Broadsheet

One of my fundamental beliefs about the world is that Ramez Naam ought to blog more. Ramez is one of the world’s greatest futurists — he predicted the solar and battery revolutions long before these were widely understood. If you were reading Ramez in 2011, you were able to understand the future of both energy technology and climate change, long before other people did. His earlier book More than Human is still a great guide to the kind of biological enhancements that AI might make possible. Ramez is also an excellent science fiction author, having written a trilogy of novels in which nanotechnological telepathy is distributed as a party drug (I’m not sure if he actually expects that to happen, but it’s a very cool idea).

Unfortunately, although he does have a Substack (which you should absolutely follow), Ramez does not blog regularly. However, after having a lengthy private debate with him about Recursive Self-Improvement, I was able to prevail upon him to write up his thoughts for my blog.

To say that RSI is a big deal in the AI world would be a colossal understatement. Among AI researchers, entrepreneurs, and AI safety people, there’s a widespread belief that as AI gets better at improving itself, there will be a “fast takeoff” or “FOOM”, in which AI’s capabilities “take off” and create a technological Singularity. This event is a staple of science fiction, including works by my favorite sci-fi author, Vernor Vinge.

A lot of people in the industry believe that this moment is now close at hand, and are racing toward that prize:

But Ramez — normally among the most wide-eyed of techno-optimists — is highly skeptical that we’ll see anything like the “FOOM” of Vernor Vinge novels. In this lengthy, well-researched post, he explains his skepticism.

Personally, I’m agnostic. Ramez’s case necessarily rests on a lot of assumptions; although it’s cogently laid out, I think the real answer is that we’ll just have to wait and see whether the Singularity arrives. But even more fundamentally, I don’t know how much this debate matters in the practical sense — even without the kind of Singularity depicted in sci-fi novels, AI capabilities are improving so rapidly that they’re already superhuman in many respects, and soon will probably be strongly superhuman in most or all dimensions. The AI of 2040 is going to look godlike, whether or not it explodes into an actual god in 2027.

Still, it’s a very interesting argument, and Ramez’s thoughts on the future of technology are always worth listening to.

1. AI is Helping Improve Itself

AI is already helping improve itself. The question is whether even fully autonomous recursive self-improvement (RSI) would cause a runaway intelligence explosion.

The theory is that each generation of AI could build a better successor, faster than the last generation did. That could lead to a “fast takeoff,” with capabilities surging to artificial superintelligence (ASI) in a year, months, or even days.

Here’s my take: Given our best current data, the AI self-improvement loop would need to be roughly 5–10× stronger to sustain itself, let alone run away. I’ll explain this math in section 8. I expect incredibly rapid AI progress by the standards of nearly any other technology. But the evidence we have doesn’t suggest a sudden explosion to incomprehensible superintelligence anytime soon.

I could be wrong. Forecasters have repeatedly underestimated AI progress! I could well be next. One thing that’s clear is that we need better data. For now, let’s work with what we can measure, and stay open to breakthroughs that could change the picture.

How Strong Is the Feedback Loop?

Figure 1. How strong is the self-improvement loop? Model.

Jump to the conclusion.

Here’s the case, with links to each part:

Key charts: The feedback loop · Measured vs. forecast progress · Diminishing returns

2. What Does RSI Mean?

People use “recursive self-improvement” to mean everything from AI boosting the productivity of human researchers to AI bootstrapping itself to incomprehensible intelligence. Here’s my taxonomy: productivity gains (Type 1), increasing autonomy while still facing diminishing returns (Types 2–4), and a runaway loop to superintelligence if we can ever find accelerating returns (Type 5).

Figure 2. Five types of AI self-improvement.

We’ve made real progress on Types 1 and 2: AI helps both researchers and engineers inside of AI companies, and powerful models can train and improve smaller ones. We haven’t yet seen clear evidence for Type 3 (though Alibaba just made some strong claims) and certainly not for Type 4. I do expect autonomous self-improvement to arrive at some point. I’m skeptical that it leads to Type 5 - runaway super-intelligence - without a major conceptual breakthrough.

There are plenty of other definitions of RSI, which can be a bit confusing. Weco’s four levels of RSI are close to mine. For a broader tour of all the things people mean when they say ‘RSI’, read Tom Cunningham’s comprehensive guide.

We Already Have Narrow Superintelligence

I do expect narrow superintelligence in highly verifiable domains. Think chess, Go, formal math, parts of computer science and coding. Highly verifiable domains are largely formal and structured types of work where machines can generate unlimited training data, with perfect or near-perfect verification of correct vs incorrect, and do so entirely in software without waiting on the physical world or humans. That’s an ideal setting for AI learning.

Figure 3. What makes a domain highly verifiable?

In fact, we already have narrow superintelligence in game plang. We’re seeing it happen now in the most formal parts of math, in particular in proofs and in finding counter-examples that disprove major conjectures. For example, OpenAI recently reported an AI-generated proof resolving the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem. Parts of software development are also extremely verifiable, while others are a bit less crisp (such as understanding what humans want).

That isn’t the same as broad superintelligence. Even our most powerful models need far more training data than humans, struggle to learn reliably from ongoing experience, and fail in surprising ways on tasks people find straightforward. Superhuman math doesn’t automatically mean superhuman judgment everywhere else.

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3. Real AI Research is Harder than Benchmarks or Forecasts

Benchmarks and forecasts suggest that AI models should reliably succeed at coding tasks that take humans hours, without human help. The real world is messier. OpenAI’s internal data shows much shorter stretches of autonomous work on research tasks.

In its Research Acceleration / RSI report, OpenAI showed how often its models completed tasks with and without human help, grouped by how long a human would need to do the work.

Figure 4. OpenAI’s internal research tasks. Source.

Even on tasks that would take a human less than 15 minutes, OpenAI’s models succeeded without human intervention only 86% of the time. The estimated task length at 80% success was roughly 15 minutes over the first seven months of the year. July’s results were similar to the whole period average.

Fully autonomous RSI would require an AI to string together a great many research tasks reliably, stretching out over complex tasks that humans need weeks or months to accomplish. OpenAI’s data suggests that we aren’t close.

Anthropic also released a graph showing how Claude accelerates AI research. It shows that internal AI models collaborate on or even lead more than 90% of R&D tasks. That’s objectively impressive. At the same time, the graph reports zero cases of AI autonomously completing AI R&D tasks.

Figure 5. Claude’s role in internal AI R&D. Source.

These are incredible tools. But they still need skilled people to set direction and get them back on track.

The Gap Between Benchmarks and Reality

For years, METR has been publishing a chart showing what length of coding task (measured in human hours to complete) best-in-class AI models can achieve. It’s been called the most important graph in AI. METR’s Mythos Preview evaluation estimated that the model could succeed at 80% of coding tasks that took humans three hours.

Figure 6. METR’s 80% task horizons. Source.

From ECI Scores to METR Task Horizons

Epoch’s own rule of thumb is that every five additional points of ECI (their overall benchmark of AI capability) correspond to roughly a doubling of METR’s task horizon. Using that formula, we’d expect GPT 5.6 Sol and GPT 6 Astra to be 80% successful at completing tasks of around 4 hours and 11 hours of human length, respectively.

Another estimate (a forecast) of AI task length comes from the AI 2027 scenario, which estimated that by July 2026, frontier AIs would be 80% successful accomplishing tasks of around 11 hours. Fairly similar.

The AI 2027 Tracker charts all of these.

Figure 7. The AI 2027 Tracker. Source.

Inside OpenAI, though, the July research-task horizon at 80% success was roughly 15 minutes.

Here’s the gap:

Measured Progress vs. AI 2027 and ECI-extrapolated METR

Figure 8. Forecasts, benchmarks, and real AI research. Tracker · OpenAI.

A four-hour benchmark horizon is about 16 times longer than OpenAI’s research horizon. AI 2027’s 11-hour forecast is about 44 times longer. Of course, the tasks being performed by researchers at OpenAI aren’t the same as those in the METR benchmark. So we should expect some discrepancy. This, however, goes well beyond that.

Actual AI research at OpenAI is an order of magnitude or more harder than metrics, benchmarks, or forecasts suggest. That should make us wary of relying too much on benchmarks, or of saying that future scenarios like AI 2027 are ‘on track.’ The authors of the related AI 2040 project still describe AI 2027 as roughly the future they expect, and say reality is tracking closer to it than even they expected. That’s not what we see from within OpenAI. This isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison, but the difference is remarkable. AI 2027 appears to be substantially over-optimistic in this regard.

In January of this year, Nathan Witkin made a case that the METR graph was exaggerating progress. The real world data suggests that at least some of his critiques were correct. The gap between benchmarks, forecasts, and data gleaned from actual use of AI should influence our expectations about the future.

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4. The Sharp Diminishing Returns to Impressive AI Numbers

OpenAI’s report also shows impressive increases in AI token usage, in compute spend per researcher, and in lines of code written. But these aren’t results. They’re intermediate measures. How much progress do they actually drive?

Researchers used 124x more tokens per person. Engineers shipped roughly 7x as many lines of code per person. Researchers ran 1.6x as many experiments per researcher vs OpenAI’s 2025 whole year average.

Figure 9. Token use inside OpenAI. Source.

Figure 10. Experiment pace inside OpenAI. Source.

From More Tokens to More Experiments

Figure 11. From tokens to code to experiments. Source.

More tokens and code don’t tell us much on their own. The 1.6× experiment pace is closer to useful research output. Even that doesn’t mean AI is improving 1.6× faster.

An enormous increase in AI output has accompanied a much smaller increase in experiments run.

This isn’t a controlled experiment. We don’t know what would happen if researchers switched back to an older model. But it gives us a useful view of AI-assisted research inside a frontier lab.

It’s not just OpenAI. Anthropic reports that their engineers are now producing 8x as many lines of code per person as they did in 2024 - somewhat similar to OpenAI. Anthropic also sees significant diminishing returns between productivity and AI progress. Here’s a direct quote from its Mythos Preview system card:

“Productivity uplift does not translate one-for-one to capabilities progress. We surveyed technical staff on the productivity uplift they experience from Claude Mythos Preview relative to zero AI assistance. The distribution is wide and the geometric mean is on the order of 4×. […] We estimate that reaching 2× on overall progress via this channel would require uplift roughly an order of magnitude larger than what we observe.”- Anthropic, Claude Mythos Preview System Card; emphasis mine

Translation: To double the pace of AI progress, Anthropic estimates that AI would need to increase the productivity of their employees by roughly a factor of 40 relative to no AI assistance.

