Netherlands Trip - Ipswich      26th June:

    I got chatting with an elderly chap from a nearby craft, who was carrying a carton of milk and a Times newspaper.
    "Did you buy them down here or did you walk up to the village?" I asked the man.
    "Neither, I drove up to the village," he informed me. "It's a long walk."
    "I know, we've done it before in order to get a meal at the Rose," I replied.
    I related the saga of the previous night at the Bristol Arms. He was not surprised.
    "The Shipwreck, Bristol Arms and the Rose open at different times, none are permanently open," he told me. He needed fuel for his boat, and the fuel pontoon at Shotley had recently been repaired. He considered for the time being it would be wiser to head up to Ipswich for fuel.

Harwich

Marsk Ship in Felixstowe

    The Dutch sailors departed, then the Times reader. We followed their example, and headed up the River Orwell towards Ipswich where we knew we could buy provisions. Our sail up the Orwell started well, the wind being sharp and gusty at times, and constantly changing direction.
    We fought our way past the 208-acre Trimley Marshes Reserve, opened in 1989 and run by the Suffolk Wildfowl Trust. This was financed by the Felixstowe Dock Company on Trinity College land in order to get permission to fill in the Fagbury mudflats and extend the Trinity Terminal. The ooze and saltings on the Orwell are internationally important as the over winter-feeding ground for waders and wildfowl from the Arctic and subarctic.

Vessel at Anchor on the Orwell

    Before Fagbury Point marshes were walled in, the vast mud flats here had a high build-up of salt due to the tidal water evaporation. On high spring tides the very salty water was collected and boiled to produce salt. The sites of the Roman salt works are on the edge of the high ground while medieval salt pans were on the saltings.
    Many of the wet meadows are managed by the traditional method of grazing with cattle. Others are grazed with sheep and by wigeon and geese during the winter months. The water levels are controlled by a system of sluices. Thus, the wet conditions can be maintained for wintering wildfowl including wigeon and brent goose and then for breeding waders such as redshank, avocet, oystercatcher and black-tailed godwit. In the spring and autumn, the muddy margins are excellent feeding grounds for migrating waders, including common sandpiper, curlew sandpiper and greenshank.
    Once we turned a bend near Levington we were forced to beat. The narrow channel combined with the gusty wind was making this a nightmare. Thus, we abandoned the sailing and proceeded under engine power.
    After passing Levington Creek, the characterful Pin Mill came into view. Pin Mill probably grew up as a station for pilot boats, close to the dangerous mud banks above Downham Reach. The 17th century Butt and Oyster inn has connections with smuggling and the books of Arthur Ransome. Pin Mill Hard appears to have been a man-made landing place. During WWII the Royal Navy had 6 MTBs operating from the hard and there were 'degaussing' ships and fishing boats in Butterman's Bay. Butterman's Bay was named after the old 'butter rigged' schooners which seem to have been the first vessels to be off loaded while anchored here. The buoys for ocean going ships were screwed into the river bed in 1878. The last ship was discharged in Butterman's Bay in 1939, just after WWII started. Before the river was dredged Pin Mill was the main landing place below Ipswich. Ships outward bound or those returning home from a voyage stopped here to fill up their fresh water barrels. The hamlet of Pin Mill is part of Chelmondiston. The hamlet in the sheltered valley took its name from a medieval fulling (cloth making) mill which stood in the valley bottom. The water to drive the mill was stored in a pond or 'pen', thus the name Pin Mill was a corruption of pen mill. There was a Butt and Oyster at Pin Mill in 1546. Butt comes from the Suffolk word for a flounder.

