A Constable portrait & a neglected cemetery in Ipswich

In about 1804, the Suffolk painter John Constable, renowned for his landscapes, painted a rare portrait. It was a painting of a very old lady, who lived in the parish of St Peter’s, Ipswich. The woman was called Sarah Lyon and she had been born in 1703.

 

Sarah Lyon

 

Sarah Lyon died in 1808 at the age of 105. It is believed that she was buried in the Jewish cemetery, close to Fore Street. A transcription published in the Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology & History, vol. XL, part 2 (2002), of the few remaining tombstones, mostly faded to illegibility and all written in Hebrew, includes one to “The woman… 5565 or 5568 [= 1805 and 1808]” which might be hers.

Yesterday, because I’m researching the history of Judaism in East Anglia, I visited the Jewish cemetery. It took me some time to find it and I’m not going to give exact details of its location, because – although it’s hard to believe – there are still people anti-Semtic enough to want to vandalise it.

It was a beautiful spring day in Ipswich and when we eventually found the little patch of ground with a small number of headstones that remain, we took the following photographs through a padlocked, wrought-iron gate. It is a peaceful place, despite being surrounded by extremely busy roads.  A robin was singing within the brick walls that surround the graves. Some of the Hebrew inscriptions are still legible.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a synagogue serving the Ipswich Jewish community in Rope Walk, not far from the cemetery. The Jewish population dispersed (probably to larger cities) and by 1877 the synagogue had become so neglected that it was demolished. Ipswich Jews nowadays must go to Colchester to worship.

 

An Education

Yesterday I visited the House of Commons for the first time in my life. It was wonderful to see the site of so many important historical events, such as Westminster Hall, where state trials used to take place, including those of Guido Fawkes and Warren Hastings.

I was there to watch an awards ceremony that had been made as a tribute to a family member who had spent many years pioneering Access to Higher Education courses. After the ceremony, we were taken on a short tour of the building by Nick Dakin, Labour MP for Scunthorpe, who had presented the awards. He was extremely kind and we even managed to get into the amazing and highly-decorated Chapel of St. Mary Undercroft http://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/building/palace/estatehistory/the-middle-ages/chapel-st-mary-undercroft-/

We’d been promised a cream tea in Portcullis House, so were slightly puzzled when Nick Dakin stopped outside a cupboard which seemed to contain electrical or computer equipment and asked us to step inside. We could only go in pairs and I went in first with another woman. On the inside of the door was a rectangular plaque which had been secretly put up by Tony Benn MP to commemorate the fact that on Census night, 1911, a suffragette called Emily Wilding Davison hid in the cupboard – then a broom cupboard – as a simple act of protest at not having the right to vote. She was able to register as being resident at the House of Commons and here is the evidence:

http://dreammail.edgesuite.net/FindMyPast/1911Census-RG14-EmilyDavison.jpeg

Emily Wilding Davison was born in 1872 and brought up in Blackheath, Surrey. She achieved First Class honours at Oxford University in 1895. Although women could by then study for degrees, they were not allowed to graduate so she left without a degree. She began a career teaching in girls’ schools and later became involved in the militant wing of the Woman Suffrage movement, the Women’s Social & Political Union (WSPU). She went to prison several times for fairly minor offences, such as attempting to give the Liberal Prime Minister, Asquith, a petition. During a later prison term, she went on hunger strike and was force fed. I don’t know if any research has been done on the psychological effects of force-feeding, but it certainly proved to harden the suffragettes’ campaign.

Emily Davison is, of course, more famous for her final act of protest when she threw herself under the King’s horse at the Derby in 1913. She was badly injured and died in hospital four days later. No-one knows if she intended to die. She had a ticket to a dance for that evening so it’s possible she only wanted to make a protest.

Tony Benn had tried to have a memorial put up to record Emily Davison’s protest for some time. In the end, he took a hammer and put the plaque up himself. He said: “It is a modest reminder of a great woman with a great cause who never lived to see it prosper but played a significant part in making it possible.”