Figure 12. Anthropic’s productivity-to-progress estimate. Source.

This is an estimate, not a measurement of progress. Even the 4× productivity figure comes from an opt-in survey of 130 Anthropic staff. I put more weight on OpenAI’s logged experiments, though the two sources measure different things.

We don’t yet know how much those extra experiments are accelerating AI improvement, if at all. In general, there are also steeply diminishing returns of more experiments in most branches of science. That means that a 60% increase in experiment pace could be on the order of a 10% boost to AI improvement pace. (A power law exponent of 0.2, for those who want to do the math.) That’s speculation for now. We’ll learn more as the labs publish results.

Test Time Compute Also Has Diminishing Returns

What about giving the same AI model more time to think?

That scales badly also. In OpenAI’s recently publicized results on unsolved math problems, success rises roughly with the log of compute over the range shown. It shows logarithmic diminishing returns. In plain English, each additional doubling of compute for a model buys roughly the same gain in success rate, while costing twice as much.

Figure 13. Test-time compute and math performance. Source.

What About Agent Swarms?

What if we throw more agents at it instead? A common RSI / ASI idea is that once we have AIs at a certain capability level, we can just spawn more copies and put them to work.

Adding agents can get tasks done faster and sometimes reach a higher capability level. But on the three benchmarks in Toby Ord’s analysis, expanding a swarm buys less improvement per token than letting one agent think longer.

His rough rule of thumb is a square root. If one agent can accomplish a task in 10 hours, then 100 agents could accomplish it in one hour. The speedup is 10, the square root of the number of agents (100). But to get this speedup, you increase the total cost in tokens or run time compute by the same factor. So going from one to 100 agents can get a task done in one tenth the time. But it’ll be ten times as expensive.

Parallel agents can save time, at a much higher compute cost.

Another challenge is that agents often think alike. In a study comparing LLMs with 467 people, the first ten AI responses offered collective creativity comparable to about eight to ten people. After that, roughly two extra AI responses added as much as one extra human response. A separate study across model families also found less diversity in AI responses. That doesn’t mean every agent has the same idea. But a hundred copies may offer less variety than a hundred different researchers.

None of this makes swarms useless-or safe. Lisan al-Gaib makes a strong case for parallel agent swarms as a potent cyber-weapon in “Accidental Scaling.” I don’t share all of his assessment of what swarms have accomplished. In math, for example, I think he gives far too much credit to the swarm and not enough to the better internal model that OpenAI used.

OpenAI says the model behind its Navier–Stokes result was developed through “large-scale reinforcement learning on top of a previously pretrained model.” Formal math is a highly verifiable domain, which makes it a particularly good fit for that approach: Machines can generate nearly limitless amounts of training data, and verify that solutions are correct or incorrect, all in software. My guess is that this model’s full results will show an especially large improvement in math.

OpenAI’s Noam Brown made the central point explicitly: he wouldn’t give multi-agent methods even 10% of the credit for the Navier–Stokes result.

I do think Lisan makes good points about cybersecurity. If you’re searching for a security vulnerability at a target site and can divide the search among agents, speed may justify a huge token bill. Swarms can be dangerous even when they’re inefficient.

I’m less convinced that this scales to research breakthroughs. Inventing something like the transformer probably takes more than searching a space someone has already defined.

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5. Better Models Matter More Than More Copies

Building a better model can bring gains that extra thinking time or more copies of the old model can’t. Look at the gap between Astra and OpenAI’s internal model on the same math problems.

Figure 14. Better models versus more thinking time. Source.

That’s the strongest version of the RSI argument: a more capable AI could do research that today’s model can’t do, however many copies we run.

But building that better model also runs into diminishing returns. More training data, more training compute, larger models, and more reinforcement-learning (RL) compute all show diminishing returns in published scaling studies. Making dense models larger usually raises the compute needed for each output token, too. None of these routes gives us a free pass around the problem.

Figure 15. Diminishing returns to scaling. Chinchilla · ScaleRL · OpenAI.

Those scaling results give us reason to expect diminishing returns when AI helps build the next model, too.

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6. We’re Not Seeing Runaway Acceleration

AI capabilities are rising quickly. But the public data doesn’t show a sustained acceleration. To the extent that AI tools are boosting productivity, they may be being offset by the problems growing harder. Or we may simply be early. Either way, the trend isn’t showing a fast takeoff.

Figure 16. Frontier ECI gains since January 2024. Source.

The public ECI frontier-the best score among models released by each date-has gained about 16 points a year on a trend fitted from January 2024 through September 2026. That’s blisteringly fast progress, but this period doesn’t show a runaway surge.

Here’s the same frontier in absolute ECI points, through July 2026, to put it in perspective.

Figure 17. The absolute frontier ECI score. Source.

The public frontier also can’t tell us everything happening inside the labs. Anthropic gives us a closer look in the Opus 5.5 system card, using its own version of the index, AECI.

Figure 18. Anthropic’s fitted capability trend. Source.

Eli Lifland, a co-author of AI 2027 and AI 2040, saw the apparent trend break as a warning that we were heading toward an intelligence explosion:

“Anthropic is probably right here [that they hadn’t reached dangerous levels of AI self-improvement], but alarm bells should be going off! Our processes are not ready to handle an intelligence explosion and we appear to be going full-steam ahead toward one.”
- Eli Lifland, On Mythos’s AI R&D Capabilities

What looked like acceleration now appears more consistent with a one-time jump. The level went up. The rate hasn’t kept climbing.

Keeping Up the Pace Takes Exponentially More Resources

Achieving those gains has required an enormous increase in the inputs to AI. For example, consider computing power. Epoch’s estimates of AI chip capacity, measured in NVIDIA H100 equivalents, show roughly 127-fold growth in just over three years (including projections at the end of this period).

Figure 19. AI chip capacity and frontier ECI. Source: Epoch AI.

This is total AI chip capacity, including inference. Still, the increase is striking: vastly more computing capacity has accompanied much steadier gains in measured capability.

The broader picture looks similar. Here are six inputs alongside capability gains, going back to February 2023.

Figure 20. Six inputs alongside frontier ECI. Epoch chip data · SemiAnalysis workload shares.

Everywhere we look, AI has diminishing returns. It gets more expensive in treasure and talent to make each step forward. More of every input has been required to maintain steady gains in AI capabilities.

We’ve been able to scale these inputs because, until recently, the cost was within the scope of what hyperscalers could pay from their profits. That is no longer the case. From this point forward, future AI investment will increasingly depend on AI revenues going up. And the scale of the numbers - 3% of US GDP is now going into AI infrastructure - suggests that eventually the growth rate will decline. If investment growth does slow, to anything less than its current blistering exponential pace, capability progress could slow too. Even if investment growth continues (which I expect for the foreseeable future) a slowdown from its current exponential growth rate to a more modest one (which I also expect) could lead to a slower pace of progress. Better AI research tools may be needed to offset that.

Better AI May Be Needed Just to Maintain the Pace

The day when we need better AI tools just to continue the pace of AI progress may already have arrived. Not because investment is slowing, but because the problem of improving AI itself gets harder at each step.

Here’s Anthropic in the Mythos 5.1 system card:

“we believe that internal usage of recent AI models has been a key factor in maintaining the current rate of progress, but we do not yet see clear signs of dramatic acceleration beyond that rate.”- Anthropic, Claude Fable 5.1 & Claude Mythos 5.1 System Card, section 2.3 – emphasis theirs.

The key word is maintaining-and Anthropic italicized that word in its own system card. Increasingly capable AI may be essential just to keep the pace of improvement where it is.

Gains on Other Benchmarks Don’t All Carry Through to Research

Opus 5.5 improves substantially on several coding and computer use benchmarks. But on CoBench, Anthropic’s benchmark built from historical AI R&D problems, it gains just 2.6 percentage points over Opus 5, within the reported error bars.

Figure 21. Opus 5.5 benchmark gains. Source.

Why the smaller gain here? Maybe AI research is simply harder than other tasks. Bear in mind that CoBench isn’t testing the ability to produce significant discoveries. It’s much more limited in scope. It asks models to investigate historical AI R&D problems using code, logs, and documents. That’s useful research debugging and productivity work, but it doesn’t directly test whether a model can invent a new architecture or make a conceptual breakthrough.

The evidence on open-ended research suggests another obstacle: coming up with useful ideas that haven’t already been tried.

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7. Why Does Progress Get Harder?

Better Ideas Get Harder to Find

Why do useful new ideas often get harder to find?

Tom Cunningham and Manish Shetty have a useful apple-picking metaphor. An AI can pick the low-hanging fruit quickly, while humans can still reach ideas the AI can’t.

Once those apples are picked, another copy of the same agent finding them again doesn’t help. A stronger model can reach higher. To add my own flourish, the apples may also get sparser and farther apart as you climb. The RSI question is whether each harvest gives us enough to build a better apple-picker.

Figure 22. The apple-picking model of AI R&D. Source.

This pattern shows up across R&D. Bloom and colleagues document fields where research effort grows while research productivity falls. A famous example is Eroom’s Law: in the historical drug-development data, the inflation-adjusted R&D cost per new approved drug roughly doubled every nine years.

Figure 23. Eroom’s Law in drug development. Source.

Pharma has other complications, including regulation, difficult clinical trials, and rising expectations for safety. Existing treatments can also raise the bar for a useful new drug. But some of this difficulty may also be that the low-hanging fruit has been picked.

Lessons from Software R&D

Stockfish, the chess engine, gives us a more direct look at software research. We have records of experiments aimed at improving it and the gains that followed. This gives us a real-world dataset to look at the gains of experimentation in software. As a result, several RSI models draw on this data. That said, not all the improvements came from these experiments. Several important ideas also came from outside the project, so we shouldn’t give its experiments all the credit.

Epoch’s analysis of software R&D estimates returns to research effort at about 0.83 for Stockfish, a bit slower than linear. These are diminishing returns, but gentle ones. These returns, however, are improvements in computational efficiency. And more compute does not turn directly into more AI capability. As we saw earlier, AI capability also has steep diminishing returns from adding more computational power. So we shouldn’t read that 0.83 as the return from experimentation to AI capability itself. AI capability grows much more slowly than compute, as we’ve seen already.

Andrej Karpathy’s autoresearch demonstration gets closer to the process we want to understand. A “teacher” AI agent changes a smaller “student” AI model’s training code, runs it, checks the result, and tries again. The teacher agent itself doesn’t improve, but it is able to improve the “learner”. This is my Type 2: A stronger AI improves a weaker one.

