My humorous Christmas present of 2022 was a Suffolk Dialect tea towel given to me by my sister. It reminded me that, when I was in the 6th form of Northgate Grammar School for Boys in Ipswich, we were given elocution lessons by Mr Cousins, the history teacher, to rid us of any trace of a Suffolk accent. Most of us had been selected at 11 years old to receive the equivalent of a public (private for non-British readers) school education in a state school. This included compulsory Latin: Latin was an entry requirement to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge in those days, no matter the subject one studied. The objective was to fit us for leadership roles in society. Any trace of a Suffolk accent was considered an impediment to a distinguished career. However, despite Mr Cousins’ best efforts, one boy, Pepper (as he proudly told us one of the Peppers of Peasenhall, a village about 24 miles from Ipswich) had an accent that was incorrigibly Suffolk. As far as I know, elocution lessons were not required for boys consigned to one of the secondary modern schools, from which Pepper had been transferred, which educated boys for less elevated careers.
I cobbled together the heading of this post from phrases on the tea towel: it means “How was I to know it wasn’t quite straight; I’m very clumsy.” One of the characteristics of Suffolk English are the “I” and “ow” diphthongs. “I” is easily rendered as “oi”, but the transcription of “ow” has defeated the designer of the tea towel and me.
I have been reflecting on my Suffolk roots since I read recently Adrian Bell’s Corduroy, first published in 1930 by Cobden-Sanderson. Some years ago, Jan had saved this gem of a book when it was deaccessioned from her library. I had not heard of it, or of its author, Adrian Bell (1901-1980). Bell was the son of Robert Bell, editor of the Observer and of an artist Emily Jane Frances (British readers will be more familiar with their son, the journalist and former MP Martin Bell). Adrian had ambitions to be a writer, but his parents urged him to do something with better career prospects. In 1920 he persuaded his father to pay a Suffolk farmer to train him. Corduroy is Bell’s account of his first year in Suffolk and ends with his buying his own farm. Bell wrote beautifully and was an acute observer of a time when farming relied on the muscles of men and horses, although technology was beginning to change the way farms were worked.
Corduroy includes a splendid description of a fox hunt, which gives one a convincing feeling of being a witness. I was struck by the contrast between Bell’s account of an event that combined vigorous activity and periods of inactivity when the fox for a time eluded the hounds or went to ground. This contrasts with TV and movie representations of hunts which tend to portray frenetic non-stop galloping and jumping. In Bell’s hunt, the fox got away.
Bell touches lightly on the social hierarchy of the time. His farmer boss/instructor Mr Colville was not of the highest status, but well above that of his labourers, whom he treated with a combination of benevolence and harsh discipline. The local squire’s position was vacant: the squire had recently died; his house was empty and he was sorely missed at the fox hunt. Bell describes in some detail the skills of the farm labourers (ploughing, harvesting mangolds and the like) and how hard they worked. However, he does not comment at all about their standard of living, except for one passage in which he refers to a labourer in his comfortable cottage. I suspect that life was much harsher than the impression that Bell gives.
A modern publisher would certainly have encouraged Bell to drop a passage or two from his account of a trip to the market to see some pigs sold. Bell notes that the buyers of chickens included “the Jews (there were about six of them, voluble, of unpleasing countenances)”, all dressed in “East End suits and patent leather shoes ornamentally inlaid”, in contrast with “the breeches and buskins and clod-scarred boots of the rest.” One local observed that “God nor Devil can understand what they say.” When the sale commenced the Jews jabbered and gesticulated, “As good as a Punch and Judy show,” one local observed. It would be harsh to rush to judgement and conclude that Bell was an antisemite (although that would not have been unusual in elite circles in 1920s Britain). Perhaps he simply have reflected attitudes in 1920s Suffolk rural society: the Suffolk I grew up in in the 1950s and 1960s was noticeably un-cosmopolitan. In any case, if I had been his publisher those Jewish traders would have been dropped or referred to much more delicately.
Bell also describes his first visit to the blacksmith to have a shoe replaced on a horse called Captain. The blacksmith was still a key figure in the village, his forge a meeting place second only to the inn. There were no longer hackneys and carriage horses to shoe (replaced by motor vehicles), and tractors had begun to displace some of the work of horses in the fields.