Women over 30 were given the vote in 1918 and in 1928, this was extended to women over 21, making them equal with men for the first time.

It was a privilege to be able to see it.

Homes for Heroes: ex-servicemen & the squatting movement in 1946

There is legislation going through Parliament at the moment which will make squatting in unoccupied properties an imprisonable offence.

Squatting – as a form of non-violent protest and an act of desperation by the homeless – has been around a long time. In The World Turned Upside Down, Christopher Hill describes how 17^th century cottagers (people who made a subsistence living on common land), squatted on land after it had been enclosed. In the 1650s, there was a concerted campaign against squatters by magistrates and cottages were destroyed in Hertfordshire, Middlesex and Warwickshire. One commentator wrote: “The poor increase like flies and lice, and these vermin will eat us up unless we enclose.”

The enclosure of common land certainly played a large part in the creation of a dispossessed class who were then forced to seek food and shelter in this way, but some of these squatters would have been people displaced by the recent civil wars, including ex-soldiers. The history of public unrest in Britain can often be linked with periods following war, when large numbers of soldiers and sailors would return home, many without shelter or work.

We have never treated our ex-servicemen well. The Napoleonic Wars “ended amidst riots… Thousands of disbanded soldiers and sailors returned to find unemployment in their villages.” (E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class). Following the First World War, having been promised “homes fit for heroes,” but given unemployment, economic depression and poverty, ex-servicemen were attracted in large numbers to the political extremes on the left and the right. Many of Mosley’s Blackshirts were people who had fought in the trenches.

The impression is often given that things were different following the Second World War, but towards the end of the war and in its immediate aftermath, there was a great deal of social unrest. There were strikes by members of the armed forces and in 1946, homeless ex-servicemen and their families took to squatting in disused military camps.

On 17^th August 1946, the Times reported: “More huts formerly used by the services in various parts of the country were occupied by homeless families yesterday. After commandeering huts at the rocket battery site at Cowley Marsh, Oxford, “squatters” extended their activities to the ex-Admiralty huts on Balliol College ground at Jowett’s Walk.”

Other squatters were reported at Crayford in Kent, Cricklewood in North West London, plus at various locations in Worcestershire, Staffordshire, Somerset, Wiltshire, Essex and Shropshire. In Gravesend, a sports club was occupied by a homeless family who refused to allow club members in to attend a meeting.

There are hints in contemporary newspaper reports of an unsavoury side to the squatting movement caused by the resentment of “Poles” (presumably those Polish servicemen who had fought for the British during the war) and Prisoners of War who were yet to return to their native countries. Most of the squatters were simply desperate, however:

“A demobilized soldier, accompanied by his wife and son, has taken possession of Wellingborough Grange, near Lincoln, a seven-bedroomed house which has been empty for nearly two years, and eight families have occupied Litley Court, a large house taken over by Herefordshire Agricultural Committee for use as offices.” (Times, 23^rd August 1946.)

The Prime Minister and several other members of the Cabinet decided that matters should not prevent them from taking a short holiday, but by September the squatting movement had taken off. Private houses, not just military properties, were being occupied and the squatters were moving closer to the home of the government itself:

“The organized invasion of private property in Kensington and elsewhere in London… has confronted the Government with a situation which they regard far more seriously than the recent seizure of military camps.” (Times, 10^th September 1946). The final straw appears to have been the occupation of the Duchess of Bedford House, a block of luxury flats in Campden Hill Road, Kensington. The Minister of Works took legal advice. The Times began to sound panicky, describing it as “… [an] invasion to a point where no private house would be safe.”

The tone of the Times’ coverage, initially sympathetic, changed. It began to point out that there were thousands on the council’s waiting list for housing and the squatters, in its opinion, were trying to “jump the queue”  and it quoted “some Kensington women:” “There are no Kensington people here. … It is just for Communists.” Although its editorials were critical of the squatters, however, it acknowledged that there were 250,000 families on local authority waiting lists and that there was, indeed, a desperate need for more housing to be made available.

