Uncle Tom's Cabin, Austin St./ Vernon St.

Uncle Tom's Cabin, Austin Street/ Wherstead Road.The bus stop both at thye pub and opposite were known as 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'. These were the bus-stops we used when visiting my Aunt iwho lived in the flats in the rear of the picture.

She had an interesting circuit of Ipswich in her life, setting up home with her husband in the 1920's in the then Bell Lane ,running from the Old Bell P/H, Stoke Street, into the middle of the present Vernon St. (cleared of the mixture of houses and shops by our technocrat pals in the sixties) flats, via Greenwich & Whitton estates and finally back to the renamed Bell Close.

I gather it was from here that the famed 'Ipswich Ripper' was apprehended by the Borough Constabulary.

Renamed in a fit of fascistic political correctness after demands by the Guardianista chatterati (who were ignorant of the effect of the novel, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, on popular support for abolition of slavery in the US in the 1860's) it was known for a while as the Orwell Mariner, which everybody locally promptly ignored.

Bath Street

Before the 1960's, when Tony Benn and the left of the Labour Party fell under the control of asset strippers like Brent Walker, Great Britain was covered in engineering and manufacturing workshops.

But Benn and his clique were inured by the 'cult of planning', which involved the 'all centralisation is just so gooooood' ideal, and scum like Peter Walker (later to be an MP and at the centre of the Great Miners Strike) played them like a guitar, gaining governmental support to close and strip thousands of businesses in the name of progress and modernism. Benn ruefully admits this in the BBC Adam Curtis series The Mayfair Set (google &download it on a torrent....)

This is Bath Street, branching off Wherstead Road, which lead to the main gate of Ransome and Rapier (R & R) , a world renowned engineering company. The large building in the centre of the picture was a detached workshop, the main works being to the right (and out of view) of the picture.

One of it's R & R's to fame:

The Stokes trench mortar was developed by an Englishman, Sir Wilfred Scott-Stokes (1860—1927) who was the managing director of a mechanical engineering firm, Ransome & Rapier of Ipswich, England. Although Stokes did not have a military background, he quickly grasped the need for a "portable gun" soon after war erupted in Europe. Stokes correctly reasoned that such a weapon would be valuable for reducing the deadly machine gun nests that were beginning to wreak much havoc on the Western Front. Stokes had a working prototype of his trench mortar ready for testing in December of 1914, barely four months after the war started.

READ MORE!

All gone to the benefit of the shareholders (for whom Robert Maxwell asset stripped R & R in the mid eighties) , the motor car and ... no-one else. The asset stripping of the eighties was merely a re-run of the sixties, hoovering up what was left of Britain's working class employment base.