One public run, posted by an agent operating on Karpathy’s behalf, reported 89 experiments over roughly 7.5 hours. About 92% of that session’s gain arrived by run 44. Gains came quickly, then slowed. The setup was deliberately small, with a five-minute training budget per experiment. But the agent could change the architecture, optimizer, and training settings; it wasn’t limited to a handful of knobs.

Figure 24. Gains in one autoresearch run. Source.

A later public run got further, so the first run hadn’t hit a hard ceiling. This is a useful early example of autonomous research, and yet another place where we see the diminishing returns endemic in AI research. That said, this was a very early experiment. I expect future systems to do much better. This particular AI improvement loop will likely grow stronger.

From More Activity to Better Ideas

This is where the distinction matters. More tokens can buy more code, and more code can help us run more experiments. But experiments only improve AI if they uncover something useful.

Figure 25. From AI activity to useful improvements.

AI Still Struggles With Big Research Ideas

The bigger question is whether AI can come up with ambitious new research ideas or conceptual breakthroughs.

Anthropic’s description of Opus 5.5 is blunt:

“As with previous models, it is weaker on open-ended research: internal users report that it mostly tests incremental ideas and prefers less ambitious hypotheses, and in our human-run biology exercise, it deferred to the published literature and struggled to develop novel ideas (Section 2.2.2).”- Anthropic, Claude Opus 5.5 System Card, section 2.3.3; emphasis mine

METR’s assessment in the same card identifies what may still be missing:

“This is highly uncertain, but we expect that full automation of AI R&D will require large improvements in foresight, prediction, creating one’s own feedback loops, and generally other skills that might typically be referred to as researcher ‘judgement’ or ‘taste’.”- METR, quoted in the Claude Opus 5.5 System Card, section 2.3.6

In these examples, humans still supply much of the direction and judgment.

Future models will probably get better at this. But in the world’s stockpile of potential training data, we have many more examples of incremental work than of breakthroughs. I wonder whether that makes novelty harder to learn. That’s speculation, but worth watching.

This is also tough to address by simply running more copies of the AI. A huge number of parallel agents can help with the incremental improvements or searching over a large set of parameters, but for breakthrough ideas they may run into the homogeneity problem: More parallel agents still think alike.

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8. The Self-Improvement Loop Doesn’t Look Strong Enough

How far are we from the self-improvement loop being strong enough to sustain itself, or to propel itself into runaway super-intelligence? Can we quantify this?

We can make a rough estimate. Better AI helps with research; useful research produces better AI. For the loop to sustain itself, each round must produce enough gains to propel the system through the next loop, even as improvements get harder to discover.

Figure 26. The AI self-improvement loop. Model.

In a recent paper, The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement, Tom Cunningham and colleagues modeled this from the standpoint of how much more productivity every point of additional ECI produces from an AI. They ask first and foremost what that number would need to be to create a self-sustaining feedback loop. And secondly, they try to determine what that productivity-per-ECI-point number is today.

First, they find a self-sustaining RSI threshold of roughly 15% more research productivity per extra ECI point. In their model, that’s about where better AI would generate enough progress to sustain the loop.

The picture below shows the idea. At the threshold, each cycle of gains powers the next. Above the threshold, the feedback loop accelerates. Below the threshold, the feedback loop is too weak, and the rate of improvement it brings drops on each cycle. This model isolates the software loop; outside investment can still drive rapid progress.

Figure 27. Three illustrative feedback paths. Source.

Updating this slightly with data from the Stockfish experiments puts the threshold a little higher, at roughly 19% per ECI point. I wouldn’t put much weight on that precise difference. Both estimates are uncertain. But they give us a way to think about the strength of the feedback loop and a rough band at which self-sustaining or runaway RSI may begin.

How Fast Are Gains Coming Now?

The second thing Cunningham and team do is make a rough estimate that the current AI productivity gain is about 9% per ECI point. That’s below their self-sustaining threshold.

I like the model. OpenAI’s newer data, however, suggests the loop may be quite a bit weaker.

Cunningham’s estimate of 9% productivity gain per ECI point is based on Anthropic’s survey of 130 staff, who reported roughly 4× the productivity they’d have without AI. Cunningham and colleagues compare that with a 16-point capability gain since early Claude Code.

That comparison assumes the earlier tools added little or no productivity, so ‘no AI’ is a reasonable starting point. The authors say this explicitly. I’m not sure the assumption holds for the same researchers doing the same work, but that’s a smaller issue.

The authors themselves know that this is a rough calculation, and warn that the 4× survey estimate is probably too high.

OpenAI’s newer data gives us a firmer way to check the number: Actual logged experiments over time, rather than human estimates of their own productivity with and without AI. I put more weight on this for three reasons:

Direct and broad measurement. Instead of relying on surveys, OpenAI actually tracked and measured experiments run on their infrastructure. That means they didn’t rely on researchers estimating their own productivity, which can be far off.
Full sample, not opt-in. Similarly, OpenAI’s data catches every active experimenter, while Anthropic’s only reflects the 130 employees who took the time to answer the survey – and who therefore may not be a representative set.
Enormously more data. We don’t know how many experiments are in the 32 weeks of OpenAI data, but it’s likely at least tens of thousands of individual examples and possibly hundreds of thousands.

Any way you slice it, the new OpenAI data, released after Cunningham’s paper was drafted, is a larger, more comprehensive, more representative, and almost certainly more accurate dataset than Anthropic’s internal opt-in survey of employees.

Now let’s use OpenAI’s experiment data to calibrate the productivity gain per ECI point. We know that in August, OpenAI researchers ran ~1.6× as many experiments per person per month as the 2025 average. If we pair that with roughly 16 points of frontier ECI improvement, it works backward to about 3% productivity gain per point of ECI. By contrast, 9% compounded over 16 points would mean roughly 4× productivity.

Figure 28. Comparing productivity estimates. OpenAI methods.

Here’s OpenAI’s published weekly series alongside that hypothetical path of 9% more productivity per additional ECI point. The blue line ends at ~1.6×. The red line shows what 9% per point would imply if 16 ECI points were spread across this period. That doesn’t match what we see from OpenAI’s data. I want to be clear here that all data sets are noisy. We don’t know exactly what model researchers were using on what days, or whether the new experiments were also higher quality than old experiments. We need more experiments and more data to further calibrate these numbers. Working with what we do have, what we see is a quite low boost to productivity from each additional ECI point.

Figure 29. Experiment pace versus a hypothetical path. Source.

Even that 3% could give better models too much credit. OpenAI also used far more tokens and had more compute for experiments. Those could account for some of the increase in experiment pace. So the range is probably a bit lower.

I use 2–3% productivity gain per ECI point as a working assumption, allowing for some help from those other inputs. This is still a rough estimate, albeit one that’s based on the best real-world data we have.

Figure 30. Productivity estimates and the takeoff threshold. Source.

With those assumptions, 2–3% per ECI point against a 15–19% threshold leaves a roughly five- to tenfold gap. That’s a big gap, though its size depends on how well experiment counts capture useful research and whether the assumed capability change is right.

Figure 31. Diminishing returns around the loop. Source.

AI is helping build better AI. Under this estimate, though, each turn of the loop adds less than the last. The feedback would have to become much stronger to sustain itself.

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9. What Could Accelerate This?

This software loop sits alongside faster chips, bigger data centers, more training data, and greater investment. Those can keep driving rapid progress even if the loop can’t sustain itself.

The loop itself could strengthen too. Better training data, memory, and research judgment could all help.

A breakthrough on the scale of the Transformer architecture in 2017 could change the picture much more. That would be a good reason to revisit these estimates.

Better researchers might also run fewer experiments and learn more from each one. A handful of better ideas can matter more than a mountain of routine runs.

Still, diminishing returns in machine learning aren’t new. Cortes and colleagues were fitting machine learning scaling curves in 1993: More examples reduced error, following a power law with diminishing returns. These diminishing returns and harsh scaling laws are as old as machine learning. They didn’t appear for the first time with transformers or LLMs or deep learning. That doesn’t prove today’s relationships will last forever. But until we see evidence that we’ve found a new approach that scales without these inhibitors, we should plan for diminishing returns as likely to be with us for some time.

Software, Hardware, and Economic Feedback

That said, the world is more than just software. Tom Davidson, Basil Halperin, Thomas Houlden, and Anton Korinek model software progress, hardware progress, and economic feedback together. Better AI helps design better chips; better chips support better AI; economic growth finances more investment in both. Several feedback loops can combine to overcome diminishing returns even when one loop alone can’t. I think it’s fantastic that someone has attempted a model that integrates all these different avenues of improving AI through software, hardware, and economics.

But I have questions about the software loop itself. In their central calibration, fully automating software research puts that loop roughly at the threshold for explosive growth, even without help from better hardware or broader economic growth. Recall that Cunningham’s model puts the self-sustaining threshold at roughly 15% more research productivity per additional ECI point, while our estimate using OpenAI’s experimental data puts today’s gains at only 2-3%. These models use different measures, so we can’t equate their numbers directly. But the contrast matters: their fully automated software loop reaches the threshold, while our best estimate from current data puts today’s loop far below it.

Having AI do all the research doesn’t eliminate the diminishing returns inherent to improving AI, or the broader problem of useful ideas getting harder to find. This is the distinction between Type 4 and Type 5 in the taxonomy above. An AI might autonomously design, train, and test its successor, and still need exponentially more resources to make each additional step forward. Closing the loop doesn’t tell us whether it’s strong enough to sustain itself.

The authors do account for diminishing returns. The concern is whether their calibration overestimates how much useful AI research each round of software improvement produces. Diminishing returns appear to be fundamental to machine learning. We see them in training, in test-time compute, and in the search for better algorithms. Full autonomy could remove human bottlenecks without removing any of those constraints.

We’ve already seen this within autonomous research. In the Karpathy autoresearch example above, most of the gains arrived early, and more experiments bought progressively less improvement. That was a small experiment with a fixed teacher model, not a test of fully autonomous RSI. It doesn’t settle the question. But it illustrates why removing the human from an experiment loop doesn’t, by itself, remove diminishing returns.

I do expect the feedback loop to get stronger over time. Better AI should become better at research. But based on our best current data, reaching self-sustaining feedback requires a loop roughly five to ten times stronger than today’s. Treating fully automated software research as already at that threshold is a substantial leap, before we add the benefits of hardware improvements or economic growth. I could be wrong, but I’d like to see evidence that autonomy brings enough additional useful discoveries to close that gap.

