Aldeburgh Pupils Prepare to Become Cod Bangers!

The pupils at Aldeburgh Primary School have been participating in Holding Back the Tide with the full on enthusiasm of a gale force ten. This is an appropriate simile, for the topic chosen by their songstress headmistress, Linda Berry, is a musical production about the flooded village of Slaughden, which was eventually taken over by the storms and sea floods of the East Anglian coast.

Mrs Berry has written a production entitled, ‘The Cod Bangers of Slaughden’. In former centuries Slaughden was a big ship building port. The fishermen of Slaughden used to trawl for cod up in Iceland. And the boats had a lead-lined well underneath with holes in so they could sail home with their catch still alive to keep it fresh. The fisherman would dock at Harwich with their catch and sell the cod customers. Once the customer had bought their cod the fisherman would bang the cod on the head and hand it over. So they were called the cod bangers. The production will dramatise lots of stories of smuggling, piracy and fun sea shanties. The sea shanties are authentic to East Anglia history and the production promises to be entertaining as well as educational.

Preparations for the musical were launched with a visit from popular sea shanty singer, Jimi Lawrence, who taught the pupils an array of shanties for the production. They had great fun learning about the songs and their history. The production will be performed in the Jubilee Hall in Aldeburgh on 3rd and 4th December.  Further information can be obtained from the school office of Aldebugh Primary School.

Great Yarmouth High School Designs Artwork for Holding Back the Tide

An interpretive piece of artwork about the historical fishing port of Great Yarmouth was produced by ‘Gifted and Talented’ Art and Design class, Year 11 students, Hannah Lawrence & Sophie Porter.  It involved research visits to the local museum and the docks. Photos and sketches were taken to use as inspiration for the final piece of artwork.  Here, they write about their project and what it means on a personal level to live in a seaside community:

“Growing up and living in a seaside town packed full of interesting history and stories of the sea has been a huge inspiration. What with generations of families, possibly our families, holidaying and working in Great Yarmouth, there is so much to be told and so much to be seen. Because of this, we found that this project would be something that would commemorate our own personal memories of our lives on the seafront and the nautical history of Great Yarmouth.

Our piece is made up of different size, circular pieces that intend to portray the importance of boats in Great Yarmouth (the portholes), with a collection of images inside we have created by responding to images we had taken which can also be seen within the piece.

Firstly, one of my own personal favourites was the piece that shows footprints in the sand. This to me is something of a personal memory which I hope many people can relate to…those carefree days as a child spent walking along the beach with your mother, father and siblings, a picnic and an ice-cream to finish the day off, melting before getting the chance to eat it all up! It’s never a trip to the seaside without an ice-cream!

Other pieces that could, perhaps, cause some confusion are our response images. One of which is a print intended to show the stages of the new Wellington Pier being built, and the other taken from a picture where you are able to see the scaffolding through a concrete wall. Smaller circles have also been created by using a range of paints, drawing and print inks; watercolours, poster paint, acrylics etc. all showing the more nautical side of Great Yarmouth. The big idea of our piece was to create something that you are able to walk around because Great Yarmouth is bursting full of history, facts, museums, works of art, sculptures etc. it would portray how much there is to look at brilliantly.

To finish off the piece and to carry on the theme of our project, we used wire to hang the pieces off of and hooked the ends to create the sense of fishing hooks and old pieces of fishing wire. Lastly, we decided to mount the wire onto a piece of wood which we didn’t sand down or spend any time making, how some would say, ‘beautiful’, as this to us was an amazing example of driftwood, and as many of you know, there is a lot of gnarled but beautiful driftwood on Great Yarmouth beach.

It was a great honour to celebrate the beauty of our small, but interesting, town by creating this piece and so we hope that you enjoy looking at our piece as much as we enjoyed making it.”

The Holding Back the Tide exhibition will be on display, along with Sophie and Hannah’s artwork from 2^nd to 16^th March 2009. 

Local Press Interest in ‘Holding Back the Tide’

During the past fortnight we have had our ‘letter of appeal’ for local photographs and film footage published in several regional newspapers including the East Anglian Daily Times and the Essex County Standard.  

So far we’ve had a good response from the public.  Film footage of Aldeburgh during the wartime has been offered by the family of the policeman stationed there during the war who was on duty at the time of the bombing of the High

Street and witnessed the event.   Another gem that’s been dusted off and offered to us is Super 8 film of Felixstowe docks and the first RoRo (Roll on Roll off) ferry.  We look forward to using this material in our exhibition in 2009.