The Labour government, represented by Aneurin Bevan, refused to support the squatters, despite having recently passed laws that would have enabled the use of military camps for emergency housing. Newport (Montgomeryshire) Housing Committee used those laws to convert a military camp, putting in water and other facilities, and housing people from their own waiting list, but most authorities did nothing.

University of London students took over the Ivanhoe Hotel in Bloomsbury in mid-September. They hung a large placard from a window: “600 rooms vacant; why be homeless?” The local authority took no action to evict them – they were waiting for a decision on another case in the High Court – but massive numbers of policemen were posted around other empty buildings in the area.

The government’s response continued to be hostile to the squatters and they resorted to classic tactics: picking out the politically active (Communist Party members) and prosecuting them and “divide and rule” – by continually describing the squatters as “jumping the housing queue” they hoped to encourage resentment towards them by other people in need of homes.  The withdrawal of basic facilities like water and sanitation was also sanctioned. On 17^th September, the Times reported that a deputation of squatters had visited 10 Downing Street with a 2,000 signature petition but Mr. Attlee declined to receive them.

Soon afterwards, the High Court granted the Minister of Works an injunction “restraining the defendants [named members of the squatters’ committee] … from entering, remaining or otherwise trespassing on the premises” at Duchess of Bedford House.

What may have initially appeared to be a defeat for the squatting campaign, however, resulted in an immediate change of heart from the Labour government. The disused military camps, plus other former hostels and hotels that had been requisitioned during the war, were released as temporary accommodation (with full facilities) for homeless families and as soon as 23^rd September 1946 a massive programme of building 100,00 temporary and 100,000 permanent dwellings was announced, to be completed by the end of the year. The next few years saw a huge increase in house building resulting in many of the council estates that provided good homes for the less well off until the Thatcher government sold them off under the “right to buy” in the 1980s.

More recently, soldiers returning from duty in Iraq and Afghanistan have had problems obtaining the accommodation and health care they need:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/home-for-heroes-help-war-veterans-370418

The issues surrounding how we treat our veterans may have changed since the Napoleonic wars but our society still doesn’t appear to show them very much gratitude for what they have done in our name.

How to sell your wife

Anyone who has read, or seen a TV adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge will remember the early scene where the main protagonist, Michael Henchard, sells his wife to a stranger after he gets drunk at a fair.

It is a powerful scene and enabled Hardy to construct a great story in his usual style, based on implausible coincidences and drawing on the folk traditions of the agricultural labouring class of the time. Like the later scenes in the novel depicting the “skimmity ride” where effigies of Henchard and his mistress are drawn through the streets in an act of ritual humiliation and moral indignation, the wife-selling incident was based on real events. The problem for a historian is that, being part of folk culture which by definition is not recorded officially, it’s quite difficult to find evidence to back up stories about such behaviour.

In his book Wives For Sale (1981), Samuel Menefee makes a compelling case for the historical reality of wife sales with plenty of actual and anecdotal evidence. I agree with his conclusion that the ritualistic nature of wife sales probably means that it was a labouring class form of divorce. Stories of such sales virtually disappeared as soon as the divorce laws were reformed to make them accessible to other people than the very wealthy. Its happier counterpart was “jumping over the broom” which was an unofficial form of marriage. Despite what I had been taught to believe about the Victorian era, I discovered by researching in documents like parish registers and census returns that unmarried couples frequently lived together in nineteenth-century England and illegitimacy was common.  Of course, many of these relationships were hidden in official documents where a woman would be described as a “housekeeper” – even carpenters and agricultural labourers had “housekeepers” if the census is to be taken on face value. I did find one example of honesty in the 1851 census of Northamptonshire, where a woman’s occupation was entered as “fancy woman,” however!

