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Designed & Maintained By Carol Gingell

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More 1920s and 1930s photographs from the Andrew Day collection

The friends returned for another holiday on the Broads, but this time decided to hire a sailing cruiser. Here we see the men of the group posing for the camera at Wroxham - in the background you can see the boatsheds of Ernest Collins & Sons.

Another photograph of the holiday party onboard their yacht c1930. The thatched building in the background looks very familiar, but I haven’t been able to place it yet!

This is Bure Court at Wroxham, pictured c1930 when it was a private house. It was later converted for use as a hotel and became a very popular watering hole during the 1950s and 1960s. Sadly, the building was destroyed c1975 after a major fire broke out.

The final photograph from this collection shows the crew sailing c1930.

Thorpe St. Andrew c1929 with some of Alfred Ward’s fleet lined up in the foreground, next to Thorpe Gardens. “Sealion” was one of a class of three motor cruisers, the others being “Seahawk” and “Sea Warrior”, which were 28ft in length with a 9ft beam. The class were built between 1927 and 1929 and the Blakes brochure told us that: “every endeavour has been made to produce a comfortable, easily-handled, and extremely attractive craft”. These 4 berth cruisers cost between £11 and £14 10 shillings for a week’s hire in 1929. In the foreground is “Swallow” which was of similar size to Sealion and also slept 4 - by 1933 she had disappeared from the Blakes brochure so had either been sold, or possibly renamed.

Tom and Annie Ralphs pictured with Lady Rhona at Beccles Yacht Station in June 1938. Lady Rhona was a 24 ft, 4 berth motor cruiser which would have cost £9 10 shillings for a weeks hire in June.

Moored on the River Waveney between Reedham and Beccles. The group travelled by train from Lancashire to Norwich, and then on to Reedham where they boarded Lady Rhona at Sandersons.

Sitting in the garden at the Bell Hotel at St. Olaves in June 1938.

Another photograph taken at St. Olaves in 1938 - Johnson’s Yachting Station can be seen in the background on the left.

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The next set of photographs date from June 1938 and were sent to me by Edith Hudson. They were taken by her parents, Tom and Annie Ralphs, during a holiday aboard the cruiser Y315 “Lady Rhona” which the couple had hired with friends from Sandersons at Reedham. The four friends were all cotton workers from the small mill town of Westboughton, Lancashire - Tom Ralphs was a warehouse manager whilst Annie worked as a weaver. It’s quite a nice illustration of the fact that boating holidays on the Broads were now becoming affordable for the working classes. The introduction of statutory paid holidays for workers during the 1930s certainly boosted the UK holiday industry as a whole and gave people the opportunity to actually take a holiday, but it still must have taken a good bit of hard saving by the friends for this trip. Edith Hudson tells me that her parents fell in love with the Broads and had planned to return the following year, but the outbreak of WW2 prevented this. It would be 40 years before Tom and Annie returned to Norfolk.   

Lady Rhona, pictured moored at Potter Heigham. Edith remembers her parents telling her that they had crossed Breydon Water, missed the sign for the Bure, and couldn’t work out why people were yelling at them as they edged ever nearer to the open sea!

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