Project Update

Holding Back the Tide project is due an update from the team and the last two months has seen the oral history phase progressing assuredly and steadfastly.  The result is an impressive archive of stories which have been recorded for use in our touring exhibition next year, alongside the school projects which were completed earlier in the year. 

 

The many hours of recordings and numerous people interviewed amounts to so much preparation, both before and after interviews, in order to glean each hour of recording.  Thank you to our volunteers, especially in Scratby, Norfolk, for their painstaking efforts to ensure we have good quality interviews for our own use and for future use by researchers and the people who live on our East Anglian coast. 

 

Our favourite interviews are many, but examples that come to mind are the memories of John White, the Felixstowe Ferry Harbour Master and Colchester resident Ralph Merry. If continue browsing our web ‘blog’ you will see some of the interesting memories that have come to light in the last two months from our oral history work.  More memories to follow in the next couple of weeks.

Two Hundred Year Old Whale Skeleton Discovered at Mersea

Ralph Merry, resident of Colchester, is an enthusiastic coastline observer.  He’s even been known to discover the odd two hundred year old whale skeleton in the mudflats at Mersea on the inside of Cobb marsh island. 

‘To the casual observer it all seems pretty much the same, but in fact it’s always on the move.  Even off the front of Mersea looks pretty much the same but I reckon there’s five level feet of mud disappeared from virtually all the way from West Mersea right through to East Mersea.  The whole level has gone down.  … I think one of the contributing factors is pollution, pollution possibly from a large number of ships which were moored in the river or just generally pollution in the sea.  Because the whole of the estuary was the estuarial mud and it was held together with what they call ‘eel grass’, it was just like huge beds of marine grass growing on the grass mudflats.  Fronds of grass two feet long and had an extreme calming influence on the waves. 

Apart from the fact that it was five feet higher up with the grass growing on the top even on a rough day within the weeds it was relatively calm and of course, rather like grass on a beach, the weed attracted mud so it was continually building up at the same rate it was washing away.  It was in a state of equilibrium in actual fact.  As soon as the eel grass died the whole root system holding together the mud disappeared.  When I was  young and the family would go down to Mersea we’d play in this mud and it was marvelous. You get fish in the creeks and crabs galore.  But now it’s just one flat area in fact, in places the mud has worn away so far you’re down to base London clay which is quite possible it’s how it was only two  hundred years ago, mud comes and then it goes again and it’s certainly in a phase of going at the moment and this is why I found a whale yesterday, it’s been covered up two hundred years. 

Walking round the mud I went to Bossun Fleet at Mersea which is on the inside edge of Cobb marsh island near the houseboats.  I was looking at an anchor which had recently been pulled in from deep sea, a fishing boat caught this anchor and about three hundred feet of chain all the way from Orford Ness.  I went to look at the anchor and as I walked round I found some bones, about three feet long.   We went back with a man from the natural history museum and he identifedit as  whale skeleton.  Sections of it will hopefully be exhibited in the Mersea Museum.  We’ve found other skeletons in the past but nothing quite as significant as that. ‘

Proud Descendent of ‘Ethelred the Unready’ Speaks of Heritage

Fishing smack at Mersea with Bradwell power station in the background

If you ask Ralph Merry about the history of his family he likes to tell you a story with a twinkle in his eye that his family origins can be traced back to Ethelred the Unready.  He tells a tale of how his ancestor was fishing at Colne Point one day when a Viking ship approached the shoreline.  A Viking shouted out ‘Excuse me, can you tell me the ‘vay’ to Colchester?’  Ethelred thought quickly on his feet and directed them in the opposite direction towards Bradwell and hence they landed down the coast at Maldon and the rest is history.  Joking aside, Ralph’s ancestors can be traced back to the 16^th C and his family are hereditary freemen of the borough of Colchester. 

 

 

 

 

 

‘My own immediate family… we’ve been in coal trade in Colchester ever since shortly after the First World War when my grandfather founded a coal business and I was in that trade until fifteen years ago when we packed up.  I’ve been retired since then fortunately.  Born in Colchester and lived there all his life, Ralph has a passion for the sea and the local rivers, especially the Colne.  In retirement  Ralph spends a vast quantity of his time along the shoreline at Mersea or sailing on the Colne. 

