Lowestoft Timeline - 1535 to 1974

May 1535 - Muster Roll of Lothingland Half-hundred, dated 23rd of the month, listed and named 292 able-bodied men for its defence. Lowestoft provided 130 of these (46%), with three widows included for their late husbands’ weapons. Armaments consisted mainly of bills (a hatchet-like metal attachment on the end of a pole) and bows and arrows, with a minority of the men also possessing helmets and body armour. No firearms are recorded. 

1540-1 - Order given for for Lowestoft to be fortified with artillery. Three batteries, consisting of timber-reinforced bulwarks (each with three guns), were set up on the shoreline. The ordnance was made in the royal armoury at the Tower of London and gunners from there (Nicholas Sendall, James Hayms and Simon Legge) were appointed to take charge at a wage of 6d per day. 

May 1545 - Military survey of East Coast defences, carried out by Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, gave the width of Lowestoft Denes, from Whapload Road to the shoreline, as 960 yards. Today, they’re about 200 yards wide. The flint base of one of the two warning-beacons set up, seven years after this survey, can still be seen just inside the entrance to Belle Vue Park. It has long been known as the Witches’ Stones.

AD 200-1499 | 1500 | 1600 | 1700 | 1800 | 1900 

June 1545 - Manorial rental list gives details of the property-holders in town and of the annual rents they paid to the lord of the manor. The presence of fish-houses for curing red herrings is a notable feature.

1547 - Accession of Edward VI. 

1552 - Two beacons were set up, on the orders of the Marquis of Northampton, as a warning against an attack from the sea. One was on the North Common (the flint base of  which is still to be seen, as referred to in No. 32), the other further to the north near the junction of Corton Road, Gunton Drive and Links Road. The idea was to light one of the beacons if a large fleet of ships was detected at sea and to fire them both if any landing was attempted. By 1584, the latter of these had rotted and been pulled down, with a windmill built on its site. This structure is to be seen on a map of the local coastline from Pakefield to Gorleston, dating from the 1580s, and also on a fine Lowestoft Porcelain polychrome jug in the Castle Museum collection, Norwich.

1553 - Accession of Lady Jane Grey – eleven-day reign.

1553 - Accession of Mary I.

1554 - Accession of Mary I & Philip of Spain (following their marriage).

1558 - Accession of Elizabeth I. 

November 1567 - Thomas Nashe, the famous Elizabethan satirist and writer, was baptised in St. Margaret’s Church during this month (date not given). His father, William, was Vicar of the parish (1561-73) and had married into the Witchingham family in April 1562 (mariners and blacksmiths) – eventually moving on to West Harling in Norfolk.

June 1570 - On the 10th of the month, Thomas Annot (merchant) founded a free grammar school for forty local boys to be taught “the Rules and Principles of Grammar and the Latin Tongue and other things incident and necessary to the said Art”. A building on the eastern edge of St. Margaret’s Churchyard functioned as the Schoolhouse. In the very same year, the medieval Town Chapel was relicensed for worship by the Bishop of Norwich, having been out of use during the upheavals of the English Reformation.

1571-4 - During these three years, a total of forty-three Dutch adults (twenty-six men and seventeen women) came into Lowestoft from across the North Sea to escape the persecution of Protestant people in the Netherlands by occupying Spanish forces. They included nine married couples, most of whom had children – some of whose baptisms and burials are recorded in the parish registers. After a relatively short stay in the town, they moved on – many of them probably finishing up in Norwich, which had a large Dutch/Flemish element in its population, whose names were recorded in the famous so-called Strangers Book. Another possible place of settlement was Great Yarmouth, which had a Dutch element resident among its population because of the North Sea herring fishery and a long-established trading relationship based on it.

March 1582 - At the annual manorial leet court, held on the first Saturday in Lent (3rd of the month, in this case), two notable orders were made. The first concerned the influx of poor families from other communities coming into Lowestoft and placing a burden on the town’s capacity to cope with them. Any person found renting accommodation to such people, without the permission of the parish Churchwardens, would be fined the sum of 39s 11d (just short of £2.00). The second was that, by 24 June, the town authorities (the Churchwardens again, most likely) were to provide a ducking-stool “in a place convenient”, with a fine of 40s (£2.00) to be imposed if not done. This means of punishment for social disorder (such as verbal abuse, slander, physical violence etc.) was most likely set up at the common watering-place – a pond for livestock, on the western edge of town, which once stood near the bottom of what is now Thurston Road.

January 1584 - Lothingland Muster Roll of 16th of the month (recorded as 1583, by   use of the old, Julian calendar) listed and named a total of 473 able-bodied men (between the ages of sixteen and sixty) for defence of the Half-hundred. Lowestoft and Gunton were done separately at some point after 25 March (the Julian date of the New Year), with 243 named for the former and 10 for the latter. Therefore, a total of 726 in all, with Lowestoft contributing 33% of the whole. The Lowestoft figure included four widows, seven men described as senex (Latin for “old” or “aged”), one as blind, two as sick and three as absent. The overall weaponry was still mainly the same as in 1535, but with a number of firearms (calivers) also in evidence. Of the forty-three pieces recorded, twelve were to be found in Gorleston and nineteen in Lowestoft – probably, mainly for protective use among the maritime community while at sea. The remainder, in other communities, were largely owned by members of the gentry.

June 1584 - There was serious concern at this time that an invasion by a Spanish army, under the command of the Duke of Parma, would be launched from the occupied Netherlands and make its landfall on the Island of Lothingland. A contingency map of the area was hurriedly drawn, naming known (and surreptitiously practising) Roman Catholics – whom it was assumed might be expected to assist an invading force in restoring England to the “true Faith” – and placing them in the parishes where they lived. The Muster Roll immediately above was referred to, as well as the fragile state of the locality’s defences - including the disappearance of a warning beacon (the one referred to in the 1552 entry) - and the four Suffolk commissioners charged with making a report of Lothingland’s readiness to withstand attack were not optimistic in their assessment. They concluded that, if an enemy got a foothold in the Island, then Great Yarmouth (a major East Coast port) would not be able to hold out for even a single day! In the event, the Spanish invasion of England came four years later, when the Armada set sail.

December 1584 - Reference made in a property transaction, in the manorial records, to the exportation of red herrings to the Italian port of Leghorn [Livorno] – a major point of reception in the Mediterranean for such merchandise from Lowestoft.

1597 - After two centuries of “rumbling on”, the Yarmouth-Lowestoft trade disputes came to the fore again. An Act of Parliament was passed (at some time, after 29 April) requiring that the seven-league distance (at one mile only to the league) be measured from the Crane Key [sic] in Yarmouth and a marker-post placed on the shoreline at its termination before 24 August. Yarmouth petitioned against this, as it did not place Lowestoft within its area of jurisdiction.

1597 - Visitation of the parish by William Redman, Bishop of Norwich, noted the excommunication of local woman, Joan Rivett, for refusing to attend Church and for being a member of “The Brownists” (followers of Puritan preacher, Robert Browne of Norwich). This suggests the presence of an early Nonconformist group of Christians in the town.

First half of the 17th century - Period of economic and demographic decline because of a temporary collapse of the herring fishery (caused by Dutch dominance) and two serious plague epidemics (1603 & 1635). The parish registers show the community “falling back” on the land to sustain itself, with comparatively few references to mariners and fishermen, but a substantial number to husbandmen.

1603 - Accession of James I.

Spring-Summer 1603 - Lowestoft’s worst epidemic during the Early Modern period recorded. Bubonic plague killed 280 people between May and September, which was 19% of the population (1,500 in number). Among the many victims was William Bentley, the parish Vicar.

1609 - Lowestoft authorised by Trinity House to place two “leading lights” on the beach, which (when aligned by vessels out at sea) would lead to safe passage through the Stanford Channel into inshore anchorage. The Stanford separated the Holm Sand (to the north) from the Newcome Sand (to the south).

February-June 1610 - Continuing aggravation with Great Yarmouth, with Lowestoft failing to get the seven-mile limit of its rival’s influence approved by Parliament. In one of his representations to the House of Commons, Thomas Damet (Yarmouth MP and port bailiff) described Lowestoft as “a town of small importance” whose people were poor “by their idleness”.

December 1618 - Very detailed and beautifully handwritten Manor Roll of the 22nd of the month recording all property-holders and properties in the parish, giving descriptions and locations of the latter as well as their rental values. It was possibly drawn up with a view to sale of the manor by its lord, Sir John Heveningham.

1625 - Accession of Charles I. 

1628 - John Wilde (merchant) charged by Trinity House with supervising the construction of a “high lighthouse” on the cliff at Lowestoft, to replace one of the leading lights down on the beach and give better alignment to vessels using the Stanford Channel. The spot chosen was towards the top of Swan Score(Mariner’s Score), on the north side, and the light continued in use for forty-five years or more.

1633 - William Wilde, son of the man above, was captured by Islamic pirates in the Mediterranean (perhaps while on a trading voyage of some kind, carrying red herrings) and wrote a letter to his father from a gaol in Constantinople, dated 22nd November and describing what had happened. This is quoted in full on p. 382 of Edmund Gillingwater’s An Historic Account of the Ancient Town of Lowestoft (1790). Wilde was forty years old, at the time, and never returned home. A surviving son, also named William, was left the sum of £100 in his grandfather’s will of 4 April 1641 – to be invested for him until he reached the age of twenty-one.

Spring-Autumn 1635 - Another bad year of plague epidemic, when 148 people died between May and October. The population at this time was probably round about 1,200 as a result of the 1603 epidemic and having not recovered from it - which means that a further loss of 12% was sustained. 

April 1641 - John Wilde’s will (among its many monetary bequests) reveals the sum of £100 left to his daughter, Mary Andrewes, with further sums of £20 to each of her three children, John, Deborah and a third, unnamed one born in Barbados. Her husband, Samuel Andrewes, appears in a 1638 list of the inhabitants of Barbados holding more than ten acres of land. English colonisation of the island had begun in earnest in 1627, with tobacco as the first main crop and with sugar accompanying it from 1640 onwards. It looks, therefore, as if this family were among the early plantation owners, using black slave labour from the West African coastal area to work the land. 

14 March 1644 - Oliver Cromwell visited the town with a force of cavalry and placed the town under an 8 p.m. curfew. He came to intercept a Royalist arms shipment (either incoming or outgoing) and stayed overnight at the Swan Inn (site of Nos. 41-42 High Street), before returning to Cambridge. He took a number of suspected Royalist sympathisers away with him (including James Rous, Lowestoft’s vicar) and later released them, after a period of house-arrest. The year 1643 is the one usually given, but that was by use of the old Julian calendar, when the new year began on 25 March. Adoption of the Gregorian calendar in Great Britain occurred on 2 September 1752. 

12 June 1644 - Francis Jessop of Beccles, visited St. Margaret’s Church (with assistants), having a commission from the Puritan Earl of Manchester to remove all “superstitious images” having orate pro anima written or carved on them (“pray for the soul of”). He ripped out all the funeral brasses (except two) from the floor of the church and sold the metal to Josiah Wilde (a local merchant) for the sum of 5s. It was later melted down and cast into a bell by John Brend, of Norwich, and hung in the Town Chamber to sound the curfew.

