The Cardinal, the Russian Prince, the Cartoonist, and the Football Managers

 

A visitor who strolls around the centre of Ipswich, and takes a brief diversion to the football stadium, comes across statues that commemorate five notable men (sorry no women) in the history of my home town. To a teenage boy Ipswich in the 1960s and 1970s seemed a dull, un-cosmopolitan place. When my university studies took me to exciting places such as Peru and Mexico, this young man dreamed of the world beyond Ipswich. I used to joke to people who asked me where I came from that Ipswich had only two important people in its history: Cardinal Wolsey and Alf Ramsey, a football manager. Looking back, clearly, I was wrong.

 

Wolsey is indeed commemorated with a statue that depicts him in his cardinal’s robes, seated in a grand chair, from beneath which peeks a cat. The statue is located at the junction of Silent Street and St Peter’s Street, close to Wolsey’s presumed birthplace. Around the base of the statue runs the following inscription: “Cardinal, archbishop, Lord Chancellor and teacher who believed that pleasure should mingle with study so that the child may think learning an amusement rather than a toil.” My first response to this statement was that it should be read to the ambitious politicians turned Secretaries of State for Education who have turned our national education system into an arena of cramming knowledge deemed useful (i.e. of direct economic value) rather than helping students to develop an enquiring, intelligent and discriminating mind. The emphasis on education is, presumably, a reference to Wolsey’s never-to-be-realized plan to endow a school (The King’s School) in Ipswich from which students could progress to university studies. All that remains is Wolsey’s Gate close to the waterfront: a rather sad remnant of Tudor brick, a wooden gate, and a coat of arms in stone much eroded by the emissions of traffic that passes within a few feet. For some reason, Ipswich fails to commemorate another great Medieval figure, Geoffrey Chaucer, who was born in London, but whose parents owned a wine store in Tavern Street (the booze center of the Medieval town). Several generations of Chaucers were vintners and merchants in Ipswich.

The statue of Cardinal Wolsey.

 

Wolsey's Gate.

 

The next monument is in Cromwell Square (Thomas Cromwell assisted Wolsey in the dissolution of monasteries to raise fund for his Ipswich school and another in Oxford). The sculpture commemorates an exiled Russian, Prince Alexander Obolensky, who played rugby for Oxford University, Leicester and England. The prince died when his Hurricane fighter plane crashed on Martlesham Heath near Ipswich during a training flight. In short, the prince's connection to Ipswich is sketchy at best. Nevertheless, the memorial was unveiled in 2009 by Obolensky’s niece, Princess Alexandra Obolensky. Unfortunately, one of the main sponsors of the work was Roman Abramovich, a Russian oligarch then owner of Chelsea football club, now the subject of sanctions as a facilitator of President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The memorial to Prince Obolensky.

 

 

Close to the town hall stands an altogether different monument, which features some of the famous characters created by the cartoonist Carl Giles: Grandma, twins Lawrence and Ralph and Rush the dog. Grandma looks up to the studio window of a nearby building where Giles worked. Giles lived about four miles from his memorial in Tuddenham, where he owned a farm and converted a barn into a light-filled studio (now a bed and breakfast), and frequented the Fountain pub.

 

The Giles memorial (photo by John Peacock).

Alf Ramsey's statue at Portman Road football ground

The statues of two mangers of Ipswich Town Football Club stand, naturally enough by the club’s stadium. Alf Ramsey was manager from 1955-1963, and took the team into the First Division, of which they became champions in their first season. He was also the manager of the England team that won the World Cup in London in 1966. The other manager, Bobby Robson (1969-1982), whose team won the FA Cup and the UEFA Cup, and was for several years one of the best in England. I once met Robson when he was signing copies of a memoir (not the best book of its sort) in the boardroom of Macmillan Publishers. After I had introduced myself as an Ipswich boy from the glory days, he spoke with boyish enthusiasm about those times and gave me a signed copy of the book.

