Return to Suffolk 1948 - 1955

Return to Suffolk – 1948 to 1955

Who, in his right mind, would choose to live in furnished rooms in Battersea and work in central London when there was a chance of a job, with unfurnished living accommodation, in a familiar and well-loved part of rural Suffolk? Certainly not me!

It was in the late autumn of 1947. I had been discharged from the army after nearly seven years’ service, on 23rd April 1946. Heather Gilbert my fiancée (whom I had met in Ipswich on the day that war was declared!) and I were married four days later on 27th April at Gants Hill Methodist Church, Barkingside, Ilford. Recalled a week early from our honeymoon in Devon so that I could attend a government course for ex-service trainee sanitary inspectors, Heather and I trudged the streets of south-west London with our suitcases until we eventually secured furnished rooms in Battersea’s Southolm Street, within a few hundred yards of the Polytechnic that I was to attend.

I attended lectures and demonstrations at Battersea ‘Poly’, at the Brixton School of building and at Smithfield Meat Market. I underwent practical training with Battersea Borough Council and with Sutton and Cheam, and Esher Urban District Councils. I bought myself a second-hand bicycle and cycled to Smithfield Market, and to Sutton and Esher every day that I trained there. In September 1947 I sat for the Sanitary Inspectors’ statutory qualifying examination and passed.

Armed with my newly acquired certificate I found employment with the Westminster City Council on what was then the princely salary of £450 a year, including ‘London weighting’. The Knightsbridge District, which I was to take over when I was thoroughly familiar with it, included Buckingham Palace, which gave me no trouble whatsoever, and the Royal Albert Hall. If today the drains of the latter famous edifice are less than perfect, it could be because supervising their reconstruction after damage sustained during the war, was one of my tasks.

Parts of ‘my’ district could only be described as very posh indeed! I recall that on one occasion we received a complaint about some building defect (was it a leaking roof? a blocked drain? I don’t remember) at the ‘White Eagle’ Polish Officers’ Club. I called to explain that as their premises were Crown Property the Council had no jurisdiction over it at all and they should get in touch with the Crown Agent who would, no doubt, quickly sort their problems out for them.

I was welcomed by a very regal Polish gentleman speaking perfect English, who simply refused to listen to a word I had to say until we had first lunched. ‘But …’, I tried. ‘Not a word!’ he said, showing me at my seat. ‘First we lunch. Then we talk business’

Well, we had a splendid lunch and it was only over the post-prandial coffee that I was able to explain and apologise. ‘Not a word, old man’, he replied. ‘Thank you for giving me the phone number of the chap I should have contacted – I hope that you enjoyed your lunch’. Well yes, I had - but all the time I had had the feeling that I was enjoying it under false pretences!

I was happy enough working ‘at the centre of things’ in Westminster, and might well have spent my whole local government career in London, had I not seen that job advertisement in the ‘Municipal Journal’. It was for an Additional Sanitary Inspector with the Gipping Rural District Council. The salary was only £390 a year (£60 difference in salaries seems trivial now. Believe me, it wasn’t then) the bottom rung of the Administrative, Professional and Technical grades. There was a car allowance though and the promise of unfurnished housing accommodation to rent.

The Gipping Rural District! I knew it well of course, and couldn’t have asked to work anywhere better. It was bisected by my beloved River Gipping. It encircled Stowmarket, its administrative centre was at Needham Market, and it included parishes like Bramford, Claydon, Great Blakenham, Coddenham and Somersham, through which my friends and I had cycled in my youth.

My scruples at applying so soon for another job were laughed at by my colleagues at Westminster. I applied and was granted an interview at the Council Offices, Needham Market on 20th November 1947. I remember the date well, since it was the wedding day of the Queen (then Princess Elizabeth) and Prince Philip!

There was only one other applicant at the interview. I was familiar with the district. I was prepared to buy a car and learn to drive – and I still had a Suffolk accent! I was appointed and started work on 1 January 1948. My father had died in 1939 and Heather and I lived with my mother in her home in Kensington Road, Ipswich, while the bungalow that had been allocated to us was being completed.

This was half the main block of a former isolation hospital in what had once been called Workhouse Lane but had been renamed ‘The Crescent, off the Norwich Road in Barham near the ‘Sorrel Horse’. The hospital was being converted into five bungalows for members of the Council’s staff. We moved into our new home, our first real home, in the spring.

