Cauldwell Hall was a farm, long before the surrounding roads of Ipswich were built. I lived there as a child with my grandparents, Lionel and Nellie Vulliamy. Lionel was a solicitor and also the coroner who conducted the Sutton Hoo inquest. He had made a beautiful garden with a big lake in the valley. This was fed by a spring which came out at the same temperature summer and winter. Spring Road was named after this. He had a tame flamingo there. He used to walk round the garden calling it.

There was a crag pit where we used to look for fossils, and plantations of bamboos and at one time he grew bat willows for sale to make cricket bats.

 

Third photograph: the lake and garden in the snow; the railway viaduct over Spring Road is in the background.

 

There were a lot of mature trees, mostly beech and oak. Luckily, he was no longer alive to see them cut down and the lake destroyed to make way for a housing estate. It would have broken his heart.

The house remains, but turned into flats now.

Lydia Vulliamy

We are grateful to Lydia for these memories and photographs. Cauldwell Farm (and later Hall) played an important part in the Victorian development of eastern Ipswich, notably for housing. The Ipswich & Suffolk Freehold Land Society was hugely influential in Ipswich from 1850, particularly its role in building the ninety-eight and a half acres of the California Estate. The original farm has a long history and is said to have Anglo-Saxon origins, after 1066 being gifted to the Norman knight Roger Bigod. The name 'Cauldwell', as a Manor, may date from the early 14th century in the ownership of the Holbroke family. Edmunde de Caldeswelle appears to have been in residence in the Holbrook manor house in 1327. In the 16th century when Caldwell Hall was part of the extensive property of Christchurch Priory, the assets of the Priory were seized by that son of Ipswich, Cardinal Wolsey, to provide funds for his ill-fated College which he started to build in Ipswich in the late 1520s. Caldwell Hall was bought from Sir John Pope by the Withepole family, who built Christchurch Mansion in 1563. By the early part of the 17th century, the Caldwell Hall estate had passed to Robert Leman and then to William Rivers, eventually to John Footman in 1848. From 1919 to his death in 1956 Cauldwell Hall was the home of the Ipswich solicitor Lionel H. Vulliamy. Quite an extraordinary story. –Ed.

Next article