The Southwold Diary of James Maggs II | 1848-1876
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
THE SOUTHWOLD DIARY OF JAMES MAGGS 1818-1876 Edited by Alan Farquhar Bottomley Volume II 1848-1876 Published for theVOLUME Suffolk XXVI Records Society by The Boydell Press - © Alan Farquhar Bottomley Published for the Suffolk Records Society by The Boydell Press, an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd, PO Box 9, Woodbridge Suffolk IP12 3DF First published 1984 ISBN O 85115 411 5 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Maggs, James The Southwold diary of James Maggs 181&-1876. -(Suffolk Records Society; v.26) Vol. 2: 1848-1876 1. Southwold (Suffolk)-Social life and customs I. Title II. Bottomley, Alan Farquhar III. Series 942.6'41 DA690.S78 ISBN 0-85115-411-5 To my mother and in memory of my father Leonard Farquhar Bottomley Omnium parentum Optimi parentes Vobis hunc librum Filius iam dedit. Printed in Great Britain by Short Run Press Ltd Exeter, Devon. Contents List of Illustrations v1 List of Abbreviations vu Introduction 1 THE SOUTHWOLD DIARY OF JAMES MAGGS 1848-1876 6 Errata in Vol. I 151 Index 153 - List of Illustrations James Maggs in old age frontispiece South Cliff, Southwold 26 Handbill re theft of tombstone 28 Middle Cliff, Southwold 85 East Cliff, Southwold 135 South Green, Southwold 136 Map of Southwold in 1840 eridpapers VI Some of Maggs' habitualNote abbreviations on Abbreviations are idiosyncratic and, as such, have been kept. Most are self-evident, such as agt, for against, et foretc, and vd for vide. Several are not, and a complete list follows: acct = account mo = month ag/agd = aged ob = observe agt = against Obd = Obadiah amt = amount offc = office b.d = birthday p = past bot = bought pd = paid brot = brought qrtr = quarter C.B. = Common Book sd = said C.H. = Custom House sh = share cr/crs = creditor, creditors solor = solicitor chwdn = church warden tempo = temporary daugr = daughter T.B = Town Book dee = deceased U.Ho = Union House dro = drowned (workhouse) ec = each wd = widow et/et.et. = etc wk = wreck exor = executor wt = with fro = from yt = that furor = furniture ye = the -g = -mg interd = interred Blkshore = Blackshore k = killed Blythbro = Blythburgh masr = master Haleso = Halesworth memo = memory Misner = Minsmere mess = messrs SoWold = Southwold vu •r---------------- Introduction to Vol. 2 In the general introduction to the Diary, all but one of James Maggs's children were accounted for, either by marriage or death. The exception was Maria, the youngest, who remained at 20 Park Lane to keep house for her father after the death of her mother in 1865. 1 On March 20 1868 the diarist made his will, leaving a double share in the residue of his property to Maria in 'acknowledgment for her kindness and attention to me since the death of my wife'. 2 Neither this will, nor any other, seems to have been proved. The reason for this may have been that shortly afterwards, on June 10, this, the last of his daughters, was married here, in St. Edmund's church, to Lieutenant Alfred Brown of the United States Navy. 3 The old man was not left completely deserted. Minnie Aldrich, Maria's illegitimate daughter, now five, was left in the care of her grandfather. 4 By 1881, when Maggs had but nine years of his long life left to him, she was still at Park Lane and had taken over her mother's duties. 5 Maria's grandfather had most probably been a sailor; her uncle, William Maggs, had been drowned off Happisburgh; one of her brothers, Edward, went to sea at the age of twelve (though he did not much like the experience); and sister Ellen had married Charles Durrant of the Customs and Coastguard Service. Durrant, who signed the register at her wedding as one of the two principal witnesses, may perhaps have introduced the bride to her husband, who was himself the son of a Custom House Officer. 6 It is thus easy to demonstrate the way in which the sea lapped at the lives of many of the nineteenth century inhabitants of Southwold. And it had ever been so. In pre-Conquest times the island, for such it was then, had been the means by which the men of Reydon had found access to the herring fisheries and upon it they had doubtless beached their vessels, landed their catches and dried their nets. The pounding of this sea is audible in the pages of the diary. It was a fickle and treacherous friend to the ports of East Anglia. Strong north to south currents eroded any projections along the soft coast while even more potently the ebb and flowof the tide attacked what lay between. Maggs records that in 1827 four acres were swept away at Easton Bavents and that in the same gale there were losses, though much less severe, at Southwold between Gun Hill and New York Cliff. 