MEET THE AUTHOR

In 1860 the Rev Richard Cobbold created an illustrated record of life in Wortham. SUE HEASER explains the book’s resurrection

How did you find the book?

I was visiting Suffolk Record Office in Ipswich with my friend Maureen Ling, and we were just browsing our way through the rector Richard Cobbold’s work. There are probably six or so volumes of his watercolours of the village of Wortham, mostly of people, and one of oil paintings. And then Maureen opened this little book that we’d almost discounted – it’s about seven inches by four, so it’s really quite tiny.

It looked just like some sort of ledger or diary, and I never thought that there would be any paintings in it. The Friends of Suffolk Record Office had purchased the book in 1999, and it had just been sitting there with nobody in the village realising what a little treasure it was. In the book Cobbold included a painting of each house (or group of houses), and a record sheet where he filled in the identity of the owners. Then he wrote in his lovely copperplate hand his personal memories of the people who had lived there in the 33 years since he’d come into the parish. He made the book as a present for his wife, and completed the whole thing between May and July 1860. We took some photos and made some transcriptions, and I thought it was such a shame for the book just to sit there in the record office.

How did you match up the buildings in the book to those in Wortham today?

Some of it was extremely difficult. Some of the 120 buildings described hadn’t ever been identified. It became a bit of an obsession as I made my way around the village in my daily life trying to work out the subjects of some of these paintings. There was one, a little group of very humble cottages, that had defeated everybody in the past. I suddenly spotted that behind them were three poplars, and I had a eureka moment. I’d seen three poplars in one of the other paintings, behind the schoolhouse. I then realised that these cottages were actually on the side of what is today Wortham School.

How does it feel to have published the book? It’s had a really enthusiastic reception, not just in the immediate villages where people are familiar with Richard Cobbold or with the places he painted in the book, but from much further afield – we’re getting orders from as far away as Tyne and Wear, Chichester and Birmingham. From what I understand, most buyers are looking into their family history and the word’s getting around that this is a very fulsome new source for people who have relations in this area.