Passing Pin Mill

    Passing Pin Mill and its anchorage, high up on the bank beyond the trees stood Woolverstone Hall, built in 1776 by William Berners. His mother was a descendant of Cromwell. The Berners family owned Woolverstone Hall Estate until 1937. Local folk lore tells the tale of William Berners' pet monkeys raising the alarm when Woolverstone Hall caught fire enabling the family to escape unharmed. Following this, Berners had images and statues of monkeys made to adorn the Woolverstone Hall estate. Before 1900 the Berners kept a schooner and then the steam launch Undine off the Cat House Hard. Once a year a barge brought coal from the north of England to the Hard for Woolverstone Hall. During WWII the Hall became HMS Woolverstone where training took place for the D Day landing. A concrete landing hard was built for both landing craft and the mock landing craft which were moored in the river to make the Germans believe that the D Day landing was coming from the east coast. Because of the considerable build-up of part of the D Day invasion fleet in the Orwell the river was closed to the public. The Hall is now the home of Ipswich High School for Girls.
    On the opposite shore lay Pretyman's Hard, by Nacton Quay, which was once the landing place for Orwell Park house. When the royal yacht Britannia was attending the Harwich Regatta King George V came up by launch and landed here. He then went through the water gate and up to the big house to have lunch with the Pretymans.
    The water reservoir at Potter's Point was built in about 1890 by E.G. Pretyman, owner of the Orwell Park Estate. To get to his yacht Pilgrim at low tide, Pretyman sat in a boat on the mud, correctly dressed in yachting attire with his two boatmen, in front of the reservoir. On the command "Now!" the reservoir gate was opened and the two men rowed furiously on the wave of water to reach the river. After G.M.T. Pretyman took over the estate in 1930 he turned the reservoir into a swimming pool, but it was not used after the 1953 Floods washed the pavilion away.
    The brick culverts here were to let salt water into the oyster purification beds which were part of the Ipswich Oyster Company started by Colonel Tomline. This short-lived venture closed in 1886 and later the oyster farm was let by E.G. Pretyman to a Colchester company who took the oysters away by horse and cart until they gave up in about 1910.
    Nacton holds another claim to fame. Margaret Catchpole was born in 1762 in the village of Nacton near Ipswich. In 1793 she found employment in the household of John and Elizabeth Cobbold, who lived at Cliff House, Ipswich, as a nurse & cook; a position she held until 1795. It was during this time that she learned to read and write.
    Catchpole's boyfriend was a smuggler named William Laud, who was a wanted man after shooting another of Margaret's admirers, John Barry. In May 1797, when she found out that Laud was in London, Margaret stole a horse from her former employers and rode the 70 miles or so to London to meet him. On arrival, however, she was arrested and tried for theft at the Suffolk Summer Assizes at Bury St. Edmunds. Initially sentenced to death, her sentence was commuted to seven years imprisonment at the intercession of the Cobbolds, from whom she had stolen the horse.
    For three years she seems to have been a model prisoner, until in 1800 she escaped from Ipswich gaol by scaling a 22 ft wall using a clothes line, having heard that Will Laud was waiting for her; their intention being to go to Holland. They were apprehended, however, with Laud being shot dead and Margaret being recaptured. Tried for gaol breaking and once more sentenced to death, her punishment was this time commuted to transportation to Australia.
    Arriving in New South Wales in 1801, she at first found employment as a servant; later becoming a midwife as well as keeping a small farm. Although pardoned in 1814, she never returned to England. She died of influenza in 1819 and is buried in Richmond NSW (near Sydney, around 450 miles south of Ipswich, Queensland).

Black Cat House

    Shortly after Pin Mill lay two marinas side by side. Curiously, the Royal Harwich Yacht Club is based by Woolverstone Marina. On the bank above the marina is the Cat House, a Georgian Gothic cottage, which was a popular haunt for river smugglers. Legend has it a silhouette of a cat was placed in the window as a signal to warn that the authorities had been alerted.

    In the distance the Orwell Bridge gracefully arced across the river. To our right, an old deep-water channel had once existed at King John's Ness below Pond Hall. It was because of this deep water that John Barnard, who had one of the St Clements shipyards, moved here after he won a contract to build large men of war for the Admiralty. He built three men of war, the largest being the 854-ton HMS Hampshire in 1741.

