Ipswich

“ Lying in a valley surrounded by hills, up which the town is gradually climbing, and watered by the picturesque Orwell, which elevates the town to the dignity of a port, and within little more than an hour and a half’s run from London by the Great Eastern Railway, Ipswich may claim to be a place well worth visiting, while to the trader it is known and appreciated as a busy and thriving town. ”

“ Ipswich may claim to be the most prosperous and enterprising of all the Suffolk towns. It goes with the times. Its citizens are active and pushing men of business, and have enlightened ideas as well. They are also Liberal in politics and practical in religion, and are never behind in coming forward when there is a chance of benefiting themselves or their fellow-creatures. And yet Ipswich has a history as long as the dullest cathedral town. It was a place of note during the existence of the Saxon Heptarchy. Twice it had the honour of publicly entertaining King John ”

“ The country round Ipswich, as if qualified on purpose to accommodate the town for building of ships, is an inexhaustible store-house of timber, of which, now their trade of building ships is abated, they send very great quantities to the king’s building-yards at Chatham, which by water is so little a way that they often run to it from the mouth of the river at Harwich in one tide. ”

“ The Great White Horse is famous in the neighbourhood in the same degree as a prize ox, a county paper chronicled turnip, or unwieldy pig, for its enormous size. Never were such labyrinths of uncarpeted passages, such clusters of mouldy, ill-lighted rooms, such huge numbers of small dens for eating or sleeping in, beneath any one roof as are collected together between the four walls of the Great White Horse of Ipswich.’ This was the great hotel of the Ipswich of my youth. As regards hotels, Ipswich has not improved, but in every other way it has much advanced. ”

“ Christ Church is now on sale. Ultimately it is to be hoped it will be purchased by the Corporation for a people’s palace and park.
In the old times Ipswich must have been a much more picturesque place than it is to-day. All its old records are religiously preserved by a worthy townsman, Mr. John Glyde, in his Illustrations of Old Ipswich, a handsome work, which is a credit to the town, and which ought to find a place in the library of East Anglians wealthy enough to purchase it. ”

“ All this while, which was usually from Michaelmas to Lady Day, the masters lived calm and secure with their families in Ipswich; and enjoying plentifully, what in the summer they got laboriously at sea, and this made the town of Ipswich very populous in the winter; for as the masters, so most of the men, especially their mates, boatswains, carpenters, etc., were of the same place, and lived in their proportions, just as the masters did; so that in the winter there might be perhaps a thousand men in the town more than in the summer, and perhaps a greater number. ”

“ Those who imagine Suffolk to be a flat and uninteresting county, with no charms for the eye and no associations worth speaking of, are much mistaken. There are few lovelier rivers in England than the Orwell, on which Ipswich stands, up which river the fiery Danes used to sail to plunder all the country round, and on the banks of which Gainsborough learned to love Nature and draw her in all her charms. ”

“ Six miles up Harwich water stands Ipswich; which is a gallant town and rich. This Town is such a place for the Busses, as in all England and Holland I know no place so convenient. First, it is the best place in all England for the building of Busses; both for the plenty of timber and plank, and excellent workmen for making of ships. There are more there, than there are in six of the best towns in all England. Secondly, it is a principal place for good housewives for spinning of yarn, for the making of pouldavice [canvas] ; for there is the best that is made. ”

“ Industries include large engineering and agricultural implement works, railway plant works, the making of artificial manures, boots and shoes, clothing, bricks and tobacco and malting. The port has a dock of nearly 30 acres, accommodating vessels drawing 19 ft. and a large extent of quayage. Imports are principally grain, timber and coal; exports agricultural machinery, railway plant, artificial manures, oil cake, &c. Ipswich is a suffragan bishopric in the diocese of Norwich. The parliamentary borough returns two members. The corporation consists of a mayor, 10 aldermen and 30 councillors. ”

