Lowestoft Almshouses

The first almshouses in Lowestoft were provided by John Manyngham, the parish vicar from 1457-78. The exact year of institution is not known, but they were located on the north side of Fair Lane (now Dove Street) near its junction with West Lane (now Jubilee Way). And they seem to have remained in operation, in some form – undoubtedly with alterations made – into the final quarter of the 19th century, when White’s Directory of Suffolk (1874), p. 450, makes reference to thirteen charitable dwellings located in Fair Lane, with a further eight units in Bell Lane (now Crown Street West) and four in the High Street. All of these houses were under the jurisdiction of the Churchwardens, giving free accommodation to the occupants and with necessary repairs paid for by the town’s General Charity Fund – the income for this being the rents cumulatively deriving from various bequests of land and houses over the years, made for the relief of poverty.

There is a reference to the 15th century almshouses in a manorial rental of June 1545 (Suffolk Archives, Ipswich - 194/A10/71), in which they are described as “the allmes howssis late master manyngom”. They also feature in a leet court minute of February 1585, when the parish churchwardens were fined 3d for not sufficiently maintaining the road surface outside the buildings – this being required of property owners in the town under the manor’s rules of conduct. A surviving Manor Roll of 1618 (Suffolk Archives, Ipswich - 194/A10/73), p. 27, records them as “various houses called the Almshouses”and gives no further information, but the building had three units within it, each consisting of a downstairs room, with chamber above. During the early years of the 18th century, the property was amalgamated with the one immediately to the west to provide four dwellings, and the town’s residential  capacity for the elderly infirm and needy was further increased in 1715 by the purchase of the house which stood next on the west to this consolidated property.

The money to acquire  the premises and convert it into a further block of four one-up/one -down units came from the will of James Hocker (al. Hawker), an unmarried labourer who had died of smallpox in December 1710 (during the town’s first recorded epidemic of this particular disease) and who – having no near living relatives – had left the whole of his earthly estate, worth £120, for the relief of poverty in the town. He had further directed that the sum of £80 was to be used for the creation of almshouses and the implementation of this should have resulted in a total of eight small charitable units being present on the north side of Fair Lane. However, two of the first set of four had been destroyed in a fire of 1707 and were not rebuilt until twenty or so years later – at which time, the block in which they were situated had ceased to function as almshouses and served the parish as a small in-town workhouse until the Mutford & Lothingland Union building opened in 1765. The stock of material supplied to create employment was most likely locally grown hemp fibre, which would have been spun into twine to make drift-nets for catching herring and mackerel. Higher quality material for producing rope(s) was imported from the Baltic. At least part of this whole charitable complex stood above ground, until demolished during the 1960s.

In addition to the properties in Fair Lane, there was another almshouse unit situated on the freehold land west of the High Street at its southern end, occupying the site of what are now Nos. 113 & 115. The 1545 Rental describes them as the “allmes howssis sumtym [some time] John Reynolds”, which is presumably a reference to the founder. But no date can be attached to their creation – and no one of that name is to be found in the Lowestoft 1524-5 Lay Subsidy list. In fact, the sole example of this particular name in both the Lothingland and Mutford half-hundreds is to be found in Bradwell, at the other (northern) end of theformer jurisdiction. The available information relating to the number of units which comprised this particular charitable facility is unclear. The Lowestoft Town Book (Norfolk Record Office, Norwich - PD 589/112) – a compendium of information collected and written down during the 18th century – refers to “a freehold tenement at the south end of the town and consisting of two lower rooms and two chambers”. While the Manor Roll of 1618, p. 78, refers to “the Town of Lowestoft” (i.e. the civic body responsible for relief of poverty under terms of the Poor Law Act of 1601) as holding “one house with adjoining garden”, in exactly the same part of town. It is possible that this description did not take account of the building’s dual nature, of course– but, no more than that can be said.