On hardware, I have some further reservations. The model doesn’t explicitly include the years it can take to turn a chip design into deployed hardware. The authors discuss physical bottlenecks, and I’d like to see manufacturing and construction delays built into the predictions.

I also wonder how much past chip progress came from better ideas, and how much depended on ever more expensive factories and equipment. If we give researchers too much credit for gains that also needed those investments, we could overestimate what faster AI research alone would produce.

Even with those reservations, this is the most compelling paper and model I’ve seen for combining feedback loops in software, hardware, and economics to understand how fast they could push AI forward. I’m not convinced it establishes that a fast AI takeoff is possible under realistic conditions. More data could help us calibrate that judgment. But it gives us a useful framework for understanding what could happen beyond the software layer alone.

This is an important paper that helps us model AI as part of a broader economy that might have larger feedback loops around it. I appreciate it, and I’m glad they wrote it.

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10. We Need More Data

These estimates rest on less data than I’d like. I might be putting too much weight on a few observations and reaching a comforting conclusion I want to believe. We need better measurements, shared often enough to catch changes as they happen.

When OpenAI released its research data, Cheryl Wu welcomed the disclosure and pointed out how much was still missing. More tokens and experiments are useful things to know about. We also need to see how they turn into better algorithms and more capable AI.

Figure 32. Cheryl Wu on OpenAI’s research data. Source.

Now Wu, Arjun Ramani, and Basil Halperin, with their colleagues at the Elasticity Institute, have written a concrete proposal: How to Measure RSI. It lists eight things the labs could share to help answer these questions. Check it out.

Figure 33. Eight proposals for measuring RSI. Source.

I’d especially like to see how much useful research each new model adds, holding resources roughly constant, and how that research translates into better AI. That’s how we’ll learn whether the loop is getting stronger.

What the Future Holds

AI is already helping build better AI. It’s improving at a stupendous pace, and I expect that to continue. We already have narrow superintelligence in chess and Go. I expect increasingly superhuman performance in parts of formal math, coding, and cybersecurity, and any other verifiable domain where machines can generate training data and verify success at machine speed. Those are powerful capabilities. That doesn’t mean we’re close to super-intelligence for less verifiable, messier, open-ended work - or to a general ASI.

I’m skeptical of a fast takeoff to super-intelligence, but evidence matters more than hunches. Let’s collect the data we need to get a clearer picture of what’s happening. Including evidence that could change our minds. If better AI starts producing enough useful research to make the next round easier, I want to know. If the gains keep shrinking, I want to know that too.

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Among our grandad’s papers was his memoir of his childhood in Ipswich, Suffolk. It had been typed up, double-spaced, with a preface and postscript by his son, our dad, John Gyford.

I’ve added a few extra paragraph breaks and also included many related period photos. Most of these are from the collection of David Kindred on Flickr with kind permission. The dates of many are unknown but hopefully they aren’t too far from being contemporary with these memories.

§ Goodbye Victoria:
An Edwardian Childhood in Ipswich

by Criss Barrington Gyford

§ Preface

My father recorded his childhood memories on two tapes during 1982. Before recording them he prepared himself a series of notes and scripts from which to talk. This document represents a transcript of the first tape supplemented by the scripts for the second tape. The latter, although recorded and heard thereafter by myself, has since disappeared but my recollection of its contents matches those of the script, which has survived.

John Gyford

§ These are the memories of Criss Barrington Gyford, born at 7.30 on the evening of December 7th 1901 at 90 Fore Street, Ipswich, Suffolk.

A photo of a bit of a photo album, black card with an embossed frame, and a square cut-out at the centre. Through the cut-out we see a sepia-toned photo of the head and shoulders of a young boy, possibly early teenage, facing the camera, in front of a brick wall. He's wearing a dark suit jacket, a dark shirt, with a prominent white colloar overlapping both the jacket and a bow tie. He's wearing a hat, that looks soft with a narrow brim. He's just about smiling. — Criss Barrington Gyford as a boy.

My father had the same name as myself, Criss Barrington, and he married Bessie Florence Potter on the 13th of February 1899 at St. Matthew’s Church in Ipswich. He was then a soldier in the Suffolk Regiment and before the end of the year was in South Africa for the Boer War. He was wounded in one of the skirmishes out there and returned to this country in 1900 and was discharged from the Army as unfit for further service and in 1901 I was born. That was the year in which Queen Victoria died and if I were to write my autobiography I think I should call it Goodbye Victoria because I seem to have been brought up in quite a Victorian atmosphere. My parents, my uncles and aunts and grandparents were all real Victorians and the few years of King Edward’s reign didn’t seem to alter that: nothing altered I think until the end of the 1914-18 war.

My father was the son of Charles Gyford, who as a young man was a blacksmith in the village of Bedfield in Suffolk, but who later came to Ipswich to work in Ransome’s foundries.

A photo of a vast warehouse type room filled with many rows of workbenches. There are many men and boys at work on bits of metal. They're all wearing flat caps and either jackets or waistcoats. — Ransomes factory, 1916. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

He married Maria Stevens and they produced a family of twenty-three children of which my father was the youngest. The twenty-second child had died before my father was born and it used to be a family joke that my grandmother had twenty-two children twice. Many of the children died in childhood and my father used to say that some of his brothers he never even met or knew – they moved out of Ipswich and he never got to meet them. The only names I can recall are Albert, Edgar, David, Arthur, Samuel and two sisters, Laura and another sister who lived in Harwich but whose name I cannot recall. Five of his brothers actually served together in the Boer War. My father was very proud of his Army service and he did very well for the few years that he was in the Army, playing cricket and football for the Suffolk Regiment. He was stationed at Bury St. Edmunds and on some occasions turned out for Bury St. Edmunds football team.

My mother was the daughter of Thomas and Mary Potter. Tom Potter was for some time a blacksmith also at Ransome’s foundries but later became a market gardener on the Felixstowe Road. Her mother had kept a corner shop on what later became known as Potter Street in the St. Clement’s area of Ipswich but most of my mother’s time was spent on the market garden in Felixstowe Road until she married my father. She was one of a family of eleven, so really I had quite a number of uncles, aunts and cousins but most of the Gyford people seem to have moved out of Ipswich although practically all the Potter people remained in the area so I had plenty of relations to whom I could have turned but somehow it didn’t turn out that way. The names of the Potter family are contained in the family Bible which is now in John’s possession. Strangely enough my mother, after her marriage, didn’t seem to be particularly friendly with her own family. She was on quite good terms with her sisters Ruth, Anna and Eda but for the rest of the family she seemed to have no time. I never really understood what it was all about but the result was that I didn’t enjoy the company of cousins as much as you would expect me to have done.

A photo of a very old building with 'Ye Olde Neptune Inn' painted on the front. It has leaded windows, a tall brick chimney. Two small boys and a man stand on the pavement in front. — The Old Neptune Inn on Fore Street, a couple of doors along from Gyford’s shop. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

Number 90 was built in the early 1500s, about the same time as the Neptune Inn. It was timber framed, almost certainly oak, with exterior and interior walls of lathes and plaster with pargetting designs of trefoil and open rose. Actually the Sorrel Horse inn on the opposite side of Fore Street dates from 1490 and so the house might have been built before 1500.

A photo of an old building that looks like a house with a small courtyard in front. — The Sorrell Horse, Fore Street. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

Whilst Dad was serving in South Africa, Mother had converted the front room of number 90 into a greengrocer’s shop, based on her market gardening experiences I expect, and as soon as Dad was physically fit they began to build up the business. Two or three years later they bought the next door house, number 92 and doubled the shop area and made the backrooms of 92 into a large store room.

A photo of a street of old houses. The first floors mostly jut out slightly over the ground floors. Some have dormer windows in the roofs. The building closest on the left is numbers 90-92 and its sign reads 'Fruiterer. C. B. Gyford. Greengrocer. There are no vehicles but tram tracks are just visible on the road surface. — Fore Street around 1910, with C. B. Gyford’s shop on the left. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

A new doorway upstairs gave us a very large room always known as the ‘best room’. The ceiling was a very well carved plaster one and very ornate. There was a large three oil-lamp chandelier in the centre, which you pulled down for lighting and was then pushed up and kept in place by counter weights: there were also two bracket oil-lamps, one each side of fireplace. A large bow window overlooking Fore Street was a favourite vantage point for me. From this window I saw the laying down of the original tramlines and the putting up of overhead electric wires and the first electric trams to replace the horse-drawn ones. Also I could watch the lamp lighter with his long hooked pole and lighted taper as he lit the gas lamps – I could see twenty-one lamps from that window.

One lamp-post became known to the family as Bessie’s lamp-post because my sister when suddenly turning back to come home from school struck her face on the metal post and burst her eyebrow open and had to have it stitched up at the doctor’s to which she was taken by taxi summoned by phone. Number 90 had the phone connected in its early days – the telephone number was 612 and there was a white metal sign outside the shop with a blue bell design on it and the words ‘you may telephone from here’, the only such sign in the area. All the same, Mother was not at all keen on using the phone – “too much electricity is not good”, she said.

A photo of a wide junction in a town. The impressive stone buildings are three stories tall. Many have arched windows, pillars, and balconies. There is a double-decker tram and the only other vehicle is a two-wheel cart pulled by one horse. There are a few dozen people in dark clothes, mostly men. — A tram on The Cornhill, 1906 or 1907. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

The tramcars came along Fore Street when I was about three years old. The double lines outside number 90 meant that any cart delivering goods had to move over to allow the trams to pass and this used to cause a lot of trouble with the drivers especially if the tramcar driver kept clanging his bell. Where a single line existed then the conductor used his stick to change the lights from green to red to indicate that his car was coming onto the single line. The trams were open-topped with leather aprons for the seats for the passengers in wet weather. They were double-ended trams so there was no need to turn around. There were horse-drawn cabs on the Cornhill in what we call now taxi lines, taxis – motor-car taxis – appearing in about 1909. There was a cabmens’ shelter on the Cornhill for the drivers’ rest and refreshment. This site was later occupied by the Boer War memorial, which was later put in Christchurch Park and re-dedicated by the Prince of Wales after the 1914-18 War.