"Launch of a Fourth Rate on the Orwell" by John Cleveley the Elder

    A painting by John Cleveley the Elder entitled "Launch of a Fourth Rate on the Orwell", depicts John Barnard's Hampshire being built at King John's Ness. Also in the picture are two other ships built by Barnard, namely the Biddeford, shown being towed down to Harwich to be rigged out, and the Granado.
    Freston Tower to our left has various claims for construction dates, ranging from the 15th to 17th centuries, though and the current owner suggests the tower "was built in 1578 by a wealthy Ipswich merchant called Thomas Gooding". On the shores below the tower, the 1953 floods revealed 13th/14th century kilns, which were used for creating peg tiles.
    At the start of the Freston Hill, a thousand-year-old lane leads down to Stumpy Lane Wharf, which existed in 1757. The 19th century farm wharf was in ruins by WWII when a slipway and base was built here for army landing craft.
    The road to Shotley skirts Red Gate Hard, a place where barges loaded goods from the Wherstead farms until about 1925. A ferry once crossed from here over to Pond Hall.
    And then we were gliding below Orwell Bridge, whose construction commenced in October 1979 and was completed in December 1982. Built on pilings sunk 40m into the river bottom, the bridge has a main span of 190m which, at the time of its construction, was the longest pre-stressed concrete span in use. The total length is 1,287m from Wherstead to the site of the former Ipswich Airport. The width is 24m with an air draft of 43m. The bridge is constructed of a pair of continuous concrete box girders with expansion joints that allow for expansion and contraction.
    Not far past the bridge, by Bourne Bridge, a dock was cut in front of the Ostrich (now the Oyster Reach, and incidentally where Rosie and I had our wedding meal with a small group of family and friends) in 1787 to load trees felled in Wherstead Park. Until about 1910 barges brought London muck for the farms and went out with stackie freights of straw and hay. Up until 1938 the barge Twilight came once a year to load chestnut stakes. The Long Hard to the south of Ostrich Creek was used by Dutch barges before 1914 to unload cheese to avoid paying harbour dues.
    The port of Ipswich was quite busy. A large gravel works stood on the left bank, not as large as its Ostend equivalent, and the right bank contained several ships having ballast removed, grain poured in, and powdered cement poured in to mention a few.
    The lock to the inner basin was no problem and soon we were into the Haven Marina. I checked into the harbour master's office, where a squat fellow with unruly hair and a strong Suffolk accent was in heated debate with the young receptionist.
    "Well, my mate, he say there be plenty of room on pontoon C for my boat," he blurted out.
    "I'm sorry, but you can't use pontoon C," replied the exasperated woman.
    "Well, thar's a funny thing. He say I can. Plenty o' room he say," he insisted.
    This loop repeated itself a few times before he went off, presumably to find his friend. I later discovered he was trying to berth on the fuel pontoon.
    Thankfully our berth allocation was totally painless. I returned to Duonita, and had a chat with the woman on the motor boat next to us; her husband had helped us with our lines when we arrived. They were on a three-week tour around the East Anglian coast, and had set off from Portsmouth, and stopped of an Eastbourne on the way. Sadly, the fuel they took on board there must have been contaminated, since their engine had hiccupped all the way from there. Their fuel had since been polished, but they were now waiting for new fuel filters. "It could be three weeks," they had been told by a marine engineer.
    At last, we could say we had arrived into Ipswich, the town where I had been living for the last 51 years. The town had an interesting past - a time to reflect on it.
    The River Gipping enters the town at Handford Bridge, the area around which the Gipping at one time split up into several channels which wound through a delta or flood plain of marshland to enter the tidal Orwell at several points. The largest of these Gipping channels ran through the Portman Road and Princes Street to link up with the tidal water at Stoke Bridge. In the 19th century the Gipping marshes were bought by developers and built over. That part of the Gipping was piped underground while most of the Gipping was diverted into the top of the tidal Orwell. When the spiral underground carpark was being dug out, an underground channel was broken into, resulting in much flooding. The Handford water mill worked where the present Alderman Canal ends until about 1888, and lower down at Stoke, the Stoke Mill, a tide mill, worked until around 1850.
    The River Orwell commences at Stoke Bridge, though the sea reaches up as far as the Handford Sea Lock. The name Orwell appears to be Anglo Saxon, meaning 'river near the shore'.
    The Romans appear to have had estates all around the upper reaches of the Orwell, but Coddenham was the only Roman town in the Gipping valley. It was the Anglo Saxons who started a settlement around 600AD on either side of the ford linking Stoke to the main part of Ipswich. The name probably came from 'Gippswic' meaning the Gipping Market, and it was as a market centre that Ipswich first took shape.
    Traces of early Saxon quays, little more than simple wicker revetments, were excavated along the shore line that followed the present College Street and Key Street. The medieval town of Ipswich continued to grow and ships from the Orwell quays sailed all over northern Europe and as far south as Spain. As ships steadily increased in size there was a need to create quays in deeper water so the process of reclaiming the mudflats and pushing the quay frontage into deeper water began.
    Ipswich became a self-governing borough by a charter granted by King John in 1199. This charter effectively gave the River Orwell to the people of Ipswich for all time, making it one of the few British rivers which does not still belong to the Crown.
    Ipswich trailed Dunwich in 1279 when it had thirty great ships to the latter's eighty. With Dunwich's decline in the Middle Ages the town built up a sizeable fleet. Its facilities were such that in the 14th century Edward III and the Black Prince fitted out 500 ships here for the Calais expedition.
    In 1500 it became a King's Port, one of only eleven leading ports to enjoy trading privileges. By the Elizabethan era, when England was starting to create the first overseas empire, Ipswich began to make its name as a shipbuilding centre. It was called 'the shipyard of the Thames' and was launching 10-12 new ships every year, all built in good Suffolk oak. By 1673 Ipswich was turning out around twenty new ships a year.

