Mon Aug 17, 2020 7:29 am
#1790940
Thanks @rusty eagle - you're right about the witches. Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General, visited Aldeburgh and had the town pay to have a special gallows erected on which seven “witches” were hanged. The town also paid people for giving evidence against these women and Hopkins himself was paid for his time and expertise in sniffing out the witches. Though torture was illegal he did seem rather skilled at persuading the weaker and more defenceless members of society to confess to being witches.
The Moot Hall is fascinating and was used as a gaol for the town for a long time. In the late sixteenth century the smuggler Peter Lambert was caught and imprisoned there. His wife carried on the business until such time as she could bake a file into a meat pie which Peter then used to escape, apparently.
There's lots more history which I wish I'd had time to include, especially about the airfield. It was massive, it had the same pattern of hangars as at Duxford with the same 100ft Belfast truss roofs and the same concertina doors. At least, that was the plan. How much was completed isn’t entirely certain. Now there's just one concrete pad visible where the canteen used to stand.
The airfield was built in October 1915 between Chapel Farm and Hazelwood Hall Farm, it was known locally as Hazelwood Aerodrome and was used as a support airfield for the Royal Naval Air Service station at Great Yarmouth.
During the First World War it was used primarily as a night landing ground with fighter aircraft such as the Royal Aircraft Factory BE2 and Airco DH6 taking off from here to counter Zeppelin raids crossing the North Sea to attack east coast towns. A Zeppelin had been sighted directly over Aldeburgh as early as August 1915. During the following winter aircraft would come and spend the evening here, flying patrols north as far as Southwold and south as far as Felixstowe to watch for approaching raiders.
The air station at Hazlewood was initially under the command of Sub-lieutenant Anthony Scarisbrick who took a house on the seafront in Aldeburgh and lived there with his wife, Emily, and their children: Richard and Emma.
Towards the end of the war, in August 1918, the Anti-Submarine Inshore Patrol Observers School was established there and the airfield became home to the Blackburn Kangaroo anti-submarine patrol aircraft. I spent a few years in the Royal Air Force flying anti-submarine patrols but not in anything quite like the Blackburn Kangaroo. The job they were training men to do here at the first ever school for marine observers was essentially the early version of the job I did later in the Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft.
There was a great deal of redevelopment at RAF Aldeburgh after the formation of the RAF, there was even a narrow gauge railway built from the river to the station to deliver building materials but after the Armistice the need for the base and the school was uncertain.
What had become, the RAF’s No 1 Marine Observers School closed in September 1919 and that was the end of the airfield.
You can walk across the old airfield on two footpaths that cross it and three of the timber framed buildings were bought by the Ogilvie family and relocated to the village of Thorpeness and can still be seen on a road called The Uplands.
See, history geek through and through.
I plan to do one about Bury St Edmunds next.