A shelter on The Cornhill around 1894, before electric trams replaced horse-drawn trams in 1903. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

A regular thing at the private houses that still existed in Fore Street was the cleaning of doorsteps every morning with a scaling stone and a whitener. There was also the sharpening of carving knives on the doorstep for carving the meat joints. Sunday meals were taken to bakers’ ovens for a few pence. In those days I would be sent for a half-shoulder of lamb, knuckle-end, which would cost two shillings and threepence. There would be children in the shop buying four penny worth of scraps for the poor homes in Waterworks Street and places like that. Sugar was threepence a pound, you could buy double weight margarine for sixpence a pound; double weight meant that if you asked for a pound for your sixpence you would get two pounds. My mother always gave us suet pudding or batter pudding for the first dinner course unless the main course was meat pudding or steak and kidney or rabbit pie. Rabbits cost eightpence or ninepence each skinned, the skins fetching threepence or fourpence.

A photo of one side of a street of old two and three storey buildings. The closest is H. Wells, a 'pork butcher' with a huge queue of people leading from the open door away down the street. — H. Wells butcher, Fore Street. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

One of the earliest things I recall is wearing a white furry coat and a matching beret hat and having my father’s South African Boer War Queen’s Medal pinned on my coat and being carried on my dad’s shoulder on his way home from the Cornhill where he had been presented with the medal by Lord Kitchener who had come down to Ipswich for that special purpose to present medals to the Suffolk Regiment. But I particularly remember looking down the steps to a fruit shop in Westgate Street: evidently the road had been built up, but the shop itself was well below street level probably because the ceiling of the shop was not raisable. To me it always seemed peculiar that a shop should be down steps instead of up.

The back doors of number 90 Fore Street opened onto a driftway which led down to the docks and as a little boy I spent a lot of time playing down there on the barges. The chief cargo was grain for the maltings and lucca beans which were processed into cattle food.

A photo of two men on an old barge, either side of a large wooden ship's wheel. They're both wearing flat caps, jackets and trousers, and each has a cigarette in his mouth. On the dockside behind them are carts and men. — A pair of barge hands in the 1920s at Neptune Key, roughly behind the location of the Gyford shop.(Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

Opposite number 90 there were two maltings, one kept by Mr. Meakins, another by Mr. Chinnery. These maltsters lived in a company house and had to attend to the large semi-underground maltings in their backyards. Meakin’s house had been once occupied by Captain Eldred, the round-the-world voyager, and his alleged captain’s cap is now in the Christchurch Mansion museum. Chinnery’s yard also had stables for the horses that pulled the grain carts that took the malted substance to breweries. It was chiefly Cobbold’s brewery of course and in those days boys with pails and shovels followed the horses to collect the manure, most of the children being barefoot. It was a regular thing in those days to see the women going to Sneezums the pawnbroker on Saturday mornings to get out their husband’s and children’s Sunday clothes and then they would return them on Monday again because they needed the money.

A photo of a street of two and three storey buildings. On the right we can see part of a shop and its sign 'A. J. Snee…'. In the distance is 'Henry Sneezum, Pawnbroker and Clothier'. Closer than that is 'Albion House. General Drapery. Fancy Drapery.' Between them is 'Cycle Agent'. There are two horse-drawn carts on the road. — Fore Street, with Henry Sneezum, pawnbroker and clothier, in the distance. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

On Tuesday mornings, if I was at home, I would make a point of going to the window of the upstairs room because Tuesday was the market day when the cattle from Nacton Road, Felixstowe Road, Bucklesham Road would be driven down Bishop’s Hill, along Fore Street round into Salthouse Street on their way to the market. Of course there were practically no cattle vans in those days – a lot of them came by road. The cattle from Foxhall Road came down the Back Hamlet and occasionally two herds would join together, which would mean great excitement along Fore Street. Of course they were followed by a good many boys with their shovels and pails, etc.

Another memorable occasion were the horse-drawn timber carts. These carts had two separate bogies; the front bogie was under the forward part of the actual trunk that was on the timber cart and the other bogie was nearer the other end of the tree trunk so that the actual tree trunk made the body of the cart. These were drawn usually by four Shire horses, two in the shafts attached to the front bogy and the other two in traces ahead of it, and they found it very difficult to round the bend from Salthouse Street to Fore Street – it was about a forty-five degree turn and there had to be a lot of backwardsing and forwardsing before they could actually get round. Of course that would hold up all the traffic, including all the trams, and would make quite a jam.

A photo of a cobbled street junction. There is a large, slightly blurred, dog in the foreground. Opposite the junction a shop has the sign 'Draper. G. H. Jary'. Four men are standing around, wearing caps, one of them very blurred. One of the buildings in the background is half-timbered. — A Victorian view of Fore Street from the junction with Salthouse Street. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

The horses then towed the trunk along and went down Duke Street towards Brown’s the timber merchants down by the docks. These trace horses were stationed in the forecourt of the Carpenters Arms at the foot of Bishop’s Hill. These horses were used to help to pull heavy loads up the hill. Bishop’s Hill was much narrower than it is now, with big hedges each side. At the top of the hill, at the junction of Nacton Road and Felixstowe Road, was a large water trough, for the cattle of course, and with metal cups for human drinking, and a lower trough for things like sheep and dogs.

Although cycles were then very popular and the motor-car was just beginning to be more used, the chief means of locomotive power was still the horse. My father had two horses – the names I remember are Charlie and Black Bess. These were used to pull two trolley vans that took vegetables round to two parts of the town: one part was between Fore Hamlet and Back Hamlet such as Foxhall Road, Rose Hill Road and places like that, where there were very few shops and where people were only too pleased to buy their vegetables from the van. The other van used to do the area of Henley Road and Westerfield Road, a better residential area but again an area with very few shops. Dad didn’t know much about horses so of course he had a horseman, a fellow called Tom, whom I particularly remember because he was the first person I knew who had a gramophone and he brought this gramophone along to one of our Christmas parties where the children were absolutely amazed and surprised at hearing such a thing. In fact I think Dad often wondered where Tom got his money from to afford such a thing as a gramophone which was expensive in those days. Anyway Tom used to look after the horses quite well and of course he took around one of the vans and the other van was taken around by a fellow called Bob. I learned to (cycle) ride by going along Fore Street with my Dad and round by the Earl Grey and then coming back again: the cross traffic wasn’t so much of a problem in those days and I soon learned well. Bessie of course was carried on Dad’s cycle if we went any distance, such as to Felixstowe or places like that. Later Bessie and myself cycled to Boyton – eighteen miles that was – when we were staying with our Aunt Ruth. On one occasion on a Sunday, Dad drove over to visit us whilst we were there. He drove over with Charlie pulling the trap but unfortunately he let the horse fall at the Eagle gates. The horse was stabled afterwards at Boyton but because it had running joint oil from its knees owing to the fall it had to be shot: I’ve always remembered that. The place at Boyton where Aunt Ruth lived was the old Mill House with the Mill stump still standing.

Next door to number 90 was a very small shop between 90 and the Neptune Inn. It was just a shop, with one room at the back and two bedrooms upstairs. It was occupied by Haggars, that was the name of the people; they were pork butchers, an elderly couple who had a niece who had a daughter by her cousin who had emigrated to Australia on the promise of sending for her but he never did so.

A photo of two shops on a street. 90-92 is C. B. Gyford, Greengrocer, its sign obscured by foliage presumably fixed to the shop. Outside are many barrels, a cart and displays of fruit and vegetables including bananas. Next door the shop has a sign reading 'E. Haggar'. Five men are standing around along with one boy and then a woman in Gyford's shop doorway. — Fore Street around 1905, with C. B. Gyford’s shop in the foreground and Haggars next door. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

The cousin was the son of this elderly couple and so she lived there: it was quite a serious matter in those days of course, this illegitimacy. In the doorway of this shop there were two large hooks, one on each doorpost, from which the carcass of a pig was suspended and cut in halves vertically with a large chopper. This happened twice a week so I suppose they made their living out of these two pigs. Their sausages I always particularly noticed because they had rather large pieces of meat in them and mother used to complain a lot about that. Then one day she learned that they were going to get a new mincer: she was quite excited about it. Lo and behold! – when the new mincer arrived it had exactly the same sized cutters so they still got the large pieces of meat in the sausages. I do remember the scraps of solidified pork fat which they used to sell and which we often had for a five o’clock meal. We used to call them scraps but I believe some people call them scratchings.

Next door to this shop of course was the Neptune Inn, not as some books says the oldest inn in Ipswich – the Sorrel Horse was at least twenty or thirty years older. Within 200 yards of number 90 I should think there were at least thirty pubs whose names I will try to recall. On the corner of Salthouse Street there were three pubs and opposite to the corner one was the Beehive Inn. On the corner of Church Lane was a pub later converted into a fish-shop: on the corner of Fore Street and Waterworks Street was another pub (later) converted into a shop for second-hand furniture. On the opposite side of Fore Street was the Wheatsheaf, whilst at the Eagle Street – Tacket Street junction there was a pub on each corner, four pubs at one crossways. In the other direction there was the Vine public house in Church Street, now part of Grimwade Street, and there were three more at the corners of the Grimwade and Church Street intersection. At the junction with Back Hamlet and Fore Hamlet was quite a large pub, the Earl Grey and there was a pub called the Star on the opposite corner near the Grimwade Memorial Chapel at the corner of Long Street.

A photo of a wide junction on a street. There's a four-wheeled wagon with no horses stood in the open space. Behind it is a two-story building with a grand roof. There's no traffic on the roads and only a few people on the pavements. — A Victorian view of Fore Street by William Vick, at the junction of Back Hamlet (left) and Fore Hamlet (right). The Earl Grey pub is behind the wagon. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

On the opposite corner of Long Street was another pub later converted to a shop. On the other side of the Earl Grey there was one each side of Duke Street which also had a passage leading to the dock-side where there were two more dockside pubs. There were several more pubs along Duke Street opposite Ransomes works and opposite the Gas Works and up Little Wykes Bishop Street. In those days pubs and butchers’ shops both had sawdust sprinkled on the floors. Wykes Bishops Street by the way was the street in which my father was born and where he lived until he was fourteen and from where he went to school, at Cavendish Street school, and I can recall my mother, who was very fussy about her dresses had a dressmaker who lived somewhere around Wykes Bishop Street. I particularly remember the room which she used – it was used as a sort of fitting room, because she used to take me with her so that I would know where to take Bessie for her dresses. The room had dozens of Goss China ornaments on the many shelves around the room: I always remember those.