The “ritual” of wife-selling consisted of an unwanted wife being taken into the market square of a town with a halter around her neck. Although it would appear that most of the sales had a pre-arranged conclusion (in that the buyer was often already the lover of the woman concerned), she was then auctioned off. A payment was made, usually cash, but it sometimes involved goods, or livestock. The husband would then hand the woman over to her new man. As Menefee writes: “The ritual was important: location in a public place, often a market; a formal announcement or advertisement; the use of a halter; the presence of an ‘auctioneer’; the transfer of money, and sometimes the exchange of pledges. The symbolism was derived from the market sale of goods and chattels, with which the participants were familiar, and intended to make ‘lawful’ what was essentially a form of divorce and remarriage.”

In Menefee’s view, wife-sales took place in a society in which women occupied an inferior position, but he thought that it would probably be wrong to assume that they were being represented as chattels. “The need to observe a ‘lawful’ procedure was the real significance of the ritual. In fact, the women may rarely have been victims. They knew their value and their rights in their society, and their consent was generally a necessary condition of sale.”

I’m not sure that I either agree with this or feel that it makes the custom and practice of wife-selling any less objectionable.

Wife-selling was less common in East Anglia than in other parts of the country, but here are a few examples of incidents in Suffolk:

Parham, 1764. Ipswich Journal, September 29th 1764: “Last week a man and his wife falling into discourse with a grazier at Parham Fair, the husband offered his wife in exchange for an ox provided he would let him choose one out of his drove, the grazier accepted the proposal and the wife readily agreed, accordingly they met the next day and she was delivered with a new halter round her neck and the husband received the bullock which he sold for 6 guineas, it is said the wife has since returned to her husband, they had been married about 10 years.”

Newmarket, 1770. Menefee cites a case of wife-selling that took place in Newmarket, Suffolk on Tuesday, 6 March 1770. However, it was not reported in the local press and it’s possible that, if it happened, it occurred in one of the several other Newmarkets in Britain and Ireland.

Baylham, 1783. Ipswich Journal, 21^st June 1783: “Not long since a man at Baylham in Suffolk having had a disagreement with his wife sold her to a farmer, the fee was 1s and he delivered her with a halter about her.”

Stowupland, 1787. Enid Porter in Folk-lore of East Anglia (1974) writes that a wife-sale “took place in Stowupland in Suffolk in 1787 when a local farmer’s wife was bought by his neighbor for 5 guineas, wherewith to buy a new dress and then went over to Stowmarket and ordered the bells to be rung in celebration of his having parted with her for so handsome a sum.”

Blythburgh, 1789. The Ipswich Journal, 29^th October 1789 reported the following story:  “Samuel Balls sold his wife to Abraham Rade in the parish of Blythburgh in this county for 1s. A halter was put round her, and she was resigned up to this Abraham Rade. ‘No person or persons to intrust her with my name, Samuel Balls, for she is no longer my right.’ ” Then followed the names of 4 witnesses: Samuel Balls, M. Bullock (village constable), George Whincop and Robert Sherington (landlord of the White Hart).

A Samuel Balls, a single man of Holton, married Mary Bedingfield of Blythburgh by license on 6 August 1782, in the presence of Samuel Thrower and William Blowers. This may be the unhappy couple seven years before.

Other examples, for which I can find no evidence in the local press supposedly took place in Wrentham (1802),  Sudbury, (1821), Bungay, (ca. 1877), the latter was mentioned in The Rabbit-skin Cap, the autobiography of a gamekeeper called George Baldry and it may well be apocryphal.

“Each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds:” some Norfolk casualties of the First World War

In 2000-1, I was involved in a digitisation project for Norfolk libraries, which scanned, indexed and uploaded thousands of old photographs of the county. They have been available online (via the library website http://www.norfolk.gov.uk/Leisure_and_culture/Libraries/ ) for many years now – although I’m not sure that many Norfolk people are aware of them – and are now known collectively as Picture Norfolk.

One section of this collection comprises the Norfolk ‘Roll of Honour,’ photographs of every soldier and sailor (Royal and merchant navy) who was killed in the First World War. Most of the original photographs had potted biographies written on the back, some quite lengthy, and I found many of them very moving to read. I particularly remember the three brothers in south Norfolk, agricultural labourers, who were all killed. I believe there was another family where at least three brothers, sons of a clergyman, died too. The First World War did not discriminate according to social class.

