Rags and Bones

Title: Rags and Bones

Author: Frank Grace

List price: £20.00

ISBN: 0 906290 85 6

Contents: In late-Victorian Ipswich, over 8,000 people lived in the slums of the St Clement’s district, the town’s largest area of working-class housing. Known locally as ‘The Potteries’ or ‘The Rope Walk’ area it was overlooked on one side by the Borough gaol, and on the other by the huge foundry buildings of Ransome’s Orwell Works and the wharves and warehouses on the dockside. Through the lives and experiences of the inhabitants, Frank Grace explores in depth the world of the poor including the tragedy of Joe and Polly, the trials of the migrant Youngman family, the Mulletts, the notorious drunkard Mary Jane Beedel, ruffians like Walter Pike and petty criminals like Harriett King. The themes which at that time dominated ‘The Condition of England Question’ – poverty, crime, migration, family and neighbourhood, work, housing and public health – are discussed, and, using the memories of  inhabitants between the two world wars, later chapters examine the close of an era when late 1930’s slum clearance brought the hundred-year history of the area to an end.

Author: Frank Grace is one of Suffolk’s well-known historians. He studied History and English at Nottingham University, where he was awarded his Master’s degree, after which he lectured at Suffolk College, was a part-time tutor at The Open University for thirty years and a local history tutor for the universities of Cambridge, Essex and East Anglia. He has published many articles on aspects of local history, particularly on the seventeenth- and nineteenth-century history of Ipswich. In 1992 he published The Late Victorian Town, a study guide for students, and was a contributor to A Historical Atlas of Suffolk (1988), East Anglian Studies (O.U. 1984) and the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. For twenty years he was editor of Suffolk Review, the journal of the Suffolk Local History Council. Having written on the government of Ipswich from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century and on Puritan influence there in the seventeenth century, retirement offered the opportunity to write this in-depth social history of a working-class community in the town.