My sister Bess was born when I was three and a half but I don’t remember anything about the event or about the earlier years of our life together but I do recall that I had to take her to this dressmakers to have her dresses made. My mother was very, very keen on having everything tailor-made if possible; even my suits and shoes had to be tailor made. This really was a drawback, because both these things were soon too small. The shoes being ready made (tailor made) by the time I got them – and it sometimes took the shoemaker a couple of months to make them – they were already getting too small for me and this was very bad for my toes. The same with the suits: by the time I got the suits and had worn them for a few months then the sleeves were too short and the trousers were getting too short for me because I was growing quite quickly. The same thing applied to things like tight kid gloves which we had to wear and which in my case gave me chilblains. Shoes came from a man called Fitch, whose business was actually run under the name of Daldry which was his father-in-law’s name. We used to go to parties when the Fitch children had them and I always recall that from their back bedroom window upstairs you could overlook the Jewish cemetery. I wonder if it’s still there: if it is its where a new by-pass road is going to be constructed. That’s where my shoes were made. My suits came from a Mr. Pierrepoint in Tacket Street opposite the Salvation Army citadel. The Salvation Army citadel was a former theatre where David Garrick made his early appearances. Later my suits came from J. and J. Edwards in Carr Street, then later on much more posh suits from Ridleys.

A photo of a street with mainly three-storey brick buildings. The main one has a big sign painted on one end reading 'Tannkard Inn. Cobbold Light Dark.' We can see the edge of the building at the far left and part of a big sign reading 'CITADEL'. — Tacket Street with the Salvation Army citadel just visible on the left, next to the Tankard Inn. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

Further from number 90 beyond the Neptune Inn was Beard’s, grocers and wine merchant. Half their place was a shop and the other part was a rather nice residence. Next to them Barnard’s the corn chandler’s and Isaac Lord’s house and their coal warehouse which led down to the dockside. Then came another fruit shop kept by Richard Potter, who actually was mother’s cousin and who set up shop there in opposition to the Gyfords with the idea of closing them down but of course that just didn’t happen. Then there was Fenner’s cycle shop and Bloomfields the bakeries – which was always a very nice-smelling place of course because the baking was done on the premises. Another pub on the corner and on the opposite side of Fore Street from the pub was Taylor’s sweet shop and Taylor the hairdresser. Further down towards number 90 on the opposite side was the Beehive Inn, then Sneezum’s the pawnbrokers and a furniture shop which later became a communal butcher in the 1914- 18 war, and Jackson’s the chemists. Jackson made his own pills and he actually showed me how to make these pills, which of course was very interesting, with a little wooden press thing. He made things like Jackson’s Little Liver and Kidney Pills: he also had Jackson’s Famous Cough Mixture. His daughter Mary Jackson became a very good concert pianist. Next to them was Meakins, a place I’ve already mentioned, then Mrs. Watson’s boarding house for working men exactly opposite number 90: then Keels’ – Mr. Keel was a solicitor’s clerk, then came Chinnery’s maltings. Next to that a doss-house for poor men, then Betts’ who had home-made sweets and on the corner of what was then Church Street, now Grimwade Street, was Ribbon’s hardware shop, which was below road level, you went down about two steps into the shop. On the other corner was a shop that was empty for some time but later was occupied by Barnard’s who moved from further up Fore Street, that’s next to the Sorrel Horse which I think was built in in 1694. Then came Edward’s the bakers, then a tobacconists and then the social settlement, to which I used to go on Sunday evenings with my grandad Potter except in the summer term.

A photo of a junction on a street with old two and three storey buildings. There's no traffic and just a handful of people including a slightly blurry girl in a dress in the foreground carrying a large package. — Another view of Fore Street, with the Lion and Lamb pub at the centre. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

Both sides of my family were staunch Liberals, the Labour Party having had little foothold in agricultural Ipswich in those days. My grandmother Gyford’s sister Annie Stevens had married a Daniel Goddard who was a foreman at the Gas Works. He later became a worker representative on the newly formed Gas Board – to begin with the gas had been manufactured by Ransome’s as a sideline to their engineering works and Ransome himself was a Liberal and a Quaker who worshipped at the Friends Meeting House in St. Peters Street. Getting back to this chap Goddard, he was chosen as Liberal candidate in the 1906 General Election and beat the sitting Conservative candidate. Ipswich had two parliamentary seats in those days and Goddard’s successful partner was the Rev. Sylvester Horne who had three sons, the most prominent of them being the radio and T.V. personality, Kenneth Horne. The Chairman of the Ipswich Liberal Association was Major Rowley Ellison whose daughter married Isaac Foot, a strong Liberal and the Foots had three sons of whom the most notorious is Michael Foot whom I believe people think is a Socialist.

A yellow, black and white card or poster with black and white photos of the heads of two men, one with white hair, moustache and beard (labeled COBBOLD), the other with glasses and moustache (GODDARD). A banner across the top reads 'IPSWICH PARLIAMENTARY ELECTION'. In the middle it says 'SOUVENIR, 1906' and underneath 'THE LIBERAL MEMBERS'. — A postcard of the Liberal candidates for the Ipswich parliamentary election of 1906, Felix Cobbold and Daniel Ford Goddard. (From Wikipedia)

Getting back to that chap Goddard again. He won the next General Election in 1910, was knighted and became a Privy Councillor so rejoiced in the billing as the Rt. Hon. Sir Daniel Ford Goddard, but he was beaten in the General Election after the 1914-18 war, when Ipswich became a one-member seat; he was beaten by Captain Ganzoni. Ganzoni later purchased Belstead House on the outskirts of Ipswich near the Ostrich Inn on Wherstead Road, and Ganzoni became Lord Belstead and his son is now a worthy junior minister in Mrs. Thatcher’s circus.

Before the 1914-18 war Goddard used to hold regular Sunday evening services for men in the social settlement and I used to wait outside the social settlement at about 6.30 for my grandfather to come along.

A colourised photo with a three storey brick building in the background and a double-decker green electric tram in the foreground. — A postcard showing the Social Settlement on Fore Street, probably in 1904. (From the Ipswich Society)

He would take me in with him although I was only ten years old at the time. There was the usual hymn-singing, mostly sailors’ hymns like Eternal Father Strong to Save and that sort of thing, and there was usually a lantern-slide lecture given either by Goddard, who had travelled quite a bit, or by some guest speaker. But the enthusiasm was mainly in the Liberal cause there were practically no socialists in those days but it was quite interesting and I enjoyed going to these things which ceased of course when war broke out.

My mother was very fond of crocheting and knitting: she would make cushion covers using the cloths which were marked out in squares and using thick cotton in a circular pattern in each square: it made a very nice design and so we had many nice coloured cushions about the place. My dad had no particular hobby, he was concerned mainly with the extension of the shop and the fact that he was very much now in the wholesale business as well and he also acted as a ship’s chandler – he supplied practically all the vegetables and meat to the various ships in the Ipswich docks. Many of these of course were sailing ships; I have seen as many as four full-sized sailing ships at one time on the far side of the docks. And of course steamships were becoming much more important then and several of those would be in the docks at the same time and he would have the supplies for those. He had also opened another shop in Brook Street and had a third one in St. Matthews Street, so he got very busy in that way and he had no particular hobbies of any sort. He never smoked cigarettes or a pipe but was very fond of cigars and he usually smoked those at the weekends: I would be sent to Dotheby’s, the tobacconists in Orwell Place, now part of Tacket Street, to buy the cigars, which were called Torpedoes and cost threepence each.

A busy street scene with a few dozen people quite dressed up. Women and girls are wearing long dresses and wide-brimmed hats. Men are wearing a variety of caps, boaters, bowler hats, etc. A man in the foreground with a bowler hat has a white shirt and tie, a three-piece suit, and is smoking a pipe. A small boy is looking at the camera, wearing a wide straw hat with a white collar spreading over his shoulders and chest. — Orwell Place, around 1910. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

Most of the shopkeepers in those days wore waistcoats and white aprons; the butchers wore striped aprons and straw hats.

§ My first school was Clifford Road Infants School. I went up Back Hamlet, then turn left along an unmade road across Grove Lane which was not then built up. There was high ground on each side of Grove Lane in those days and there were deep gulleys down the sandy banks where the children clambered up or down. There were open fields from Grove Lane to Clifford Road itself which appeared to be on the edge of the town although there were houses then along Foxhall Road. The headmistress was a Miss Garrard who lived in Palmerston Road and who treated me as a rather favourite child – probably because she was a school friend of my mother and a staunch Liberal. Both my sister and myself were able to read well by the time we started school. I don’t know why that was, as I cannot recall ever getting any reading lessons, but there were always books available in our house, mostly along religious lines. My favourite reading material was comics – Comic Cuts on Tuesdays with its Dreamy Daniel and Weary Willie, and Chips on Thursday with its tramp Tired Tim and its back page Casey Court which was a weekly wonder of Do it Yourself in those early days. Other periodicals I recall were Tit-bits and Answers, but it was not until I was nine years old that I graduated to the Boy’s Own Paper, and the novels of R. G. Henty and Rudyard Kipling and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.

Comic Cuts from 15 October 1910, and Chips from 1 August 1908. (From Wonderfully Vulgar, Comic Cuts and Chips)

At Clifford Road school during the reading lessons each day I was given a duster and told to dust the shelves and silver cups in the hallway and so pass my time because I was such a good reader – it was a waste of time to sit in at the reading class, I was much ahead of any of the class. At eight years of age I transferred to the Central School in Smart Street off Foundation Street where the headmaster was Mr. Harrison. There was a fee of 6d a week at this school although it was a Council school: girls were on the ground floor of the building and boys on the first floor. What I particularly recall was that on Empire Day we would all parade in the playground and the Australian flag would be raised whilst we sang ‘Rule Britannia’ and we were told that on that same day the Union Jack had been raised at our corresponding school in Ipswich, Queensland. At the end of my first year there, Mr. Harrison retired and was replaced by a Mr. Welburn who was the first graduate head of a primary school in Ipswich. He had a B.Sc. and was also well-known locally as a musician.

My sister Bess began her schooling at the age of five at Miss Banks’ private school in Foundation Street which meant that I could take her to school as it was only just round the corner from the Central School. I believe Miss Banks’ fees were 6d a day. It was from the Central School that I took the eleven plus exam for a scholarship and passed, much to the annoyance of the parents of my school chum, Percy Gilbert, who lived in Church Street and who did not pass his 11+. According to my mother the chief objection to me being given a scholarship was that I was only ten and a half years old but that the Gilbert boy was eleven, and so I ought not to qualify for another year. Anyway, we both went on to the Secondary School that September, although I think the Gilbert boy had to pay half-fee. Actually, in September the Secondary School did not resume its school year until ten days after the Central School resumed and my parent insisted that I returned to the Central School for those ten days, much to my annoyance at the time, but it was all for the best because I was placed in the 5th Form where a Mr. Murgatroyd introduced me to Algebra, and from that time onwards Mathematics seemed to become reasonably easy for me. I was the only one in the first form in my new school who had ever done any algebra.