Opposite us was Barham’s disused and disintegrating workhouse while behind our bungalow was an area of stony, rabbit-infested heathland known as ‘The Broom’. A walk across the Broom and over the railway line took us to the River Gipping and to Great Blakenham. Here we could catch a bus to Ipswich or Needham Market. We called our first home ‘Broomside’ and later, when we moved into another smaller but more convenient bungalow on the same site, we took our nameplate with us. It became new ‘Broomside’.

The Public Health Department was on the upper floor of the Council Offices, a large converted house in Needham Market’s High Street that had been called – and was still usually called - ‘Hurstlea’. Chief Sanitary Inspector was Ewart Morgan, a Welshmen from Port Talbot. There was another Additional Sanitary Inspector, older and more experienced than I was. He was Bernard Davies who came from the Birmingham area. Sam Seamans was the administrative officer, clerk and mainstay of the Department. Sam Seamans and I were the only ‘natives’. We were also the only ex-servicemen in the Department.

Bernard Davies and I were occupied with the rural housing survey. Every rural home in the district had to be inspected and classified either as fit in all respects, capable of being made fit at reasonable cost or unfit for human habitation. The survey taught me that slum dwellings were not an exclusively urban phenomenon and that delightful thatched ‘picture postcard’ cottages sometimes concealed unbelievable squalor behind a picturesque façade.

I inspected cottages where the ground floor was simply mother earth and where every interior wall was running with dampness. One remote group of cottages, I recall, had a fenced-off ‘drinking water pond’ as its sole source of water. Things are, I have little doubt, very different now – but I can’t claim to have played any material part in effecting that improvement.

We were responsible for refuse collection, cesspool emptying and, since few properties in the district were on a sewer, for organising the odoriferous ‘nightsoil collection’. This noxious task was carried out during the hours of darkness so we didn’t see a great deal of the nightsoil collectors.

There was an arrangement with Ipswich Corporation that the tanker used for cesspool emptying and nightsoil collection could be emptied down a designated sewer inspection chamber, into Ipswich’s sewerage system. The designated chamber was well over the other side of town from the Gipping District. On one occasion, when running a little late, the driver of the vehicle decided to raise a sewer manhole cover and dispose of his load in Ipswich’s Henniker Road, near the Gipping boundary.

The vehicle was a tanker with an 18in. diameter quick release facility for rapid emptying. What happened when the full tank was suddenly discharged into an inspection chamber carrying a 9in diameter sewer can be better imagined than described! That was when the driver learned the hard way, that there was a reason for that distant specially designated disposal point.

I have never relished taking other people’s orders – or indeed, giving orders to other people. All my working life I have yearned for independence. When the post of Housing Manager of Gipping’s roughly a thousand council houses became vacant I applied for it and was successful. Nominally in the Engineer and Surveyor’s Department I reported directly to the Council’s Housing Committee on tenancy and rent arrears matters. I had just one subordinate, Les Mayhew, who looked after the office and priced the housing repairs jobs that were carried out by the maintenance staff – a job that I could never have managed! Les became a trusted friend. He married Thelma Overton, a member of the office staff, and Heather and I exchanged news and Christmas greetings with them for many years.

Gipping RDC at that time had an extraordinary method of allocating council house tenancies. When a house became vacant, or houses under construction were completed, posters advertising them for letting were displayed in the parish in which the vacancy or vacancies existed and on the Council notice board in Needham Market. Application forms had to be completed, and I visited and reported on the circumstances of each applicant to the Housing Committee.

Some people filled in many application forms for different houses before they were successful. It isn’t a system that would be likely to appeal to any local authority today but I can only say that it seemed to work reasonably fairly, and it did tend to preserve village communities.

If a rent collector were on holiday or off sick, I would occasionally go out on rent collection. Even in those days it astonished me to find that some tenants, having to go out on rent day, were trusting enough to leave their back door unlocked and the rent with the rent book on the kitchen table!

Rents were low; phenomenally low by today’s standards. I can remember some of our council house rents going up to £1 a week (inclusive of rates). ‘Yew’ll never get folk round here to pay that sort of rent’, insisted one local ‘expert’. ‘They’re used t’ paying tew or three bob a week’.

The working atmosphere in the public services generally (at least in rural Suffolk) in the early 1950s was infinitely more relaxed than it is today. In one very remote parish of the Gipping rural district, there were just two council houses. Their address, somewhat unimaginatively, was 1 and 2 Council Houses, The Street.

They were in need of external painting. We invited tenders and accepted the lowest tender. From time to time on my rounds I would drive out to this particular parish and was quite surprised to see no evidence of work being done there. I phoned the builder who assured me that he had finished the job the previous week. ‘It certainly needed doing and I made a good job of it’, he insisted. ‘You’ll be getting the bill next week’.

