James Woodforde and Yarmouth
Woodforde's second visit, 1776
On 17 September 1776, Woodforde set off from Weston for Yarmouth with his nephew William Woodforde, known affectionately in the diary as 'Nephew Bill'. After a second breakfast 'on coffee' at the King's Head in Norwich they rode to Yarmouth via the Queen's Head at Acle. Once again, Woodforde chose to stay at the Wrestlers' Inn.
We got to Yarmouth about 4. o'clock and there we dined, supped and slept at the Wrestlers in Church Square kept by one Orton - a very good house - After we dined we took a Walk on the Quay and viewed the Dutch Vessells, abt. 70. Sail which came in last Night, to go a fishing soon for Herrings - The Dutch are very droll Fellows to look at, strange heavy, bad dressed People with monstrous large Trowsers and many with large wooden Shoes
Dutch herring fleet, Roelof van Salm, 1688–1765 [© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Macpherson Collection, Item BHC0938]
The Dutch herring fishery
The National Maritime Museum captions van Salm's painting as follows:
This painting depicts a lively fishing scene, painted in the grisaille technique. In the foreground, left of centre, can be seen the Juffrouw Maria (Dutch for 'Miss Maria') escorting a number of Dutch herring busses (approx. ten visible), a type of seagoing fishing vessel, each shown with cast out drift nets. Two three-masted naval vessels are also depicted in the image, serving principally as escort vessels and defences. To the left of the Juffrouw Maria is a small rowing boat carrying six men.
The Dutch began fishing off Yarmouth as early as 1494, but the three Anglo-Dutch Wars in the second half of the seventeenth century interrupted the trade. By Woodforde's time it had recovered and in 1751 there were estimated to be 250 Dutch herring 'busses' regularly fishing off the Norfolk coast. The herring fishing season at Yarmouth traditionally commenced at Michaelmas (29 September) and continued through October and into November until the herring drew off to spawn.
Willem Beukelszoon, the pioneering Dutch herring fisherman, depicted in a lithograph of 1821 [© Rijksmuseum Amsterdam]The Sunday before Michaelmas was known as 'Dutch Sunday' when the fleet put into the port and Yarmouth people were able admire the fishing 'busses' to enjoy what became known as 'silver darlings' - herring cured in the superior Dutch manner.
According to legend, Willem Beukelszoon in the fourteenth century invented 'gibbing', which involved removing the bones, gills, and those internal organs of the herring most prone to rotting, and then pickling them with their own juices in brine. The herring were thus preserved not just for home consumption but also for export; a factor in the growth of Dutch maritime trade.
Willem Beukelszoon is pictured in this lithograph after a stained glass window of 1660 in the church at Biervliet in Zeeland. Although he apparently lived two centuries earlier, the window and the lithograph are probably a close approximation to Woodforde's observation of 'People with monstrous large Trowsers and many with large wooden Shoes'.
Woodforde's and Nephew Bill's arrival in Yarmouth on 17 September was fortuitous, since the Dutch herring fleet had begun to arrive. Had their visit been a week or so later they would have experienced Dutch Sunday, which was still being celebrated in 1821 when it was painted by George Vincent.
Dutch Fair on Yarmouth Beach, 1821, George Vincent (1796–1831) [courtesy of Great Yarmouth Museums]
The Harbour Fort
Following a wet afternoon the previous day, Wednesday September 18 began hot and stormy. Nephew Bill had expressed himself 'highly pleased with the Town of Yarmouth', and having spent the night at The Wrestlers . . .
After breakfast we took a Walk on the Beach, down to the Fort where we stayed a Couple of Hours, there made a kind of a Dinner, drank a Bottle of Wine, Cyder, &c. there - One James Johnson an old Soldier, and who is the Master Gunner there, behaved remarkably civil to us indeed, which made us stay so long - paid 0 : 6 : 6 We did not get back to our Inn till 4. o'clock, quite tired and fatigued with our Walk which was near 10. Miles to be sure
Woodforde had visited the Fort the previous year and did so again in 1778.