"1753 View from Stoke Hill" by John Cleveley

    However, Ipswich slipped into a decline during the 18th century; the silting beside the quays coupled with the increasing size of ships made the port difficult to reach. The practice of off-loading ships anchored in the Downham Reach just above Woolverstone increased, but was an expensive practice. There was talk of building a new port in Downham Reach, but the River Commissioners, who met for the first time in 1805, decided to hire a gang of labourers to dig away the mud which was blocking the channel to Ipswich. Progress by hand labour was slow, so a subscription was raised to build a 'steam dredging engine'. The thousands of tons of spoil were used to fill in the low ground in Stoke and St Clements.
    The deepening of the channel to Ipswich did not save the town's shipbuilding industry. Jabez Bayley started to lose money on his ventures from the Halifax Yard on the Wherstead Road in the early 19th century. The Elizabethan shipbuilding area of St Clements, which had a slipway just south of Coprolite Street, was the last yard to build wooden ships for the ocean trade, and this ended with the brigantine Clementine from William Bayley's yard in 1885. After this Bayley and the other Ipswich yards just built wooden sailing barges and other small craft.
    Meanwhile, business people were no longer content with a dredged channel with 12ft of water, they wanted the actual port improved. In 1836 a meeting was held, which included the Ransome brothers and John Chevallier Cobbold, and it was agreed that a wet dock should be built at Ipswich so that ships could be floated away at the quays and larger vessels could use the port. Thomas Palmer was commissioned to create a non-tidal dock by damming up the old channel, fitting a lock, and digging a new channel, the New Cut, through the low land at Stoke to allow the fresh water from the Gipping to drain out that way. In 1842, the first ship, the trading sloop Director owned by John Cobbold, left through the lock gates loaded with grain. When it was opened, this was the largest enclosed wet dock in Britain. The old Customs House, built in 1844, proudly stands on the Common Quay.
    Apart from giving access to world trade and shipbuilding, the Orwell provided the town with another lucrative industry during the 19th century, coprolite. This fossilised animal dung was dug up in great quantities along the Orwell-Deben peninsula and ground down to form a fertiliser. By 1877, 10,000 tons were being shipped each year. The industry is remembered in Coprolite Street.
    The size of ocean-going ships continued to grow, and the Dock Commissioners laid buoys in Butterman's Bay allowing them to discharge some of their freight before going up to Ipswich. Decades were spent discussing an alternative to the Butterman's Bay buoys, and it was not until the 1920s that they actually built Cliff Quay. Later, the West Bank ferry and container terminal was built on the Wherstead Road side of the river. Once a year the river is dredged using a survey vessel with sonar to measure how deep the water is coming up the estuary. The depth is kept at 5.6 metres when the tide is out and at high tide there is usually between 3 to 4 metres more water in the river.
    Today, the bulk of commercial shipping berth on Cliff Quay and the West Bank terminal. The Port of Ipswich has 1640m of quay on the river below the Ipswich Wet Dock and 64,000 square metres of covered storage. The port's cargo is generally raw materials such as timber, cement, grain, fertiliser, animal feeds, aggregates, liquid bulks, containers and roll on/roll off container traffic.