The surname Reynolds itself is certainly to be found in earlier phases of Lowestoft’s history, since a man called William Reynald is seen to be the leading tenant of the manor in the Lothingland Hundred Roll of 1274, holding twenty-four acres of villein land (two separate areas of twelve acres each) and three acres of the lord’s demesne. Fifty or more years further on, the Lay Subsidy of 1327 has a Reginald Reynald (likely, son of William) paying 2s in tax – the largest amount of the twenty-nine people contributing. He is also found named in the Calendar of Patent Rolls, Edward III, vol. 2, p. 501, as the Lowestoft constable (26 August 1333) – while a relative, Richard (brother or son, perhaps) features in vol 5, p. 220, in connection with retrieving items of wreck along the shoreline (13 June 1341). Finally, the surname is still found in use during the early 1800s (along with a number of others dating from the 1274 Hundred Roll) to identify the manorial chieves, as they were known [chief tenements] – thirty-five small areas of land dispersed around the parish, whose holders were responsible (on a rotational basis) for collection of the annual lord’s rent imposed on each and every one. Both of the Reynolds chieves (survivors of the holdings of 1274)were located along the north side of what is now Normanston Drive, about halfway along between the Fir Lane junction and the St. Peter’s Street-Rotterdam Road traffic roundabout.

Which brings this article on to the third lot of Lowestoft almshouses, which (like those resulting from James Hocker’s bequest) are also to be found elsewhere in the article relating to bequests made for the relief of poverty in the town, 1560-1730, and which were almost certainly included in the eight dwellings mentioned in White’s Directory of Suffolk (1874), p. 450 – referred to in the opening paragraph. All of these particular charitable homes stood in Bell Lane and the ones to be discussed stood at the far end of the roadway where it abutted onto Goose Green – the southern sector of the smallest of Lowestoft’s seven areas of common, which bounded the town on its western extremity (the northern part being known as Fair Green). As things stand today, the location of these almshouses was the small open space on the southern side of Crown Street West at its junction with Thurston Road.

Turn the clock back three hundred years and a single building containing four one-up/one-down dwellings (with a yard to the rear) would have been seen occupying the plot. It was generally known as St. Martin’s Hospital. The building was erected in 1716 and the name derived from that of Martin Brown, merchant of Rotterdam, who provided the money for its construction and charged his relative James Wilde (a merchant, also, of perhaps the town’s most notable family of the time) to supervise its construction for four, poor, elderly women (widows or spinsters) to reside there rent-free. When James Wilde died in December 1725, his will of November 1723 placed the continuing responsibility for the running of the premises upon the Lowestoft churchwardens.

Martin Brown himself was the second son of Edward Brown (tanner) and had been born in May 1646. Both his mother and father had died by the time he was three years old, leaving him and his older brother Edward (aged five) and a younger sibling Thomas (aged five months) in the care of their paternal grandfather (also named Edward and also a tanner). When Edward Snr. died in October 1652, the youngest child had also been dead for nearly seven months, and the two surviving children were committed to the care of their mother’s brother, Martin Folkes (gentleman) of Rushbrooke, near Bury St. Edmunds. Both boys were well endowed with money and property from their mother’s and their grandfather’s wills, and at some point Martin was apprenticed to a merchant in Rotterdam. He became a notable trader there himself, a process assisted by marrying his employer’s widow, and he lived in the city for the rest of his life. However, he obviously retained an interest in the place of his birth and it is likely that he visited it from time to time during the course of business conducted and to maintain family contact with relatives. He was the largest contributor to the fund raised for the rebuilding of the Town Chamber and Town Chapel in 1698 (making a gift of £50) and, when he died in 1715, he left money for the building of almshouses – which were duly erected on the site of a cottage which had been purchased and cleared away to make room for them.

The fourth set of charitable homes in Lowestoft was built more than a hundred years after St. Martin’s Hospital, being constructed in 1838 and consisting of a block of six units situated on the east side of Whapload Road to the south of Rant Score East. This was known as The Fishermen’s Hospital – the last word being in common use at one time to describe charitable dwellings provided for the elderly and infirm members of society in towns and villages up and down the length of the land. White’s Suffolk Directory (1874), p. 450, had this following description of them: “Six neat almshouses, called the Fishermen’s Hospital and each having three rooms, were built by subscription in 1838, upon the beach, for the residence of six of the oldest and poorest master fishermen of Lowestoft. They have no endowment, but the inmates participate in the charities for the relief of poor parishioners.” In having three rooms each, one-up/two down, the facility offered far better accommodation than its earlier counterparts in being able to provide one downstairs space for cooking and eating and another for more leisurely use. 

