Drought of 1921
Sir,- I hope you will let me just send you my few memories of the above and will find room to publish them. In that year I was 21. I lived in Ashfield Road, Elmswell.
We and the next-door neighbours each had a l5ft well. (By the way it was always difficult to keep the water out of the cellar in that next-door house.)
These two wells supplied water to people as far away as East Wood, Cubitts Hall. More than a mile they travelled with all sorts of containers, some horsedrawn. Wells in Grove Lane and Grove Farm, one 60 feet anothcr 90 feet, were dry. There was also a well just opposite ours which didn’t dry up.
We were very lucky, with apparently two or three strong springs in that area. I know of the depth of these dry wells having helped a well-known plumber from Stowmarket at about that time, when his trade was needed on pumps, on vats in the wells. His name (a real comedian) – Tubby Welham, Bond Street, Stowmarket.
In that year also the harvest (what there was) was finished in mid-August.
The well of the now-closed public house The Oak, in Ashfield Road, 60 feet deep, was also dry.
J. BORLEY
Nine House, The Green, Woolpit, Nr. Bury St. Edmunds