 

The Bobby Robson statue

Ipswich’s glory days in terms of its economy lay further in the past than its sporting glories. It claims to be the oldest continuously occupied English town (since about 600AD), and received its borough charter from King John in 1200. Medieval Ipswich was one of the most important ports in England, a rival even to London. The town had two strategic advantages. It lay on a navigable river, the Orwell, which opens into a wide estuary where its waters join the Stour and the North Sea, providing access to the markets of the Low Countries and northern Germany. That trade was fuelled by woollen cloth, since Suffolk was an important sheep-rearing region. Ipswich merchants even sought wealth in the far-off Americas, including Mexico (this blog is after called Mexico and Other Matters). From 1586-1588 the merchant Thomas Eldred, and another Ipswich man Thomas Fuller (an apt name for a native of a town famous for its cloth), was on board the small fleet of Thomas Cavendish, of Trimley St Martin, some 12 miles from Ipswich, which circumnavigated the globe, halting off Baja California to raid the Spanish galleon the Santa Ana, which was en route from Manila to Acapulco.

 

A 19th-century drawing of Thomas Eldred's house in Fore Street. A pub once elsewhere in Ipswich bore Eldred's name, until the name was changed in 2012.

The layout of the town centre of contemporary Ipswich, generally reflects the Medieval town plan. It takes no more than 15-20 minutes to walk across the former Medieval centre from north to south or east to west, yet such was the borough’s wealth that in this narrow space there were 15 churches (12 survive, but many now deconsecrated and used for something other than worship), a chapel and four priories (Augustinian, Franciscan, Carmelite and Dominican). There were also four leper hospitals: Medieval England’s public health was generally poor, and ports helped to transmit disease.

 

John Speed's map of Ipswich, 1610

Nothing remains of the priories or the hospitals, but a walking tour of the remaining churches gives an impression of what power the church must once have exercised. For example, a stroll up St Stephen’s Lane takes you past St Stephen’s church (previously a tourist information centre, now closed). One hundred metres away stands St Lawrence on Dial Lane, and about the same distance on Tower Street is St Mary-le-Tower, Ipswich’s civic church. About 500 metres from St Lawrence is St Mary at the Elms, a not particularly notable little church, were it not for its role as the shrine of Our Lady of Grace, once visited by Henry VIII, Catherine of Aragon, Sir Thomas More and. of course, Wolsey. On 20 September 1538 the shrine was destroyed and the statue of Our Lady taken to Chelsea to be burned. However, the good people of Nettuno, south of Rome, add an unexpected twist to the story. Their church displays an ancient wooden statue known locally as Our Lady of the Graces, or less formally as The English Lady. It seems that Our Lady escaped the flames of Chelsea and ended up in Italy, or at least that’s how they see it in Nettuno. A replacement statue, set in a modest niche in the wall, is now venerated in the Ipswich church.

 

The modest shrine of Our Lady of Grace at St Mary at the Elms

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St Margaret's, Ipswich (© Simon Knott, http://www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/ipsmarg.html).

The most glorious of Ipswich’s ancient churches is St Margaret's, built in the late 14^th and early 15^thcenturies, and dedicated to St Margaret of Antioch. While she was being tortured on the orders of a Roman governor, whom she refused to marry because she had dedicated her virginity to God, Margaret survived numerous dangerous episodes such as being swallowed by a dragon (Satan in disguise), and only gave up her mortal coil when she was beheaded. Ipswich’s Medieval churches underwent changes over the years, especially in the Victorian era when the town was a flourishing manufacturing centre, and St Margaret’s is no exception. The exterior was restored and the height of the tower increased. However, the Victorians fortunately left alone the church’s great glory, its double hammerbeam wooden roof, installed in the 1480s and 1490s. In 1644, a visiting iconoclast had the saints set in niches below the roof decapitated, but otherwise did no damage. The roof was sumptuously painted in the 1690s as a tribute to William and Mary’s triumph in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Ipswich was resolutely Protestant , non-conformist of various flavours, and even Puritan (a local historian opines that we Ipswichians still are a puritanical lot).