10 March 1645 - a serious and destructive fire occurred. It destroyed all fish-houses along Whapload Road between what are now Nos. 2 and 59-60 High Street, as well as all dwellings from Nos. 47-48 to 63 High Street (east side) and Nos. 143 to 145-6 (west side). It started in a fish-house below what used to be No. 1 High Street and spread from there. The cost of the damage done amounted to £10,297 2s 4d [£10,297.12].

1649-1660 - The Commonwealth.

February 1653 - Commission of Sewers (an investigatory body for monitoring local flooding and drainage capacity) found that the Waveney marshes could flood as far up as Earsham, when tidal surges destroyed the shingle bank separating Lake Lothing from the sea.

January-March 1654 - During the time of Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate, the town’s  Presbyterian Dissenters felt bold enough to take over the Town Chapel for their own type of worship. On 22 January, the parish constable, Thomas Brethett (a shoemaker), disrupted their observances and was reported to the Council of State. His “misdemeanours” were considered on 2 February and a month later, on 2 March, an order was given that Mr. Albery (the minister) and his congregation be allowed to use the Chapel.

1660 - Accession of Charles II.

21 February 1661 - Commission of Sewers met at the Swan Inn (now the site of 41-42 High Street) to determine whether a barrier against the sea’s tidal action should be constructed where the coastal shingle bank stood or at Mutford Bridge – this, following a recent tidal surge. The former location was chosen and it was agreed to raise the sum of £600 to pay for the work. Thirty-seven local communities, in both Norfolk and Suffolk, were charged varying sums of money, commensurate with the area of land flooded. 

May-June 1662 - Seven-mile distance from Crane Quay, Yarmouth, marking that town’s limit of maritime control and running southwards, was finally measured out on Tuesday 27 May. The end-point of its sphere of maritime control was somewhere to the north of Lopham Score (Tramp’s Alley). On Friday 20 June, an oak post was set up on the beach at this point to show where Yarmouth’s authority ended. The matter reached its conclusion a year later, on 10 June 1663, with the House of Lords confirming Lowestoft’s freedom from Yarmouth’s attempted control.

March 1663 (1662, by old-style Julian calendar) - Rose Cullender and Amy Denny were tried and executed for witchcraft at Bury St. Edmunds Assizes. Their trial (10-13 March) has the dubious distinction of being the only English one of its kind to have a surviving transcription of proceedings. They were hanged on the Thingoe Hill gallows on 17 March. Gilbert Geis and Ivan Bunn covered the whole episode, in thought-provoking detail, in their book A Trial of Witches (1997).

3 June 1665 - Battle of Lowestoft. A naval battle of the Second Dutch War and a major victory for the English fleet. Two leading Lowestoft mariners were involved - the brothers-in-law, Thomas Allin and Richard Utber, both high-ranking officers in the Royal Navy.

7 February 1666 - Lowestoft parish registers have this burial entry (though placed in the entries for 1665, under use of the old Julian calendar): “Maijer Tho: Willd of Yarmouth was killd at Corton by a musket shot that went into wessen” – the last word being a variant of weasand, an old English term for the windpipe or trachea. A Dutch privateer had come close inshore and Wild (sixth son of John Wild, but an Army officer who lived in Yarmouth) was one of an onshore party monitoring its movements. The fatal shot might well have been delivered by a musket, but might also have come from a small culverin mounted on the vessel’s gunwale and loaded with multiple shot. Thomas Wild lies buried in the central aisle of St. Margaret’s Church, next to his parents, not far from the Chancel steps.

25-26 July 1666 - St. James’s Day Battle, off the North Foreland (Kent coast). Brothers-in-law Thomas Allin and Richard Utber again involved in leading roles in a crushing defeat of the Dutch fleet. Both men were knighted for their Naval services during the Second Dutch War and also had their names perpetuated in the second verse of a song of the time, entitled A New Ballad, which celebrated the St. James’s Day action: “Twas brave Tom Allen [sic] led the van, Stout Utber and bold Tiddiman [Sir Thomas Teddeman]. 

1670 - Petition to Parliament was submitted by local merchants, requesting that any vessels fishing for herrings be granted exemption from paying the duty on beer consumed aboard (2s 6d per barrel), in order to help alleviate current economic difficulties. Twenty-five craft cited as being engaged in the activity.

1672 - House of William Rising (merchant) was licensed for legal Nonconformist worship. It stood on the site of what is now No. 67 High Street. 

This was also the year in which Sir Thomas Allin (as he had become) acquired the manorial titles of both Lowestoft and Somerleyton, ahead of retiring from service in the Royal Navy in 1678. While living out of town in Somerleyton Hall, he attempted to move Annot’s Free Grammar School from its decaying premises on the eastern boundary of St. Margaret’s Churchyard into a large house he owned at the end of Swan Lane(Mariners Street). The schoolmaster, Henry Britten, and the townspeople resisted this interference – the latter possibly resenting the way Allin had grandified himself and then tried to lord it over the place of his birth.

1674 - Upper room of the Town Chamber was used to accommodate Annot’s Free Grammar School, as the Schoolhouse abutting onto St. Margaret’s Churchyard had become too dilapidated to continue in use. The ground-floor part of the Chamber continued to function as a corn-trading area. 

The Hearth Tax return of this year, with its high number of exemptions from payment, shows that the town was going through a period of economic difficulty.

1676 - Samuel Pepys (as Master of Trinity House) authorised the building of a new “High Lighthouse” on land to the north of the town – a site which is still in use today, with a building constructed in 1873. The reason for moving the light from the top of Swan Score was the fire-risk caused to nearby houses by the sparks emanating from its wood- and coal-burning brazier.

31 January 1679 - Lowestoft was granted port status in its own right –  but as a subsidiary to Great Yarmouth, which was the head-port for a large sector of the East Anglian coast. The appointment of duly qualified customs officers based in the town wasn’t long in following.

August 1682 - The probate inventory of Elizabeth Pacy (merchant’s widow) lists among her many possessions and assets a vessel called the Riga. This demonstrates the long-established trade between Lowestoft and the far end of the Baltic Sea, with grain, malt and cured fish being exported and hemp, cordage, pitch, deal planks and pig iron being imported. Samuel Pacy, her husband – the richest merchant in Lowestoft during the second half of the 17th century – had died in September 1680 and his own inventory (which hasn’t survived) would have been almost identical.

1685 - Accession of James II.

1690 - Accession of William III and Mary II.

1695 - Accession of William III – following the death of his wife.

1695 - First Nonconformist (Presbyterian) Chapel was built in the town, on land formerly occupied by the Triangle Market area’s canopies. It housed a denomination whose adherents, at the time, were known as Independents and who would later be called Congregationalists.

1698 - Town Chamber and Town Chapel (the latter standing to the rear of the former) were completely rebuilt, using money raised by public subscription: £347 13s 7d in all (£347.68). The Chamber, fronting the High Street, had an arcaded corn-trading area on the ground-floor (with folding wooden doors to render it secure when not in use) and a public meeting-room above. Use of the latter by Annot’s Free Grammar School continued.

1702 - Accession of Anne.

1703 - Building encroachment onto the town’s main market area, to the south of Blue Anchor Lane (Duke’s Head Street), necessitated the creation of new trading space. A site was chosen near to the Corn Cross, on the southern corner of Tyler’s Lane (Compass Street) next to the High Street, and an inn called the New White Horse was demolished to make way for it. This area was used for many years as a car-park for Town Hall staff and part of it remains today as public open space.

1707 - Two of the four parish almshouses in Fair Lane (known, alternatively, as Almshouse Lane - and now Dove Street) were destroyed by fire. Though comparatively small in scale compared with the “Great Fire” of March 1645, this particular blaze serves to demonstrate the problem of even minor ones in pre-industrial communities.

1708 - Revd. John Tanner (1684-1759) was appointed Vicar of Lowestoft, a position he held and served with distinction until his death in December 1759. Not only did he care for the townspeople and minister to them in an exemplary way, he also enjoyed a good relationship with the town’s Nonconformists – something not at all typical in England at that time. He became deeply interested in the history of the town (probably by marrying into a branch of the long-established Mighells family in January 1712) and performed valuable work in transcribing details of the transfer of real estate in the town between c. 1600 and 1720 – the latter year being one in which he also compiled a list of property-holders and their messuages.

1710 - Four more “one-up one-down” units were added to the Fair/Almshouse Lane charitable cottages, using money left in the will of James Hocker (labourer), who died without close family and left his estate for charitable uses in the town.

1710 - First cases of smallpox to be recorded in the town, with 35 deaths resulting. Other outbreaks followed: 1718 (14 deaths), 1719 (7 deaths), 1724 (19 deaths), 1738 (34 deaths), 1748 (48 deaths) and 1749 (34 deaths). The population at this time was about 1,800 or more in number.

1714 - Accession of George I. 

1716 - Terrace of four almshouse units for poor women were built at the end of Bell Lane (now Crown Street West), on the south side, with money left by Martin Brown of Rotterdam (merchant) – a native of Lowestoft who had made his fortune in the Dutch city. It became known locally as St. Martin’s Hospital – the word being commonly used to describe a place of charitable care as well as one providing medical attention. 

12 November 1717 - Much smaller fire than that of 1645 occurred and destroyed fish-houses below what are now Nos. 55, 56-7, 58 & 59-60 High Street. These buildings were always at a certain degree of risk of the smouldering fires at ground-level getting out of control and igniting the combustible accretion of fish-oil and soot which encrusted the interior walls of the building as well as the wooden frames on which the herrings were hung to cure.

14 December 1717 - Tidal surge occurred [Gillingwater, p. 32], which carried away the earth dam and causeway at Mutford Bridge, killing the fish in Lake Lothing and the broad at Oulton with saltwater intrusion. The term “bridge” derives from a medieval word of Germanic origins, bregge, and could refer to any means of carrying a roadway across water – not simply the type of structure which defines a bridge today. The date given by Gillingwater is almost certainly an error for the 24th, which (with the 25th) was one of the greatest recorded disasters along the North Sea coasts, with a reputed overall death toll of c. 11,000 people. Four unnamed men are referred to as being lost at sea in the parish register burial material, post-20 December – presumably in this very same storm event.

1719-20 - Revd. John Tanner purchased the parish great (or rectorial) tithes – the money raised as a 10% church tax, charged on the value of corn grown in a particular place – for the benefit of the Lowestoft minister. These had been in the control of St. Bartholomew’s Priory, Smithfield (which had appointed priests to St. Margaret’s Church since c. 1130), but fell into private hands following the Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536-40). Eventually, they finished up in the hands of the Church family of Pakefield – members of which were forced to sell them on the open market (because of financial difficulties) for the sum of £1,000, plus accompanying legal fees of £251 5s 1d [£251.25]. John Tanner raised £523 15s 6d [£523.78] from a local subscription list, was granted £200 from Queen Anne’s Bounty (a fund set up by the monarch to enrich poorer parishes), took out a £100 personal loan from a church member and mortgaged himself up to the hilt for the remaining £427 9s 7d [£427.48]. The interest on the loan and the mortgage had cost him £431 9s 6d [£431.48] by the time that the twenty-five year repayment period had run its course on 29 September 1745and it was another four years before the increased parish income kicked in. Clergy earnings rose from an average £39-£45 p.a. (levied on field crops other than corn and a small share of fishing profits) to £109-£115. He enjoyed the extra £70 for the last ten years of his incumbency – but, he hadn’t done what he did for his own benefit. It was much more for his successors and he was, in any case, a very philanthropic figure in the life of the town.                   

