II

EASTERNMOST ENGLAND

59

William Gooch who made this reply; and the Gooches lived for many years at Benacre Hall. A bend in the road, however, soon takes me out of sight of their old home, and having crossed a stretch of marshland opening out towards the sea, and climbed the hill which leads up to Kessingland, I have not far to go to England's easternmost port. Before the roadside hedgerows, in which the sparrows are chirping and the

chaffinches spinking, give way to suburban terraces, the trawlers are seen dipping towards the harbour, while beyond. the network of shoals off Lowestoft Ness the smoke trails of steamships blur the far horizon. For a time I must exchange sweet country scents for the briny odours of fish-wharves, birds' songs for the clatter of fish-barrows and the clangour of the fish-salesman's bell.

LOWESTOFT AND FRITTON LAKE, YARMOUTH AND BREYDON WATER

Now it happens that I know Lowestoft as well as most men know places in which they have lived for several years, and if it were fitting I might not only give a summary of the chief events in its history, but entertain some readers with the vagaries of its town council and the humours of its craving for royal visits. I might say a good deal, too, about its ordinary summer aspect when Clapham and Brixton are primly disporting themselves on the south beach or placidly promenading the pier. A whole book, too, might be written about Lowestoft's rivalry with Yarmouth, which commenced centuries ago with quarrels about the herring fishery, and is continued to-day in carping criticisms of the merits of the towns' respective visitors, boisterous assertiveness on one side being met by smug complacency on the other. But I doubt whether any one outside Lowestoft is interested in its municipal mummeries and parochial squabbles. I fancy most people would rather learn whether Lowestoft can claim their attention by some more stirring events than are

CH. III

A TERRIBLE STORM

61

recorded in its council minutes, and would like to know whether it has any associations calculated to cast a glamour over its somewhat oppressive modernity. So I will glance through the records of its historians, and see whether, from a litter of dry deeds and other musty documents, I cannot discover some page which will appeal to other than legal brains. Surely a town which boasts that its Ness is England's easternmost point must have tempted some invading fleet to bombard it or land an alien army on its shore! But no; I can find no record of any such occurrence. The only event bearing any suggestion of an attack from seaward is the fitting-out of a ship by Yarmouth burgesses who were bent on making reprisals on the Lowestoft men for some damage done in the course of their miserable quarrels about fish. Still, as in the case of most coast towns, it is the sea that does most towards making Lowestoft history, and too often makes it a sad one. Listen to what it did on the 19th December, 1770.

About one o'clock in the morning a dreadful storm arose, and "continued with increasing violence till five, when the wind suddenly changed from the south-west to the north-west, and for two hours raged with a fury hardly ever equalled. Anchors and cables proved too feeble a security for the ships, which instantly parting from them, and running on board each other, produced a confusion neither to be described nor conceived; not a few immediately foundering. . . . At daylight a scene of most tragic distress was exhibited. Those who first beheld it assert that no less than eighteen ships were on the sand before this place at one and the same time; and many others were seen to sink. Of those on the sand, one half were entirely demolished with their crews before nine o'clock; the rest were preserved a few hours longer; but this dreadful pause served only to aggravate the destruction of the unhappy men who belonged to them, who betook themselves to the masts and rigging. These continually breaking, eight or ten were not unfrequently seen to perish at a time, without the

possibility of being assisted. . . . It is impossible to collect with certainty how many lives, or how many ships, were lost in this terrible hurricane. Twenty-five at least, perhaps thirty ships, and two hundred men, do not seem to be an exaggerated account. This, indeed, is too small a calculation if credit is to be given to one of the seamen, who declares he saw six vessels sink not far without the Stanford, among which was a large ship bound for Lisbon, with sixty or seventy passengers on board."

It was such disasters as these-too frequent in the days when all the coasting trade of the kingdom was carried on by sailing craft that provided work for the East Anglian beachmen and led to the forming of the beach companies, of which there are still a few surviving on the Norfolk and Suffolk coasts. The chief object of these companies was salvage; for this they built the long slender gigs and graceful yawls which now rest during the greater part of the year on the beach shingle; but they were instrumental in saving many lives, for their salvage craft were the lifeboats of the coast before the days of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. Equal shares all round of the profits of a salvage trip were taken by the men who manned or helped to get afloat the gigs or yawls; even the laying of a hand on the boat's rudder as she left the beach entitled a man to a share. Rival companies competed keenly when a ship struck on a shoal or, disabled, drifted towards the shore. Each gang of beachmen strove its hardest to get its boat first afloat, and the race for the endangered vessel was a sight to see. But the day has gone when the beachman's was a profitable calling; now it is the steam tugs that go bustling out of port when a ship is in distress. The beachman of to-day is glad to earn a few shillings by 'longshore fishing or a few pounds by mackerelcatching "round at the Westward," and the older men, who can remember the good old times when a day's work sometimes brought in enough money to maintain a family throughout a winter, sit in the old companies' wooden sheds and

deplore the changes they have seen. They do this at Lowestoft ; and if you go down on to the north beach you may join them in the headquarters of the Old Company of Lowestoft Beachmen, which, adorned with the figureheads and name-boards of ships lost off the coast, still stands between the coastguard station and the sea.

That part of Lowestoft-the fishermen's quarter-which lies at the foot of the hanging gardens sloping down from the High Street, is far more interesting than the south beach with its throng of pleasure-seekers or the Esplanade with its fine

hotels and ugly houses, for the pebble-built cottages, battered net-chambers, and red-roofed curing-sheds tell the story of a Lowestoft that knew nothing of boarding-houses and never dreamt of catering for Clapham and Brixton. The men who lived here when many of these quaint old structures were built found them useful for other purposes than those for which they were presumably erected. Kegs of brandy and packages of foreign laces and silks not infrequently found temporary lodgings under heaps of brown nets, and their conveyance thither meant midnight expeditions to lonesome clefts in