Suffolk Summer

 

Triple-arched bridge in the Abbey Gardens.

I wrote a little about John Tate Appleby in my last blog and was so impressed with the little I had read about him, I sent for his book [second-hand from Oxfam Online!] I am currently reading its 136 slim pages and am entranced with it, and with him, a man I would have loved to have met. He is described as an engineer from Arkansas which conjures up a certain picture but as soon as I began to read Suffolk  Summer, his love of language and his facility with the English language was quickly apparent. Almost as quickly evident was his deep joy in the Suffolk countryside.

He arrived in Cockfield in March 1945 when the war in Europe was almost over. From November 1942, part of the U.S. Eighth Air Force had flown from East Anglia on bombing sorties over Germany and the areas it occupied, and its last mission had been in April 1945. Appleby was a celestial navigator; I never did discover exactly what this signified but, given the time of his arrival in Suffolk, John Appleby did little celestial navigation choosing, instead, to explore the beauties of the county.

He started life in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in June 1907, as a prosperous farmer’s son, the family owning orchards and canning factories, but in adulthood, he moved far from his early rural life. He graduated from Harvard in 1928, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris before travelling around Europe during the 30s, as a correspondent for the Washington Post. When America entered WW2 in November 1942, he enlisted in the Eighth Air Force as a trainer in celestial navigation and it was this role that brought him to Suffolk towards the end of the war in Europe. Almost immediately he fell in love with the Suffolk countryside; he wrote of the “dazzling greenness of the fields and the beauty of the hedgerows.” He was stationed about eight miles outside Bury St Edmunds, in the country heart of Suffolk, near to Lavenham and Long Melford, villages steeped in mediaeval history and guaranteed to appeal to this mediaeval historian who eventually was to write academic works on English Kings John, Stephen, Henry 11 and Richard 1 and became associate editor of the American Historical Review. In his eventual obituary, a friend quoted Appleby as saying that his world ended in 1215! He was thrilled to discover that Bury Abbey had been the place where King John’s barons had gathered in 1214, to swear they would force their king to grant them certain rights which rights, eventually, became the Magna Carta.

Long Melford Church nave.

He purchased a bicycle and became besotted with his rural exploration, quickly stumbling over the art of brass rubbing, deliciously introduced to him by two American servicemen he encountered in Long Melford Church as they were making rubbings of the fifteenth century brasses there. He was thrilled and resolved to take their advice on suitable paper and the necessary heel-ball. “Heel-ball is a stick of lamp-black and wax, used by cobblers to blacken the edges of the soles and heels of shoes and boots.” One wonders if lamp-black is a term, or a process, known even to cobblers in 2022. But, as John Tate wrote, brass rubbing became an “absorbing occupation” and one which he felt connected him to a long-distant past. He was a devout Catholic interested in all ecclesiastical architecture and this passion combined with the new delight, contrived to keep this American serviceman on the road exploring his beloved Suffolk until he left in November 1945. He began his short career in brass rubbing in St Mary’s in Bury, on 21^st April, 1945, doing a rubbing of a 1481 brass of Jankyn Smith who had left a charity dispensed on Plough Monday every year. Does anyone now know the date of Plough Monday any more?

Lavenham.

John Appleby’s deep love for the churches, brasses, villages and countryside of Suffolk is almost palpable in Suffolk Summer. In Bures one evening, he follows the advice of the pub landlady to walk by the river in this Constable country. “I followed her suggestion and found a lovely walk along the Stour, with the light dying in the sky and the moon beginning to shine. There were tall poplars along the stream, and the air was fragrant with flowers and the evening mist.” His lovely book is a testament to a deep love affair he chanced upon as his war ended.

St Mary's, Bury St Edmunds.

"The English landscape at its subtlest and loveliest is to be seen in the County of Suffolk. I can say this with dogmatic certainty because it is the only county in England that I can pretend to know. Furthermore, the people of Suffolk themselves tell me this, and I know it must be so."

Robert de Bures, 1255-1331
Acton Church, Suffolk.

On June 17th, Appleby went to Bures determined to find the famous brass there.
"The brass is a full length, life-sized portrait of Sir Robert de Bures, in armour,
and dates from 1302. It is, I believe, the fifth oldest brass in England and is a
work of great beauty."
This brass was undoubtedly crafted before Sir Robert's death and depicts the 
armour fashionable three decades earlier.

Flatford: Constable country.

Addendum.

A correspondent has sent the following information on Celestial Navigation. Good to know!!

It's where you determine the location of your aircraft by taking accurate observations of the stars and other objects in the sky through a transparent aperture in the roof of your aircraft and using the resultant numbers  to determine your position.

 

It's a much more complicated version of what they used to do on ship with a sextant to determine where they were sailing.