King's Lynn From Old Photographs

By Robert Pols

The Norfolk town of King’s Lynn was one of the country’s most important ports in the Middle Ages. Although it declined with the growth of the Atlantic trade in later centuries, it continued to thrive as a port and its historical prosperity is still evident in many remarkable buildings that have survived. Today, many areas of the town are being regenerated and King’s Lynn is the largest centre of population in West Norfolk.In this fascinating collection of images from the Victorian and Edwardian eras, with some later examples up to the 1920s and 1930s, author Robert Pols has collected the work of local photographers, many identified by name, to produce a portrait of King’s Lynn in the past. Represented are not only the buildings of this ancient borough, but daily life, including work, shopping, health, education and travelling, as well as its links to the sea. Pastimes and pleasures are shown, as are public events and local people as recorded by the town’s professional photographers. Significant national events also left their mark on King’s Lynn, not least its royal connections and times of war. King’s Lynn From Old Photographs provides an insight into the town’s history, and will interest both long-term residents and first-time visitors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Amberley Publishing
• Release date: Nov 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781445679945

Book preview

Introduction

King’s Lynn has received a mixed press. In the eighteenth century, Fanny Burney, novelist and diarist, wrote, ‘A Country Town is my detestation. … I am so sick of the ceremony and fuss of these fal-lal people! … Abominable Lynn!’ Novelist Daniel Defoe, however, thought it ‘a beautiful, well built and well situated town … abounding in good company’. In the 1960s, architectural writer Nikolaus Pevsner judged it ‘a delightful little town’, but soon after, when the developers had been at work, poet Sir John Betjeman took one horrified look at the supposedly improved shopping centre and refused to enter it.

Agreeing with Defoe and Pevsner is easy for those who are fond of the town, and many of them lament with Betjeman the redevelopments of the late 1960s. It is with Fanny Burney that they part company, but that is a matter of taste. King’s Lynn is undeniably a country town, and Fanny Burney was captivated by London and ambitious to sample life at court. She eventually got her wish, but whether being chased through Kew Gardens by a mad king is really much more desirable than living in a country town is open to discussion.

In fact, King’s Lynn inspires affection for what it is, appreciation for what it has preserved, and sadness for what it has let go. That is nothing new. The town’s Victorian and Edwardian inhabitants felt exactly the same way. Already they were aware both of a preserved heritage and of a lost past. Remarkably, despite accusations (then and now) of civic vandalism, much evidence of what previous generations loved is still to be seen today. King’s Lynn was, and is, a town full of history you can see and touch. It began life as Linn (or Lin, or Lenne), a settlement on the edge of a large tidal lake; in the thirteenth century it became Bishop’s Lynn; Henry VIII granted it the name King’s Lynn; and to locals it is known, simply and affectionately, as Lynn.

Much of Lynn’s story unfolded in pre-photographic days. Friars chanted in cloisters, and some of them made their mark on the wider world: Nicholas of Lynn was an eminent astronomer who, according to some, discovered America long before Columbus, while John Capgrave wrote The Chronicle of England that began, modestly enough, with the creation of the world. Medieval merchants prospered by trading with Baltic ports and eighteenth-century merchants grew so rich that they opened their own banks. Captain George Vancouver went out and charted the north-west coast of North America, and Margery Kempe went out and wept her way noisily around the shrines of Europe and the Holy Land. King John started his disastrous Wash crossing from Lynn, and Edward IV sailed from the town to escape from the Earl of Warwick’s army.

This book, however, is concerned with a later age and presents a snapshot of Lynn during the Victorian and Edwardian years (and sometimes a little later). It is not, though, the first book to feature old photographs of the town, and it is unlikely to be the last. It is reasonable, therefore, to ask how it differs from its predecessors. The answer to that lies in its attention to the photographers.

Books of this kind regularly and quite properly acknowledge those who have permitted images to be reproduced, but the men and women who originally took the photographs are rarely mentioned. That seems a pity to me, and I have tried to do them some justice. Often, sadly, the photographer remains unknown, but wherever possible I have chosen pictures by identifiable local photographers, have said a little about them in passing, and have even contrived to give them some space of their own, where notice can be taken of their working lives. One photographer, Jasper Wright’s assistant James Speight, kept a diary on which I have been able to draw, and a collection of glass negatives by an anonymous local amateur has also made its contribution to the mix. As a result, this is not only a book of old Lynn pictures, but also, to an extent, a book about Lynn as seen through the eyes of its own people.

1

An Ancient Borough

King’s Lynn, photographed across the River Great Ouse in the early 1900s by W. S. Dexter. The Custom House, Clifton Tower and St Margaret’s Church all look out over the river, and beyond them, in the words of the corporation’s official guidebook for 1905, ‘there is scarcely a street that has not something to remind one that this is an ancient and historical town.’ That seems like a cue to cross the water and explore.

The imposing west end of St Margaret’s Church (now King’s Lynn Minster), photographed at the beginning of the twentieth century by W. Boughton & Son. Herbert de Losinga, Bishop of Norwich, established this parish church in 1101 as part of his penance for having bought promotion. The founding charter promised that whoever made an offering in the new church would, after death, enjoy a forty-day reduction of time spent in purgatory.

Alfred Jewson, who began his career as commercial photographer in around 1912, concentrates here on the base of St Margaret’s south-west tower. It presents an architectural history in miniature of the building’s first two centuries, with rounded Norman arches at the base, small transitional arches above them, and, at the third level, pointed arches in the Early English style.

The reredos at St Margaret’s was designed by George Bodley and erected in 1899. This photograph, taken five or six years later by ‘The Don’ (the trading name of Frederick Wright and family), shows why it has attracted unfavourable comment. The structure mars the view of an impressive rose window, and its heavily gilded figures and fussy detail were described by one early critic as ‘a cross between Jarley’s Waxworks and Wombwell’s Menagerie’.

In the shadow of