“ The Ipswich of to-day, however, with its water and steam mills, its export business in boots and shoes, its great ironworks, is, in East Anglia, the conspicuous type of go-aheadness, and when the Orwell is at high tide the outlook from the heights is of extreme beauty. The estuary then is a lovely stretch of scenery; gently rising hills laid out with grounds and country seats, diversified by woods and high cultivation, appear on either side, and the estuary from grassy shore to grassy shore is covered with water, dotted with white-sailed yachts and craft of more serious order. ”

“ There was not much half-and-half work in the Ipswich politics of my young days.
When people fight fiercely in politics, it is natural to expect an equal earnestness in religious matters. It was so emphatically with respect to the Ipswich of the past. ‘The Reformed religion, after those fiery days of persecution,’ writes John Quick, ‘was now revived, and flourished again in the country, under the auspicious name of our English Deborah, Queen Elizabeth; and Ipswich, the capital town of Suffolk, was not more famous for its spacious sheds, large and beautiful buildings, rich and great trade, p. ”

“ On which account I may freely advance this, without any compliment to the town of Ipswich, no place in Britain is equally qualified like Ipswich; whether we respect the cheapness of building and fitting out their ships and shallops ”

“ I could say much more to this point if it were needful, and in few words could easily prove, that Ipswich must have the preference of all the port towns of Britain, for being the best centre of the Greenland trade, if ever that trade fall into the management of such a people as perfectly understand, and have a due honest regard to its being managed with the best husbandry, and to the prosperity of the undertaking in general. ”

“ I could see the steeples of Portsmouth and of Newburyport, the bluff at Boar's Head, and the smoke of a score of inland villages. Following with the eye the south coast where it sweeps round Ipswich Bay one sees Cape Ann and Thatcher's Island outlying; the gate-way of the busy bay beyond, into which all manner of craft were pressing sail. Northward were Newcastle, Kittery, and York, and farther eastward the lonely rock of Boon Island. Shoreward is Appledore, with the turret of its hotel visible above; and right below us the little harbor so often a welcome haven to the storm-tossed mariner. ”

“ Ipsus, a small town in Phrygia, the scene of a great contest between the generals of Alexander for succession to the empire.
Ipswich (57) , a town in Suffolk, on the Orwell, 12 m. from the sea; is an old town, and has a number of interesting, as well as some old-fashioned, buildings; is well provided with churches and educational establishments, and was the birthplace of Cardinal Wolsey; manufactures agricultural implements, and exports besides these leather, oil, coke and agricultural produce. ”

“ The tide was out at that time, and the banks of the Orwell are to this day a marvellous acreage of muddy foreshore at low water. But Ipswich has always been a prosperous town, and its leading inhabitants flourishing men of mark. In these days it is the headquarters of agricultural implement manufacture, sending labour-saving machinery to all parts of the world. The busy ironworks extend along both banks of the river. New docks are established where a new cut has been made to serve them. ”

“ Away from Ipswich, and Colchester, and Norwich there is a delicious sleepiness about the old East Anglian towns, as if they feel they have done their duty in their day and are out of the world. They are all in a declining way. They have all seen better days. They have not quite died out, because the Great Eastern Railway has connected them all together and insists on their sharing in the labours and triumphs of the present day. ”

“ Wemyss flourished his halbert, the soldiers uttered a shout, and poured forth to the muster-place.
It was a clear frosty night; the whole sky was of the most beautiful and unclouded blue. Seven tolled from the bells of St. Peter's church. The winter moon, broad, vast, and saffron-coloured, rising above a steep eminence called the Bishops' Hill, poured its flaky lustre through the narrow and irregular streets of Ipswich, which in 1688 differed very much from those of the present day. ”

“ The 21st of April, 1775, witnessed an awful commotion in the little village of Ipswich. Old men, and boys, (the middle-aged had marched to Lexington some days before) and all the women in the place who were not bedridden or sick, came rushing as with one accord to the green in front of the meeting-house. A rumor, which no one attempted to trace or authenticate, spread from lip to lip that the British regulars had landed on the coast and were marching upon the town. A scene of indescribable terror and confusion followed. ”