The most upsetting thing, though, was when I read a desperate-sounding plea scrawled on the back of one photographs, along the lines of: “Please return this photograph. It’s all I have left of my son.”

Now that the last veterans of the First World War have died, and many of the children who remember them have also gone, we will forget them. That’s the way of things. But these are just a few of the young men of Norfolk who died in the First World War.

Please remember that the copyright on these images remains with Norfolk County Council and these images should not be reproduced without permission.

 1. First Class Steward Arthur Nunn, from Billingford

http://bit.ly/v8sMFh

2. Private Walter J. Starling, 1st Norfolk Regiment, from Fakenham

http://bit.ly/uowluw

Eldest son of Mr. & Mrs. W. Starling of Sculthorpe Lodge Cottages, Fakenham. Wounded and taken prisoner at Mons in 1914. Died in hospital in Russia (as a POW) in 1917, aged 23.

3. Private Benjamin Thorpe, 1st Norfolks, from Cromer

http://bit.ly/udeN4K

Born in 1896, he was killed in France in 1917 and buried in Roclincourt Military Cemetery, near Arras.

4. 1st Class Stoker Benjamin Watts, HMS Natal, from Acle

http://bit.ly/uhaRKL

5. Private Walter Codling, Royal Army Medical Corps

http://bit.ly/stw356

Private Codling was an employee of Jarrolds. He joined a local detachment of the British Red Cross Society. He was lost on the Royal Edward, which was torpedoed in the Aegean Sea, in 1915.

6. Private Sydney Valentine Symonds, 1st Norfolks,  from Norwich

http://bit.ly/t4gUTP

Private Symonds was born in Norwich in 1895, and went to  Thorpe Hamlet School. He enlisted in August 1912, and died from wounds at Mons in September 1914.

7. Captain Christopher Magnay, 1st Battalion, Norfolk Regiment, from Drayton

http://bit.ly/rXpnXu

Captain Magnay was born at Drayton, in 1896. He was killed in action at Vimy Ridge, 23rd April 1917

8. Corporal Robert Fisher, Coldstream Guards & Private Charles Fisher, Norfolk Regiment

http://bit.ly/uG0W7E                 http://bit.ly/smOPeJ

Robert – born at Fundenhall in 1892, the eldest son of Mr & Mrs Horace Fisher, of Barford, near Wymondham; enlisted 6 March 1911; died in London hospital, in 1915.

Charles – second son of Horace and Ellen M. Fisher, of Barford,  born at Fundenhall, in 1894; enlisted in 1913; killed in action 14 September 1914.

9. Lance-Corporal Alphonso Allison, 7th Norfolks & Corporal Horace Allison, Royal Marine Artillery,  & Private Dan Walter Allison, Scots Guards, from Bawburgh

http://bit.ly/vqhXY9      http://bit.ly/uB1MBD           http://bit.ly/vLweHC

Alphonso – Lance-Corporal Allison was born at Bawburgh, in 1893, the son of William & Maria. He enlisted in November 1914 and died of wounds in France, in October 1916.

Horace – the record only states he was from Bawburgh. Presumably, if not a brother of Alphono & Dan, he was a member of the same family.

Dan – Private Allison was born at Costessey, in 1887, the son of William & Maria Allison. Killed in France in 1914.

10. Mrs. C. M. Fathers, Officer of Forage Corps

http://bit.ly/v3YQT3

Mrs C.M. Fathers (originally Miss C.M.Spencer) was an officer in the Forage Corps, Royal Army Service Corps. It is not clear whether she survived the war.

11. Rev. Charles Ivo Sinclair Hood, Church of England Chaplain to H. M. Forces, 1/3 East Anglian Field Ambulance.

http://bit.ly/w4Qu5I

Reverend Hood was born in 1886 & enlisted in October 1915. He died in April 1918.

