Continued from Part One.
Old cottages, churches and an icehouse
Did you like working in those old cottages? Like old thatched cottages and inglenooks.
That must be wonderful coming across these old places.
I absolutely adored it. And the things you found! In my time I've got tins of coins and things like that. One of the weirdest things is at one cottage. We took the floor up and we lowered the floors in the cottage about 18 inches probably, because there was very little headroom, and they wanted the floors lowered, and we took all these things out, and when we took ‘em out in the lounge ... never told them this to this day ... that was B. and I and we were takin' these slabs up and we found a patch of sand, right in the middle of the clay floor, and we thought "What the heck ?" And we looked and there was a dead cat, skeleton, been laid under the floor in this little hole of sand and been put back and the floor put back. Now this was done ... these pamments were probably ... ooh I don't know ... 16 or 1700s, so that could have been down two or three hundred years. And I said to B. "I'm not goin' to take ‘em out", I said. We said "No", so what we done, we scooped the sand and stuff, put it in a box with the cat's skeleton ... that was fallin' to bits then, don't get me wrong ... and when we lowered the floor and put it back we dug another hole, put the cat back in and covered it up. I never did tell.
Why did you not want to take it out?
I'll tell you why. I found this out ... ‘cos, as I've said to you, I work in with museums and things ... and that was put there as a talisman. They put shoes in chimneys and things, and the cat was put in the floor to keep spirits away, and I spoke to some chap who dealt with it. He came to our museum a few years ago, and he said "You done the right thing". "'Cos", he says "that was put in there to ward off evil spirits, and if you believe in anything like that you should do it because if you don't put it back you might ...." I mean. I don't know if that's true, but we never did tell [the owners] that we'd found it, because I didn't know whether they would like it or not (laughs).
But I found several things in my time, buried in chimneys and things like that. I never found a shoe or anything like that, but several times found bottles and cigarette packets with messages writ in: "Fred So-and-so dropped this in here in ... ", you know.
How old? Like hundreds of years?
Well, yeah, we've got some ... funnily enough we've got some in our museum. Two floorboards found in Harleston. I didn't find these but they're dated 1841 and that says things like "This board was laid by Martha Foulsham in 1841". They just cut bits of floorboard off, put their names on and put them under the boards. Every house I've worked on in my life, every job I've done, I've either left a message somewhere ... if I worked on lead chimneys I scrape me name and a date in, if I do a house roof I invariably drop some coins in with a piece of paper with me name and that.
It's a very human thing to do, isn't it?
I've done it all the time because I think, I like to find ‘em, somebody else might want to find ‘em.
My kids did that when we had a wall replastered.
Well, you see, somebody just might get that plaster off one day and find that.
So what was the oldest sort of date you found?
Well, I found coins . .. I mean, I've got a lot of coins in a tin in the other room, and I've got a couple of pennies from 1770s, lots of Victorian coins, little bits of silver. I mean I could show you things but it's difficult to explain ‘em. There's so many of them. I tell you I've got so much stuff I found in ... when I say "stuff" it's usually little ... that's usually coins, not very high denomination, loads of farthin's and pennies behind chimneys and down in floorboards and behind mantel ... Take mantelpieces, you'd be surprised how many coins you do find ‘cos they drop behind the mantelpiece. And floorboards in bedrooms. There's loads and loads and loads.
But when we left Thorpe Abbotts and moved to Starston ... I can't remember now... I'm goin' back about fifteen, eighteen years now. We bought a cottage at Starston, that was called Windsor Cottage and that was a 16th century oak beam cottage and I totally done it up just afore I retired. And I had a statue of a gnome my sister give me and I wrapped that up and I put it under the floorboards. That's still there, it's under the floorboards and hopefully somebody will ... Because I think, that was my way, possibly, like the cat thing ... I don't know... I didn't really do it for that, but I like to put things in for somebody else to find.
I done a wall at Thorpe Abbotts down at the bottom of the garden, put a concrete base in. I put a plastic dinner tin in there, I put Dinky toys, cars and newspaper, some coins, and they're buried ten feet under the ground. Whether they'll ever be found I don't know, but they're there. And I shall always do it, even today if I'm doin' somethin' and I can scratch a name or hide a name somewhere I'll do it. I'm tryin' to think of things we found, but it's names and things ... yeah, you find lots of people's names, and you find cigarette packets. I've had loads and loads of cigarette packets. I collect cigarette packets and matchboxes and I've got all the ones I picked up on the road when I was about seven or eight in the 1950s. The old road cleaner at Yoxford where I used to live knew I collected matchboxes. He give me all the matchboxes he found from 1910 and I still got all them, from 1910 until he retired. I've got albums full of matchboxes and cigarette packets, so that's me, you see. Because I love it I still do it so I like to hide things up.
What about the bottles over there? Are they things you've dug up?
Some of ‘em are, yeah. Not all of them, but a lot of those, yeah. There's a Shipham's meat pot one up there, there's cough medicines, there's fluids. Bottles, yeah. To be honest with you when I said about diggin' that septic tank we never found any there but I've dug absolutely dozens and dozens of bottles out of the ground, diggin' trenches and footin's, yes. Most of them haven't got labels, most of them in't got names on, but ones what have, like those ones over there, there's Morgan's Brewers from Norwich, Doubledays, there's horse linaments, there's Ipswich Coop, I think. They're all over the place, but, you know, you just find ‘em and they come to light. I'm just tryin' to think where we got to ...
You were talking about how things took off.
Yeah, we done mainly old buildin's. That weren't until the latter years of my workin' life that I went into doin' new work on some new housin'. Never did like it. I like getting' in the old houses, pullin' the place to pieces and rebuildin'. My wife says I didn't make enough of me life.
