2026
Spinning House, Cambridge
Part of a team transcribing Spinning House Committals Books for the Cambs. & Hunts. Family History Society. In the Victorian era, the Spinning House was a private prison where the University held women suspected of soliciting undergraduates. The University’s legal right to do this ended in 1894 following the notorious case of Daisy Hopkins.
2025
Benjamin Britten and his uncle, William Hockey
Joe Phibbs – classical composer and Britten devotee – gave me the idea of investigating how well Benjamin Britten knew Ipswich. Britten’s links with Lowestoft and Aldeburgh are well documented, but our recent research opens up an intriguing new chapter in the story of his rise to international fame and fortune. It suggests that the young Britten’s Ipswich family played a formative role in nurturing his burgeoning genius.
The Brittens moved away from Ipswich some years before Benjamin was born but his parents – Robert and Edith who had lived in Russell Road – had a close and lasting relationship with Edith’s brother, William Hockey, and his wife Jane. Uncle Willie, as he came to be known, was an acclaimed talent on the Ipswich music scene in the early years of the twentieth century. Among other things, he was a celebrated bass-baritone performer, choirmaster at St Mary le Tower, accomplished conductor and, for some years, music master at Ipswich School.
It is known that the young Benjamin often visited and stayed with his aunt and uncle in their Berners St home. They certainly made music together. Aunt Jane was a talented amateur pianist and Uncle Willie’s musical reputation in the town was by then well established. And we now know that – approaching his 10th birthday – the boy Benjamin composed a seven page ‘sonata fantaste’ while staying with the Hockeys.
We believe this puts the influence of Britten’s Ipswich family firmly on the composer’s musical map.
What is less clear is what led to Uncle Willie’s rather dramatic fall from public grace in the 1920s. There is a report of his suffering some sort of breakdown earlier, in 1913, from which he appears to have recovered. But he went on to leave his teaching post at Ipswich School quite abruptly in1920, quite possibly following a dispute with the new head, and he resigned from all his high profile musical roles and responsibilities in the town in the years following. By 1939, Hockey was recorded as living in the former workhouse, by then renamed Heathfield Public Assistance Institution – penniless, alone and, until now perhaps, almost entirely forgotten.
Nothing so far has emerged from available records which explains Willian Hockey’s public disgrace. We know that his family were snubbed by a once adoring public, so something essentially personal rather than criminal must have come to light. The mystery remains, though, subject to all sorts of unverifiable speculation. We just don’t know.
What about Britten’s ongoing links with his Ipswich relatives? As an adult he came to see his Uncle as a ‘reprobate’ and wanted little to do with that side of his family. He did, however, send gifts of money at Christmas to Hockey’s daughter, Elsie, and pay for a headstone to be placed on her parents’ otherwise unmarked grave in Ipswich cemetery. William died in 1948, remembered with great affection and deep sadness by Elsie who by then was living in Fonnereau Rd, not far from her childhood home at 88 Berners St.
Deaf Perspectives: past, present and future
Working for Hannah Salisbury of HJS Heritage, I was part of a small team compiling a database of Suffolk residents who described themselves as deaf in the 1911 census. Our work formed the historical background for pupils from two local schools to use in creating short films exploring aspects of deaf life. Find out more about this project at:
https://www.theoffshootfoundation.co.uk/researching-deaf-history/
2024
Returned to Krakow
I was given a carrier bag of dusty old docs in Spring 2024 by an couple living near Eye in Suffolk. They had belonged to the wife’s step-grandfather, Andrzej Flatau (1904-1968), and were mostly either in Polish or German. There were about 100 of them in all.
About 20 of the papers related to Andrzej Flatau himself. An electrical engineer, he had escaped the Nazi invasion of Poland in early September 1939 and eventually settled in England.
The remaining papers had belonged to Andrzej’s father, Michał (1865-1925). Michał, born into a Jewish family in Warsaw, studied law at Vienna University and rose to become the chief police commissioner of Krakow.
It was fascinating to sort and list these papers and witness a great sweep of C20th European history shaping these two men’s lives. I’m so pleased that Krakow Archives has welcomed these papers into their collection and the documents are now safely where they should be.
2010 – 2015
Research assistant for local author, Sheila Hardy
Scandalous Georgian divorces by Sheila Hardy, unpublished – I researched about 20 divorce cases which hit the headlines in the C18th
Our Scotch Tour by Sheila Hardy, unpublished – holiday diary of Meta and Mary Farbrother
Suffolk Murder and Crime by Sheila Hardy, History Press, 2012 – collection of historical true crime stories
The Real Mrs Beeton by Sheila Hardy, History Press, 2011 – biography of C19th cookery writer, Eliza Acton
Fieldwork 