12. Lance Corporal James Rix, Royal Engineers

http://bit.ly/tyoiTM

Lance Corporal Rix was killed in action in April 1918.

“Ipswich for the Cup, but first a word about the ladies…”

I am never one to refuse the chance of making a gratuitous reference to my beloved Ipswich Town, but this is about the history of women’s football in England generally, so the Ipswich bit – having occurred in the 1950s – will have to wait until the end.

Like most people, I don’t know much about women’s football, although I watch some international matches and Arsenal Ladies beating whoever-it-is in the FA Cup Final every year. In 2007, however, I saw a fascinating BBC documentary about  the history of women’s football. Focusing on the famous Dick Kerr’s Ladies team, it showed rare, flickering black-and-white images of women’s football in the early part of the 20th century. I had known nothing about this: proper football matches played between proper teams. Some of the matches had been watched by massive crowds. On Boxing Day 1920, Dick Kerr’s Ladies beat St. Helen’s Ladies 4-0. The attendance was 53,000.

That date, 1920, is significant. Only a year later the FA decided to ban women from playing football on Football League grounds. “The game,” they pronounced was “quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged.” The decline in the women’s game was dramatic and it never fully recovered, although it has been revived in the 21st century, thanks to interest in the United States and other parts of the world.

In Britain, people still talk of women’s football as something that is novel and a little bit odd. However, references to women playing football appear to go back a long way. Sir Philip Sidney mentions women playing footie in one of his poems, A Dialogue Between Two Shepherds (c.1580), and, yes, girls, it looks as if they tucked their skirts into their knickers back in Tudor times too:

“A tyme there is for all, my mother often sayes,

When she, with skirts tuckt very hy, with girles at football playes.”

In 1894, the Hampshire Telegraph & Sussex Chronicle heralded the developments in the women’s  game: “Female football teams will shortly contest in public. Women played football in this country centuries ago. Mr. Pepys complains of the nuisance in the Strand, when milkmaids kicked the ball about on May-day, as was their immemorial privilege [my italics].” Sadly the newspaper ruins everything by adding the inevitable comment: “It was not an edifying practice even then.”

The 1880s and 1890s saw some interest in women’s football, but newspaper reports were generally negative describing matches between teams made up of the “softer sex” and indulging in the usual rhetoric about scratching and unnatural aggression. Even attendance at football matches played by men was under scrutiny, for example, this writer in the Derby Mercury, 15th March 1893, believed: “”Women undoubtedly lose their influence over and attraction for men when they dispossess themselves of their womanly attributes; and girls who constantly attend football matches, and think nothing of seeing their own and other people’s brothers and cousins maimed, most assuredly do so.”

Women’s football, despite being popular as a spectator sport, came in for criticism in the press right from the start. The organised women’s game began in 1895 with a North vs. South match. The North, predictably, won 7-1. The usually liberal Ipswich Journal writing about the match stated that “it seems as if we have reached the climax of fin de siècle enormities when we read of the formation of a British Ladies’ Football Club…” and it was patronisingly described in the Times (25th March 1895):

“A match, under Association rules, between teams of ladies was played at Nightingale-lane, Hornsey,  on Saturday… Great curiosity was aroused and the ground was thronged by 7,000 people. The football was of a very harmless nature, and its novelty soon grew irksome to many of the spectators.”

The same newspaper continued in the same vein in May 1920 for its report on the England vs France women’s international, introducing (for the times, at least) a sexual frisson with a rather fanciful preamble about a boy (a young Sepp Blatter, perhaps) spying on some schoolgirls playing football in a cathedral close (!):

“The fortunate youth who penetrated these mysteries was all unconscious of attending the birth of the new woman  – he was much too intent on the spectacle. Was he not enjoying one of the few privileges of which Woman does not apparently propose to deprive his sex  – that of watching her insist on doing what a Man does better?”