1727 - Accession of George II.

July 1735 - John Wilde (gentleman) left the whole of his estate for the founding of a free grammar school for forty local boys – to be implemented after the death of his sole beneficiary-for-life, Elizabeth Smithson. He lived in the long-established family home (now numbered as 80 High Street) and had never married. His title of “gentleman” derived from accrued family wealth creating the life-style, not from genuine gentry origins.   

1737 - King George II landed on the North Beach, having been forced ashore by a storm during a return journey from Hanover. He rested for two hours in the house of Mr. John Jex (now 45 High Street), before moving on to Harwich by road. His Majesty having relieved himself, while in Lowestoft, Mr. Jex kept a sample of the royal urine in a bottle as a souvenir for years afterwards!

1743 - Last vessel to go lining for cod, in Icelandic waters, recorded in the parish’s tithe accounts. It belonged to William Balls (merchant). Edmund Gillingwater in his published history of the town (1790), p. 109, makes reference to “an eminent merchant in the town” named Mr. Copping sending a vessel northwards in 1748 – but there is no record of this in the parish tithe material. 

1748 - Legal status granted to the town, in the form of the right to hold Quarter Sessions and Petty Sessions, with a lock-up constructed not far away on the eastern edge of Fair Green (what is now the St. Margaret’s Plain area). The so-called Shire House, at the end of Swan Lane (Mariners Street), was where these sessions were held. It was the same building as that once belonging to Sir Thomas Allin, referred to earlier in No. 65. The lock-up (for holding those on remand) was known as The Cage and led to Fair Green becoming known as Cage Green.

2 September 1752 - adoption of the Gregorian calendar, to replace its Julian predecessor. Because of an adjustment which had to be made in changing from one to the other, the day following the 2nd had to be the 14th - which led to many people believing that they had been robbed of eleven days of their lives!

1757- c. 1800 - Production of Lowestoft soft-paste porcelain at the Bell Lane (Crown Street West) factory. It stood where the one-storey office building of Crown Artist Brush Ltd. is now situated. Blue-and-white wares were the first to be produced, with polychrome pieces following later. The factory also had a London warehouse for sales in the capital and further afield. It was the third longest lived of such porcelain works after Worcester and Derby.

1760 - Accession of George III.

1760 - Tidal surge of this year (followed by others in 1772 and 1791) broke through te shingle bank separating Lake Lothing from the sea and carried the Mutford Bridge crossing away – causing extensive flooding. Information to be found in a pamphlet written and published by George Edwards, Superintendent Engineer of the Lowestoft Harbour Works, p. 19 (1879). Title of the work: The River Waveney: Did It Ever Reach The Sea via Lowestoft?

1760s - Lowestoft began to develop as a seaside resort. In c. 1760, an Assembly Room was built onto the Queen’s Head inn, on the south side of Tyler’s Lane (Compass Street) and the first bathing machines (modelled on those at Margate) were introduced by Scrivener Capon of the Crown Inn in 1768 (Gillingwater, p. 51). However, an advert placed by Capon in the Norwich Mercury the following year says that Deal’s machines were the ones copied. 

October 1764 - John Wesley’s first visit to Lowestoft (sixteen, in all, 1764-90), where he addressed a crowd in the High Street, speaking from the top end of what is now Martin’s Score. He recorded in his diary that he had never seen “a wilder congregation” in all his travels, but subsequent visits to the town reveal a growing affection both for it and its Methodist faithful.

1768 - At the request of Sir Ashurst Allen (lord of the manor), the town’s two annual fairs (1 May and 2 September) were moved from the Fairstead onto the overspill market area created in 1703. One reason for this may have been a decline in their popularity, over the years, to the point where a large open space was no longer needed to stage them.

1770 - Final annual leet court, of all, was convened (held, last Saturday in Lent). This adjudicated upon breaches of manorial law and appointed officials for the following year. Its copious surviving records from the late 16th century onwards provide perhaps the most informative and fascinating insight into the social life and activity of Lowestoft during the Early Modern period.

7-8 August 1775 - Head-count taken by the Rector (Revd. John Arrow) and two churchwardens gave the town a population of 2,231 people. Arrow was an ex-Royal Navy chaplain, who succeeded John Tanner in 1760 and served the parish until his death in June 1789.

1776 - Construction of the town’s first Methodist Chapel on a High Street site, which is occupied today by the Wesley House retirement flats. It opened on 19 November and John Wesley himself attended, preaching at the two services held during the morning and the afternoon.

1781 - Building of Wilde’s Free Grammar School enabled, following the death of Elizabeth Smithson. It was erected in 1788 on land to the rear of John Wilde’s former residence (now, 80 High Street) and currently functions as the Lowestoft Heritage Workshop Centre.  The High Street house itself became the Schoolmaster’s dwelling. He was required to preach an annual Founder’s Day sermon on 23 December, in St. Margaret’s Church (whole school attending), based on a verse drawn from Proverbs 22. 6: “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”  

January-December 1782 - War with Holland, causing three gun batteries to be built in the town. The largest of these (the Southern one) had a green created in front of it – hence, the road name Battery Green, which is still in use today.

August 1784 - John Adams, American ambassador to Holland and France and later second President of the United States (1797-1801), landed unexpectedly in Lowestoft while on a sea passage to London. His diary entry for the fourth day of the month has this to say. “Sett off, for London, had a tedious Passage from Helvoet, of near two days. Obliged to put in at Leostoff, and ride from thence 24 miles in a Cart.” The distance cited suggests that he went to Norwich and that his means of conveyance was basic! He met with his wife and daughter, on the 7th, at the Adelphi Buildings (situated between The Strand and the River Thames).  

1785 - Act of Parliament, of this year, was passed to enable the creation of a turnpike road between Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft, and beyond. A key piece of the highway is what is now known as London Road North, which provided a direct route southwards over the shingle-bar separating Lake Lothing from the sea. Eventually, building plots were laid out alongside the highway (especially on the western side) and a map of 1830 – drawn by R. Barnes, surveyor – shows substantial (though not dense) development there.

5 April 1786 - James Woodforde, Rector of Weston Longville (in Norfolk), visited the town with a nephew and servant during the morning and recorded, in his famous published diaries, what a fine place it was. He had been at Southwold the previous day and was not complimentary in what he had to say about it – using the term “indifferent” to describe it.

1789 - Charles Sloane, third Baron Cadogan, built an imposing, summer, marine residence on the cliff-top at the north end of town (now No. 3 High Street). At the time, he was a member of the family which had both Sloane Square and Cadogan Square (plus other elite London addresses) named after it.

1790 - Edmund Gillingwater published his book, A Historical Account of the Ancient Town of Lowestoft. A total of 203 subscribers guaranteed the sale of 244 copies of the work. The younger brother of Isaac Gillingwater (both, like their father, barbers by trade), Edmund spent the majority of his adult life as a stationer and bookseller in Harleston. Isaac Gillingwater, in his own right, was also a capable local historian and author of a three-volume manuscript work of c. 1800 entitled ‘A History of Lowestoft and Lothingland’ (Suffolk Archives, Ipswich: 193/1/1-3). Study of this suggests that Edmund may have drawn upon this material for his own, earlier work. The family home in Lowestoft was on the north side of Tyler’s Lane (Compass Street) on a site occupied by an annex to the Town Hall.  

1791 - First buildings on the Southern Denes recorded (some of which may have been houses). Spasmodic development continued, but really took off during the mid-late 19th century, following the coming of the railway and the development of the harbour, with the area eventually becoming known as The Grit or Beach Village – the former term mainly used by the people who lived there.

1795 - Fish-house in Blue Anchor Lane (Duke’s Head Street) was converted into a theatre for the use of the Fisher Company of Comedians. This family of actors later went on to create a chain of theatres located in the market towns of Norfolk and Suffolk, in which a cyclical two-month season of entertainment was put on for the inhabitants of a particular area.

August 1797 - Personal account of A Tour to Lowestoft, handwritten by a young man in his late teens, initialled as RP (Robert Paul) and donated to the Lowestoft Archaeological & Local History Society, gives a brief but fascinating insight into the town at the end of the 18th century. Starting out from Saffron Walden on Saturday 26th, he and his brother made overnight stops at Cambridge, Bury St. Edmunds and Beccles, before arriving in Lowestoft at 6.55 p.m. (18.55) on the Tuesday evening (29 August). An evening walk along the beach (with a rough sea mentioned and reference made to seeing both lighthouses lit) was followed by one along the town’s High Street, with its defensive batteries at either end. A good supper was had at the The Crown inn, and the arrival of the mail coach from Ipswich was noted at 10.00 p.m. (22.00). The sleeping hours were disturbed at 2.00 a.m. (0200) by someone in the next room calling for assistance required to help a friend get out of his trousers! An early start at 6.15 a.m. (06.15) on the morning of the 30th took the visitors to the Beach, where the bathing machines were used for a morning dip at a cost of 9d (4p) per hour. Then it was back to The Crown for breakfast, followed by a visit to the Porcelain Factory where some of its well-known trifles were purchased. After that, the small party set off for Great Yarmouth at 10.00 a.m. (10.00), with overnight stops made there, Norwich, Bury St. Edmunds and Cambridge, before reaching Saffron Walden at 8 a.m. (0800) on Sunday, 3 September.

1801 - Lowestoft’s first lifeboat (built by Henry Greathead of South Shields) came into service. The local beachmen had no liking for the vessel, deeming it to be unsuitable for use along their particular part of the Suffolk coast because propulsion by oars alone created difficulties reaching any craft which had foundered on the outlying sandbanks – these being some distance from the shoreline itself. 

1807 - Town’s second lifeboat, the Frances Ann, replaced its predecessor. It was built by Lionel Lukin, a London coach-builder, and was the first lifeboat to be propelled by both oar and sail. It remained on station until 1850 and is said to have saved over 300 lives during its period of service.

1809 - Bath-house for salt- and spring-water hot and cold dips was built close to the junction of what is now Hamilton Road and Whapload Road. It was replaced in 1824 by an improved premises which (according to publicity of the time) had “subscription and news rooms, with cold, warm, shower, vapour and sulphur medicated baths”. This facility opened on 24 June with a ball held “for the benefit of the Mutford and Lothingland Medical Dispensary”. 

1812 - Theatre for the Norfolk and Suffolk Company of Comedians (Fisher family) was built at the further end of what is now Crown Street West, on the southern side of the roadway. It has long been known as Crown Street Hall (having served for years as a community building) and has been converted into flats. Together with one at Wells-next-the-Sea built the same year, it was the first of a network of such places of entertainment dispersed through Norfolk and Suffolk: Halesworth (1812), Woodbridge (1814), Eye (1815), East Dereham (1816), Sudbury (1817), Thetford (1818), Beccles (1819), Swaffham (1822), Newmarket (1825), Bungay (1828) and North Walsham (1828).

1820 - Accession of George IV.

1820 - De luxe version of Edmund Gillingwater’s published history of Lowestoft was produced, with illustrations by Isaac Johnson of Woodbridge, surveyor and cartographer. These included a title-page exterior study of St. Margaret’s Church (full on, from the east end of the building), the interior of the Town Chapel, the High Lighthouse and the Lower one down on the beach.  