Did they in fact walk ten miles? A modern assessment would suggest it was closer to six miles from The Wrestlers to the Harbour Fort and return. Nevertheless, if they walked south along the beach with the town walls to their right and the sea to their left, under a stormy sky, it would have been an exhilarating excursion. Perhaps they returned along the quays beside the River Yare.
In around 1825 J.M.W. Turner R.A. (1775–1851) painted a pencil and watercolour view of Yarmouth from an elevated postition at Gorleston. The painting sold at Christies, the London auction house, in 2016 for £886,500.00. Fortunately, William Miller (1796–1882) made an engraving of the painting in 1829 for his Picturesque Views in England and Wales.
Great Yarmouth with Nelson's Monument, J.M.W. Turner, c.1825, engraved by W. Miller, 1829 [Private collection]Painted under a stormy sky such as Woodforde and Nephew Bill might have experienced, it offers the opportunity to examine their walk that September day. Nelson's Monument, sometimes known as the Norfolk Pillar, was erected in 1817 and therefore postdates Woodforde. The Harbour Fort is, however, much as it would have appeared in 1776.
Yarmouth Jetty, John Crome (1769–1821) [Google Art Project and the Yale Center for British Art]
The following day, having spent another night at The Wrestlers Woodforde and Nephew Bill returned to the Fort on a 'fine & fair' morning, but clearly the sea remained high following Wednesday's storm.
It was very pleasant and very delightful indeed - nothing can beat what we saw to day - immense Sea Room, Shipps & Boats passing & repassing - the Wind being rather high, the Waves like Mountains coming into the Shore - we rode close to the Ocean, the Waves sometimes coming into our Carriages -
John Crome, with John Sell Cotman, one of the founders in 1803 of what became known as the Norwich School of Painters, painted Yarmouth Jetty (in fact the entry to Yarmouth Harbour viewed from the south) between 1810 and 1811. The seas are much as Woodforde recorded them 35 years earlier. In the absence of a road to the Harbour Fort, the Yarmouth Carriages (or Coaches) rode along the beach. It is unsurprising that the waves sometimes came into them because, as Woodforde related in 1775, they were 'not more than a foot from the Ground'.
Yarmouth Quay
The four highlights for the visitor to Yarmouth in the 1770s were the Quay, the Assembly House, the Bath, and the Fort. Having visited the Fort, Woodforde and Nephew Bill proceeded to visit the Quay that evening. Richard Beatniffe in the 1777, third, edition of The Norfolk Tour, gives an indication of how important trade was to the economy of Yarmouth and the surrounding region. He tells us that one hundred and fifty vessels were employed in the local Yarmouth herring fishery and a further between forty and fifty in the export of the fish.
The herrings are for the most part exported by the merchants of Yarmouth, the rest by those of London, to Italy, Spain, and Portugal.
Beatniffe continues:
These fisheries, together with another to the North Seas for white fish, called North Sea Cod, [engage in] a brisk trade to Holland, France, Norway, and the Baltic, for deals, oak, pitch, tar, and all other naval stores; the exportation of corn and malt . . . the shipping of the greater part of stuffs [fine woollen cloth] at Norwich for foreign markets; the importation of coals . . . with other articles of merchandise from the North, and the heavy goods from London consigned to Norwich, Bungay, Beccles, &c. all together occasion much business, and employ abundance of hands and shipping.
The situation of this town is very commodious for trade, the river Yare being navigable from hence to Norwich, which is 32 miles, for keels of forty tons burthen; besides, there is a navigation by the Waveney to Bungay, the southern parts of Norfolk, and the North of Suffolk.
Having returned to the Wrestlers' at about 3 pm and enjoyed a meal of smelts (small marine fish that spawn in freshwater in spring), roasted shoulder of mutton, follwed by tarts . . .
In the Evening took a Walk on the Quay, as fine a one as was ever seen - a great deal of Company walking backward and forward - We got aboard an English Vessell, and were treated with Wine, Gin &c. the Sailors behaved very civil indeed to us, had a difficult Matter to make them take any thing, but at last I did, and all the Silver I had, being only - 0 : 1 : 0 She was a Collier and going soon back to Sunderland
Yarmouth Bridge and Quay, 1795, watercolour by an unknown artist [reproduced by A.W. Yallop 1905]At 1,014 yards in length from the Bridge to the South Gate, the Quay was reckoned to be one of the longest and finest in Europe: perhaps only Seville in Spain and Marseilles In France surpassed it.
