In the Ipswich Journal of 27 May 1721 there appeared the following plea from a letter writer: “Pray resolve me in your next Week’s Paper, whether there be any such Thing in Nature as Mermen and Mermaids, I being not yet satisfied in the verity thereof, notwithstanding the Reports of Seamen and others.” The vexed reader of the Ipswich Journal may well have believed in mermaids, possibly because his parents had told him from an early age to believe in mermaids (as they might convince their infants to believe in Father Christmas today). His parents would have a very practical reason for doing so, as we will see.
MIND THE MERMAIDS
With the possible exception of the Orford “merman” found by fishermen off the coast at Orford Ness and described by mediæval chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall (FT318:28-33), Suffolk’s merfolk were all female – mermaids rather than mermen. And “Reports of Seamen” didn’t feature in Suffolk mermaid traditions. The Orford merman – possibly just a human gone feral – was the only merperson found off the coast, as all the Suffolk mermaids were freshwater specimens, found in the county’s rivers, lakes, wells, pools and even its drainage ditches.
Rendlesham had a “Mermaid’s Pond,” also known as the S-pond, as it was shaped like a letter “S”. A reader of the in the 1870s – a man who wrote to the newspaper describing his childhood there some 50 years earlier – recalled reader who was a boy back in 1814 strayed too near the edge of the pond, “our nursemaid would call out to us not to go so near ‘lest the mermaid should come’” and hook him and his playmates in with a crome fork, which was a sort of rake with curved teeth, used as a muckraker.