1822 - Mutford and Lothingland Medical Dispensary was set up in a rented house in what is now Crown Street West as a means of “affording medical and surgical assistance to the poor of Lowestoft and its neighbourhood”. The house in question may possibly have been No. 38 (Clare House). A doctor named William Collins Worthington was appointed to act as physician.  

1827-30 - Lowestoft’s first harbour (the inner section) was designed and engineered by William Cubitt. In tandem with this, a navigation route to Norwich was also created by linking Lake Lothing and the broad at Oulton with the River Waveney and by connecting the Waveney to the River Yare via the New Cut at Haddiscoe. A possible Roman log causeway was found when the Bridge Channel was being dug through the shingle-bar separating Lake Lothing from the sea.

1830 - Accession of William IV.

June 1830 - Town’s first harbour bridge was given its official opening on the 12th. It was of double-leaf construction, which split in the middle, lifted and swung outwards, and it continued in operation until the year 1897. A local newspaper of the time described it as being a “beautiful structure”, which was moved “by the aid of the simplest machinery with so little exertion that a boy can open it with the greatest ease”.  

August 1831 - Inner Harbour was officially opened on the 13th, built by the Norwich and Lowestoft Navigation Company. It failed to live up to people’s initial expectations, largely because the navigation route to Norwich didn’t generate a great amount of traffic and the sea-lock gates were destroyed by Teredo Worm or Ship Worm (Teredo navalis). By 1843, the harbour company was bankrupt.

1833 - St. Peter’s chapel-of-ease constructed, as St. Margaret’s parish had grown so much in size of population. Situated on St. Peter’s Street, between Alexandra Road and Tennyson Road, it was demolished after being made redundant in 1974. The Runnymede Court retirement flats complex now occupies the site.

1837 - Accession of Victoria.

1837 - Lowestoft’s first gas works was opened. Built by James Malam at a cost of £2,500, it was located not far from Ness Point and gave the name Gas Works Road to the track which provided access to it. It also had a public house named after it, the Gas House Tavern in Wilde’s Street – the last hostelry but one to close down on the Beach Village  (September 1966) – with the Rising Sun (al. “the Japanese Embassy”, in local parlance) following it in November 1968.

1838 - Fishermen’s Hospital/Almshouses (three units, with two one-storey ones added at either end in 1907), built on Whapload Road near the later Steam Laundry premises. Such charitable accommodation for retired fishermen (especially those in need) was a common feature in many English coastal communities at one time, with the word “hospital” itself originally deriving in medieval times from the Latin adjective hospitalis, meaning “for a guest”. Later use of the word increasingly focused on care for the sick, but the earlier meaning of giving shelter to those who needed it survived alongside. 

1839 - Infirmary erected on the eastern edge of what is now the St. Margaret’s Plain area (on the site of The Cage lock-up) to replace the Dispensary of 1822. It opened in the spring of 1840 and Dr. Worthington continued in post until c. 1870. It had two wards, each with eight beds, with a further smaller ward for cases requiring extra attention. In 1872, its annual number of in-patients was c. sixty, with a further 300 being attended to by its dispensary. Replacing The Cage, which had formerly stood on the site, led to the area then eventually becoming known as Infirmary Plain – the latter word probably resulting from the increase in house-building on what had originally been Fair Green making the area less verdant in nature. 

1841 Census - Town population of 4,647, with 1,104 houses. In terms of size (both physically and numerically), these statistics may be considered as showing the final phase of Lowestoft’s pre-Industrial existence. Current developments, nationally, and Samuel Morton Peto’s innovations, locally, were about to change the nature of the town forever.

Population increase (1841-1911) - In 1841, Lowestoft’s population was 4,647, rising to 6,781 ten years later. By 1871, it had reached 13,623 and stood at 19,150 in 1891. By 1911, it was 37,886. This rapid increase in numbers was the result of Samuel Morton Peto’s developments of the 1840s and 50s creating better links by rail and sea for fishing and other maritime-related activity, by the growth of ancillary industries to support this activity, and by the increase in seaside leisure opportunity created to the south of the harbour.

May 1843 - Police force already established in the town, with one inspector and three constables. Robert Peel, Home Secretary of the time, had inaugurated a regular force for London on the implementation of the 1829 Metropolitan Police Act, which was followed by the County Police Act (al. Rural Constabularies Act) of 1839, which allowed the setting-up of police forces in the country as a whole. East Suffolk established one in 1840 (followed by West Suffolk in 1844) and Lowestoft’s would have followed on the back of this. Major Peter Allez, a retired Army officer and native of the Island of Guernsey, was appointed as its first superintendent (see Jack Rose’s Lowestoft, pp. 40-1).

Mid-1840s to 50s - Decade of Samuel Morton Peto, who purchased the harbour works in 1844 and created an outer area of activity to accompany the inner one, and who also connected Lowestoft to the national railway network by linking it to Norwich (1847) and Ipswich (1859). In addition to this, he also created a new, model, seaside resort between 1848 and 1856, to the south of the harbour. Fishing activity, maritime trade and leisure opportunity all benefited from his overall series of developments and expanded considerably.

May 1847 - Official opening of the Lowestoft-Norwich railway, on the 3rd of the month - the Act of Parliament necessary to authorise its construction having been passed in 1845. Construction of this length of track enabled Samuel Morton Peto’s earlier, much quoted metaphorical promise to the town fathers to deliver Lowestoft-caught fish “alive” in Birmingham and Manchester to become reality – at least, in the sense of their freshness. One vital part of the engineering work had already been carried out previously: the New Cut canal at Haddiscoe, linking the River Waveney with the Yare as part of the Lowestoft-Norwich Navigation. The western bank of this was used to carry the line – and it is possible that Peto heard of Lowestoft’s potential for development from William Cubitt, who had supervised the building of the harbour and associated works and who (just like Peto) had extensive construction projects in operation in London during the 1830s and 40s.  

July 1849 - South Pier, Esplanade, Royal Hotel and adjacent houses completed - the first phase of Peto’s creation of the South Lowestoft (Kirkley) seaside holiday area. One of the most impressive engineering feats in all of this is largely unseen: the building of the sea wall on which the Esplanade sits. Scouring out of the beach in the Children’s Corner area, in recent years, and the remedial work to address this revealed the high quality of the brickwork, with high-fired stock used to counter the effect of saturation by the sea.

1850 - First Outer Harbour, completed. Built by the Norfolk Railway Company, this was a major step forward for the harbour as a whole – enabling it to increase its level of activity in fishing and maritime trade, providing space for a fish market, an ice-house for the storage of material imported from Norway, and livestock sheds for the North Sea Steam Navigation Company’s trade with Denmark in cattle and sheep. The South Pier, by way of contrast, had nothing to do with such activity, being devoted entirely to leisure pursuits of one kind or another, with a Reading Room constructed there during 1853-4 and a bandstand added in 1884.

            This year also saw the People’s Weekly Journal (the forerunner of the Lowestoft Journal) begin publication.

1850-55 - Planning and construction of Marine Parade and Wellington Esplanade (or Terrace) was put into operation. The former terrace, in the advertising used at the time of its construction, was described as consisting of “excellent second-rate houses” –  this, in contrast with the large, detached villas which occupied the sea-front and prevented most of their lesser neighbours form having a direct view of the ocean. Even so, most of them (with three floors above ground and a basement below) were initially purchased by wealthy people for holiday use, such as the Colman family of Norwich (mustard manufacturers), which had No. 8 – and the architect himself, J.L. Clemence, lived at No. 14. Wellington Terrace, a little further to the south, was of even larger scale, having four floors above ground as well as a basement, and with an unimpeded sea-view. It also provided an enclosed private front-garden for its residents, with a public roadway running between it and the houses. Jeremiah James Colman (of mustard fame) purchased No. 20 at some point, after moving into Corton in 1869 and having a cliff-top summer residence there until his death in September 1898.

1852 - Congregational Church, London Road North, was built with J.L. Clemence as architect. The structure combines Italianate features (particularly the north-west tower of the facade) with Romanesque semi-circular headed windows and doorways. Use of Somerleyton white brick as quoining, window and door surrounds, and dentilled cornicing on the upper levels, works very well in contrasting pleasingly with the accompanying red brick.

1853-56 - Crimean War, coinciding with Samuel Morton Peto’s innovations in the town, had direct connections with Lowestoft. Peto’s associates, Lucas Brothers, built sectional wooden billets for the troops at their joinery works on the south side of the Inner Harbour, as well as a hospital for Florence Nightingale. Peto was given a baronetcy in 1855 for building a railway from Balaclava to Sebastopol to carry munitions and supplies in one direction and wounded soldiers in the other. Alma Road and Alma Street commemorate a British, French and Turkish victory over the Russians in September 1854, while Raglan Street was named after Fitzroy Somerset, 1st Baron Raglan, overall British commander in the Crimea. The Beach Village had a public house named The Balaclava – in memory of an allied defeat (which included the legendary Charge of the Light Brigade) in October 1854 – while the English and French victory at Inkerman in November 1854produced the Inkerman Arms public house and nearby Inkerman Cottages. All of these buildings were located in the Coleman Square neighbourhood. 

July 1854 - Town’s Improvement Commissioners were established by Act of Parliament, on the 10th, as a civic body in a rapidly expanding community – both in terms of population numbers and the space taken up by the increasing number of houses being built. Their work mainly concentrated on improvements to the town’s roads and creating its first proper sewerage system. A levy of 2s 6d (12½p) in the pound – assessed on the value of property owned – was imposed to finance the work and Samuel Morton Peto was one of the first commissioners (twenty-seven in number) to be elected.

1855 - Redundant Fisher Theatre (Crown Street Hall) was demolished to about six feet above ground-level and rebuilt as an Assembly Rooms. This had a limited life-span and did not remain in use for more than about a decade.

            The first purpose-built Fish Market opened (3 May) and the present-day Railway Station was constructed in the Italianate style so much a feature of the town’s Peto-era architecture (replacing the original wooden building).

1856 - Dry Dock opened on the north side of the Inner Harbour. Capable of slipping at least four of the local sailing drifters or trawling smacks, and a lesser number of larger trading vessels, it became a valuable asset in the overall number of services the port could offer.

1857-60 - Old Town Chamber and Town Chapel were demolished and replaced by a new Town Hall designed in the popular Italianate style – adopted by Victoria and Albert at their Osborne home on the Isle of Wight (1845-51) – by J.L. Clemence (1822-1911), who was born in Lowestoft, but who trained under the supervision of the well-known London architect, C.R. Cockerell. It was probably this connection that brought him to the attention of Samuel Morton Peto, whose building company of the time (Grissell & Peto) was doing work all over the capital during the 1830s and 40s. Having qualified, Clemence became Peto’s local architect “on the ground” for much of the latter’s Lowestoft development. 

June 1859 - Railway line to Ipswich (via Beccles) opened on the 1st, which also served to connect the town with London. To start with, both Bishopsgate and Fenchurch Street stations were used as end-points, but were superseded by Liverpool Street in 1874. This terminus was constructed by Lucas Brothers, Samuel Morton Peto’s former associates – the later having largely withdrawn from public life because of his financial difficulties

1860s - Beginning of an upturn in the local fishing industry, with the start of Scottish herring drifters coming down each autumn (from the Firth of Forth, initially) for the main voyage of the year and with the arrival of sailing trawlers from Kent and Sussex relocating to Lowestoft to exploit largely untouched and productive North Sea grounds between Lowestoft and the Dutch coast.