The Times does go on to briefly describe the actual international match at Stamford Bridge, which France won 2-0. The writer is even good enough to admit that the players “exhibited enough skill to disappoint those who had come to laugh,” but is more enthused by the French women’s short light blue jumpers.

So why did the FA ban women in 1921? My guess it was part of a wider move to put women back in the home after the First World War. In the same year, Bath City Ladies had played in a match in Manchester to raise money for ex-servicemen, but ex-servicemen needed jobs and women were required to return to more traditional roles. It was time for society to re-invent what was considered to be appropriate behaviour for a woman. In 2008, the FA apologised for the ban and the statement that football was “unsuitable” for women.

So, to go back to the title of this piece. It’s taken from an article written by Dingle Foot, former MP for Ipswich, and published in the Times in 1978. He was writing about his memories of Sir Alf Ramsay’s great team, of course, but was also looking forward to the FA Cup Final that Ipswich Town were about to play – and win – against Arsenal. In the article, he recalled a revival of the women’s game in Suffolk when he was the local MP:

“… the rise of Ipswich did not end there. The girls began to play. They attracted immense attention. At their first match they refused to obey the referee as they played for another ladies team from rural Suffolk.” They appealed to their Member of Parliament. All he could come up with was a Kiplingesque poem:

It’s goodbye to Jacky Milburn and salute the rising sun

McGarry’s come to put the Town back in Division One

But compared with Ipswich Ladies even Portman Road must fail

For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

…

The girls have sacked their manager for all the world to see

‘Twas he who sinned against the light: he backed the referee

No ode will now be written to Mr. Nightingale

For the female of the species is much rougher than the male.

So here by Orwell’s flowing tide Britannia’s flag unfurls

To show in Wolsey’s ancient town that girls will still be girls

Down with the ref, up with the chicks, oh great Minerva, hail

The Ipswich ladies footballers submit to no mere male.

Two days after this poem appeared in the local paper, Dingle Foot received a letter from the captain of the Ipswich ladies’ team assuring him of their full support in the election. He held his seat. “No doubt,” he wrote, “this was due to the Ipswich ladies. In the end the girls always win.”

“Gypsy blood” – an eviction of travellers at Blaxhall in Suffolk

George Ewart Evans was born in South Wales in 1909 but moved to Suffolk and wrote several fascinating books about East Anglian folklore, including Ask the Fellows who Cut the Hay (1956) and The Horse in the Furrow (1960). In his books about the folklore of the horse and the horseman in Suffolk, he drew heavily on the local knowledge that he obtained by talking to the people of his village, Blaxhall, where folk culture appears to have remained alive right through the twentieth century and beyond. The local pub, the Ship, has long been a centre for traditonal folk song which deservedly received the attention of another scholar’s Ph.D. thesis (published as The Fellowship of Song : Popular Singing Traditions in East Suffolk by Ginette Dunn ca. 1980).

Evans believed that the strange combination of mysticism, folklore and practicality that imbued the role of the Suffolk horseman (think “horse whisperer,” if it helps) came from the gypsies who travelled around East Anglia. In fact, there were several families in Blaxhall who were descended from gypsies who had settled in the area and some local folkloric and musical traditions may have come to the area with the gypsies and thus from other parts of the British Isles and other travelling people.

The first official record of the presence of gypsies in Britain was made in 1505, but oral tradition suggests that they were present in East Anglia following the Black Death of 1348-9. Presumably, they were attracted by the opportunities to work after many villages in Suffolk had been completely depopulated by the plague. Many gypsies travelled around East Anglia working on the land, the Fens being the most favoured area as agricultural labour was more readily available. There are many examples of a generally happy co-existence between the gypsies and local people, for example, descriptions  – probably romanticized – of massive gypsy weddings are common in local literature. The East Anglian Magazine often featured letters and articles of recollections about gypsy life right up until the 1970s. George Borrow and John Heigham Steggall also wrote (perhaps fancifully) about the subject in the nineteenth century.

A gypsy family camping on wasteland in Ipswich, date unknown.