Reflecting on the changes over the decades since his youth, he observes, ‘I used to enjoy going down to the Hythe.  I used to go down for the gasworks mornings to get coke from the gasworks, that was supplied by ships.  Every day a ship would come up with coal from either Blythe or the Humber and that would be unloaded there and they would of course make the coke from that.  I also loved to see all the barges, the barges up as far as the old Hythe bridge, used to be dozens of barges up there, it was a marvellous place.  Of course the timber yard which has just been flattened, there was Brown and Sons, there was the earthworks, there was the gasworks on the other side, there’s an oil terminal so there was always a lot of activity down there.’

‘It was always great fun when they launched the boats ‘cos got a good crowd down there and the boats were built on the top of the slip rope and when it came to launching whoever was launching the boat would crack the bottle of champagne.’

And Ralph has his own distinct opinions and observations about the changing coastline within his living memory, ‘Despite all these threats of scaremongering of rising sea levels I don’t think you’ll find it’s risen noticeably in the last forty years. We have a summer house down at Mersea with a gate which is in exactly the same place as it was sixty years ago and in fact the tide comes up to the gate less now than it did forty years ago.  We always had seaweed in our front garden in the spring time when we went down and I haven’t seen seaweed in there for quite a few years.’ 

‘I think possibly the river is genuinely cleaning up because there’s far more seals in the river now so there must be a lot of small fish here.  … Marsh harriers are another one.  They were non-existent twenty years ago now there’s breeding pairs all over the place, marvellous sight, down on Langenhoe marshes, two breeding pairs.’  

‘Well there has been one wildlife loss, when I was young, we always saw schools of porpoise in the river.  Always, every summer  you’d see maybe a dozen or so in small groups.  I have seen odd individuals in recent years, I went out to Bradwell last Friday, I sat in the middle of the river and I watched three porpoises. ‘

A Postcard from Scratby Just to say ‘Hello…’

Postcard from Scratby

Update… Holding Back the Tide’s oral history volunteers have been busy beavering away up in Scratby, north of Great Yarmouth, collecting stories for the project. Mavis Sjaz has conducted three interviews from residents and holidaymakers of Scratby,  ‘I’ve interviewed one family who are three generations of holidaymakers to Scratby and I’ve captured some very interesting stories.’ Watch this space for further updates on the stories themselves.  Coming soon…

Wartime in Aldeburgh

Inspired by their involvement in the recent Heritage Lottery Funded project, ‘Ebb & Flow’, the Aldeburgh District Local History Society, are continuing to collect a substantial archive of oral history stories from their town.  Dudley Fryer, lifetime resident of Aldeburgh, was recently interviewed by Heather Mabey, a volunteer for the group.  Here he tells of an incident he witnessed on the beach at Aldeburgh during the Second World War.

‘…During the war one Sunday … we were on the beach with father and my mother and my sister and there was lots and lots of people on the beach because in those days there was lots and lots of fishing boats and they usually all came in together on the tide.  People used to go down and see what they had caught and of course there’d be a lot of military people, Army and Navy on the beach. 

And one day I remember now that there was two planes circling and they went down, came in from the southern end of Aldeburgh right up the beach where there was all these people and they just literally sprayed all the way along … shooting everybody on the beach.  But I think they were way off target, they were just a little bit, you felt as if you could almost put your hand up and touch these planes they were so low, obviously my father pushed us all down onto the beach underneath a boat and there was all this commotion going on and, I think it was a miracle, but I don’t think anybody was hit. 

It just makes me wonder sometimes that my son Dean, who’s a fisherman, sometimes when he’s pulling his nets in he gets empty bullets, spent cartridges and I very often wonder would that be the day that we were shot on the beach.’

Legends of Felixstowe Ferry

 

 

 

John as Harbour Master

One of our oral historians interviewed the harbour master at Felixstowe Ferry, John White, and he shared his wealth of knowledge about the coastline and river Deben where it opens out to sea, meeting the North Sea.    A resident of Felixstowe Ferry virtually all his life, John’s work has covered fishing, boat building, running the Felixstowe Ferry to Bawdsey and operating a boat trip business along the Deben and coastline.

 

 

John’s ferry connections go back to his father’s generation when ohn’s John’s Ferry connections go back to his father’s generation when his  father was a fisherman.   He used to fish for lobsters, crabs and whelks.  The lobsters were sold mainly to local fishmongers in Felixstowe but also to the Newmarket races for the clientele there.  His father’s first fishing boat was called Girl Pam named after his daughter and it’s still on the water along the East Anglian coast.  His parent went on to run the Ferry Boat Inn for several years with his mother continuing the role of publican for a further fourteen years after his father passed away.