Really?
Yeah, she says I should have gone and classed myself as a specialist in oak beams and timbers and woodwork. But you see I never found it a problem. I know I say it many a time I do find it not a problem to do that sort of thing and I look at people sometimes when they're tryin' to cut a bit of wood and I think "What the heck are you doin'?" I shouldn't be like it really. I mean, you can tell I'm an anorak because if you look out the window over there you'll see all those stones hangin' there, look. Well if you look there's stones hangin' there and ...
I had noticed those.
Well I retired ten years ago and every year, every day if we go to the beach I pick up a stone, look for lucky stones with holes in, you see. And I got about two thousand hangin' round the house now.
They're all ones with holes in?
They're all stones with holes in, all what you call hag stones. So I got about two thousand stones hangin' round my garden.
In Norfolk there are so many wonderful old properties that must just have been ...
Well, flint, you see. That's another thing we used to do a lot of - Colonel S. back at Ellingham. He's got what you call the Yarmouth Road wall, that's a flint wall about four or five hundred yards long, that's only about four foot high and every year for fifteen, twenty years we spent a week pointin' them walls up on both sides. Then we'd go round what you call the loke, which is a big dry wall down his house, flint walls all the way, and I'm talkin' hundreds of yards, and we had a week each year pointin' up the flint walls of the loke.
So did you actually have to do the flint knapping?
No, they're lime walls where some flints would fall out over the winter period, so in the summer time ... you have to do it in the summer when that's dry ... you mix lime mix up ... you have to do it in lime mix, put them back, you push your flints in and point it up. But he was . .. this was Colonel M. - he was adamant that that wall was not going to fall down, and that's still bein' done now ...
That's brilliant isn't it, because that would just have been left.
But that was a real old Estate where you had these walls and you had copings on the top. The other thing we done there - it's just suddenly come back to me - this was about 35 years ago, 30 years ago? They had an ice house, an ice house in the woods and unfortunately a great big tree grew right up the middle, cracked all the thing to pieces. He asked the Council whether they could do anything and, I think this must have been the South Norfolk Council, and they said "Oh yes, that's a very important buildin'" and he got a big grant for it, and we had to take ... other than the dome ... we had to take all the front arch off it, all the doors off it. We had to number every brick because the bricks are all cut on the arch ... it was a very, sort of Gothic shaped arch, and every brick was slightly shaped to fit. It had been put up about early 1800s as an ice house, if you know what an ice house is?
Yes, before they had ice ...
They used to go down the River Waveney, get the ice, take it up to the Estate and put it in. And inside the ice house there was a well about thirty feet deep, put a ladder down and they used to go down and get the ice. And we had to rebuild this whole thing, number every brick, and we had to get special lime mix mortar as they call it, lime mix putty from France, ‘cos the Council wouldn't allow us to put it together ... And there were needle thin joints, and when I say needle thin joints in brick ... These are wide in here, these are quite wide joints. I'm talkin' about joints about that thick and they're notoriously difficult to put together because if you a slight bit of stone in it they don't push up tight. And that took weeks and weeks to build that, and that's there now. I've been back ... that was supposed to be open to the public, but I don't think that ever did get access to the public. I think the Colonel got it done and then he was quite happy to shut it up again.
So I wonder if he uses it for anything?
No, no. There's one at Long Stratton, in't there? If you go from here through Long Stratton there's a shopping block on the left, and there's an ice house in front of that, which the Council have preserved, but most of them, this one of the Colonel's was under a big heap of soil so that's about 18 inches ...
Is it Blickling I've seen one?
There probably is one at Blickling. Most big places have ice houses.
That must have been a very satisfying job, like a big puzzle.
That was a superb job, that was, every brick came off that and they all went back to Thorpe Abbotts in my garage, and they were laid in my garage and over a period of months, when we got spare time we used to chip the old lime mortar off each brick, set it to one side. I'm talkin' thousands of bricks, not a few dozen, thousands of bricks and every one had a number A1, B2, and they had to all go back in the position they were when they came out. When we finished all right, yes, that looked new, don't get me wrong, white lime joints and the bricks were clean, but now, if you go there now, that look as if it's been there a hundred years.
That's something to be proud of, isn't it?
Yeah, I like that sort of thing.
Possibly if you were starting out today you'd be a person specially trained to work on old churches.
Oh I've done a lot of churches. We used to do a lot on churches and church houses, because we had a contract with the Diocese in Norfolk. Again you see it was me and B. to do mainly the church houses up, but we used to do a lot of church walls and the flint walls. Ellingham Church, we did a lot of work on the walls, flint walls and, funnily enough, my son C. still does the work at Ellingham Church, does the work ‘cos the Colonel was a great church person, and he knows we do it and he gets C. to do it. So, yeah, I've done quite a lot on churches and things, and Ellingham Church we had to put some big perspex windows in the tower to stop the pigeons goin' in and out and sittin' on the bells. Things like that. But Thorpe Abbotts Church the storms of the 1980s ... '87 weren't it? After my birthday, 15th October, the day of my birthday, the end of the Church come down and we got the contract to put all that back. Had to be put back with stainless steel pins. That was another one of these architect's things where that's been there for 5 or 600 years with lime mortar, no pins, no nothin'. Soon as the end falls out you have to drill holes in the blocks, put stainless steel pins in ‘em and pin it all in. Things like that get me, because I think "No, you can put it back as it was with the proper stuff and that'll still be there in 300 years time." Funnily enough the storms of '87 give us a massive amount of work, a massive amount of work! Months and months and months. Chimneys down, houses ...
Our contributor positioning revamped cockerel wind vane on Thorpe Abbotts church tower. Early 1990s.
