ALONG BRITAIN’S EASTERN SHORES

Evening Star, Issue 23687, 21 September 1940, Page 3

ALONG BRITAIN’S EASTERN SHORES

LAND OF GREAT MEMORIES [Written by L.R., for tbo ‘ Evening Star.’] England is continually in all our hearts during tlic.se days of trial, and the thoughts of those of us who were born there or have visited her go winging over the dividing seas to the places we loved best. We draw mental pictures of those places as they were when we last saw them, and try to visualise them under war conditions. It is difficult to accustom oneself to the thought that England’s peaceful country lanes bristle with anti-aircraft guns, or to picture a sandbagged London.

1 find myself mentally wandering back to the east coast, and particularly that portion of it known as East Anglia, for it was there that I spent my childhood. I picture again miles of desolate marshes carpeted with purple sea lavender and pink thrift, leading down to the marram hills which break the violence of the North Sea’s “ white horses.” 1 see vast flint churches dominating clusters of red-tiled or reedthatched flint cottages set .among rolling acres of wheat and barley, or memory-wander • through the winding, history-steeped streets of Norwich, a city noted for its numerous churches, its Christmas cattle show, and the manufacture of boots and shoes, mustard, and agricultural machinery. The fame of that machinery travelled far even in less hurried times, for loaning against the wall of the Old Colonists’ Museum, Auckland, is the first plough used in New Zealand on May 30, 1830. It once belonged to a Mr Kemp, and is proudly marked “ Made in Norwich, Norfolk. England.” All England’s shores are full pf history, but the East Anglian coast began piling it up during the Roman occupation, when, to cope with sea raiders, whose attacks became a serious menace to peaceful settlement in the third century, the Romans built a series of coastal ports stretching from the Wash to the Solent. Many traces of that occupation remain to this day, and frequently Roman coins and pieces of pottery are ploughed up in Norfolk fields. Buffeted by an icy north-east wind, East Anglia is a laud of terrifically cold winters, bracing springs, hot summers, and beautiful autumns. Always there is a strange atmosphere of old loneliness, especially among the broads and on those marshes where the shrieks of the wheeling sea birds add to the eeriness at dusk. It is strange that these shores should be so lonely now, for away back in the Middle Ages the east coast was the busy commercial coast of England, and an appropriate name for East Anglia would have been “ the wool coast.” From Saxon times until the fourteenth century the principal trade was that of exporting wool to the Continent, particularly Flanders, where it was made into cloth and sold back to England. This trade, and also fishing in the North Sea, were monopolised by a German trading group known as the Hanseatic League of tree German cities, on the shores of the North Sea and the Baltic, which was formed for the protection of commerce against pirates and robbers, and controlled the overland route through Poland and Russia to Persia and the Middle. East. So powerful did this league of merchants become that, coupled with the peaceful penetration of aliens, it threatened the independence of the economic life of the country and began to bo resented by Englishmen. Eventually, in the sixteenth century, a band of English merchants put their heads together, called themselves “ the English Merchant Venturers,” and formed joint stock companies to undertake voyages to Russian ports, and the Hanse merchants were sent packing, being expelled from the country by order of Queen Elizabeth. Norwich remained the centre of the weaving trade from about 1300 to 1833, when the power looms made their appearance and rang the death knell of hand-weaving. Many names in this old city still remain to remind one of those days. There are, for instance, the Madclermarkct and the Woolsack Inn, and in many villages throughout Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex the actual houses built by the Flemish weavers still stand Worsted, in Norfolk, of course, was the manufacturing centre of the fabric of that name.

East Anglia has produced its artistic and literary notables, too. Both John Crome and Cotmau, the landscape painters, wore born in, and painted their masterpieces around Norwich. East Borgholt produced Constable, and Gainsborough was bora hi the Essex village of Sudbury. Edward Fitzgerald translated the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam among the boatmen at Woodbridge, in Suffolk, while his contemporary and friend, George Borrow, came into the, world in a Norfolk village bearing the quaint name of Dumpling Green. Equally quaint were George’s habits, and he must have been a great trial to bis wife, who is reputed to have said, Ab ! George is a good man, but he is a strange creature. Do you know, lie will say to me after ' breakfast, “ Mary, I am going for a walk,” and then I do not see anything more of him for three months.” But though the erratic Borrow wandered far and wide, in England and on the Continent, ho always retraced his footsteps to East Anglia, and produced his two most notable hooks. ‘ Luvengro ’ and ‘ The Bible in Spain.’ in the summerhouse of his home at Onltoii Broad. The most famous of East Anglia’s sons, Horatio Nelson, I have left until last, for that name brings back a flood of mental pictures. Trafalgar Square, in the “ heart of the Empire,” with the Admiral atop of his column, gazing serenely over the Thames; the vastness of St. Paul’s Cathedral, where he is buried in the crypt; Portsmouth, and a bronzed sailor enthusiastically conducting a crowd of sightseers over the Victory; and, dearest of all memories of childhood, rambles through Thorpo meadows by a meadow-sweet and wil-low-herb fringed river to the little village whore ho was born in 1758. Burnham Thorpe is still just a sleepy hamlet; its flint cottages lie scattered amid the fields very much as they were in the days when Nelson’s father was rector there. The old rectory has gone, but the old church remains. Over all is an air of peaco-To-dav the peace of that village and hundreds like it is threatefied. and the east coast is once again, as in the time of the Romans, fortified to cope with potential sea invasion. To he sure, there is the added menace of air attack, also, hut 1 fancy parachutists would meet with scant courtesy in this quarter of Britain, for its sons and daughters all have, like Nelson, an abounding love for England, and once again the signal will he hoisted, “England expects every man will do his duty.”-