John reflects, ‘I think fishing was the main industry here just after the war, but there was always a boatyard here. 

Fishermen at the Ferry

 

I think the boatyard was started in about 1928 by the son of the then proprietor of the Ferry Boat Inn.  During the war they used to build quite a lot of boats for the Royal Navy, like motor boats that were in use all the time during the war.  After the war it was then taken over by a company in Ipswich called CH Fox.  I started my apprenticeship… with C H Fox in 1955 I think.  I am a boat builder myself and spent 42 years building boats down at Felixstowe Ferry.  In fact I’ve spent the whole of my working life at Felixstowe Ferry.’

 

 

 

 

John’s ferry connections go back to his father’s generation when ohn’s John’s Ferry connections go back to his father’s generation when his  father was a fisherman.   He used to fish for lobsters, crabs and whelks.  The lobsters were sold mainly to local fishmongers in Felixstowe but also to the Newmarket races for the clientele there.  His father’s first fishing boat was called Girl Pam named after his daughter and it’s still on the water along the East Anglian coast.  His parent went on to run the Ferry Boat Inn for several years with his mother continuing the role of publican for a further fourteen years after his father passed away.

 

      ‘Down at the ferry here I think there were more people fishing.  There were five or six full time fisherman at the time, when I started in the boatyard there were three people working – two apprentices and one shipwright who was the manager for CH Fox.   It’s always been quite a close community.  There are 29 houses here, not all occupied nowadays, but in those days they were all full time occupiers.

 

 

      ‘There were also some old retired boys that used to live on one or two houseboats.  Some of those houseboats were actually Flying-boat hulls.  Flying boat hulls came from Felixstowe Air Station, the sea planes that were probably no longer in production, because they were all individually built in those days, most of them built of wood, built by shipwrights, by the way, and the wings were cut off and I remember at least three hulls down here laying in the mud creeks which people used to use as houseboats.’

 

      ‘For the last ten years I’ve been harbour master here and for some of that time I also ran the ferry across the river.  But every year the river entrance changes because of the shifting shingle banks.  And that’s caused by what we call the coastal drift with the shingle from north to south.  And when the shingle coming from the North hits the river entrance here you’ll get certain different tides that shift the shingle around causing what we call a bar on the river entrance.  That bar moves every year and the channel that goes through those shingle banks, the banks we call the knolls, basically the channel moves a little further south every year.   Occasionally it extends itself too far to the south and breaks through to the north east again, starting the cycle again.’

John in the 1980s as ferryman on 'Girl Pam'

 

 

 

 

Nowadays as well as the main job of harbour master, John gives talks about the legendary characters of yesteryear at Felixstowe Ferry to groups who request it.  He has some funny stories about local characters that were well known at Felixstowe Ferry throughout his life there.  If you ever meet John ask him about Albert Aldis who ran the local bus between the Ferry and Felixstowe town.  John’s chats about the ‘Legends of Felixstowe’ are popular and he regularly talks to groups of a hundred or more.  It’s fair to say that over all the decades John has become a true legend himself.

 

 

 

 

Reflections From Rowhedge, Essex

As the stories for the oral history phase of ‘Holding Back the Tide’ gently ‘drift to the shoreline’, which treasures do you choose to share with the readers of our blog? There are so many to choose from it’s a difficult choice. So a stake has been firmly spiked in the ground starting with the memories of Rowhedge resident, Hazel Thornton. In the first of a two part series, Hazel reflects on her life in Rowhedge both as a former business owner and a sailing enthusiast.

Villagers of Rowhedge may remember Perrot Irrigation, the business which Hazel and her husband Lawrence formed at the end of the High Street towards the wharf. Between the years of 1978 to 1991, when Lawrence retired, the Thorntons ran a successful operation, resourcefully hiring the skills of an existing Rowhedge rigging business to help with their irrigation projects. ‘We were setting up on our own. We moved to East Anglia for good reasons,’ remembers Hazel. Perrot Irrigation was connected with another company based in Stuttgart and Hamburg.

