Tower Ramparts car park circa 1930s. Source: East Anglian Daily Times
Another letter, a few hundred more questions. This is the fourth time that the Meadows family have come up in a letter from Jim. I wonder how close Alice or her children, Hilda & Winifred, were with them. Alice left Ipswich in 1906 when Hilda was 10 & Winifred 11. Did the Meadows girls babysit them? So many stories to discover, so little time.
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Entrance to Buttermarket Ipswich from the Princes Street end circa 1930s. Source: IpswichStar
I can only imagine how Alice must have felt when she received each of these letters. Was her heart racing to hear news from back home? Did she unfold them quickly? Unwrap them slowly? Caress the paper as her friends shared details of their lives and those she left behind? How I wish I had the letters she had written in response! This delightful letter is filled with more changes to Ipswich and more.
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The UK 1911 Census is a great way to match handwriting to old letters as it was the first census the household members filled out on their own. Thanks to that census, I was able to quickly verify the identify or J.T. Ives and connect it to this 1938 letter.
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