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| Charles Jacobs, blacksmith and Primitive Methodist preacher, and his family. My grandfather, Edwards George, is the small boy standing to the right of his mother Jane Rachel. Charles' son Harry was also a blacksmith |
As I read this and other passages in the book, I realized that I was visiting the Suffolk of my parent’s youth and of my grandparents and great grandparents. My paternal great great grandfather, Charles Jacobs, born in 1814 in Badingham, Suffolk, was a travelling poultry seller (much like the Jews described by Bell). His son Charles (born 1846), my great grandfather, became a blacksmith and a Primitive Methodist lay preacher. By 1883 he was a trustee of the Methodist chapel in Melton, near Woodbridge, which is now a business premises. His son Charles was in turn a blacksmith, but another son, my grandfather Edwards George Jacobs, was a domestic gardener. He married my grandmother Mabel Jackson, a domestic servant in 1906. Their son Douglas, my father was born in 1912 in a cottage adjacent to the Dog pub in Grundisburgh. The family subsequently moved into a rented house, Hillside Cottage, a former bakery with no running water or sewage. Edwards died when I was a new-born baby, but I remember clearly visits to my grandmother in the 1950s and 1960s. There was still a blacksmith’s forge in Grundisburgh and we would watch the cows of the farm at the top of the hill amble down to the Barley Mow meadow for grazing. Mabel was a stalwart of the Women’s Institute and was trusted by owners of some of the large houses in the village (one was the mother of the famous jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton) to keep en eye on their homes in their absence. The big event of the year was the Grundisburgh Show, held in the grounds of the family seat of the Cranworth family. Mabel regularly entered her cakes, vegetables and flowers in competitions at the show. We children were more interested in the games, rather less so in the gymkhana.
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| Edwards and Mabel Jacobs at Hillside Cottage, Grundisburgh |
My maternal great great grandfather Samuel Bennett was a mariner, married to the daughter of a mariner. Their daughter Mary Ann married my maternal great grandfather William Lucas, the son of an agricultural labourer. In the 1860s William was an under coachman at a large house in Great Baddow in Essex. By the 1870s he was groom to a well-to-do farmer, William Toller, who owned land at Gedgrave, on the edge of the North Sea marshes a mile or so from Orford. Orford was a port, so perhaps that is why my grandfather Harry Lucas followed his grandfather Bennett by becoming a sailor, rather than earning his living on the land like his father. He was the first captain of a sailing barge, the Raybel, which is currently being restored to return it to service. Two of his sons would follow him to work on the barges that sailed out of Ipswich docks.
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| Richmond Farm cottages, Gedgrave, where Harry Lucas was born |
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| Harry Lucas |
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| My grandmother Ellen Lucas, centre rear, her mother Sarah Jemima Webb, my mother Alice Lucas, seated in front of Sarah Jemima, and my aunt Dorothy Lucas to Alice's left, at Great Yarmouth c.1929 |
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| The Raybel moored at St Katharine's dock in London in 2009 when it was a party venue |
In addition to Adrian Bell’s description of the Suffolk of the early 1920s, there are two other fine accounts of rural Suffolk. In 1947 George Ewart Evans (1909-1988) moved to Blaxhall in east Suffolk where his wife was headteacher of the village school. Ewart collected testimony from the older residents of life in Blaxhall in the late 19th and early 20th century. His Ask the Fellows who Cut the Hay, is a vivid portrait of Suffolk farming life before technology began to change it after WWI, and especially WWII. Evans’ account conveys the poverty of the rural labourer’s family much more starkly than Bell’s rather bucolic picture. Bell and Evans (who was born in Wales) were both newcomers to Suffolk, but Ronald Blythe was born in the county in 1922 and descended from generations of Suffolk farmers. Blythe’s book, Akenfield, was published in 1969 and captures the moments in which mechanization was transforming farming in the county. No village called Akenfield exists in Suffolk, but is rather an imagined composite of two real villages. Like Evans’ account of Blaxhall, Blythe’s book was based on the oral accounts of his rural neighbours in Charsfield and Debach. When I read it, I was convinced that I saw glimpses of my grandmother’s Grundisburgh. By the time Akenfield was published the Jacobs family of my father’s generation no longer made its living on the land. After leaving school, he moved to Ipswich to work for the Ipswich Cooperative Society (where he met my mother). His brothers moved still further from rural Suffolk: one to Cambridge, the other to Preston in Lancashire. His sister became a deaconess in the Baptist church, initially in the slum districts of Birmingham. My own generation of Suffolk Jacobs worked in building, telecommunications, local government, publishing, law, journalism, or in one case emigrated to Germany. There are no more Jacobs blacksmiths or grooms.
A note for readers interested in publishing history: the Cobden-Sanderson who published Bell’s book seems to have been Richard Cobden-Sanderson (1884-1964), a book designer and publisher. He was the son of Anne Cobden-Sanderson (1853-1926), a noted socialist, suffragette and vegetarian, and Thomas Cobden-Sanderson (1840-1922), founder of the Dove Press. Thomas formed a partnership with the printer and typographer Emery Walker who designed the typefaces for the Dove Press. The partnership ended so acrimoniously that Thomas threw the punches and matrices for the type into the Thames. There is a family connection here: Jan’s grandfather, Bert Waddams, joined Emery Walker’s firm about 1907 and worked there until 1954.