 

The double hammer-beam roof of St Margaret's.

Works of two of Ipswich’s adopted sons are displayed in Christchurch Mansion a minute or two’s walk from St Margaret's. Thomas Gainsborough (baptised 1727-1788), born in Sudbury, 10 miles west of Ipswich, moved to the town in 1752 where he painted portraits of many of the worthies of the town, until he moved to Bath in 1759. John Constable (1776-1837) also painted portraits, but he excelled as a painter of the Suffolk landscape. Some fine examples are in the mansion, which houses the largest collection of his work outside London.

 

Christchurch Mansion (built by the wealthy merchant Edmund Withypoll, 1548-1550, given to Ipswich corporation by Felix Cobbold in 1894). Withypoll is buried in the churchyard of Saint Margaret's.

Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), Mrs Mary Cobbold and Miss Cobbold with a lamb, c.1752.

Cover of the commemorative book published by Cobbold to mark two centuries of brewing at Cliff Quay, Ipswich.

The back cover of the commemorative book featured Cardinal Wolsey and his gate.

One of Gainsborough’s patrons was the wealthy Cobbold family, who moved their brewery from Harwich to Ipswich where the water in Holywells Park made better beer, and where the Cobbolds owned a large house. Gainsborough painted Mrs Mary Cobbold and Miss Cobbold with a lamb about 1752. In 1923 Cobbold & Co. marked the bicentenary of the Cliff Brewery with a fete at Hollywell Park and the publication of a book to celebrate the firm’s illustrious history. The book records the importance of the Cobbold family in Ipswich’s civic life. John C Cobbold was member of parliament five times between 1847 and 1865, and John P, Thomas C and Felix T Cobbold all represented Ipswich in Parliament. Five Cobbolds were mayors of the town between 1841 and 1914 and John Chevalier Cobbold was High Steward from 1875-1882. A selection of Cobbold’s ancient and historical Inns includes the Bull Inn, Ipswich, which “dates from the sixteenth century and in this early period was one of the most important maritime Inns of the town”; Ye Olde Neptune Inn was another 16^th-century inn originally the home of a wealthy merchant who had it decorated (probably by Flemish workmen) with rich oak panelling and carving; the Swan Inn pays £2 per annum to St Mary-le-Tower, a perpetual fine for a murder committed there; The Angel in Woodbridge pays 20 shillings a year for the needy poor of Hasketon, an obligation imposed by Alice Osborn in 1678; The King’s Head in Needham Market had a Tudor staircase; The Greyhound in Pettistree (much favoured by the current Jacobs family and reputed to be the oldest pub in Suffolk) had been occupied as tenants by the Smith family since 1821; the Ostrich Inn at Wherstead probably does not record the presence of large birds on the Orwell, but is more likely a corruption of Oyster Reach. When Bobby Robson was manager of the football club a Cobbold was the chairman, and one of the stands at the football stadium is named after the family. Robson said that if the team won Mr Cobbold would share with Bobby a bottle of champagne to celebrate; if the team lost two bottles were consumed.

 

Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), Holywells Park, 1748-1750. The waters were used to brew Cobbold's beer.

Tenants and employees of  Cobbold's brewery celebrating the marriage of John Murray Cobbold and Lady Blanche Cavendish, daughter of the 9th Duke of Devonshire, at Holywells in 1919. From the commemorative book of 1923.

The Greyhound in Pettistree, restored 1922, as depicted in the commemorative book of 1923.