    Only a timber ship now regularly enters the wet dock to deliver timber. The10.60 hectares wet dock is primarily used by leisure vessels with berth for 385 vessels. The water level is kept at 6.4m.
    I wandered ashore to use the facilities, and noticed a large crowd sitting outside the Last Anchor bar/restaurant by the marina. On my return I commented to an elderly lady who was returning from her shower, "Must be a big yacht reunion," nodding towards the large group.
    "Oh, me and my husband will be up there with them in a short while. Most of them know each other, but this will be our first time with them."
    "Are you all from the same marina, or do you all have similar vessels?" I enquired.
    "No, but we all bought yachts from the Norfolk Yachting Agency, and they organise these big get togethers. We keep our boat at Great Yarmouth, but the boats come from many marinas in Norfolk."
    I thanked the lady for enlightening me, and she boarded her vessel to dry her hair.
    Rex and I headed off to Tesco Express on the other side of the harbour basin, and purchased enough provisions to see us out for the rest of the trip. On our way back we admired the determination of a gull that dropped a mussel from 3m onto the road, pick it up and repeat the process until it managed to gain access to the juicy contents within the shell.
    In the evening we dined in the Last Anchor. The food was amazingly good, in fact so good that Rex went and personally congratulated the chef. The young waitress who served us was a charm. We discovered it was her third day in the job. We informed her lords and masters that she had done a splendid job too.
    In one of Rex's crafty fag breaks, he had spotted three signs adjacent to each other, all just centimetres apart, and all conflicting each other. Well, this is Ipswich after all.

Smoking Conflicts, All Centimtres Apart

    On the way back to Duonita we spotted a large vessel under tarpaulin, obviously being restored. We learned it was Glala, a classic motor yacht built by A.R Luke before the First World War. She had had an eventful history that included service with the Royal Navy and the National Fire Service in the 1940s.
    Glala started life as 'Doris' in 1915, and was built on the River Hamble near Southampton. Doris was commissioned by a wealthy Argentinean diplomat, Aaron de Anchorena, to cruise the Amazon. At the time, it was among the first diesel motor boats, featuring twin-screw propulsion and a wooden design. It changed hands numerous times, counting industrialist Sir William Verdon-Smith and MP Ronald Nall-Cain among its owners. But arguably its most famous former master was Sir Alan Cobham, who christened it Glala, by combining the names of himself and his wife, Gladys.

Glala on the Eve of War 1939

    Engineering firm AEC bought Glala in 1938, before it was requisitioned by the War Department at the onset of the Second World War in 1939. She started the war as a harbour defence vessel in Sheerness and patrolled the Thames estuary. However, the vessel's finest hour was during Dunkirk in 1940. Glala made a number of trips during the evacuations, and came back home loaded with men from France.
    Since 2017, Glala has been under the ownership of Kathy Norris and Andrew Robson. The opportunity to own a beautiful and unique Edwardian motor yacht, a vessel in the National Historic Fleet and one of the largest of the Dunkirk little ships, was too good to pass up. Restoration work is still ongoing.