July 1860 - Both Artillery and Rifle Volunteer Corps were formed. The Artillery Drill Hall (Arnold Street) was built and opened in 1872. W.O. Chambers, the architect, was an officer in the Company, holding the rank of Lieutenant.

1862 - New Methodist Chapel was built, on the site of its predecessor (1776), with J.L. Clemence as architect. Set back some way from the building-line, it was of austere Romanesque appearance and constructed of white brick. It was demolished in 1984 and the Wesley House retirement flats erected in its place. The flanking walls on either side of it, abutting to the pavement, remain in place.

            This year also saw the opening of a General Post and Telegraph Office on London Road North.

1863 - Samuel Morton Peto, having seriously overstretched himself with a number of his contractual engineering projects, was forced to liquidate some of his assets, in order to pay debts which were owed. Part of this process was to sell the Somerleyton Estate and leave the local area. His financial troubles continued with the insolvency in 1866 of the London, Chatham & Dover Railway Company, with which he was connected, and with the failure of the Peto & Betts engineering partnership. Further complications resulted from the collapse of the Overend, Gurney & Co. Bank, the same year, and Peto was never to regain his previous high profile in business and public life.

1865 - Trawl Dock was constructed for the increasing number of vessels engaged in this type of fishing, which can be traced back to the late 1840s, with vessels from Barking (north Thames-side) using the town to land catches from grounds previously unexploited between East Anglia and Holland. Migrations from Kent and Sussex followed, and local boat owners also began to become involved in trawling – leading eventually to Lowestoft having the largest fleet of sailing trawlers (smacks) in the whole country, with about 350 vessels registered in the port in the year 1910.

1867 - Remodelled Assembly Rooms (Crown Street Hall), having gone out of use, were taken over by local Roman Catholics for the celebration of Mass – this, being made possible by a Jesuit presence from Great Yarmouth.

1868 - Christchurch (Whapload Road) was designed by W.O. Chambers and built with money deriving from a public collection started by the Rector of Lowestoft, the Revd. Francis Cunningham, to serve the population of the expanding Beach Village – not long before his death in August 1863. It bore the original title of The Cunningham Memorial Beachmen’s Church for the Beachmen and Fishermen of Lowestoft and was opened for worship in February 1869. Cunningham’s wife, Richenda, was a member of the Gurney family of Norwich and a gifted artist, having been taught drawing by none other than John Crome the Elder - founder of the Norwich School of Painters. Some pencil studies by her are to be found in the town’s Art Collection, which consists mainly of items donated over the years by local people. 

Sea Fisheries Act of this year (among other things) established the registration of fishing craft in their home ports, using wherever possible the first and last letters of the place-names. Thus, Lowestoft had LT attached and (Great) Yarmouth YH. Ambiguities, such as Hull and Hartlepool were resolved by first letter only for the first named – hence, H and HL – and there were further means of identification adopted for other particular cases, e.g. (King’s) Lynn LN and London LO. 

1872-3 - Lowestoft Public Hall (now, 150 London Road North, Halifax UK Bank) was created to provide the town with a sufficiently large indoor space for all kinds of public meetings and other activity. It opened its doors on 15 April 1873. W.O. Chambers was the architect. Among the notable meetings held there was that of 10 January 1884, when a majority of the people attending voted against a proposal to create a chartered borough out of Lowestoft and Kirkley. The Improvement Commissioners, however, were of a different mind and went ahead with it.

1873 - James and Archibald Maconochie began their food-processing enterprise at premises in Raglan Street. It has been said that they began in their kitchen, at home, producing pickled onions. James Maconochie (the older brother) is to be found in White’s Suffolk Directory (1872) living at 70 Denmark Road and is described as a fish merchant. The brothers originated from Wigan, the children of a mother from Stony Stratford and a father from Edinburgh. Archibald ventured into politics and was Liberal Unionist MP for East Aberdeenshire from 1900-1906. 

26 July 1873 - First edition of the Lowestoft Journal (replacing the People’s Weekly Journal) was published on Saturday. The weekly newspaper became an important part of the town’s history and culture in its recording of everyday events and continues today as one of the local publications produced by the Archant media company.

1874 - Belle Vue Park opened, both as a civic amenity and also to raise the tone of part of the old North Common, which had tended to become the haunt of “undesirables”. Its presence and function were greatly enhanced more than a decade later with the building of a bridge over the Ravine (an “atmospheric” renaming of the former Gunton Score) and its integration with the Sparrow’s Nest gardens. 

1876 - Samuel Richards arrived in town from Penzance and set up a shipyard on the east side of Kirkley Ham’s outflow into Lake Lothing. This enterprise became famous for the quality of its work as Richards Ironworks Ltd., with its most interesting contract of all perhaps being that to build trawlers for the USSR during the mid-1950s – these said craft most likely intended as much for surveillance work in Northern waters as for fishing.   

February 1877 - Third of the month was the funeral day of Lady Pleasance Smith (aged 103), who lived at what is now No. 49 High Street. This remarkable woman was the daughter of Robert Reeve, local solicitor and steward of Lowestoft manor, who in her younger days was the wife of James Smith of Norwich, famous botanist and founder of the Linnean Society. She was renowned for her relieving work among the less fortunate members of society and was also a personal acquaintance of Queen Victoria.

1878 - Marina Theatre created from a previous skating-rink. Further rebuilds took place in 1901 and 1930. Major internal refurbishments took place during 2012-13. The theatre remains in use and is able to continue its entertainment function through putting on a variety of acts and performances throughout the year.

            This year also saw a boatbuilding business started up on the northern shore of Lake Lothing, at its Oulton Broad end, by John Chambers and Charles Page. Chambers & Page, as it was known, increased in size and capacity and, in 1913, was renamed John Chambers Ltd. By 1915, it was well established as a local shipbuilder of note, building a range of vessels (particularly steam-driven fishing craft). It went into liquidation in 1930, having constructed a total of 583 ships in all.

June 1878 - Josef Teodor Konrad Korzenkiowski arrived in Lowestoft from the European mainland, working for a short period of time on a local sailing coaster named the Skimmer of the Seas. After leaving the town, he worked for fifteen years or so on board merchant vessels of one kind or another, before becoming one of the greatest English novelists under his Anglicised name, Joesph Conrad. In later life, he is reputed to have referred to Lowestoft as his “spiritual birth-place”. 

1879 - George Edwards (the Superintendent Engineer of the Lowestoft harbour works published a pamphlet entitled The River Waveney: Did It Ever Reach The Sea via Lowestoft? He lies buried in the southern part of St. Michael’s Churchyard, Oulton, with a large sandstone boulder as his grave-marker (dredged up from the bed of Lake Lothing and kept by him for this purpose). One side of the stone was faced off and carries this simple inscription: George Edwards  C.E  J.P.  1804-1893.

            This year also saw the establishment of the Lowestoft Fishermen’s and Seafarers’ Benevolent Society, for the financial relief of the widows and dependents of men either lost at sea or who had died in onshore accidents related to the their work. The organisation merged with the Great Yarmouth Fishermen’s Widows and Orphans Fund in 1969.

1881 - Roman Catholic parish established in Lowestoft, using a former net-store in Clapham Road as its place-of-worship. It took nearly 300 years for the Roman Catholic element in the British population to throw off all the shackles of the past emanating from the upheavals of the Protestant Reformation and its accompanying almost paranoid suspicion of Rome. The various Penal Laws passed, to try to enforce membership of the Church of England, were progressively relaxed during the 1770s, 80s and 90s, but the great step forward was the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829 (al. the Catholic Emancipation Act), which removed most of the remaining restrictions imposed on Catholics and gave them the right to hold public office – including that of becoming MPs.

1882 - New Hospital (to replace the Infirmary) was erected on an undeveloped site between Tennyson Road and Alexandra Road. The Infirmary was closed down and sold for the sum of £550, becoming converted into St. Margaret’s National School. The presence of the latter caused yet another change in the name of this location – from Infirmary Plain to St. Margaret’s Plain.

October 1883 - Waveney Dock extension to the Outer Harbour opened, to provide adequate space for herring and mackerel catches to be landed. Although herrings were the main pelagic species caught by Lowestoft vessels (and had been for centuries), mackerel were also an important part of the annual, local, fishing cycle at one time. There were two relatively short seasons, late spring and early autumn, but neither of them was of any note commercially after the First World War. 

1884 - Royal Norfolk & Suffolk Yacht Club (formed in 1859) moved from its Norwich base to Lowestoft, building a new one-storey headquarters at the western end of the Yacht Basin. It became the Royal Norfolk & Suffolk Yacht Club in 1898, by Crown warrant, and built a new clubhouse on a different site during 1902-3. This remains in use today and was designed by G.J. Skipper of Norwich in the Arts and Crafts style, with the influence of C.F.A. Voysey plain to see.

31 August 1885 - Lowestoft granted Borough status, which entitled it to an elected Mayor and Town Council. The first person elected to serve as Mayor was William Youngman (brewer), who lived at No. 63 High Street. 

            This year also saw the destruction, by fire, of the South Pier Reading Room and Bandstand – something which caused not only the loss of a valuable social amenity, but also of a notable local landmark. 

1886 - Six-acre Grove Estate, on London Road North, was developed, with Beach Road, Grove Road and Suffolk Road all being laid out. This particular part of the London Road North area, lying to the east of the main highway, had remained undeveloped for much longer than its western counterpart.

1887 - Ravine Bridge (linking North Parade with Belle Vue Park) was built to commemorate the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria - the gift of William Youngman (Brewer), the town’s first elected mayor. 

            This was also the year in which the Borough Council bought the Sparrow’s Nest estate for a sum in excess of £11,000 – basically, all the land between Cart Score and Lighthouse Score. The area took its name from Robert Sparrow Esq., of Worlingham Hall (1741-1822), who had a summer residence built there during the early 1800s and who, along with the Revd. Francis Bowness (both Rector of Gunton and Vicar of Corton), was responsible for the building and commissioning of the first Lowestoft lifeboat.

1888 - Tuttle’s Bon Marche store opened, becoming a byword in the town for both the variety and quality of its goods, with the family diversifying from origins as a grocery business located on both the High Street and Commercial Road. Ebenezer Tuttle, son of Henry, was a well-known figure in the town during the Late Victorian and the Edwardian eras, serving as Mayor 1904-6. The business closed down in 1981 and the building, after serving to accommodate a number of diverse smaller enterprises was taken over by J.D. Wetherspoon and reopened as the Joseph Conrad public house. The necessary planning permission to enable this change of use was granted in 2012.

1889-91 - Construction of a new South Pier Pavilion and Bandstand. These formed a very distinctive grouping on the pier and were much photographed during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. The Pavilion sustained considerable damage during World War Two and was demolished round about 1954, to make way for a replacement structure.

1890 - Lowestoft Town Football Club was officially created from its predecessor Lowestoft Football Club, which had formed from a merger in 1887 between East Suffolk FC and Kirkley FC. Its Crown Meadow ground on Love Road is a substantial surviving part of a twenty-acre arable enclosure known as the Lord’s Close, which had once formed part of the manorial demesne – land that was worked for the lord of the manor himself (or herself), as opposed to rented ground which was worked by the tenants for themselves. 

