The Wharncliffe Companion to Ipswich: An A to Z of Local History

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Did he break her heart? Perhaps he just never got round to writing in the demands of battle and then it was too late. Even allowing for the level of censorship it would seem obvious that many things might interrupt his ability to write back, or to receive letters, though plainly he did get these cards. Had they met while Fred was in England on a furlough or while he was involved with the Championship of England run at Salisbury in September ?

Who was writing to Gaston Duhamel? Had that person promised Gaston to post him a letter while they were on furlough? Did the card never get sent? You can pick Les out of future photos by the dimpled chin. There is no date on this photo but it is presumably prior to their departure overseas.

In the early months of , two young brothers enlisted to serve their country in the First World War. A motor mechanic in normal life he had also served with the Colonial Forces. Leslie had served in the school cadets and also with the 12th Battery of the Australian Field Infantry. AWM image H out of copyright. While on board Les wrote to his mate Teddy Murray apparently yet to sail for war. Taken in Heliopolis Egypt August Fred Fisher 19th Les Fisher 19th. Like so many of the men, both fascinated and repelled by the sights, smells and sounds of Egypt, Les and Fred had their photos taken for posterity.

Also unusually their family preserved the records and Les at least shared his story with his children.

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The photographs reveal the progressive story of their war. Fred Fisher, Unknown and Les Fisher. The unknown man in the centre is believe to have been machine gunned. There is no date on this photo. For many of the Aussie Anzacs, the Gallipoli snowfalls would have been their first sighting of snow. I imagine the novelty wore off pretty quickly. AWM image C out of copyright.

As the months wore on and the weather changed, influenza became a high risk, along with frostbite as the men were under-supplied with appropriate winter clothing. You can read more about how the men dealt with life on Gallipoli beyond the fighting here. The 19th battalion was withdrawn from Gallipoli at night on 19 December After another period of training the men were despatched to France via Marseilles, disembarking there on 25 March After a spell in a quieter sector of the front in Belgium, the 2nd Division, which included the 5th Brigade, came south again in October.

On 26 July , he was wounded and admitted to 32nd Stationary hospital, Wimereux, France on 27 July with a severe gunshot wound to the right foot. He had copped what the troops knew as a Blighty , an injury which merited evacuation to England. Les was transferred via Boulogne on 30 July and admitted to Wharncliffe War Hospital in Sheffield where he was to stay for five months.

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This postcard was sent to Les Fisher by his sisters, Dorothy or Dorie left born , Alma centre, born and Vera born It was Dorie to whom Les gave his tiny bible which the men were given and which was carried in their breast pocket. A few months later Les was transferred to 2nd Auxiliary Hospital on 18 December so once again he was in hospital for Christmas. A further transfer came in April, to Weymouth hospital. His postcards show that he spent at least some of the time with Ned Kent from Victoria.

I wonder where they went? After returning from furlough Les was repatriated to Australia on board the Ayrshire in July , and given an honourable discharge due to injury. His daughter has a copy of his certificate but unfortunately I have not scanned or photographed it, though I saw it some years ago. The inscription on the reverse of this photo says: Note boot cut out for wound on foot, comprie sic. On his return to civilian life, Les was no longer able to follow his hope to become a police man like his uncle.

The injury to his foot had put paid to that aim, and he went to work at the Sydney Victualling Yards. Les would wear a surgical boot for the rest of his life, and receive regular treatment at the repat hospital. The family must have been pleased to have one son back at home, but older brother Fred was still serving in France. He would not return until and the family turned on quite a celebration for him at their home in Lenthall Street, Kensington Sydney. Fred Fisher is pictured bookmarked by his parents and his brother Les is in the background with girlfriend Norah Keane.

Many years later a relative approached the new owner of the property to see if they could look inside the house, and there on the wall was this photo -the new owners had always left it hanging in the hall. Les and Norah would marry and raise a family. Although Fred also married he had no children. Thomas Cutting , soldier and settler by Brian Seward and Alison Stephenson Thomas Cutting was born in at Playford Hall where his father rented the acre farm from the Earl of Bristol.

In February , when still only 16 years old, he was commissioned into the King's German Legion which was then stationed at the nearby St Helen's Barracks on Woodbridge Road in Ipswich.

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Enlisting in the final years of the wars with Napoleon, he took part in the Mediterranean and Netherlands Campaigns and was with his battalion at Waterloo though he did not fight. Following victory on 18 June , he was part of the Allied occupation force in Paris and, as soon as hostilities had ended, his unit was withdrawn to the newly proclaimed kingdom of Hanover.

There he met and married a German girl and settled down for the next 30 years in the small market town of Harpstedt, some 20 miles to the south of Bremen. On his wife's premature death, when still in his early 50s, he realised a long held ambition and sailed with the greater part of his family for a new life in Australia. To coincide with the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo, Brian Seward, Recorder for Playford, and Alison Stephenson in Australia outline his life and times making brief mention of the generations that followed him both in the Old World and in the New.

Global conflicts in the 20th century were to rent the two sides of the family apart as their respective countries fought each other in two world wars. Alison, a great-greatgranddaughter of Thomas Cutting, lives outside Adelaide in the very neighbourhood where Thomas spent the last 30 years of his life. Family background Thomas Cutting's father John came from a family of well-to-do tenant farmers in Martlesham and it was through the death of a great uncle, William Parmenter, that he came to inherit the outstanding years of a lease on Playford Hall Farm.

There is a Walford vault in the nave of St Mary's church in Woodbridge. Playford Hall as Thomas Cutting would have known it. The house was re-gentrified in and 'let to a class of tenant who was not a cultivator of the soil'. William Walford had joined the Royal Navy when 12 years old and served as a midshipman on the Bellerophon at the Battle of Trafalgar.