“ Ipswich, Mr. Pickwick visited AFTER the "Eatanswill" election, and does not hesitate to describe it under its right name. Moreover, the claims of Ipswich have been relinquished by even local literary men, who in 1905 actually proved that town to be topographically impossible and named Sudbury as the original. Bury St. Edmunds is the place to which Mr. Pickwick travelled AFTER leaving "Eatanswill," and as that borough figures prominently in the book undisguised, it cannot be that. Eye is off the Norwich coach road, and no one has ever suggested that it has any claim to the honour. ”

“ To spend a month with Isabel and her mother, in that Tudor palace of theirs, full of man-servants, and maid-servants, and regiments of guests, and flocks and herds of automobiles, would cost me more, in new clothes alone, than the whole summer at Ipswich. But, Rod, where can I stay? I'd go cheerfully and camp on my relatives, only we haven't a relative in the world, except Cousin Evelyn. ”

“ On the right the black gash of the river-gorge clove the panorama; abandoned factories and railway station clinging barnacle-like to its sides. Beyond it the rusted railway and the Rowley road led off through a flat marshy terrain dotted with islets of higher and dryer scrub-grown land. On the left the creek-threaded country-side was nearer, the narrow road to Ipswich gleaming white in the moonlight. I could not see from my side of the hotel the southward route toward Arkham which I had determined to take. ”

“ As all the world knows, the “Great White Horse” is found in the good old town of Ipswich, still flourishes, and is scarcely altered from the days when Mr. Pickwick put up there. Had it not been thus associated, Ipswich would have remained a place obscure and scarcely known, for it has little to attract save one curious old house and some old churches; and for the theatrical antiquary, the remnant of the old theatre in Tacket Street, where Garrick first appeared as an amateur under the name of Lyddal, about a hundred and sixty years ago, and where now the Salvation Army “performs” in his stead. ”

“ Be that as it may, the Ipswich traders, like John Gilpin, were men of credit and renown, and Fuller, in the seventeenth century, spoke of the number of wealthy merchant houses in Ipswich. It was in the reign of Elizabeth, remarks Mr. Glyde, that Ipswich seems to have attained the zenith of its fame. There is scarcely a branch of foreign commerce carried on at the present time, with the exception of trade with China, that was not prosecuted with more or less entirety in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. At that time Ipswich was much richer in shipping than Yarmouth, Southampton, or Lynn. ”

“ It is the centre of a rich and populous agricultural mining and manufacturing district. Coal is worked on the banks of the river with but little labour, as it crops out on the surface. There are a woollen factory, several saw-mills, and foundries and large railway workshops at North Ipswich. The first settlement was made here in 1829; the town was incorporated in 1860.
IPSWICH, a municipal, county and parliamentary borough and county town of Suffolk, England, 69 m. ”

“ IPSWICH, a township of Essex county, Massachusetts, U.S.A., on both sides of the Ipswich river, about 27 m. N.N.E. of Boston. Pop. 1910 (Federal census) , 5777. It is served by the Boston & Maine railroad. The surface is diversified by drumlins, vales, meadows, sand-dunes and tidal marshes. Ipswich has several manufacturing industries, including hosiery. The public library was the gift of Augustine Heard. Among the residences are several built in the 17th and 18th centuries. ”

“ And there are men alive and fighting in Ipswich to-day who are determined that as a port Ipswich shall resume something of her ancient position in the world.
Just around the corner from the Orwell estuary, northward, is the estuary of the River Deben. One evening, feeling the need of a little ocean air after the close feudalism of the Orwell, we ran down there from to the North Sea, and finding ourselves off Woodbridgehaven, which is at the mouth of the Deben, with a flood-tide under us, we determined to risk the entrance. ”

“ But what is this towards lessening the town of Ipswich, any more than it would be to say, they do not build men-of-war, or East India ships, or ships of five hundred ton burden at St. Catherines, or at Battle Bridge in the Thames? when we know that a mile or two lower, viz., at Radcliffe, Limehouse, or Deptford, they build ships of a thousand ton, and might build first-rate men-of-war too, if there was occasion; and the like might be done in this river of Ipswich, within about two or three miles of the town ”