1890s - Development of the Klondike Herring Trade, to Altona in Germany. This was begun by Benjamin Bradbeer who, while visiting friends in Hamburg during 1887, found that there was a market for fresh herrings in the place which could be processed in various ways suiting the German taste. The fish were exported, iced and salted, in large wooden cases in a trade which flourished up until World War Two. The wealth made from it was compared with that deriving from the Klondike Gold Rush (1896-99) in northern Canada’s Yukon region.

1891 - Trawl Dock was extended almost as far as London Road North, because of the increased fishing activity over the years. Trawling had emerged in the Thames Estuary area as early as the 1370s, but it was approaching another 500 years before it became a significant part of Lowestoft’s activities. Demersal species of fish (those living on or close to the sea bed) had been traditionally caught on baited hand-lines and (later) long-lines, both locally and further afield, before beam-trawling developed in the town from the mid-19thcentury onwards.

1896 - General William Booth visited Lowestoft, probably with a view to establishing a branch of the Salvation Army in the town. A Citadel on Battery Green Road was opened two years later, in 1898. Quite close by, on the same road – and on 21 June, the same year –  the foundation stone for a new Fishermen’s Bethel was laid for a building to replace that on Commercial Road (founded 1864). It has been used for some years now as the headquarters of the Lowestoft Players theatrical group, opening up in December 2012. 

1897 - Introduction of steam propulsion to fishing vessels, with the building of the wooden herring drifter,Consolation (LT 718) for George Catchpole of Kessingland. Within about a decade, nearly all of the herring fleet had gone over from sail to steam. 

            A.E. Murton published an updated version of Edmund Gillingwater’s history of Lowestoft, by adding a final chapter of more recent events in the life of the town.

June 1897 - New, single-span, swing bridge replaced the original two-leaf one. It swung sideways, to rest against the northern wall of the bridge channel (thereby, allowing ships to enter or leave the Inner Harbour), and was said to be one of the fastest opening-and-closing models in the whole country. It remained in operation for seventy-two years – before getting stuck in the open position in 1969. It was rumoured that the main bearing of the swing mechanism hadn’t been greased for some considerable time.

1898 - Sparrow’s Nest opened as a public park, following the Borough Council’s purchase of the land in 1887. 

            This was also the year which saw construction of Lowestoft’s first Ice Factory (at the bottom of Riverside Road, on the edge of the Inner Harbour), to supply the fishing fleet with the means of preserving catches at sea. Prior to that, much of the ice used had been imported from Norway.

1899 - Baptist Chapel, with Gothic-style brick-and-flint facade, was built on London Road North on a site now occupied by the Boots store. It would have been difficult to keep the building’s distinctive frontage as an on-street feature, given the site’s change of use to retail function, but demolition certainly removed a structure of interest.

            A grandiose scheme for “The Pier That Never Was” saw George, Duke of Cambridge (grandson of George III and former commander-in-chief of the British Army), cut the first sod on 2 December with the obligatory silver-bladed spade. It was the first and only step taken by the North Pier Company in a projected scheme for a pleasure-pier on the North Denes (directly opposite the High Lighthouse) some 699 feet long by 125 wide, with extensive approaches and grounds on either side and even a “harbour of refuge” to the south of it, occupying land reaching almost to the Gas Works and with docks enclosed by a southern pier and eastern extension. See Jack Rose’s Lowestoft, pp. 84-5.

1899-1914 - Widening of the High Street, to make way for a new tramway, resulted in major changes to the facade of the Town Hall. It also necessitated removal of the row of buildings to the north of Mariners Street. Luckily, a cellar or undercroft (dating from the first half of the 14th century), managed to survive the demolition and rebuilding process. It is located beneath what is now No. 160 High Street.

1900 - Maconochie Brothers built a new canning factory on Waveney Drive, at the junction with Riverside Road. James had died of pneumonia in 1895, but the company’s name remained as it had been since its formation. There were other factories, also, located in different places (particularly the one at Millwall, in London’s docklands) and the company became renowned for making tinned rations for the Army in both the Boer War (1899-1902) and the First World War (1914-18).

            Lowestoft Town FC reached the final of the FA Amateur Cup, only to be beaten 5-1 by Bishop Auckland. 

1901 - Accession of Edward VII.

1900-2 - Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady Star of the Sea (Stella Maris) was built. Designed mainly in the Early English style by G. Baines and F.W. Richards – the former of whom was a London-based architect who had trained under Bottle & Olley of Great Yarmouth – it is an imposing structure, both inside and out. The apsidal sanctuary is of particularly fine quality and makes an impressive focal point for the whole of the interior – just as it is supposed to.

1901 - C. & E. Morton, of Aberdeen, opened up a food-processing factory on the south side of the Inner Harbour, occupying land which had once functioned as the Lucas Brothers’ joinery factory and wharf. Its main initial occupation was the canning of herrings - but, as time went on, it diversified into other products. It closed down in 1988, having become an integral part of the town’s manufacturing industries and with strong generational ties among the members of its workforce.

1902 - First national Fisheries Laboratory established in Lowestoft, by the Marine Biological Association, at No. 13 Waveney Road (Waveney House) facing the Trawl Dock. This research facility grew in size and importance, moving into progressively larger premises in different locations (The Marina initially, with the corner of Waterloo Road and The Esplanade following later) and eventually acquiring the acronym MAFF (Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food), followed by CEFAS (Centre For Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science). Established after World War Two on the site of the Grand Hotel, Pakefield, and opening in August 1955.

June 1902 - First Sea Wall was constructed to protect the Denes and Beach Village against flooding. Built of concrete by engineer William Tregarthen Douglass, it replaced earlier brushwood barriers, sunk into the sand, which can be seen in photographs taken during the 1890s. 

1902-3 - Claremont Pier built to enable the Coast Development Company’s Belle Steamers (which plied between London and Great Yarmouth) to take on and disembark passengers. The structure was originally 600 feet long, before being extended in 1912 to 720 feet by the addition of a T-piece at its far end – this being put on to make it easier for the steamers to handle passengers. The pier’s middle section was removed in 1940(lest it be used in any German invasion attempt) and, after this threat had failed to materialise, a Bailey bridge was installed. The Army then used the whole structure for military training right up until 1948. “The Claremont”, as it is always referred to, has had something of a chequered history over the years, but it remains a well-loved local landmark as a feature of Lowestoft’s seaside environment.

1903 - Pan Yan pickle registered as a Maconochie Brothers brand product. Basically, an apple-and-curry relish (with other added ingredients), which by 1924 had become the world’s highest selling condiment, this continued in production until about the year 2000. In 2008, Chris Evans, the Radio celebrity DJ, launched an appeal to put it back into production, but the successor company which held the rights to it (Premier Foods) had to admit that the sole copy of the original recipe had been destroyed in a warehouse fire during 2004.  

23 July 1903 - Lowestoft Corporation Tramway opened, with a service running from near the Lowestoft North Railway Station to the Pakefield Terminus – a distance of a little over four miles. There was also a branch-line from the central Railway Station, along Denmark Road, to the Depot – the buildings still surviving at the southern end of Rotterdam Road. 

            The Norfolk & Suffolk Joint Railway Co. line, between Gt. Yarmouth and Lowestoft, also opened the same month (on the 13th).

1904 - Hippodrome Theatre (designed by R.S. Cockrill of Gt. Yarmouth) opened for circus entertainment, on Battery Green Road, with sliding roof for fresh air and sunken floor for flooding by water. Switched to variety theatre use after two years and was used during World War Two as a gathering-point for evacuee children. After being destroyed by fire in 1999 (while in use as a bingo hall), it was replaced by the modern building seen today. The year before the Lowestoft building was erected, Cockrill had designed the Yarmouth Hippodrome Circus – again, with a performing-area which could be flooded.

            Also, the year that saw Howard Hollingsworth purchase the Briar Clyffe estate, which still retains substantial remains of its boundary walls along the east side of Corton Road and the south side of Heather Road – the brickwork surmounted by excellent Art Nouveau period cast-iron railings. He took up residency in 1908. Co-owner of the Oxford Street department store, Bourne & Hollingsworth, along with his brother-in-law Arthur Bourne, he was a model employer of the time and a notable philanthropist. The store ceased trading in 1983.

May 1905 - Carnegie Library opened, on Clapham Road, with the help of a £6,000 grant from the American steel manufacturer’s trust. It was destroyed in an air raid of 6 March 1941. Negotiations to build the facility began in October 1903 and the result was a handsome, three-bay, two-storey structure, with three elaborate and imposing oriel windows dominating the facade and with two large, square windows and the entry doorway below occupying the ground-floor. Triangular pediments surmounted two of the oriels, while that above the doorway had a semi-battlemented mini-turret above – complete with mini-flagpole. 

October 1906 - Outer Harbour further extended by the opening of the Hamilton Dock, built by the Great Eastern Railway Company largely to accommodate growing numbers of steam herring drifters both local and Scottish. The first, ceremonial spade-cut to be made, preceding excavation of the ground-area, was made by Lord Claud Hamilton, Chairman of the GER, who had the local distinction of having a steam drifter named after him (LT 1047), belonging to the Lowestoft Steam Herring Drifters Co. Ltd. It was built in the Cochrane & Sons shipyard on the River Ouse, in Yorkshire (at Selby) – as were a number of other Lowestoft vessels of the time.

1907 - Joseph (“Jo”) Harris, ex-miner and keen Trades Unionist, appointed as the town’s first Probation Officer, having worked for five years running a Church of England Mission Hall in the Roman Hill area. He and his wife Gertrude (known universally as “Mrs. Jo”) were perhaps the best-loved of all Lowestoft’s citizens during the Inter-war Period because of their enlightened and dedicated social work.

            This year was also notable for the integration of Kirkley parish as part of Lowestoft Borough, followed by Oulton Broad in 1919 and Pakefield in 1934. Oulton Broad had been created as a civil parish in 1904 – made up of land formerly located in Oulton parish itself and in Carlton Colville. It became an ecclesiastical parish in 1934. 

1910 - Accession of George V.

1911 - J.W. Brooke & Co. opened a shipyard on the south side of the Inner Harbour. It had made its name producing high-quality cars, on a par with Napier and Rolls Royce, at its Adrian Ironworks premises in Alexandra Road (first model launched in 1902). Diversification into making engines for speedboats saw the company eventually abandon this activity and turn to maritime engineering and construction under the name of Brooke Marine. The company had come into being during the 1870s as Hardy & Brooke and had developed a speciality in all kinds of mechanical engineering, becoming well known for the quality of its work.

1912 - United Automobile Services began to run buses in Lowestoft and in 1920 started a coach building enterprise on Laundry Lane. In 1931, the Eastern Counties Omnibus Co. Ltd. took over UAS and began to specialise in building bus bodies. Laundry Lane was renamed Eastern Way. Five years later, in 1936, Eastern Coach Works Ltd. was formed and became one of the town’s flagship companies. It was nationalised in 1947and began putting bodies onto Bristol chassis (fitted with engines and transmissions), which were driven up to Lowestoft from the West Country for the driver’s cab and passenger space to be built and fitted. The company closed down in 1987 and all its buildings were demolished to make way for the North Quay Retail Park – which opened in 1990.