In when Thomas was four years old, his mother died while giving birth to her sixteenth child in seventeen years of married life. Within three years his father had remarried. His new wife was a Westerfield girl nearly thirty his junior who, according to contemporary accounts, was an 'abandoned', that is an unrestrained or uninhibited, woman with a violent temper who was reputed to have burned by 'accident or design' her husband's papers on Playford's history and other parish documents. Thomas's father, hitherto a successful farmer, churchwarden, overseer and man of substance in the neighbourhood, was later to become entangled in 'contraband excise matters', was declared bankrupt in and had to forgo the tenancy.

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He died in sad poverty and isolation in far away Newport Pagnell just three years later at the young age of He left the house in very poor condition suggesting that his troubles had been brewing for some while. His swift and unplanned departure from Playford Hall created a vacancy that the Earl of Bristol was keen for his friend Thomas Clarkson, the slave trade abolitionist, to fill. Ipswich, a garrison town England had been continuously at war with France throughout Thomas's early life but by the time he enlisted in , a year after Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, French power was on the wane.

Troops had always been billeted among the population of his home town but in , as a result of events across the Channel, purpose-built quarters were put up for the cavalry on land to the north of what is now Barrack Corner. And when the French invaded and occupied Hanover in July , so dissolving their army, many of their officers and other ranks escaped to England where they formed into the King's German Legion. Their main base throughout the war was the Sussex town of Bexhillon-Sea. Ensign, King's German Legion Such was the success that by March no further enlistment was sought.

From March onwards new recruits were marched to Bexhill and to Ipswich where they underwent training before being posted most usually to Spain but also to the Mediterranean.

It was during this final period of recruitment that on 9 February Thomas Cutting was commissioned as an ensign into the 3rd Line Battalion then stationed not three miles from his home. Typically between men in total strength, a Line Battalion was made up of some 35 commissioned officers from colonel down to ensign and included 40 sergeants, 10 trumpeters, buglers and drummers with the rest as 'rank and file'.

The battalion was broken down into some six companies each of about men with a captain, two lieutenants and an ensign but no details survive of this level of operation. Apart from the Paymasters who were all from England, Cutting was the only non-German among his fellow officers. It had served in Hanover in , in the Baltic the following year and briefly in Spain in April , At the time of his enlistment it had been deployed in Sicily for five years and, after his initial six months training in England, he set sail to join them in Palermo.

Embarking at Portsmouth on 23 August for the 75 day passage, he found on arrival on 5 November that they had moved inland to Corleone. Landing at Leghorn 14, their numbers were practically doubled by reinforcements from the Italian States who had been persuaded to join them. From here a rapid advance was made to Genoa another 50 miles in the same direction but en route it was learned that the city had been reinforced and that there were now three times the number of French defending it than when they set off.

Undaunted, and despite the mountainous conditions and poor state of the roads, it was resolved to continue the advance. The defenders had taken up a very strong position. The 3rd Line Battalion was part of the force that was directed to move around the mountains to the north of the town so as to cut off a possible enemy retreat. With help from English ships of war, the Allies quickly took possession of the ground in front of the city whereupon a deputation from its inhabitants agreed a suspension of arms and Genoa was readily surrendered.

News that the Allies had entered Paris on 30 March became widely known and hostilities ceased across the continent. Waterloo In the three years that he was to spend in the Legion, this paltry encounter was to be Cutting's only experience of the front line.

The Treaty of Fontainbleau the following month consigned Napoleon to Elba and his battalion, along with other Allied troops, headed for home. Cutting embarked at Genoa on 12 May and, having stopped off at Gibraltar for some ten weeks, continued the journey but it was not to Portsmouth. In a prophetic decision his battalion was redirected to Ostend where it landed on 12 October and was stationed at Mons just 25 miles south of Waterloo. At lightning speed Napoleon advanced from the south of France towards Paris, thousands of old soldiers and regular troops flocking to his banner.

Within two months he had amassed an army of , men and, having retaken control of government, prepared for an Allied attack that he knew would come. In all, some 14, were considered to have become involved in its attack. Thomas Cutting's buttons denoting his time in the 3rd Line Bn. According to Beamish, who wrote the Legion's history, of the 21 lieutenants in his battalion, a further five Erdmann, Pauli, Baron von Weyhe, W Appuhn and Heise were also not awarded the Waterloo Medal.

There were also a row of terrace houses from there the offices stood up to the newsagents, but these were lost when the council widen Ranelagh Road. The lettering on the company office was originally white wooden letters nailed to the front, but these used to keep getting stolen, so my dad removed the rest of the letters and painted the name on by hand! Bits of Ipswich I didnt know were there, and bits that I shall make a point of looking out for too. As an ex-Ipswichian exiled in Norfolk left in what a fascinating insight to the history of old trades I missed whilst a resident.

Amazed to see the pictures of Bramford Road. I lived there when it was a shop from the 60s to the 80s. This was what the locals called the shop which was founded by my grandparents, the Rookes. The shop passed on to my parents after his death in the Sixties. My parents were forced to move out in the early 60's when the Council made a compulsory purchase. They moved the few yards up the road to buying the business from Mr. Bowman where they stayed till the 80's. The shop was well known for its friut and veg display on the forecourt. Shortly afterwards it was converted into a residential property only.

That sign on the wall, obscured by the new building always fascinated me and I was amazed to see it on your site. I had completely forgotten about ity till then. I find your photos of the various signs around Ipswich of very great interest.

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