The west-facing river frontage was lined with handsome buildings, many dating from earlier centuries but which had either been rebuilt or refaced in the first thirty years of eighteenth century. Many were new in Woodforde's time, typically with red brick walls, side sash windows and surmounted by parapets and even classical urns. James Corbridge's 1725 West Prospect of the Town of Great Yarmouth, over five feet long, is bordered by finely executed drawings of the most important buildings in the town, many on the Quay facing the river.
The former Customs House, South Quay, Great Yarmouth, 2024 [© Google Street View]
One of the finest buildings remaining from that time is the house built in 1720 for John Andrews, the largest herring merchant in Europe. The house became a Customs House in 1802.
The Town Hall or Assembly House, Yarmouth, engaving after John Preston, 1819 [reproduced by A.W. Yallop, 1905]However, the first building that would have caught the eye of Woodforde and Nephew Bill as they walked from the Wrestlers to the Quay would have been the Town Hall, also known as the Assembly House, built by the town's corporation and opened in 1714. The entrance faced the river with a portico of Doric columns, while inside there was an assembly room for concerts and balls. It was demolished and replaced on the same site by the present Victorian town hall in 1882.
The South Quay retains buildings of historical and architectural interest interest dating from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries.
A James Cook connection
As they boarded the collier returning to Sunderland did Woodforde recall an occasion the previous year at Oxford? His diary records that on 22 November 1775:
At 12. went with Jeffries to Convocation House and saw a Captain Forster (who had lately travelled to the South Seas) have an Honorary Degree conferred on him of Doctor of Civil Law –
HMS Resolution and HMS Adventure taking in ice for water 4 January 1773, watercolour by William Hodges [William HodgesWilliam Hodges, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons]The Forster who received his honorary degree was Johann Forster. He was not a naval captain – the title was honorific – but the principal naturalist on James Cook's second voyage of circumnavigation in search of Terra Australis Incognita – the Unknown Southern Land. Alumni Oxonienses: the Members of the University of Oxford 1715-1886 includes an entry for Johann Reinhold Forster. It reads:
Forster, Johann Reinhold, created D.C.L. 22 Nov., 1775, linguist, naturalist, and traveller, F.R.S., sometime a teacher of French and German at Warrington, naturalist to Captain Cook's 2nd expedition round the world, born at Dirschau, in Polish Prussia, 1729, died professor of natural history at Halle, in Saxony, 1798.
HMS Resolution and HMS Adventure, the ships on which Forster and his son Georg sailed with Cook, were Whitby built colliers of the same design as the ship which Woodforde had boarded at the Quay. Did his conversation touch on the sailing qualities of these ships with which Cook was so familiar and on which he depended to navigate to the iceberg strewn seas of the Southern Ocean? We can never know; but Nephew Bill, who later spent five years in the Royal Navy, might well have enquired.
Postscript: Three Silver Herrings
The Coat of Arms of Great Yarmouth [PD image]
The Battle of Sluys, 1340 (detail), Jean Froissart, 15th Century [PD image courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France]Great Yarmouth has a distinctive and intriguing coat of arms. In heraldic terms it is 'Per pale Gules and Azure three Lions passant guardant in pale Or dimidiated with as many Herrings naiant in pale Argent'. The three herrings on a blue background symbolise Yarmouth's debt to the herring fishery for its early prosperity, while the three lions are derived from the standard of King Edward III.
In 1340 the King was at war with France. Lacking a national navy Edward depended upon merchant ships to engage the French fleet, many of which came from Yarmouth. The sea battle took place near the port of Sluys (modern day Sluis in the Netherlands); the French were defeated and an invasion of England was averted. In gratitude to the ships and men of Yarmouth the King granted the town the privilege of halving its coat of arms (three sliver herrings) with the lions of the royal standard. The present day coat of arms is the proud result.
The motto translated from the Latin is 'The King and our rights', indicating loyalty to the Crown but also Great Yarmouth's claim to the rights and privileges gained from its numerous royal charters.
Yarmouth's literary associations