1900-13 - Height of the Lowestoft fishing industry, with the latter year seeing a record catch of 535 million autumn herring landed by its own vessels and visiting Scottish ones. At the outbreak of World War I, the town had around 350 steam drifters and drifter-trawlers and over 300 sailing trawlers (smacks) registered in the port.

22 November 1913 - Benjamin Britten, major 20th century composer, born at 21 Kirkley Cliff Road – the son of local dentist, Robert Britten, and his wife Edith, and the youngest of four children. He nearly died of pneumonia at the age of three months and was left with a permanently weakened heart as a result of the illness. He stands as a giant in the development of mid-late 20th century Classical Music, in so many different ways, and his legacy also continues in the form of the Aldeburgh Festival, founded by him and his partner, Peter Pears, in 1948.

            Lowestoft’s first cinema, The Palace, opened this year, having been built on the Royal Plain on the site of the Royal Hotel’s disused stable block. Its first performance on 14 July was Les Miserables – the first film adaptation of Victor Hugo’s epic novel of 1862, which had been made the previous year, in 1912. The cinema eventually became a bingo hall in 1965 and was destroyed by fire on 26 July 1966.

August 1914 - Belgian refugees fleeing from German invasion arrived in Lowestoft from across the North Sea, late in month, in fishing vessels. It was this act of aggression (beginning on the 4th) – resulting from Belgian refusal to give Germany free passage of its forces to invade France – which drew Great Britain into what became the First World War. It also led to a popular jingoistic music hall song of the time, Belgium Put the Kibosh on the Kaiser, which was used by Charles Chilton in his stage musical, Oh What A Lovely War (1961), later turned into a film by Richard Attenborough (1969). 

1914-18 - First World War saw the port of Lowestoft have gun protection from Naval monitors based in the Harbour. A handful of its sailing trawlers (smacks) were armed with a single gun, hidden up for’ad, and used as Q-ships to sink German U-boats operating on the surface on the sea. This was done, at the request of some local vessel owners, to counter the loss of craft, whereby the crews were ordered off their smacks by the enemy and made to take to the “little boat”, while a timed charge was put down into the rope-room or chain-locker and detonated. After a handful of successful actions against the submarines, arming certain of the smacks proved to be a double-edged sword, as the U-boats surfaced and sank them (out of range) with their superior deck gun, whether armed or not.

16 April 1915 - Zeppelin bombing raid on the town, at 1.15 a.m. – the first raid of its kind in Suffolk, with strikes on Southwold Railway Station and Henham Hall preceding that on Lowestoft itself. Nos. 46, 47 & 48 Denmark Road were hit, as well as a nearby timber yard. Two men were slightly injured and two horses and a sparrow killed. These deceased were described as “victims of German frightfullness” [sic], with a photograph of the bird used to illustrate the point. Four months later, on 9 August, a house in Lovewell Road was struck, with eighteen years old Kate Crawford killed. The Jack Rose Old Lowestoft Society held a centenary commemoration of the first raid on 16 April 2015, with a niece of the young woman killed in the August raid attending the ceremony as a guest of honour.

25 April 1916 - Easter Tuesday - Lowestoft bombarded for ten minutes during the early morning (starting at 4.10 a.m.) by a squadron of the German High Fleet’s battle-cruisers. About 200 houses were damaged or destroyed, with twelve people injured and three killed – these fatalities occurring in a house on Sandringham Road, which took a direct hit. Unexploded shells from that incident can be seen flanking the entry door to the Maritime Museum, on Whapload Road. A commemorative booklet, with twelve photographs showing some of the destruction and entitled Bombardment Of Lowestoft By The Germans, was produced by local photographer, E.W.B. Squire. It retailed at 1s (5p) per copy. 

15 August 1917 - Sinking of the armed smack Nelson (LT 649), by a German U-boat. The vessel’s skipper, Tom Crisp, was killed in the action and awarded a posthumous VC. The name of the smack had been changed to Nelson from previous titles, G & E and I’ll Try, as part of a deception ploy to make identification of armed smacks difficult for German naval observers. Apart from Skipper Crisp, all of the Nelson’s crew survived that fatal day, but the last seen of the personnel of its sister-ship Ethel & Millie (LT 200) was all of them lined up on the foredeck of the U-boat which had sunk the Nelson.

1921 - Trawling smack Excelsior (LT 472) built by John Chambers Ltd. of Oulton Broad. This vessel continues to operate as the focus of a dedicated maritime charitable trust, offering different kinds of experience at sea. It is an important surviving link with Lowestoft’s maritime past and is still able to operate a traditional beam trawl of the type used in the heyday of such fishing practice.

March 1921 - Religious Revival occurred in the town, led by the Revd. A. Douglas Brown, a Baptist minister from Balham, South London. Its main focus of Christian renewal  and evangelism began on 7 March and ran through to 2 April, involving many of the town’s denominations and mainly using the London Road North Baptist Chapel (site now occupied by Boots store), Christchurch, The Fishermen’s Bethel on Battery Green Road (Lowestoft Players HQ) and St. John’s Church (at the bottom of London Road South, demolished in 1978)) as venues. A follow-up by A. Douglas Brown took place at Whitsun (15-21 May), with meetings held in the Salvation Army Citadel, the Baptist Chapel, Oulton Parish Church and the Union (Nonconformist) Chapel at Somerleyton. Finally, an autumn convention took place 19-23 September, using the Baptist Chapel, Christchurch and the Congregational Chapel on London Road North (now, the United Reformed Church) as places of worship in which to meet.

            There is neither time nor space here to discuss the spread of this Religious activity (especially the autumn upsurge at Gt. Yarmouth among Scottish fishing personnel), but the whole episode is well covered in Stanley Griffin’s A Forgotten Revival (1992).  

8 June 1922 - Kensington Gardens opened, with sensitive landscaping in evidence and with planting suited to a seaside environment. Aimed at use by local people and holidaymakers alike, the area became a popular local attraction. The most distinctive feature over the course of the years was probably the electric boats which were introduced to the lake during the 1930s, with their dodgem-type pick-ups connecting with the live wire-mesh overhead. They were withdrawn during the 1960s and replaced with canoes.

1923-4 - Lowestoft members of the National Union of Teachers went on strike, in protest at a reduction in salary imposed by the Lloyd George government. A committee (chaired by Sir Eric Geddes) had been established to reduce Government expenditure, following the huge cost of the First World War, and a drop in teachers’ pay was just one part of an overall financial package, which became known as “the Geddes Axe” after the name of the man chairing the group of people charged with carrying out this particular piece of austerity.

1924 - Denes Oval cricket ground and tennis courts opened, occupying land once used as allotments. The latter facility was able to be used and enjoyed by both local people and visitors, but the cricket ground became the province of the local cricket club. The first newspaper report of the game being played on the North Denes goes back to 1844, when the People’s Weekly Journal reported on Lowestoft CC’s first ever two-innings game being played. It was against Gt. Yarmouth, of all places, and resulted in a home win by an innings and two runs. However, cricket was being played there fifty or sixty years earlier and a Lowestoft porcelain polychrome jug, dating from around the 1770s or 80s and showing a batsman at a two-stump wicket holding a curved bat, was once to be seen in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, as an item on loan there.

1926 - Wooden herring drifter Veracity (LT311) built by Richards Ironworks Ltd. – the first vessel of its kind to be diesel-powered (by a Deutz 200 hp engine). In spite of operating effectively and more economically than steam-powered craft, it was withdrawn from fishing and later converted in 1934 to carry a treasure-hunting expedition to Cocos Island.  

January 1926 - New North Sea wall was built, designed by the Borough Surveyor, Sidney Mobbs. 

            It was also round about this time that Normanston Park opened to the public as a recreation ground, occupying a substantial proportion of the old medieval West South Field – one of the parish’s three, communal, open fields used to grow crops. It is the only visually significant piece of Lowestoft’s medieval past which can be seen at first glance, with a sloping of the land from both north to south and west to east.

1927 - Single-decker bus service introduced for the summer months by Lowestoft Corporation, running from North Parade to the South Pier. Abandoned after just a few months, mainly as a result of it not being economically viable – but the vehicles themselves were retained. 

1928 - Former home and grounds of the local solicitor and renowned sportsman, Nicholas Everitt – occupying the south-eastern edge of Oulton’s broad – were purchased  by his friend Howard Hollingsworth (following his decease) and given to the Town for use as a public park. This was officially opened on 20 June1929 and has provided great enjoyment for local people and visitors alike ever since.

1929 - Co-operative Society took over the Maconochie food-processing factory on Waveney Drive, which eventually grew into the largest food-canning factory in Western Europe (post-World War Two). One of its best-known products was the famous Jennie brand of herrings canned in tomato sauce. An advert for the product, of 1957, showed Old Mother Hubbard at her empty cupboard, with helpful Dr. Smile recommending the herrings as a filler of the shelves!

            Single-decker buses (referred to in the previous entry) used to provide a half-hourly service along the existing tram route, thereby dropping more than a hint of what was to eventually happen to the trams themselves.

1920s-30s - Period of difficulty and gradual decline in the Lowestoft fishing industry in both drifting and trawling operations (particularly, the former) caused by the collapse of herring markets in Germany and Russia following the end of the First World War and by inconsistent levels of North Sea catches. Insecurity regarding the overall lack of regular remunerative work at sea caused some local fishermen to migrate to other English ports – notably, those where steam trawlers (rather than sailing smacks) operated. Hull and Grimsby attracted some experienced hands, as did both Milford Haven and Fleetwood.

1931 - Lowestoft tramway closed in two stages: the northern half in April and the southern one in May. The Corporation buses (maroon-brown and cream livery) took over and became very much a feature of the local urban landscape. They continued in operation until 1974, when Lowestoft Borough Council effectively voted itself out of existence on the formation of Waveney District Council. Three surviving models are held at the East Anglian Transport Museum in Carlton Colville: an AEC Regent II double-decker (1947) and two AEC Swift single-deckers (1969). 

1932-4 - St. Andrew’s Church built in the Roman Hill area to serve that part of the town, replacing an earlier corrugated-iron Mission Hall. Construction was made possible by the generosity and commitment of the Revd. Hawtrey Enraght (Rector of Lowestoft St. Margaret’s, 1931-38), who died on the 2nd of August during the final year of his incumbency. The brickwork, unfortunately, was not of the highest quality and had to be rendered over at some point during the post-war period. This has helped to give the church a distinctive appearance, assisted by its Modernist shape which can, in some ways, be seen as resembling the ground-floor storey of a block of flats.

8 May 1933 - So-called “Town Hall Raid”, or “Riot”, took place, A crowd of around 100 unemployed men, family members and other supporters (protesting about the withdrawal of the entitlement to free coal) gathered outside the building and forced entry to it – only to find a body of police waiting inside! Arrests were made, and a short term of remand in Norwich Prison followed for those taken. When they returned home to Lowestoft, some of them were bound over to keep the peace for a year in the local Magistrate’s Court, but six others had to stand trial at the Bury St, Edmunds Assizes on charges of riotous assembly. They, too, were bound over for a year, having been successfully represented by a barrister employed by the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement.