While wool made Medieval Ipswich’s fortune, iron was the material that dominated the 19^th century, and the men (no women once again) behind it were Quakers. The story begins in Ipswich’s rival town, Norfolk in 1785, when Robert Ransome, son of a Quaker schoolmaster, took out a patent for a new cast-iron plough share. Ipswich had a big advantage over Norwich. It was an important port, so in 1789 Ransome moved to Ipswich and set up a foundry opposite St Mary-at-the-Key church, close to the harbour. He soon moved to a former maltings in a street now aptly known as Old Foundry Road. By 1807 Ransome had installed a steam engine to work the machinery. Innovation did not stop with plough shares and steam power. In the early 19^th century, the firm expanded into bridgebuilding and millwrighting. While this was going on, in 1802 a rival, Jacob Garrett, who already had a foundry in Leiston (where my great uncle George Lucas went to work in 1901), set up shop in Ipswich. Ransome’s responded by setting up a foundry in Leiston. Competition did not cramp Ransome’s style. In 1832 (two years after Robert’s death) the firm bought a licence to manufacture Budding’s Patent Grass Cutting Machine, in other words a lawnmower – Ransomes were still important lawn mower manufacturers when I was growing up in Ipswich in the 1960s and 1970s (my uncle Dennis Hussey was a director of the firm, then named Ransome, Sims and Jeffries).

By 1841 the firm was making steam engines to power farm machinery. Expansion was made possible by financing from Ipswich’s Quaker bankers, and the arrival of fresh (Quaker) engineering talent. Ipswich capitalists (including John Chevalier Cobbold of the brewing dynasty), had meanwhile been investing in railways, so naturally Ransomes turned to making railway lines, and signalling and switching gear. The firm (by then known as Ransomes and Rapier) made the large iron buffers at Waterloo station, as well as at several other London rail and underground stations. This was an international business: Ransomes made the first railway engine for the Shanghai and Woosung Railway, and also manufactured the sluice gates for the Aswan dam and other water control schemes. While engineering boomed, other Ipswich industrialists invested in other enterprises. Around 1849 Edward Packard established the first fertiliser factory, close to the all-important docks (as the aptly-named Coprolite Street reminds modern visitors). Packard soon found a rival in Joseph Fison, whose last name survived as a PlC until 1995. The Pretty family (one of whom, Edith Pretty would sponsor the excavations of the Viking ship burial at Sutton Hoo, not far from Ipswich) became one of the largest corset manufacturers in the country, with works at Tower Ramparts, in 1882. The Pretty family were also partners in a department store, Footman, Pretty & Co. And by 1880 George Whight & Co. was producing the New Excelsior sewing machine in the Buttermarket in central Ipswich.

 

Ipswich waterfront, 30 November 2023. The building to the extreme right is the 18th-century Customs House.

The Ipswich manufacturing boom touched my mother’s family (last name Lucas) by offering employment opportunities in new industries. My aunts, Florrie and May Lucas were both employed in an Ipswich clothing factory, perhaps for the Pretty family. The ancient port also provided opportunities. My grandfather Harry Lucas was the captain of the Raybel sailing barge, recently restored and once again carrying cargo under sail. Harry’s son Arthur sailed on the Thalatta for R & W Paul Ltd of Ipswich, carrying malt and barley. The Thalatta too has been restored and is now an educational vessel.

 

The Raybel unloading barley at Woodbridge in the 1920s.

So, the monuments chosen by Ipswich to commemorate famous figures from its past do not give a very representative account of the town's history. But the young student, dazzled by the exotic wonders of the Andes and the Sierra Madre, was equally wrong about his home town, as I realised when I researched a visit with my friend John Peacock in late November 2023. Our goal was to visit some Medieval churches and other surviving ancient buildings, and to see the Gainsboroughs and Constables. Also, to take in a football match: Ipswich 3-Millwall 1, I am glad to say. Unfortunately, the only bar we could find open afterwards could not serve us a bottle of champagne, so we could not celebrate in Cobbold style.

Ipswich (right) vs. Millwall, Portman Road, Ipswich, 29 November 2023.

 A special thank you: my Indianapolis friend Jack Cooney found the book that commemorates 200 years of Cobbold brewing in a used bookstore in Alamogordo, New Mexico (population 31,384 in 2020). Quite how the history of Ipswich brewing travelled all the way to the Chiuhuan we will never know, but it conjures up the Suffolk of my grandparents.