I drove out there forthwith. It transpired that as well as there being two council houses in the Street, there were, two or three hundred yards away, two semi-detached Police houses. He had painted them – ‘and they certainly needed painting more than your council houses do’, he insisted. I phoned the Police Authority, told them what had happened and assured them that, by making that mistake, the builder had probably saved them hundreds of pounds. ‘Goodness knows what it might have cost you in repair bills if they had been neglected for another year’, I told them.

The Police Authority (probably guiltily aware that the maintenance of those out-of-the-way houses had been neglected) paid the builder! I just can’t imagine even a remote possibility of that happening today – or indeed at the time of my retirement from the local government service in 1980.

Things have changed – and things have changed throughout Gipping too. I went back there on a sunny Saturday a few years ago. Gipping Rural District has, of course, been absorbed into the new Mid-Suffolk District Council. Hurstlea looked much the same from the front – from Needham Market High Street – as it had before. At the rear though, the lush lawn on which we used to play a leisurely lunch-hour game of bowls, had disappeared. In its place were new office buildings looking like a set for a new Sci-fi soap opera set in a humanoid colony

I parked my car in the car park of ‘The Chequers’, Great Blakenham and walked over the Gipping and across the Broom to The Crescent. The Broom, as I knew it, had disappeared. There was now, presumably on the site of a worked-out gravel pit, a large tree-lined lake with preserved fishing, which appeared to have been there for years. An official picnic site was nearby.

The old workhouse was no longer there and, most startling of all, the Crescent had been cut in two by the new dual-carriageway A45. This separated the old isolation hospital site from the bungalows nearer Norwich Road. The five bungalows were still there though. I gazed again at our very first home, ‘old Broomside’ and nearby, ‘new Broomside’ where our elder son had been born over half a century ago.
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Perhaps it was a mistake to go back. It might have been better to have continued to remember Needham Market the Crescent, Barham and the Broom, and indeed the old Gipping Rural District, as I once had known them.

Heather 1948 - 1955

I had lived and worked in the Gipping district for seven years, and they had been seven momentous years for me. Soon after we moved into the original ‘Broomside’ it became clear that Heather was far from well. She tired very quickly, was losing weight and sweated heavily at night. Her voice became hoarse and she developed a worrying ‘bronchitic’ cough. She had a nagging ache in the upper part of her back. I took her temperature. It was high every evening and subnormal every morning.

We visited our doctor. She produced sputum samples and had X-ray examinations. In the late summer she was diagnosed as suffering from pulmonary and laryngeal tuberculosis. She had to take to her bed and my mother moved in to help look after her while we waited for her to be offered a bed in a sanatorium.

In November she was removed by ambulance to what was then the British Legion Sanatorium (though taken over by the newly-created NHS) at Nayland, near Colchester, where she was destined to remain for the next two years. The first few months were desperately worrying ones. Her condition seemed to be deteriorating. She was given a course of streptomycin (she was one of the first patients to be given this powerful antibiotic) and, to rest her larynx and give it a chance to heal, she was forbidden to speak for three months.

Under this regime her larynx healed and the progress of the disease in her left lung was halted. Her right lung had, fortunately, never been affected. Her left lung was partially collapsed by crushing the phrenic nerve and pumping air into the space between her diaphragm and the left lung (a PP or Pneumo-Peritoneum). She was put on the list for radical surgical treatment. This was to be a thoracoplasty – a surgical procedure involving the removal of a number of ribs to collapse part of the lung permanently and give it a better chance to heal.

This was to be carried out at Papworth Hospital, now famous for heart surgery but then specialising in the treatment of tuberculosis. It was a very drastic procedure, carried out in three stages (two or three ribs at a time!) in which the patients invariably lost a stone in weight. Heather therefore had to put on a stone in weight before she could undergo it!

Heather was moved to Papworth in the summer of 1950 and spent six weeks there, returning to Nayland after having had three separate major operations and losing no less than eight of her ribs on the left side of her body. Inevitably, this was to affect her physically for the rest of her life.

It did ‘cure’ her TB though. Her condition improved rapidly after her return from Nayland and in the late autumn she was discharged home.