I realise that I seem to have skimmed over my early days without giving much detail of what I did with my time. Up to the age of about six I had to wear a smock-like overall to protect my clothes when playing in the back yard – many children wore overalls in those days. Apart from the back yard to play in, there were also the store-sheds, the stables and a very large loft over the shed and stables. There was also a large concrete paved corridor leading to the outside lavatory which had no cistern but where there always seemed to be a small stream flowing into the docks which flushed the W.C. Looking back I would think that the stream flowed under the house because our kitchen was built up on piles as an addition to the original building. I kept a number of pets at various times – rabbits, guinea pigs and some pigeons and chocolate coloured doves in the loft. I also had a goat and a goat-cart similar to the ones that could be hired on the front at Felixstowe. One day I borrowed a broody hen from Grandad Potter and successfully hatched out a dozen chicks but the rats got the lot. Creatures I didn’t keep were rats and mice, the hollow plaster walls were alive with them: you could hear them running along the walls. We always had two or three cats which kept the rats and mice away from the shop and the store rooms.

A photo of an area of grass and trees with a small single storey building in the background. The sun is casting shadows. There are lots of adults and children sitting, walking and playing. Women and girls in long dresses and, usually, wide-brimmed hats. The men most often in flat caps and suits. — Christchurch Park. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

During holiday time, Bess and I would spend a lot of time in Christchurch Park playing cowboys and Indians, which was the outcome of our Saturday visits to Poole’s Picture Palace in Tower Street. Each Saturday we were given tuppence, two old pennies, and that was usually spent as a halfpenny for two ounces of pear drops, a halfpenny for a comic and one penny for the cinema. As you entered the cinema you threw your penny into an open box – no nonsense about tickets then – the box was under the watchful eye of a small man always called “Monkey” and he could spot a foreign coin at once.

A photo of a cinema auditorium looking over the seats directly at the screen. There are balconies on either side. — Poole’s Picture Palace. (From Ipswich Film Society)

We used not to arrive too early at the cinema, because the early comers were ushered into the main body of the hall and had to sit on hard wooden seats whereas latecomers were allowed upstairs to occupy the plush seats. Of course, the films were silent but accompanied by a pianist and the roar that went up when the show began was something out of this world. There were usually three films – a serial where the villain was always putting the heroine in danger. The villain was always greeted with hisses and at the end of the film when the girl had been rescued and was being kissed by the hero there were boos and sarcastic remarks. The second film was usually a newsreel which was watched in comparative silence and I think with some interest, but the third film was what we had all been waiting for – either cowboys and Indians or slapstick comedy such as Charlie Chaplin. We really did enjoy those shows although I always left the cinema with a terrible headache – I expect it was the flickering of the pictures, together with the complete absence of any ventilation.

This Poole’s Picture Palace was run by a family called Poole and began originally as a magic lantern show in Tower Street. Later on two other cinemas opened in Ipswich – the Cinema in Princes Street and the Picture House in Tavern Street near the Cornhill. One day at school in 1915 I was told by some chums: “Gyford, saw you on the newsreel last night”. An Army sergeant who had lived in Ipswich had been awarded the Victoria Cross and the local authority were giving him a civic reception and this was recorded by Gaumont British News. The first part of the reception was a drive from the railway station to the Town Hall in an open carriage along streets lined by cheering well-wishers. Of course, crowds of youngsters were following the carriage and there was I on my bicycle just behind the cab as it approached the Cornhill – brief moments of reflected glory.

A leaflet or advert with 'PICTURE HOUSE' at the top. Below that it says 'and Cafe. Tavern St., Ipswich.' Below is a photo of a cinema auditorium, looking quite grand, including chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. — The Picture House. (From Cinema Treasures)

I also recall early in 1917 the first ‘talking picture’. It was Shakespeare’s King Henry the Fifth and the prologue and the King’s speech before Harfleur were recited on the stage alongside the picture by an actor who made a very good job of it. We were taking Henry the Fifth for our School Certificate that year so practically all the form went to see the film. I can still recite many parts of that play including those two speeches.

I did reasonably well at school. My English was good so I found that Composition – which was really writing essays – became almost natural when combined with a little imagination. My spelling was good so I was always first in dictation – that was probably due to my early reading skills. Mathematics presented very few problems and I enjoyed both Physics and Chemistry, but Art was not in my line – I think my drawings and paintings must have been too futuristic. No doubt there was some early evidence of my later journalistic skills as in the 4th Form I founded and edited the form magazine – I still have three copies of that monthly publication including my wonderful ‘Adventures of Wharlie Whaplin’. Obviously I was aware of copyright and dare not use the name Charlie Chaplin. The magazines contain a list of those form-mates who had brought eggs to school for me to give to the wounded soldiers at the Suffolk Hospital.

Those school-days were occasionally interrupted by air raid warnings which were given by the sounding of the foundry sirens – what we called the ‘bulls’. On hearing these we were sent home until another siren sounded the all-clear. Although warnings were given on many occasions there were only a very few actual air raids. The warnings were caused by Zeppelins returning from raids elsewhere, chiefly on London, and of course on their way back to Germany, but one actual raid I do recall clearly. It was at about 7.30 on a Friday evening. My father was out looking at some property – he acted as a valuer for Oxborrows the estate agent. Mother was as usual doing her knitting and Bessie was at the table reading. I was doing my Geometry homework – Theorem 23, the square on the hypoteneuse equals the sum of the squares on the other two sides – suddenly a loud thump that rattled the windows. Mother said “under the table”. Before we got there there was another thump and then a third one, and we could hear the br-br-br of a Zeppelin’s engines dying away in the distance. A few minutes later my father rushed in, saying he had seen the Zeppelin.

A terrace of houses with the end demolished exposing a large hole and wooden lath in the remaining building. A man in uniform stands guard and two men and three boys look on from the opposite side of th — Damage from a World War I zeppelin raid. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

The first bomb hit a house in Salthouse Street opposite the Customs House, killing two people and setting the house on fire. The second bomb fell into the dock and the third one into the river between the lock gates and Stoke Bridge – not bad aiming for those days so its probable that they wanted to smash the lock gates. The very first raid I recall was in the summer of 1915 when we were on holiday at Aunt Ruth’s in Hollesley. Uncle William was away on Army service. We were asleep when we were awakened by loud gunfire from the anti-aircraft guns in Shingle Street about a mile across the marshes. Bessie and I rushed into Auntie’s room in alarm but had great difficulty in arousing her – she was almost stone deaf and had heard nothing. No bombs were dropped but the Zeppelin was hit and came down in the North Sea.

A photo showing a terrace of houses with no roofs and daylight showing through the upstairs windows. Policemen stand outside. — Houses on Brook Hall Road destroyed by a zeppelin raid. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

Going back to my schooldays something I enjoyed very much was the once-a-month nature ramble taken by the Nature Study master Mr. Bachelor. He usually took us in the direction of Westerfield or Henley, and how interesting I found it all – butterflies, insects, birds, flowers. One field I still remember vividly – flowering with cowslips and buttercups and a stream that was alive with tadpoles and banks lined with elms. Over fifty years later I motored out along the Henley Road to see if I could find that same field. I found it – not built on as I had feared but just as I had always pictured it, but without the tadpoles. Happy days.

Most of the popular songs of those days we heard from the whistling and singing of the errand boys, or from the many barrel organs and the hurdy-gurdies, both of which usually had a monkey to attract money. There was also the occasional performing dancing bear with a ring through its nose – the ring fastened to the end of a pole so that the bear had to rise on its hind legs and swivel round as the pole was moved about. Gramophones were also becoming more in use and my parents had a HMV gramophone – the first one with cylindrical records that began with the words “This is an Edison Bell record”, and then later a gramophone that had the flat records. These gramophones were both of course hand wound.

A photo of a street of terraced houses with three or four horse-drawn carriages driven by men in overcoats and top hats. The front-most one has two dark horses and is a hearse, with glass sides and flowers on top. In the background nine men carry a coffin down steps from the front door of one of the houses. A police sergeant looks on. — A funeral procession in Ipswich. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

In my young days many of the side roads would have straw spread over them if there was any illness in the road. That was to deaden the sound of horses hooves and the cart wheels – but of course this didn’t happen on main roads because of the tram-lines. Funerals seemed to be everyday events then – the horses with black plumes on their heads and black drapeson the outer side. Most of poorer people belonged to a funeral club into which they paid a few pence each week so that they could afford a proper funeral. For a child, it was usual for the small coffin to be placed under the seat where the driver sat and behind this was the cab-compartment for up to six people. In the country areas it was usual for the coffins to be either taken to a churchyard on a farm wagon or on a four-wheeled light platform carriage, similar to the conveyance used by the police to get the drunks to the police station on a Saturday night. I recall that one wall of my parent’s shop was hung with artificial wreaths under glass domes – small sizes were £1 each and large one £5. I think later the cemetery authorities banned these glass domes as they were considered to be dangerous.

My father did considerable business supplying fruit and vegetables to ships and I think he had some sort of financial arrangement with the dockside public house to put the ships’ business his way. Anyway we seemed to be friendly with a great number of publican’s children and we always went to their Christmas parties and they came to ours. I can recall seeing as many as three fully-rigged sailing ships as well as smaller barquantines and brigantines in the docks at one time together with several steam vessels and many barges moored side-by-side four deep. My father as a young man made a trip in a ketch to Blythe in Northumberland with a return cargo of coal – but he only made the one trip. He said that was enough for him.

The Arthur Fitger docked at Ipswich in April 1900. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

Actually he began work at the age of 14 by going up to London to work with his eldest sister Laura who had a very flourishing flower business in the High Street, Stoke Newington. He came back to Ipswich two years later when she got married to a Mr. Stockles and his help was no longer needed. He said he often had to get up at four o’clock in the morning, in order to get to Covent Garden Market to buy the boxes of flowers. After leaving London he had a short spell in the Post Office at Ipswich in the sorting department before he joined the Army. He was stationed in the Ipswich Barracks in St. Matthews and it was whilst there that he met my mother who after their engagement came to live with her married sister, Anna in nearby Clarkson Street, and they were married at St. Matthew’s Church.

