Memory Lane 1 – Lavenham

On a recent visit to England, Dinah and I spent an afternoon in the south Suffolk countryside with M and B, trying to track down places where Mum, Dad, or their parents had once lived. It was a clear and very cold afternoon, and our trip took us to Long Melford and Lavenham.

Although I knew about some of these places before, I wasn’t certain of any of the addresses, but having spent a few days during the holiday going through old letters and photographs, we had a little more of a lead, with some definite street names and house numbers to look for.

We started in Long Melford, and had some success, but I’m going to start in Lavenham. I know Dad was born and lived in Prentice Street, a fairly steeply sloping street leading off the Market Square. The photo above was taken there – on the back it says “Harold, 1927, 21 Prentice Street”. He would have been 4 years old. The address matches that on census records, and if the street numbering hasn’t changed, this is the house. The family still lived here in 1939.

Dad’s eldest sister was 21 when he was born, so it’s likely that some of the older brothers and sisters had moved out of this house by the time Dad was born in 1923, but there were still quite a few children sharing one room.

Here’s Dad at the wedding of one his sisters, Alice. She’s holding her father’s arm, and this is a rare photo of him. The date is mid-1930s, so Dad would have been around 12 years old, and Grandad in his fifties. I think the couple behind them are auntie Olive and her husband, Bernard. Alice had met her husband, Roy, in London, where he was a chauffeur and she was a chambermaid. She later returned to Lavenham, during the war, to look after her father.

The other house we wanted to look at was 35 Market Place in Lavenham, which was Dad’s address on his marriage certificate in 1960. We think his sister Alice was the householder, but we don’t know if she owned the house. Certainly from my childhood I remember that we used a shed in the garden of 35 Market Place as a base for the Sunday newspaper rounds, and Dad always seemed very at home there. That shed now appears to be a beautifully converted little house.

We had a lovely walk around the Market Square under a spectacular sunset.

Finally, for this rather scattered post, a picture of my grandad in his finery as Town Crier in Lavenham. Perhaps this was a ceremonial position, as he held it in the late 40s, by which time there were telephones, wirelesses, and even a few televisions.

Lavenham’s fortunes have soared in the last 50 years but for most of Dad’s life it was a poor village with few opportunities, despite its past glories as the centre of the wool trade. https://www.discoverbritainstowns.co.uk/culture/cathedral/lavenham-suffolk-timbered/