1934 - W.F. Cockrell, managing director of the East Anglian Ice Co., set up a company called LT 1934 Ltd. and started to create a fleet of small, 75-foot, diesel trawlers built in the nearby Richards Ironworks shipyard with Ruston Hornsby engines. The Ala (LT 347) was first, followed by the Eta (LT 57), the Willa (LT 33), the Gula (LT 179), the Rotha (LT 208), the Rewga (LT 234) and the Celita (LT 236). Known generally as the “Ice Company boats”, these vessels very much showed the shape of things to come after World War Two, when motor power rapidly superseded steam.

1936 - Accession of Edward VIII - one-year reign, prior to abdication.

1936 - Construction of the Odeon Cinema, designed by Andrew Mather, who also did work for the rival Regal company. He and Harry Weedon (Odeon’s main architect) produced a series of stylish Art Deco buildings with simple Modernist lines and eye-catching facades. The Lowestoft Odeon opened on 23 January 1937 and remained a popular place of local entertainment until its closure on 25 April 1979 – the last film screened being the James Bond movie Live and Let Die (something ironic there, perhaps, in the title). It was demolished soon after, in May, as part of the Britten Centre redevelopment. The facade could (and should) have been saved for its architectural value, both in visual and historical terms.             

1937 - Accession of George VI.

December 1938 - Kindertransport train arrived at Lowestoft Railway Station and a welcome message was published in the Lowestoft Journal on 17 December. The main headline read JEWISH REFUGEES AT LOWESTOFT and went on to reveal that 500 children had been housed at Pakefield Holiday Camp. They had landed at Harwich, as part of an organised scheme to get Jewish children out of Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland (in Czechoslovakia), following on from the anti-Semitic excesses of Kristillnacht (“the Night of Broken Glass”) – on 9-10 November – when Jewish homes and businesses were attacked, vandalised and destroyed on a massive scale. Nearly 10,000 children altogether were brought into Great Britain, to keep them safe – with only about half of them (it is estimated) able to see one or both parents again at the end of World War Two.

1939-45 - Second World War saw Lowestoft serving as the hub of patrolling and mine-sweeping duties, with the Headquarters (known as HMS Europa) based in Sparrow’s Nest Gardens. The town became one of the most heavily bombed places in the UK during 1940-2.

2 June 1940 - Evacuation to Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire of c. 3,500 Lowestoft children, as the German aerial bombardment of Great Britain began – part of a national scheme to remove young people from areas of high risk to safer places.  Something of a reversal occurred in June 1944, as the VI (“Doodlebug”) attacks on London started, with young people from there arriving in Lowestoft (as well as other communities) to escape from the flying bomb menace. 

13 January 1942 - Worst raid of the war, in terms of fatalities, when a Dornier Do 17 bomber dropped four bombs on the middle of the London Road North shopping area at 4.27 p.m. Fifty-one civilians were killed, along with eighteen Armed Forces personnel, and one victim was classed as “missing”. This event was sometimes referred to as the “Waller’s Raid”, because a restaurant of that name sustained the highest number of casualties.

1946 - Winsor & Newton Ltd. started an artists’ brush-making enterprise at the former Morse Brewery in Crown Street (now Crown Street West). A one-storey office annex built during the 1960s stands on the site of the former Porcelain Factory.

Summer 1947 - Work began on a replacement North Sea Wall. There is a constant battle in areas of soft coastline against the erosive action of the sea and its removal of land-mass. Lowestoft is no exception and it was made clear earlier (May 1545) just how much of the Denes has been lost during (approaching) the last 500 years – almost half a mile in extent. What the future holds cannot be predicted with any accuracy. 

1949-52 - Birds Eye opened a factory unit on the North Denes at Lowestoft, starting with the packaging of foodstuffs and then expanding into vegetable processing. Peas were a major part of this early on, with potatoes and other vegetables also featuring, and with chicken and red meat products coming in later on. Currently, the factory is perhaps best known for its potato waffles, which featured in a BBC Two programme, Inside the Factory, in February 2019.

1952 - Accession of Elizabeth II.

1952 - Pye Ltd. opened a factory in Lowestoft for the manufacture of television sets, moving that particular operation from a works in Cambridge. This enterprise closed down in 1982, following a take-over of Pye by Philips Electonics Ltd., and it was then acquired by the Japanese company, Sanyo, which greatly reduced the workforce. It, too, ceased to operate in the town in 2009.    

7 October 1952 - Royal Naval Patrol Service Memorial in Belle Vue Park was officially unveiled, commemorating nearly 2,400 men who lost their lives during World War Two. Lowestoft was chosen for the memorial as it was the Patrol Service’s main base during the conflict.

1953 - North Sea tidal surge of 31 January-1 February. Loss of the wooden motor trawler Guava (LT 73) overnight, with all eleven hands – including a sixteen-year-old “deckie-learner” on his first trip. No onshore deaths in Lowestoft, but a considerable amount of flood damage throughout the lower parts of the town.

Mid-1950s - Bally Shoes opened a manufacturing business in Lowestoft, specialising in high-quality footwear and using different premises during the early years. In 1960, a new factory opened in Raglan Street, built by R.G. Carter Ltd. of Norwich and having a very distinctive “wave-effect” serrated roofline. At its height, over 300 people were employed and the annual summer sale became something of a local retail legend. The company closed the premises down in 1997.

1955 - First stage of the clearance of the Beach Village, influenced by greatly reduced wartime and post-war habitation and the building of large local authority housing estates to the north and south of the town. Clearance finished by c. 1968 and the land then used for small-scale industrial activity.

1955-6 - Construction of a new South Pier Pavilion took place, its predecessor having sustained bomb damage during World War Two. It was designed by Edward Skipper & Associates, of Norwich – the said Edward being the son of G.J. (George) Skipper, who had designed the Royal Norfolk & Suffolk Yacht Club HQ over fifty years earlier (1902-3). The building was a good, mid-century, Modernist affair, with gently rounded roof and a bold, rectangular, six-storey observation block rising beside it. Constructed of steel and glass, the latter had its top level as an open-air viewing platform, providing a fine command of its surrounds, both out to sea and landwards. It was opened by the Duke of Edinburgh on 2 May 1956.

1962 - Ice Factory on Riverside Road closed down and a new one opened at the back of the Fish Market, near Battery Green Road.

1963 - Boulton & Paul opened a new joinery factory between Waveney Drive and the Inner Harbour, complete with large timber storage-sheds. The site was chosen so that wood coming in from Scandinavia and the Baltic did not have to enter Yarmouth and then proceed by river up to Norwich, to be offloaded there. Direct entry to Lowestoft saved both time and money. 

1964 - First Tesco supermarket opened on London Road North. This company, for a long time now the largest supermarket in the U.K., started from small beginnings. John Edward (”Jack”) Cohen of Whitechapel (1898-1979) – born Jacob Cohen – the son of an immigrant Jewish tailor from Poland (and a tailor by trade himself), established himself as a market trader in Hackney after World War One by purchasing £30 worth of NAAFI stock with his demobilisation money. The business flourished, with further stalls added and a wholesale groceries enterprise begun. In 1924, the Tesco brand name was created from the initials of a partner tea supplier – T.E. Stockwell and the first two letters of the Cohen surname. The first two Tesco stores opened in 1931 at Becontree (near Barking, East London) and at Burnt Oak (near Edgeware, North London). And, as they say, the rest is history!

14 February 1965 - Lowestoft motor trawler Boston Pionair (LT 432) lost with all nine hands in a storm, off Scarborough, on the 14th. Because of certain members of the same family groups being part of the crew, the Lowestoft trawling companies then made it policy not to have more than one member of any particular family group working on board the same vessel.

1966 - Final year of commercial herring-drifting from Lowestoft – catches having declined drastically because of over-fishing of the available stock. Trawling, only, became the town’s mainstay, with different modes of inshore activity as back-up. There were 151 vessels, altogether, registered in the port at this time.

13 April 1966 - Lowestoft Archaeological & Local History Society held its inaugural meeting at the College of Further Education. It produced its first Annual Report, for 1966-67, the following year and has gone on with this publication ever since. The Report has made an important contribution towards recording the archaeology and history of the Lowestoft area, over the years.

1966-68 - Construction of the St. Peter’s Court fifteen-storey block of flats, on land formerly occupied by older housing-stock in Chapel Street and Factory Street. It was demonstrated, at the time, that the existing dwellings could have been modernised, but probably not to the extent of providing as many domestic units as a high-rise building. People’s responses to the structure were divided as to its appearance and impact on the local urban landscape, but those who lived there generally had a favourable opinion of it. With its present, “light-touch”, exterior colour scheme, it sits comfortably in its surrounds without making too drastic a visual intrusion.  

May 1969 - Lowestoft’s second swing-bridge jammed in the open position (for shipping to pass) and its mechanism could not be repaired – leaving the town effectively cut in half. The Army put a Bailey bridge in position quickly for pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists to use, but it was some weeks or more before a temporary crossing for motor traffic could be constructed, so all vehicles had to go through Oulton Broad in the meantime (in either direction) in order to reach their destinations. Construction of a third permanent bridge (a two-leaf bascule) was eventually begun.

4 May 1970 - Lowestoft-Gt. Yarmouth railway line closed, with the Lowestoft North Station’s land eventually being developed for housing and named after the man responsible for its closure: Beeching Drive!

19 March 1972 - Opening of the bascule bridge, with a notional life-span of thirty years. It is still in operation, but has had its fair share of closures over the years while repair work is carried out or when periodic failure has occurred.

26 October 1972 - Royal assent given to the Local Government Act – legislation which would change national, time-honoured, governing structures in radical ways. The most notable of these, locally, was the annexation of Suffolk’s six northernmost parishes to the new Great Yarmouth District Council – thus making Belton, Bradwell, Burgh Castle, Fritton, part-Herringfleet (the St. Olaves sector) and Hopton all part of the county of Norfolk.

1 April 1974 - Abolition of the Municipal Borough of Lowestoft (together with its Council), when Waveney District Council came into being on implementation of the Local Government Act of 1972. A bad mistake, on the part of the town’s councillors not to form a successor parish council, which has cost the community dear. Re-establishment of the Town Council in 2017 was a step in the right direction, with getting it back into the Town Hall now a priority.

            As an afterthought (and as one at the time, also): was the implementation of this piece of legislation perhaps intended as some kind of joke at the public’s expense – given the particular day, of all days, that it was introduced?  

The decision was taken to go no further, but the following observations will be made.  

1. The continuing decline in large-scale fishing activity, throughout the 1980s and 90s (with the end of large-scale trawling occurring just after the Millennium) was only partly offset by converted trawlers being used on stand-by duties for North Sea oil and gas platforms. It took up some of the employment slack caused by fishing’s decline, but by no means all of it. Nor did the jobs available on board supply vessels fully compensate.

2. It remains to be seen whether, or not, the renewable energy industry will make up for what the town lost during the same period. Given the scale of what was lost, it seems doubtful that it will.

3. During the 1980s and 90s, the fishing industry collapsed and almost disappeared, both at sea and on shore; two large shipyards closed, as did two major food-processing factories; a firm which fitted bus bodies onto the chassis ceased to operate; a company which made televisions down-sized, changed hands and eventually finished manufacturing; and a well-known shoe manufacturing enterprise also terminated its operation. This led to something like 5,000 jobs being lost (not all of them in town, of course), with a “knock-on” effect into smaller ancillary and support industries which cannot even be guessed at.

CREDIT:David Butcher