While she had been in Nayland and at Papworth I had visited her every week, sometimes twice a week, and had written every day. Once she was well enough to do so she wrote back to me equally regularly. Although it had been a terrible two years it was a time in which Heather made real and lasting friendships among the other young women patients at the sanatorium.. I remember particularly Lily ‘Chick’ Cottis, Pat Burrows and Pat Troy. Chick was an eighteen year old who had been diagnosed very shortly after enlisting in the Army. Pat Burrows was about Heather’s age and was married with one small son. We visited Pat Troy at her home in Woolwich after her discharge from Nayland. She and Heather corresponded regularly until her death, a few years before Heather’s. All three were ex-service. ‘Chick’ and Pat Burrows corresponded with Heather until her death in 2006. I still communicate regularly with Pat Burrows, now a widow and living in Australia.

Throughout her time away and during subsequent periods of ill-health, Heather was always patient, cheerful and concerned only about the inconvenience that she might be causing others. When seriously ill and asked by a doctor how she felt, her most typical response was, ‘I’m fine thank you doctor – and how are you?’

We stayed with my mother in Ipswich for a short while after Heather’s discharge from the Sanatorium but we were both eager to get back into our own home in Broomside. When the other, smaller bungalow in the Crescent became vacant we moved in – naming it New Broomside. We had both wanted to have a family and on 17th July 1953, less than a year after the doctor had pronounced Heather strong enough to become a mother, it was at home, in New Broomside that our first son, Peter was

It was at our home in Barham that Pete was weaned, took his first faltering steps, and learned to talk. He came to love our kitten José (given to us by the local vicar), the hens that we kept for eggs at that time, and playing in the sand pit that I made him in our large back garden, where Heather could keep an eye on him from the kitchen window.

And a bit more about myself

As well as becoming a father while we lived in Barham, I realized my own interest in housing administration, I, also studied for and passed my qualifying examination as an Inspector of Meat and Other Food, passed the driving test (at my fourth attempt!) became a competent amateur photographer and took my first faltering step towards satisfying my school-days’ yearning to become ‘a writer’. Heather and I also became Quakers (see ‘To Church on Sunday’ in this ‘My Life’ series).

I enjoyed being Housing Manager in a way that I had never enjoyed being a Sanitary Inspector. It is true that I returned to my former employment in 1955 but this was solely because it offered a higher salary now that I had acquired the Meat Inspector’s Certificate and I felt that I owed that to my growing family.

Many years later the opportunity arose to return to housing management and I seized it with both hands. I was very pleased indeed that at that time both my sons realized how fulfilling I found the job, and became trainee housing managers themselves in the London area. I hope that it wasn’t because, ‘Anything the old man can do must be dead easy!’

Having a baby inspired both Heather and myself to become amateur photographers. I bought (and I think it cost £12 – a considerable sum in those days!) a Paxina 2.25in x 2.25in camera with a 3.5f lens and variable shutter speeds. It was really very basic but was a great advance on the cheap box cameras to which we had both been accustomed. It produced publishable pictures and we spent more money on an enlarger and dark room equipment. Both Heather and I became capable amateur photographers and, to our great satisfaction, managed to sell a few pictures to the press.

It was while Heather was in the Sanatorium that I decided to try my hand at freelance writing but it was not until after her discharge (in 1953 in fact, the year that Peter was born) that I had any success. I sold ‘The Sanitary Man’, a light-hearted article of a thousand words about my former job, to ‘Men Only’ for the princely sum of five guineas (£5.25 but with the purchasing power then of over £100 today). I hasten to add that the ‘Men Only’ of 1953 was very different from the publication into which it has evolved and which may, I think, still be seen on the top shelves of newsagents’ displays!

With Heather’s support and encouragement – it was she who first realized how our photographic skills could be combined with my writing to make articles more saleable - I persevered with my spare-time writing, increasing my output and my income every year. An article of mine published in ‘Municipal Engineering earned me a regular feature on establishment matters in that popular local government publication. Another article on ‘How your hot water system works’ was accepted by ‘Practical Householder’ and led to a regular plumbing or drainage feature in ‘Do-it-yourself’ magazine and to my replying to readers’ queries on those subjects. Ultimately it led to my having published seven or eight commercially successful books on domestic hot and cold water supply and drainage, including two hard-backs and two that ran to two editions.

Our time in Barham saw the beginning of a profitable hobby that, when I took early retirement from the local government service in 1980, became a second career. Even today, as I approach my nineties, I have not entirely abandoned it!

The years between Heather’s discharge from Nayland Sanatorium and our leaving Barham for north-east Essex, were happy ones for both of us. Like so many good things though, I don’t think that we realized quite how happy they had been until they were past.
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