstowe

Doreen Savage, the Councillor for Suffolk Coastal District Council & Felixstowe Town Council, has been sharing her lifetime of memories towards the Holding Back the Tide project in an oral history interview with one of the volunteers. Doreen was born in Felixstowe and her love and support of the town is clearly evident in the stories she has of her childhood and current life in Felixstowe:

“In my house where I was born, which was in Manor Terrace, which is at the far end of Felixstowe, it used to be known as the fish and chip end of the town and very much a part of Felixstowe that centred around holiday accommodation and my mother in fact ran a boarding house. 

And so my early memories are of people coming to Felixstowe on holiday as they used to in those days, staying at the house and being involved very much in looking after them. Having to take their tea up to them in the mornings. It was quite a hard life really. Saturday mornings were spent changing beds and cleaning bedrooms and polishing silver and I have a lovely, lovely memory because every bedroom was needed to generate income because people were hard up in those days and so I used to lose my bedroom in the summer and I used to have to sleep on the floor under the kitchen table and one of my memories is of my Dad slicing the bread and the crumbs falling on me as I slept under the kitchen table. I was then promoted to a camp bed in the dining room which meant I couldn’t go to bed until everybody else had gone to bed. Eventually I said to my parents, “This can’t go on, I really need somewhere of my own.” so my Dad, bless him, wall papered the shed for me, put me in a little wash stand and basin down there and a little hanging wardrobe and it became mine. I got turned out at night like the cat, ran down the garden and jumped in and locked the door before anything could get at me. It was mine, it was a defining moment in my development I think. 

Listen to story: Bread Crumbs Falling…

In the ’50s Felixstowe was very much a holiday resort at that time and we used to have a railway station called Beach Station, which is no longer there sadly, and the train used to come to Beach Station road disgorge all its passengers who then used to make their way to the various establishments they were staying in and everybody at that time was involved in providing holiday accommodation of some kind.  Listen to story:  Disgorge its passengers!

Many years ago there were hundreds of beach huts on the South seafront land. Then in the ’80s the use of beach huts started to decline when package holidays started to come in and that’s when the holiday industry also started to decline and so whereas beach huts had been very much part of everybody’s life and lifestyle they weren’t. 

I know this for a fact because my mother then had a little kiosk shop on the corner of Manor Terrace and she had it for thirty three years actually and provided everything and the reason the shop was established was to service the hundreds of beach huts that were there. Unfortunately, her business just took a huge downward spiral, beach huts started to get vandalised, nobody cared about them and the whole of the area just went downhill.  

When I was a child once September got here Felixstowe died. The holidaymakers went away, everything shut, restaurants shut, amusements shut, it was just dead. Now everything operates all year round. You can go down to the seafront in January on a nice sunny day and find that you’ve got hundreds of people down there doing things. It’s great, the year just continues.

We’re so lucky here because we have an ever-changing seascape out there. It’s never the same, there are boats of all descriptions coming in and going out and it’s all different. Different in its moods, different in the views that it gives you, different in the people that it brings in and the goods that it brings in. I just think it’s so exciting”