It’s a place with tragedy and mystery in its past – but as many stories of resilient determination to build a community amid its wild and isolated environment.
The history of Shingle Street – a tiny Suffolk seaside hamlet up the coast from Bawdsey – goes back more than 200 years, when river pilots occupied a small wooden hut on the beach, assisting merchant vessels along the shifting channels.
A tavern soon sprung up, succeeded by the Life Boat Inn and several early 19th century homes – beginning a fascinating history, recorded in full by Shingle Street resident Tim Miller in his book, Life on the Edge.
Mr Miller first became acquainted with Shingle Street when his father bought the old lodging house known as German Ocean Mansion in the 1950s.
When the building was later sold, he decided to move back to the beach from his own home – further inland at Melton – into one of the Victorian cluster of former coastguard cottages.
“It remains amazingly isolated,” he said. “I called the book ‘Life on the Edge’, because that’s just what it feels like.
“When you cross the sluice bridge, it’s like leaving the rest of England behind. It’s a ‘place apart’.
“Before the bridge over the creek was built in 1928, the only way of getting here was by boat, or by walking across the marshes.”
The Second World War brought with it Shingle Street’s most talked about chapter of history – a legend that remains the subject of debate and discussion, and is addressed in Mr Miller’s book.
The story tells of the North Sea being set ablaze in the autumn of 1940, and corpses of German troops washing up on the beach.
In 1992, the government released a Ministry of Home Security file detailing the ‘Evacuation of civil population from the village of Shingle Street in east Suffolk’.
It described the military requisitioning of more than 20 homes at Shingle Street, plans to lay mines on the beach, and to use the area for bombing test runs, but revealed nothing of a foiled Nazi invasion.
Mr Miller thinks the rumour may have emerged from true accounts of beach flame-barrages created elsewhere along the coast.
“My description is taken from a witness account of what happened,” he said.
“The Home Guard was stationed at Aldeburgh and, that night, received news of an invasion. Facing south, they saw flames and heard explosions from Shingle Street.
“I’ve known old boys who were about at the time, but no one has ever been able to tell me the facts – or wouldn’t.
“Defence works had been put up. Whether they staged a trial run with dummy invaders, I don’t know.
“There were similar rumours of the sea being set on fire on the south coast. Inevitably, during the war, lots of bodies washed up on beaches all along the coast.
“Norman Scarfe (Suffolk historian and former Shingle Street resident) said the only mystery was why there was a mystery at all.
“Maybe this extreme eastern coast of Suffolk is just a place that breeds mystery.”
After the war, Shingle Street was so heavily mined that the government deemed it uninhabitable – but sisters Kate Burwood and Daisy Norton had other ideas, convincing authorities to rebuild destroyed homes and establish a community once more.
“The war department didn’t want people to go back because the beach was too heavily destroyed and mined,” said Mr Miller. “But two redoubtable women weren’t having any of it, and they went back.”
The community still remains strong at Shingle Street – an unlikely little hamlet at ‘the edge of the world’.
“It’s not just a row of holiday homes,” said Mr Miller. “Most are occupied all year, by local people. In fact, the descendents of the old coastguard Alfred Norton [pictured in the book] still live here.
“I couldn’t have put this history together without the help of family albums. The record office in Ipswich was also tremendously helpful.”
Mr Miller’s book is available at Aldeburgh bookshop, Browsers in Woodbridge, and online.
It was released by Shingle Street Publishing, which also produced local academic Jeremy Mynott’s book, Knowing Your Place; Wildlife in Shingle Street – the result of a comprehensive study of the area’s flora and fauna.
On Wednesday, October 26, Mr Miller will give an illustrated talk on the history of Shingle Street to the Ipswich Society. For more information, email secretary@ipswichsociety.org.uk.
Introducing his book, Tim Miller quotes from Ronald Blythe’s In the Artist’s Garden, in which the author describes Shingle Street as comparable in geography only to Dungeness, and Chesil Beach, in Dorset.
“It descends to the water’s edge in ranges of flint mountains that are gemmed with – if you are lucky – amber,” writes Blythe.
“Today, forests of valerian, white and purple, have to be negotiated before our feet sink into a token strip of sand.
“This is where we East Anglians expected Napoleon and Hitler to arrive. So, in 1808, we took Captain Ford’s advice, and built more than 100 Martello towers, from Norfolk to Kent – and, in 1938, no end of pillboxes. But no one came.”
Instead, says Mr Miller, the ceaseless enemy has been the sea, where storms claimed many lives over the years.
Two years ago, he raised enough funding to pay for a permanent memorial to five Shingle Street coastguards , killed after their boat capsized in the River Ore on the night of May 1, 1914.
The plaque, outside of one of the coastguard cottages in which Mr Miller lives, also pays tribute to all those who manned the Shingle Street coast between the 1890s and 2013.
The tragedy happed on a routine trip for supplies and pay from Aldeburgh, when the wind dropped and the men were swept into the shallows by the tide as they approached home. Before they could drop their oars, their 24ft whaler was battered by the sea and overturned.
Two men survived and gave evidence at an inquest into the death of boatman Walter Finnis, 32, who drowned with chief officer H Mauger, 54, Btm David Bignell, 39, Btm W McCauley, 33, and Btm Sidney Lakin, 31.
The 1914 accident left three women widowed and eight children fatherless. Only one body – that of Btm Finnis – was ever recovered from the water.
Mr Miller launched his memorial campaign after receiving a letter from one of the coastguard’s descendents.
“The grandson of one of those who died – leading boatman Bignell – wrote to me asking where the memorial was located. I wrote back saying there wasn’t one, but promised there would be.”
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