Bin-liners contained a treasure trove

THEY might have been seven dusty bin-liners, brought in from the shed by wheelbarrow, but John Bridges saw treasure trove - even, as he says with tongue in cheek, his own Sutton Hoo.

Inside were thousands of invoices and receipts - many a bit grubby - that chronicled the fortunes of a rural family business as it moved from the Victorian era to the limbo years between the end of rationing and the dawning of the swinging sixties.

The bills had been stored by farmer James Breese, a stickler for looking after the pennies and pounds, and then the people who after his death maintained the philosophy of orderly record-keeping.

Invoices were speared on metal spikes which, when full, were stored in the loft.

They covered the period from 1882 to 1957, with more than 4,200 bills covering 165 different businesses in the Framlingham area alone. That they subsequently avoided being thrown out or burned, and survived to see the 21st Century, is sheer good fortune. But survive they did - and ended up in the shed of the farmer's grandson, Jim Breese.

John Bridges, an acoustic consultant by profession and local historian by inclination, is mighty glad they did, for they are the heart of his new book - The Commercial Life of a Suffolk Town: Framlingham Around 1900.

Times were changing - steadier and better-paid industrial jobs were already sucking workers from the countryside to the towns - but a place like Framlingham was still pretty much self-sufficient, with myriad trades supported by locals and folk from outlying villages.

John's book explores some of the businesses that gave Framlingham its pulse; the list of chapters reading like a checklist for a game of Happy Families as we hop from auctioneer to baker, from bootmaker to carpenter, from grocer and gunsmith to malster and miller, and from saddler and tanner to ironmonger and vet.

John grew up in the town, though he actually drew his first breath in the back of a car outside the Ufford Crown pub on a winter's night in 1947! His mother had gone into labour but the vehicle taking her to the Phyllis Memorial Maternity Home in Melton didn't quite get her there in time.

His family ran A.E. Bridges Ltd, the agricultural ironmonger that had workshops and a blacksmith's shop. It also sold combine-harvesters and plough parts in the 1950s, but it proved difficult to compete with larger companies and so the agricultural side ran down and it concentrated more on lawn-mowers and gardening implements.

A.E. Bridges Ltd bought the ironmongery concern of Charles Garrard in 1961 to form Bridges and Garrard - a name still alive in the town today, though no longer anything to do with John's family: the business having been sold in about 1980, he says.

“My childhood was spent in Framlingham in the 1950s, with much of it around the castle and the meres. I do recall that Howard the harnessmaker, Asher Symonds the boot repairer, Simpson the baker and other traditional trades were still in business.”

It would be some time before John understood precisely how deep were his connections with the town.

He went to Framlingham College, “and then, as it was with our generation, you were pretty much told what to do”. Part of the business had a contract side that dealt with heating and electrical work. It was decided he'd go to London and work for a big firm of heating and electrical contractors, learn the ropes, and then properly join the family firm - where he'd done little bits of work in the holidays - with his bank of knowledge.

He went to London, studying at college, but later got married to Pat and moved out to west Suffolk - “and then I decided I didn't really want to go into heating and electrical contracting work. I'd already started in acoustics - for a year or so. They said 'Now would be an appropriate time to come back,' but I'd already started to establish my own separate career, which I liked very much, and made the decision not to. And I've never regretted that”.

John was six or seven when his father, Fruer, died, so he'd never had a chance to ask him about family history. “And then, in the early '70s, when I was down there looking at the old buildings, a chap said to me 'Oh, John, there's an old trunk with some things in. If you don't want them we're going to throw them out.'

“There were all these ledgers in there - three or four inches thick - and one of them dated back to 1820, and the person who signed it, in beautiful lettering, was John Fruer Bridges. 'That's my name, my complete name!' I said. “That bolstered the interest and I started to look into it from there.”

He's traced his family back to the 1500s. Ancestors lived just over the border in Norfolk, coming south in about 1724 when Silvanus Bridges moved to Framlingham to set up as a blacksmith in Double Street.

In the mid-1970s John produced Framlingham: Portrait of a Suffolk Town. Twenty years later came Early Country Motoring: Cars and Motorcycles in Suffolk, 1896-1940 after interviewing Morgan Watts. Mr Watts was the first person employed by AG Potter of Framlingham, which in the early years of the 20th Century had moved from basket-making to cycles sales and repairs and on to Ford vehicles.

It was stumbling upon the James Breese collection of receipts that provided the crucial spark for his new book -in many ways a logical progression.

Farming was going through a tough time at the turn of the century. The 1889 harvest had been poor, and five years later prices were the lowest in living memory. James Breese's horsemen, his highest-paid workers, got 14 shillings for a six-day week. A farm labourer willing to move could have got about 18 shillings a week at Ransomes in Ipswich, and skilled workers could get a lot more.

John knew Alfred Breese, the farmer's son, when Alfred lived in retirement in Pembroke Road. He'd gone to Framlingham College with John's dad. “I first went to see him primarily about this desire to know more about my father, and he used to tell me little stories about the things they did at school.

“I saw him two or three times and, as we were leaving, he said 'I've got some old invoices here, if you want to have a look at them, boy.'