The overall building had each of the three two-storey units backing onto each other on a north-south alignment, meaning that three of them looked out onto Whapload Road with three to the rear facing Anguish Street. In 1907, the capacity was increased to eight dwellings, with the addition of a single one-storey extension at either end – both of which faced out onto Whapload Road. Although not having the same degree of historical and architectural interest as Great Yarmouth’s equivalent facility of twenty original single-storey units with dormer attic-rooms, arranged on all four sides of a courtyard (situated on Church Plain and built in 1702), the Lowestoft complex was not without merit. It was demolished in February 1968, during the final phase of the Beach Village post-World War 2 clearance, but Hugh Lees (a well-known local historian of the time) recorded that “several stone plaques which used to be seen on these buildings were removed in 1964 and have been placed on the new Arm’s [sic] Houses erected near St. Margaret’s Church, which replace those on the ‘Beach’ pulled down February 14th 1968”. This statement is to be found in the Lowestoft Archaeological & Local History Society’s Annual Report, No. 2 (1967-68), p. 2, in an article written by Lees entitled The Town Under The Cliff.

Which brings this article very appropriately to Lowestoft’s final charitable provision of housing for those in need of such accommodation: the complex off St. Margaret’s Road, known as Church Green – this particular name relating to that of one the parish’s seven areas of common land, which once occupied much of the space between Boston Road and Rotterdam Road (to the east and west) and St. Margaret’s Road and Beccles Road (to the north and south). It is found referred to, during the 18th century, as “the common cow pasture of Lowestoft”, showing that it provided grazing for the town’s cattle – being close to the built-up area and giving ease of management of livestock. Up until the enclosure acts of the late 18th and early 19th century radically changed the rural landscape in parishes throughout much of lowland England especially, Lowestoft (along with many other communities) did not have the pattern of farmsteads dispersed in different outlying areas from the main centre of population. Both agriculture and animal husbandry were conducted from out of town on a daily basis, with both equipment and storage buildings mainly located there.

The Church Green almshouse facility began construction in 1964, to a design created by award-winning local architects Tayler & Green, who had established a reputation for imaginative Local Authority housing in the terraces produced for Loddon Rural District Council during the late 1940s and 1950s in the villages of Aldeby, Brooke, Broome, Chedgrave, Ditchingham, Geldeston, Gillingham, Haddiscoe, Hales, Hedenham, Kirby Cane, Langley, Seething, Stockton, Thurlton, Thurton and Wheatacre. The construction of the Church Green development was also of a high standard in both layout and use of materials and remains an important source of sheltered, rented accommodation today for people over the age of sixty who have lived in the old Borough of Lowestoft (established in August 1885) for at least three years. The wardened facility is a registered charitable trust and has a panel of twelve trustees responsible for the overall management of the sixty-seven domestic units available.

As a final addition to this article (by way of postscript, almost) it may be of reader-interest to return to the origins of charitable housing in Lowestoft for those in need and say something of John Manyngham, priest, who seems to have begun the process. He held the degree of MA (from either Oxford or Cambridge) and was the younger brother of a Buckinghamshire knight called Sir Oliver Manyngham (al. Manningham), who married into the influential Moleyns family of Hungerford and who died in 1499. As a younger son/brother of the time, John Manyngham would not have inherited the family estate and chose the Church as a means of making his way in life – a decision which would seem to have had Christian conviction behind it in the way that he served the parish of Lowestoft for more than twenty years (presumably, ending with his death in 1478) and began the process of providing charitable housing for those in need.

References to him are to be found in J.A. Twemlow (ed.), Calendar of Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland (1955), vol. 13, p. 20, when he expressed concern (during August 1472) at a disability he had been born with and which may well have been another factor in his choosing to become a priest. He was concerned about a deformed left shoulder, arm and hand affecting his ability to perform his clerical duties, and it was obviously something which worried him as he grew older. Having presumably raised this matter at diocesan level (with the Norwich archdeacon and bishop), it eventually found its way to Rome. And it was from Pope Pius II himself that a dispensation was granted for him to continue his ministry in spite of his physical handicap. In the year 1478, he was succeeded as the Lowestoft incumbent (presumably having died in post) by a retired Bishop of Dromore, in the northern part of Ireland, named Thomas Scroop(e), who served the parish until 1490 and whose large and impressive grave-slab (minus its brass) is located in the floor of the War Memorial Chapel of St. Margaret’s Church – having been removed at some stage from the middle of the Chancel.

Picture info. Courtesy of the Jack Rose Collection. These cottages in Dove Street were demolished during the 1960s and are featured on p. 16 of Jack Rose’s Lowestoft (1981) – first in the author’s notable series of four photographic histories of the town. They may possibly have been the almshouse provision deriving from the will of James Hocker (1710) and would appear to be of late 17th-early 18th century build, with the local brick-and-flint bond clearly in evidence in the masonry.

CREDIT: David Butcher