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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

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A SMUGGLING YARN

CHAP.

the cliffs. At times a daring spirit was displayed and not a little skilful subterfuge employed when a valuable cargo was to be landed unknown to the excisemen. One instance of this is still the theme of a favourite tale among the older men of the beach. A long-expected French lugger was seen making for the roadstead, and the Lowestoft freetraders were on the alert, anxiously seeking an opportunity for communicating with her crew. While they waited for a lapse in vigilance on the part of the excisemen, a boat was lowered from the lugger and rowed towards the shore. A curious crowd of beachmen and excisemen assembled to meet her, and as she came in on the crest of a roller it was observed that she contained a coffin. The French boatmen had a mournful tale to tell. On board the lugger had been an Englishman suffering from an illness which soon proved fatal. In his last moments of consciousness he had begged the captain not to bury him at sea; but to keep his body until a resting-place could be found for it under the green turf of a churchyard in his native land. Sympathy with his sad fate, and the knowledge that the lugger was not far from the English coast, had induced the captain to consent; and now he had sent the body ashore for burial. In spite of his broken English the Frenchmen's spokesman told his tale well. Both excisemen and beachmen-especially the latter-loudly expressed their admiration of the captain's conduct. A parson was summoned, and in a little while a mournful procession made its way from the beach to the churchyard; even the chief officer of the excisemen was present and is said to have shed tears. That night the local "resurrectionists" were busy ; and at dawn the churchyard contained a desecrated grave. A little way inland, however, in the midst of the marshes, a smugglers' store received the addition of a coffin filled with silks and lace!

It is in the fishermen's quarter that you may hear old sea songs sung which are unknown outside the beachmen's homes and the cabins of the North Sea smacks and drifters ; and if you are on sufficiently intimate terms with the singers

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LOWESTOFT WITCHES

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they may shyly reveal to you a lingering belief in some strange old superstitions. Even within the last ten years I have heard of boatowners consulting "wise women as to what would be the result of their season's fishing; and you may still find fishermen who will not go to sea unless they carry with them a charm against drowning. I cannot vouch for it, but I suspect it was from this quaint old colony below the cliffs that the men and women came who, in 1664, went up to the assizes at Bury St. Edmunds to give evidence against Rose Cullender and Amy Duny, two Lowestoft witches, who then and there were condemned to death for bewitching certain men, women.

Lowestoft from Lake Lothing.

and children of the town. The account of the trial contains few features that are not common in the records of similar cases of the period, except that the celebrated Doctor-afterwards Sir Thomas—Browne, author of Religio Medici, was one of the witnesses. He is described in the report of the proceedings as a "person of great knowledge," who gave it as his opinion that in such cases as that before the court "the devil did work upon the bodies of men and women operating with the malice of these which we term witches, at whose instance he doth these villanies."

CO

Inseparably associated with Lowestoft in my mind are the names of two literary Bohemians of the old school. One, whose

F

56

EDWARD FITZGERALD

CHAP.

home for several years we have already seen at Woodbridge, loved to join the fishermen in the bar-room of the Suffolk Inn -the old Suffolk Inn, now vanished-and talk of the sea and the ways of the men of the sea; the other, although seldom seen in the town, lived near it, except when he was crouching by some gipsy's camp-fire or quaffing ale in the rural hostelries of "Wild Wales." Many of Edward FitzGerald's published letters from Lowestoft were inspired by his love of the sea and During his frequent visits to the town he generally stayed at a house in the London Road; but it was in a dimly

seamen.

lighted corner of the Suffolk bar-room, where the crews of the fishing boats assembled, or among the net chambers of the There he would fishermen, that he was oftenest to be found. talk for hours with his fisherman friend "Posh" Fletcher, who was his active partner in a herring-fishing venture, and who still lives to tell of the nights and days he spent on board FitzGerald's yacht Scandal, or their fishing boat, the Meum and Тиит. FitzGerald's experiences as a boatowner were a source of much entertainment to the local men, who could not understand what induced him to participate in a business in

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GEORGE BORROW

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which it was impossible for him to compete successfully with practised owners and buyers. Yet for a time his whole heart was in it, and no details were too trivial for his attention. "Posh has, I believe," he writes, "gone off to Southwold in hope to bring his lugger home. I advised him last night to ascertain first by letter whether she were ready for his hands; but you know he will go his own way, and that generally is as good as anybody's. I think he has mistaken in not

sending the Meum and Tuum to the West this spring, not because the weather seems to promise in all ways so much better than last (for that no one could anticipate), but on account of the high price of fish of any sort, which has been an evident fact for the last six months." I wonder what Carlyle and Tennyson thought (if they knew) of their friend, 'Old Fitz," as a fish-merchant !

George Borrow was not so well known in the town. In his isolated home on the banks of Oulton Broad he lived, during his latter years, the life of a recluse; or if he ventured abroad it was to stalk solitarily a tall, striking figure, wrapped in a Spanish cloak-along the quiet Oulton lanes. There his piercing glance sometimes made the lonely farm-hand quail and think of the baneful effects of the "evil eye," while children, awed by the presence of the mysterious squire whose chief friends were the roving gipsies, ceased their playing until he had gone by. It is scarcely twenty years since Borrow died; yet there are few dwellers in Lowestoft or Oulton who remember that he lived among them. His old home is pulled down; and for the majority of the pleasure seekers who row or sail on Oulton Broad the little summer house on its bank has no associations. Yet it was in this quiet retreat, within hearing of the rustling of the waterside reeds and sheltered by a copse of storm-rent firs, that the "Walking Lord of Gipsy Lore" wrote Lavengro, The Romany Rye, and the Bible in Spain. Here, too, he entertained his Romany friend Jasper Petulengro, when that