Ipswich Whaling Station

Whaling Ipswich 1-Whaling Ipswich 2-Whaling Ipswich 3
Extraordinary as it may seem to the present day inhabitant of Ipswich, the town has an extant whaling station. At least we are led to believe this and there is some recent published supporting evidence. While visiting the Wherstead Road area below the Live and Let Live public house, we had some time to kill and wandered into Orwell Kitchens. Around the back of the works we discovered an ancient looking industrial chimney, banded with iron. The proprietor informed us of the original purpose of the buildings and mentioned that the kitchen business was soon to move down the road. The photographs above were taken after that move, hence the lack of close access to the chimney. The second picture was taken down the alleyway between two of the terraced houses in Wherstead Road. The third was taken across the back gardens from the inside the car dealership further down the road while the proprietor was dealing with customers. Robert Malster's fine 'A-Z of Ipswich local history' (see Reading List) detailed the brief story of whaling in Ipswich.

The Ipswich Journal of 26 August, 1786 carried an advertisement for subscriptions to a new venture: a whale fishery established by banker Emerson Cornwell and shipbuilder Captain Timothy Mangles. The company's vessels the Ipswich and the chartered Orwell with crews of between 40 and 50 men each embarked from the Thames in March 1787 and hunted whales in northern waters. The Orwell took seven whales yielding 150 butts of blubber and 4cwt of whalebone and it was lightered from lower down the Orwell river up to the area on the west bank known as Nova Scotia. The Ipswich took no whales that season, but brought back one and a half butts of blubber from killing 54 seals. The boilers for rendering down the blubber were housed in the buildings shown above. The newspaper suggests that there wasn't much smell from the process beyond 100 yards of the boilers, which is hard to believe. Despite a third vessel being sent out the next year the industry was soon abandoned and the vessels, lances and harpoons were put up for sale in 1793.

Although this subject doesn't have lettering on it (it's quite possible that it once did!), we are including it on the Ipswich Historic Lettering website, because we feel that it deserves to be recorded. The danger now is that the whole site will be cleared and the ubiquitous blocks of flats erected, losing a vital piece of local history. We have written to the Ipswich Society, the Ipswich Borough Buildings Conservation Officer and the Museum of East Anglian Life with regard to saving the chimney stack – which shouldn't be too difficult to dismantle and rebuild, one wouldn't have thought – but with no reply.

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Copyright throughout this site belongs to Borin Van Loon, 2003.

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