7 When the town lost the protection afforded by Easton 1. Maggs I, p.15. 2. ibid. 3. Southwold Parish Registers. 4. Census of 1871. 5. Census of 1881. 6. Southwold Parish Registers. 7. Maggs I, p. 67. - and Dunwich, the 'horns' of Sole Bay, it was bound to suffer, though relatively immune until then. Just over twenty years later the breakwater was repaired at the foot of Gun Hill but this did not prevent alarming inroads being made there in 1853 and damage being suffered from New York Cliff to the south to Long Island Cliff to the north. 8 The beach at the foot of these cliffs was lined with beach houses and fish houses but these the sea attacked in 1856 and finally swept away in 1862.9 Two years later the Coast Guard watchhouse, exposed in 1853, finallyfe ll when serious erosion swept away the path from New York Cliff to Gun Hill.10 In the closing decades of the century, after Maggs had made the last entry in his journal, coastal defence was to become and remain a living issue in the town as methods of coast protection were fiercely debated until our own time. The sea carried south what it had washed away, creating spits and choking harbours and estuaries.This was a more considerable problem forSouthwold than the erosion itself for its prosperity was closely linked to the state of the haven. The Free British Fishery of 1750 had been doomed by the sand banks that had formed at the mouth of the Blyth and the problem had not gone away in Maggs's own day. In 1833 and again in 1839 steam dredgers had been hired to clear the river but in the latter year, and again in 1843 when it was possible to walk across to Walberswick, the harbour was blocked. 11 In 1852 an attempt to haul a schooner across the bar using a cable and capstan ended in failure and the loss of the vessel.12 Maggs recorded that three years later men were digging a channel through a new obstruction. 13 Yet three years more and the channel was again blocked.14 The state of the harbour was not the only discouragement to shipping. The coast was lined with treacherous sandbanks, inconstant in their siting but lethal in their effect. When the wind was strong and from off the sea ships could expect to be driven upon them. In 1829, with a gale blowing from the east three vessels were lost, one off Walberswick and two off Dunwich. 15 Gales blowing from the E.N.E. in the winter of 1835-6 drove twenty-three ships on shore between Kessingland and Corton on one occasion and five colliers on to the Barnard Sands on another. 16 Shortly afterwards twenty- 8. Maggs II, p. 64. 9. Maggs II, pp. 86, llO. 10. Maggs II, p. 113. 11. Maggs I, 79 & 65. The mouth of the haven had been dug out six times in 1810 and 1811. (Maggs 'Hand book etc ....', p. xiii). Between 1805 and 1818 it was dug out thirteen times. (ibid., p. xii ). In 1839 a number of ships belonging to Patrick Stead of Halesworth were trapped inside the harbour. (Report of Evidence given before the Harbour Commissioners at Southwold. 1839.) 12. Maggs II, p. 52. 'Even at the best of times it was a job to get a fully-laden ship in without first lightening her.' (Roy Clark, 'Black Sailed Traders', p. 116.) 13. Maggs II, p. 79. 14. Maggs II, p. 96. 15. Maggs I, p. 72. 16. Maggs I, pp. 92-3. 2 17 seven ships came on shore between Kessingland and Lowestoft and in 1843 one vessel was lost at the pier and two others on the Barnard. After the fearful east coast gales in November 1855 the shore at Southwold was littered with grounded vessels, the brigs18 'Nelson' at North Cliffand 'Hylton Castle' at Long Island Cliff. Just south of Gun Hill lay the brigs 'Ocean' and 'Emma' and the barque 'Cape Horn'. In between these dramatic losses there were numerous individual casualties, for the east coast in Maggs's day was as dangerous as the stormy south-west. Yet the coastal trade throve and the horizon would more often than not have been alive with sail and later with steam and steel. In addition the fisheries19 were active and in 1840 forty-seven mackerel boats appeared in the bay. Three years later Maggs counted seven20 to eight hundred vessels of unspecified character between the two nesses. Southwold itself suffered regularly when its men and ships were lost at sea and many who were baptised at St. Edmund's failed to find burial in the churchyard outside.