The reality may have been a little harsher. The Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, volume I, (1888-9) tells us that “between 1513 and 1523 some “Gypsions” were entertained by the Earl of Surrey at Tendring Hall, in Suffolk (Works of H. Howard, Earl of Surrey, ed. Nott, London, 1815, vol i. Appendix, p.5). On October 7, 1555, the Privy Council Register of Queen Mary records at Greenwich a letter to the Earl of Sussex and Sir John Shelton, Sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, returning again to them the passports and licences of ‘suche as name themselves Egiptians of wch company they had some in prison requiring them to examyne ye truth of their pretended Licenses, and being eftsons punished according to the Statute to give order forthwith for their transportaticon [sic] out of the Realm.’ “

The following January, a further letter to Mr. Sulliarde, Sheriffe of Norfolk & Suffolk, instructing him to “proceed” with the 5 or 6 “Egiptians” he had apprehended. They should be sent out of the Realm with charge not to return upon “pain of execution.”

“About 1650 Sir Matthew Hale (1609-1676) says, in his Pleas of the  Crown  (1778, i. 671): “I have not known these statutes much put into execution, only about twenty years since at the Assizes at Bury [St. Edmunds, in Suffolk] about thirteen were condemned and executed for this offence, namely for being Gypsies.’ (p. 24, Early Annals of the Gypsies in England by H T Crofton.)

The last known gypsies to be executed (for the “crime” of being gypsies) in Britain were, in fact, put to death in Suffolk in the 1650s.

The travelling families that settled in Blaxhall seemed to be well-integrated into village life by the time that George Ewart Evans made his study of the area. However, there was still a consciousness of differences between those villagers who were “local” and those who had “gypsy blood,” as he described in Ask the Fellows who Cut the Hay:  “To say that a man has gipsy blood in him is to put him down as unreliable, And finally to place him beyond the pale of the true village community.”

Even Evans’s use of language seems strikingly hostile to the present day reader, he uses the expression “the accusation of gypsy blood,” for example,  although he was in fact sympathetic. When he was interviewing people in Blaxhall they would recall the gypsy origins of some of the families in the village:  “Oh, his grandfather (or great-grandfather) married a travelling woman. The Picketts and the Taylors and the Becketts were the names you used to meet most among the travellers. I believe it was a Pickett he married. They were nice folk but they had a different line o’ life entirely to us.”

Despite the apparent integration, however, events took a sour turn in around 1900:  ”About 50 years ago…  the travellers were turned off their usual pitch on the Common. The reason given for this action was that their horses and donkeys roamed about at night and broke into and spoiled the villagers’ common yards. But they also worried the farmers by poaching, and by surreptitiously letting their horses on to the pastures late at night, retrieving them early in the morning before any of the farm people were about. …

“The Parish Council, on which two or three of the most influential farmer’s served, [my italics] was the chief agent in banishing the travellers. Robert Savage was himself a member of the Parish Council for 52 years and recalled the occasion: ‘All the village didn’t want the travellers to be moved off the Common. And I came in for a few shots at the Ship, mostly from people who were hinting that I was running in with the farmers in having the travellers turned off. But at the next Council meeting when the chairman asked, “Is there any other business?” I got up and said: “Yes, there’s more parish business done at the Ship than there’s done here!” And I told ‘em my mind.  Nobody said nawthen to me after that.’

“The eviction was accompanied by a kind of ceremony – a ceremony of ejection – that many of the old villagers remember vividly. The body of men, who emphasized that they had nothing against the travellers – ‘The people wor all right: it wor the horses and donkeys!’ marched from the Ship Inn in a column headed by a trumpet and mouth-organ. This military seeming demonstration, however, met with no resistance; for the travellers had already had word. By the time the column arrived their horses and donkeys were harnessed ready to pull their caravans and carts on to the road. This they did, and the police are waiting on the high road to compel them to move on to another parish.”

Presumably, there are many people in East Anglia who have gypsies or other travelling people amongst their ancestors. Not only that, they have made a largely unacknowledged contribution to the traditions, language and culture of the region.