Joe and Phyl in Ipswich 1932-34
1932: Vincent Helgia 'Joe' Knott and Phyllis Alice Page marry, and move to Ipswich. Read on...
 |
In 1931, Joe Knott left his native Rochester in Kent looking for work. He worked on road-building projects in Yorkshire where he met Arthur Page, the brother of his future wife Phyllis. Arthur was another migrant worker, and Joe came back with him to East Anglia, where he met my grandmother. The photograph of them on the left was taken in Ely on the 24th April 1932. Joe went to work for British Sugar at Cantley in east Norfolk, but he married Phyllis at Ely Register Office on 15th August 1932, when he was 24 and she was just 19. Joe's address was 9 Council Cottages Cantley. They went to live in Cantley, but a few months later in the autumn of 1932 they moved to Ipswich.The fertiliser manufacturers Fison, Packard & Prentice were building a new factory on Cliff Road, Ipswich. It would cost £200,000, and have a 75,000 ton capacity. Work began on the factory in the late summer of 1932. Joe headed south. He lodged in rooms in Tacket Street, probably above the Brand & Son department store - they let rooms to the labouring and trade classes. He then found more permanent lodgings for them both in Cavendish Street, the same street that I would live in when I moved to Ipswich in 1985, and Phyl joined him there. More than half a century later, Phyl wrote to me in a letter that Grandad and I lived in Ipswich for a short time when we were first married but I expect it has changed a lot during the past fifty three years. We also lived in Cavendish Street at first, Grandad was helping to build a factory for Fisons. Later we moved to the Gainsborough estate where Aunt Julie was born. I remember the fare to Felixstowe was 9d in old money. Those were the days Simon when family's could live on less than £2 a week. I remember that in my early days in Ipswich I used to pass a church that played a hymn every hour on the hour on the church clock. The house (so Phyl told me) was near the bottom of Cavendish Street, near to the White Elm public house and nearly opposite the school. However, the lower part of Cavendish Street was partly destroyed by bombing in the Second World War, and the surviving houses were demolished, probably in the 1960s, although the pub building itself survived to the time I lived further up the street in the 1980s. The former school is still there today. 1932 became 1933, and early in the new year they moved to 20 Fletcher Road, a council house on the new Gainsborough estate. This house still survives today. The Gainsborough estate was under construction in the 1930s by Ipswich Borough Council as slum clearance replacement, and Joe and Phyl may well have been the first residents of this particular house. The fact that they moved to a council house suggests to me that my grandparents had plans to settle in Ipswich. The 1930s were a hard time for jobs, and they would have been grateful for the security. Their first child, a girl, was born at the Fletcher Road house, and was baptised in the first All Hallows church on Landseer Road on April 23rd 1933. But it seems that once the factory was complete, there was no more work to be had. Perhaps my grandfather found a temporary labouring job with one or other of the big Ipswich companies - Ransomes, Cranes, Tolly Cobbold, Pauls and Cranfields employed tens of thousands of workers between them, and Ipswich was one of the main industrial towns in the southern half of England. But eventually they decided that Ipswich did not have a future to offer them. Perhaps my grandmother was homesick for Ely. She came from a close-knit family, and had never left the town before her marriage. |
My grandparents headed
back to Ely, where my grandfather got a job working for
the sugar beet processing factory there. They would
remain in Ely for the rest of their lives, living at 25
Willow Walk until 1947, and then 37 Chief's Street. My
grandmother died in 1990, and my grandfather died in
1996.
Fison's Cliff Road factory has since closed. There was a
serious fire in 1983 which destroyed much of the plant,
and then the building itself was demolished in the late
1980s. It is now a lorry depot with zonal intended use as
a site for apartments, although the recession has put
that on hold. The factory site is at the bottom of the
road where I live now - I could walk to it in five
minutes from the seat I sit in as I type this. As I cycle
to work each morning, I imagine my grandfather cycling in
the opposite direction, a cigarette hanging out of his
mouth no doubt.
The photographs below show some of the places known to my grandparents in Ipswich as they were in the 1930s, and some as they are today. Click on the photos to see enlarged versions.
|