‘So we came here because we felt it was very well placed both from the point of view of trading with the continent and also with selling our wares which were irrigation equipment because, of course, this is the driest area of the country where irrigation is needed. There was a great variety of irrigation here, there was arable, there was fruit orchards, there were market gardeners, race courses which needed irrigating. In 1978 the ships could come from Hamburg to Rowhedge dock or Colchester dock, there were docks at Wivenhoe, Brightlingsea, so we traded.’

Perrot Irrigation supplied Newmarket racecourse with its irrigation system. Hazel explains that in order to irrigate the difficult shape of a race course equipment called tow trains is required.

‘The lengths of pipes had to be tensioned with wires and opposite us [Perrot] we had riggers who were extremely skilled in being able to do this. We never imagined we would need to use a skill of that kind but of course when you’re pushed to do things you draw things together. So I think the period we were here was a snapshot of only a decade or more which in retrospect is really quite remarkable about how businesses link up.’

When asked what Perrot Irrigation would have done had they still been operating when the shipyard closed and they lost the skills of the riggers, Hazel considers the question for a moment and then it dawns on her the magnitude of what the impact would have had on her business had they not retired by then,

‘Yes that’s an interesting thought, how dependent we are on what’s around us and what’s going on and how sad it is when things finish. Much like when the greengrocer gave up [in Rowhedge]. People used to do their shopping at the greengrocer, at the butcher at the Co-op. The greengrocer gave up and so people went up to Old Heath so they got their meat up there so the butcher failed. You need a nucleus of activity that has to be kept going in order for it to keep going. Same thing in industry. I cannot believe that we were here at the time when we could benefit from that because it wasn’t very long after [the shipyard closed] we sold on the business, about 1991. Had we been younger and carried on the business here we’d have had extreme difficulty. The [river] dredger gave up the ghost and the port closed which meant that we couldn’t have imported here.’

Hazel recalls one very high tide early one year,

‘I remember it was really quite chilly and from our landing at Perrot Irrigation one had a magnificent view of the river there. The canteen was upstairs and whenever we went up to make a cup of tea, we’d stand on the landing and look at the river, it was great. And this particular day there was a vast tide and it made the place almost unrecognisable. It was a very, very, very high tide and we went home for lunch and we couldn’t get back along the High Street to the works. I remember we took up our shoes and socks and paddled the last bit. When we came down Albion Street we had to negotiate that last bit and remarkably our premises which are quite old and have been used for a lot of other things, clothing factory and lemonade bottling factory in previous years was not flooded. You noticed the lie of the land so much more critically when you’ve experienced a flood like that and by an inch or two we were not flooded.’

Hazel also has fond memories of the sprat boats sailing up the river Colne,

‘Between ’88 and ’95 we used to watch out for the sprat boats coming up, again, part of the history isn’t it of the fishing, just terrific. Of course we knew when the high tide was going to be. We knew the time of the year when they fished so one could keep a look out for it and I think they came alongside the Hythe at Colchester. So my husband would leap into the car and go up and I think I’ve remembered them correctly, and buy them from the quayside. You could literally get a bucket of sprats and of course they were as fresh as could be. We’d freeze some of course and gorge ourselves on them. They were small and so easily cooked, you just had to drop them in hot fat. Quite delicious!’

Hazel’s family home in Regent Street has a historical link with river life in Rowhedge. ‘This house is called ‘Saionara’ named after one of the racing yachts and this house was built on the prize money from the skipper being invited to crew those magnificent vessels and the people in this village would be fishing in the winter and crewing the yachts in the summer.’

When asked about changes she’s noticed whilst living in the coastal river village of Rowhedge Hazel has several observations,

‘When we first lived here and worked here [1978 onwards] there were of course, people whose business was nautical. Ian Brown and the [ship]yard, and the life boats and so on. So occupations have changed but if you look at Rowhedge today I think Fabian Bush is probably the only boat builder here. And a lot of the skills have gone. So huge changes. And of course more leisure. I suppose that’s not a bad thing but wouldn’t it have been nice to have kept the business and the leisure. The heritage trust [in Rowhedge] is intent on preserving both memories and artefacts. There’s a number of people here who still sail. There was a party on the riverside yesterday. ‘The William’ came up with oysters. The new jetty there it’s just wonderful because it’s right close to people who come over from Wivenhoe, we can go across to Wivenhoe and Fingringhoe , this is a practical link between these villages that have got so much past history and in common and want to keep alive the river and all that it could mean.’

Next time: Hazel’s memories of sailing into Felixstowe Dock in the 1950s and relaxing trips to Pin Mill on a chartered yacht with her husband and family.