“There was this one for Fruer Bridges. Now, my father's name was Fruer Bridges, and I looked at this and thought 'That's funny; it says 1890.' Of course, that Fruer Bridges was my great-grandfather. Apart from the little mark where the spike had gone, it was in absolutely wonderful condition. He said to me 'My son, Jim, he's got quite a few more of these. You might like to go and see him.'”

Life being busy, it was ages before John and Pat called on Jim and Joan Breese - “and then all this material kept arriving in these black bin-liners! I bundled them into the back of the car and spent the next few weeks going through the receipts. I had to use a mask, in the end, because of the dust coming off them”.

What did he feel when he opened the first bag and saw what there was?

“It was exciting. I remember pulling one out and seeing it was AG Potter - but not AG Potter as a cycle dealer or a car man, it was osier and basket merchant. So this was really early on; he'd only just moved to Framlingham. I thought 'Wow!' I knew I'd stumbled on something very special.”

So when exactly did the history bug bite him?

“I'll tell you a little story. Pat, my wife, comes from London, and her mum and dad came up to meet my mother before we were married. We were walking through the churchyard” - St Michael's - “and Pat's dad said 'I see all the ancestors are down there, under that tree.' I said 'What do you mean?' He said 'Well, there's all these Bridges.' I'd never seen them before! I was embarrassed that a chap had to come up and show me where my ancestors were buried!

“All these things came together: learning about the family, and seeing that. I can talk in the book about different periods and know that my family were living here and going through those days.”

Surprisingly, John says he was never taken by history at school, and suspects his teachers never thought he'd be any good at writing, either. But the details of his family and hometown - and, for his second book, his fascination with things mechanical - proved inspirational in adulthood.

“And I like to go to the record office - find bits of information and try to pull a story together.”

The section on electricity is a good example, he says. “I rewrote that several times. There were a limited number of facts on Framlingham, and then I went to the record office and found all the records of the electricity company in Stowmarket, and you link in to this guy Napier Prentice, who had a vision for electricity.

“He lived in Stowmarket, went to France and did work over there” - including helping light the Paris Opera House - “and then came back and said 'I'm going to set up these electricity supplies throughout Suffolk.' And then I find in the record office that in 1921 Framlingham wanted to have one. So you put the whole lot together.”

Publishing his third book has left him a contented man.

“This is something I've always wanted to do, and now I've done it it's there for posterity. There's been a limited number of books written on Framlingham over the years, and now this will take its place among them. That makes me feel pretty good.”

The Commercial Life of a Suffolk Town: Framlingham Around 1900 is published by Poppyland at £14.95. ISBN 9780946148806.

John Bridges is giving a talk, and signing books, at Framlingham's summer arts festival. It's at 7pm on Sunday, July 1, at Westbury Centre, Fairfield Road. Tickets £6. Box office 01728 724649.

JAMES Breese, whose vast archive of invoices proved a goldmine for John Bridges, was born in 1861 - one of five boys brought up on their father's farm at Benningham Hall, Occold. He went to Framlingham College in 1874 and later became involved with the farm.

He saved up £400 by raising pigs - a lot of money for a man of 23 - and decided to hire a nearby farm. As time went on he increasingly bought land, bringing his total holding to more than 1,000 acres.

“However, he reckoned to make no real money from farming until the outbreak of war in 1914,” says John, “and before that never made more than an average of £1 a coomb for corn” - a coomb being about 100kg.

Breese lived at Church Farm, Saxtead - rented from SG Carley from 1889 until he bought it in 1914. Annual rent in 1900 was £120. He also farmed at World's End, Saxtead, with help of oldest son Norton. His younger sons - Herbert and Alfred - farmed White Hall, Debenham, and Grove Farm, Ashfield cum Thorpe, respectively.

James died in 1944 at the age of 82. John says: “His approach to farming was very much that of a business, which was somewhat unusual at the time, but essential in that period of long depression and low prices. Keeping a record of income and expenditure would be an important part of that process.”

Fram facts, from John Bridges's book

Edwin Middleton's confectionery shop on Market Hill, which he ran from 1885 until about 1910, sold a range of christening, wedding and birthday cakes, as well as Assam tea, oranges, figs, Bosnian plums, German yeast and Quinine wine

The 1901 census showed 24 people working as shoe- and bootmakers in Framlingham - half of them self-employed

Framlingham had 16 inns in the middle of the 18th Century. By 1900 there were nine

Framlingham had nine separate butchers' shops, according to the 1901 census

The town's post office was at a number of different locations before it moved to the purpose-built office in Riverside in 1903 that it still occupies today. Then, there were three mail deliveries each day - at 7am, 9am and 6.30pm - and the post office stayed open until 8pm on weekdays

Framlingham's telephone exchange opened in May, 1908, with only 13 initial subscribers. By 1923, the operator service was still available only from 8am to 9.30pm on weekdays and 9am to 10.30am on Sundays

George Jeaffreson was a doctor in Framlingham for more than four decades. “He had a very practical approach to situations,” says John Bridges, citing the case of a boy with tuberculosis. Several times the doctor told the parents to leave the bedroom window open, for ventilation. “Finding it closed on his next visit, he kicked out the window frame!”