I was baptised in St. Clement’s church but I cannot recall either of my parents being church-goers, and I never attended St. Clement’s church. When I was about ten years of age I had to go with my sister Bess on Sunday morning to the Congregational Church at the foot of Back Hamlet – the Grimwade Memorial Chapel was its official name. I suppose the reasons for being sent there were that my Aunt Kate attended that chapel and the Grimwade family were staunch Liberals. John Henry Grimwade was the nephew of the ‘memorial’ Grimwade and had inherited the family business of gentlemen’s outfitters on the corner of Westgate Street and the Cornhill. The Grimwades lived in a large house on Fonnereau Road, and every Sunday morning the family of four would set out on its progress to church, walking down the centre of the road, across St. Margaret’s Plain, down Upper Orwell Street and Fore Street – there were no trams running on Sundays. John Henry attired in morning frock-coat and striped trousers with a shining black top hat, was obviously in charge and would doff his hat to any passerby who glanced at him. Bessie and I used to walk up Fore Street deliberately so that I could touch my cap to him and watch him pompously raise his topper – it quite amused us.

We also attended the Sunday School opposite the chapel and when I was twelve I was given the job of School Librarian, but during the war years my devotions wandered elsewhere and I attended the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Museum Street, St. Bartholomews’ Church off Felixstowe Road, the Salvation Army citadel in Tacket Street – my Aunt Hannah was a Salvationist and her son, my cousin Willie Newson, played a cornet in the band; and I went to the Town Mission which was a break-away from the Salvation Army and held its meetings in Poole’s Picture Palace in Tower Street. On one occasion I accompanied a Mr. Hilling, who was a business partner of my father, to a Quaker meeting in the Friends’ Meeting House in Friars Street and met Mr. Ransome the boss of Ransome, Sims and Jeffries the foundry people, but I did not like the informality of the service. On the whole I think I preferred the High Church Anglo-Catholicism of St. Bartholomew’s. I never attended a Roman Catholic church. I think there was only one in Ipswich and that was in Orwell Place, which is now part of Packet Street.

Reverting to my years at the Secondary School, the school building was in the Tower Ramparts and faced what was left of the original wall around the port of Gyppeswyk which was the former name of Ipswich. The Ramparts were about three foot above street level and about half-a-dozen houses had been built on the foundations.

A photo showing an empty street. On the right of the road a grass verge leads up to the pavement and a few houses. In the distance is a four-storey warehouse or factory with a tall chimeny and a covered bridge across the road. There is a very tall telegraph pole. There are six young boys and a young woman stood at various places looking at the camera. — Tower Ramparts in the 1880s, or maybe later. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

To the right was the north gate to the port – that is Northgate Street and to the left was the west gate where Westgate Street joined St. Matthew’s Street at a five-way junction known as Hyde Park Corner where Churchman’s the tobacconists had a shop with a more than life size figure of a Scotsman in full ceremonial dress in the doorway. Parallel to the Ramparts was Soane Street where there was a row of shops one of which was the school’s unofficial tuck-shop which we were allowed to patronise in the mid-morning break. The name over the doorway was M. A. Bell so of course it was known as Ma Bells. There was often an appetising smell of fried sausages from the kitchen as Ma Bell had given the sixth form prefects permission to do that. The majority of these lads and their followers in later years did not survive the horrors of the Somme, Passchendale and Hill 60. The shops have now disappeared together with the Ramparts which are now part of the car park.

§ Somehow it is always the pleasant things that remain most vivid in one’s memory and no doubt that is a good thing, as one doesn’t want to relive unpleasant happenings and actually I cannot recall any unpleasant things. My week-ends were chiefly occupied by playing on the dock-side, on and off the barges and I can recall more names of the barges now – the Ida which was built in 1895, the May built in 1901, the Alice May which was new to me in 1905, the Spinaway and the Cambria. Some of these still sail in the annual Thames Sailing Barge race.

A photo of a river with a pebbley bank leading down to it. There are a number of sail boats moored in various places, including a large barge in the centre with its sails furled. — A barge docked at Ipswich in the mid 1890s. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

Many of the skippers were school-mates of my father or mother but although they knew me and my sister Bess, I have forgotten their names. On at least three occasions I sailed down-river on a barge and was put ashore at Pin Mill with my cycle and made my way home from there. There were three main barge owners: R & W Paul who had their own shipbuilding and repair yard just outside the lockgates. Paul’s barges had a white cross on the topsails, which I think represented a windmill because they were mainly concerned with wheat and barley milling. Cranfield’s was another milling firm that owned barges that brought not only grain but lucca beans for cattle feed. A third bargeowning firm was Measons whose emblem was a white moon – they were general carriers and did not do any milling. All these barges were well-maintained and several of the larger ones traded to the continent – these were gaff ketches known as ‘boomies’. The smaller ones were known as ‘spritties’ with a spritsail on the mizzen mast, although slightly larger barges had the spritsail on the main mast and a gaff on the mizzen. A barge with a crew of these was known as a ‘matie’, but many had only two in the crew, with an extra boy during the school holidays to help with the cooking.

A photo of the corner of some docks with five-storey warehouses lining the dock in the background. There are three barges docked next to each other, sails furled. — The barges Mabel, Fossil and Nautius in Ipswich Dock near Coprolite Street in the 1890s. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

When not playing on the docks or in our backyard, Bessie and I would go to Christchurch Park particularly to play Cowboys and Indians in the conifer plantations, re-living the films we had seen. Occasionally we would go up to Bishop’s Hill to the race course and make our way across to Grandad Potter’s garden where we were assured of plenty of fruit and the gift of a penny each from Grandad.

Naturally, summer holidays were the best for enjoyment. My first August holiday away from home was spent at Boyton, a few miles from Hollesby, which I have mentioned before. This was to stay with Uncle William Sharpe and Aunt Ruth, my mother’s sister. Uncle Will was secretary and accountant to the Hollesley Bay Labour Colony which was run by the London County Council and provided farm work for men from London who were on remand, or on probation or just, I suppose, were unemployed. The colony was concerned mainly with fruit-farming, with a considerable amount of arable land that was being won back from the surrounding heathland. There was dairy farming on the marshes, and they also did well breeding Suffolk horses, which they continued to breed even after mechanisation took over. Bessie and I cycled to Boyton via Woodbridge and Melton across miles of heathland dotted with small conifer woods and inhabited by hundreds – probably thousands – of rabbits. The first part of this heathland turned out to be the site of the Sutton Hoo Viking discoveries. Much of the heath is now occupied by Bentwaters, the airfield run jointly by the R.A.F. and the United States Air Force. The tiny village of Boyton was on slightly higher land than the surrounding marshes which probably explains the windmill there – our uncle’s house was called The Old Mill House and the mill stump still existed in the garden.

My main enjoyment of the holiday was wandering about the countryside, particularly along the marshes that led down to Hollesley Bay. There were quite a number of grass snakes to be seen – quite harmless as distinct from the poisonous adders on the heathland. A wonderful variety of birds especially on the shore of the bay – oyster catchers, spoonbills, and a variety of gulls which in those days seemed to keep well out to sea and show little interest in the farmlands as they do today. It was here that I was first introduced – by some village children – to the devil’s puff ball which when dried out gave a black powder that would heal up cuts and scratches – I have wondered since if this was a form of penicillin. There was only one shop in the village – a Post Office combined with a general store where one could buy sweets and which Bessie and I patronised each day and probably accounted for our popularity with the village children.

A photo showing a village road with a couple of brick buildings, and tall trees in the background. — Hollesley post office and stores around 1915. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

I recall the variety of sweets now – large pear drops, small pear drops, acid drops, orange suckers, lime suckers, mint humbugs, clove humbugs – all of which we enjoyed excepting the clove ones. Unfortunately the sweets were twice the price charged in Ipswich shops. We got only two ounces for a penny. I cannot recall any chocolate being on sale.

By the following year the Sharpes had moved to Ivy Cottage in Hollesley near to the Colony’s headquarters. Ivy Cottage was a large four bedroomed house with two large reception rooms and a very large kitchen. There was no bathroom but a very large kitchen table was hinged to the wall under the window and when this table top was raised it would reveal a white porcelain bath. Water was heated in a large coal-fired copper in the corner of the kitchen and the water transferred to the bath by means of a long-handled ladle. The cold water supply was from a pump over the sink and the pump needed to be primed by pouring in about a pint of water to make sure it would draw up from below. The closet was in an outside shed and consisted of a wooden seat over a large pail which was emptied each night by the night-soil man who would open a small trap-door at the back of the shed and empty the contents into a four wheeled tank drawn by a horse whose clumping hooves were sure to wake you up during the night. Cooking was done on a coal-fired oven and Aunt Ruth used to bake the most delicious rabbit pies I have tasted, supplemented by slices of fat pork. Fortunately, in view of her deafness, Aunt Ruth had very little household shopping to do – all foodstuffs were supplied by the colony, that was one of the perks of the job, so that at least twice a week fresh fruit and vegetables were delivered together with joints of meat, rabbits, hares, chickens and bread. But Auntie did bake her own cakes and, of course, the various meat pies.

The house stood in a large area of garden, mostly lawns and flower beds but it included a mixed woodland coppice which to me was a boy’s delight as it attracted many kinds of birds and I could climb the trees to locate and look at the eggs in the nests – I never robbed a single nest, I don’t think it occurred to me. On the opposite side of the roadway was a high bank of sand and this was riddled with holes made by sand martins which were flying in and out all day. When I tired of the garden I would wander across the marshes that stretched to what was left of Hollesley dock – it was said that quite a lot of smuggling went on here and gin was referred to as “a drop of Lloyd George” as he, when Chancellor of the Exchequer, had put a tax on spirits that made it more worthwhile to dabble in smuggling.

August of course, was the harvest month and I recall the excitement of being in a field of corn that was being cut. Armed with a stick, we children waited for the rabbits that were in the uncut section and then we moved in striking at the rabbits as they attempted to escape. I remember my disappointment when the first rabbit I struck down was taken from me and added to the other dead rabbits to be distributed to the field workers when the cut was finished. I did get a rabbit to take home but it was not the one I had killed.

A photo of a field with two large hay stacks, one half-way constructed. They are round and, when finished, have a conical top, reaching two or three storeys high. There are several men at work, a horse-drawn wagon, and a steam engine. — Harvest in Suffolk, around 1900. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

There were no combine harvesters in use at that time and the reaper-binder, drawn by two horses, cut the corn-stalks to within a few inches of the ground, arranged and tied them into sheaves which were then thrown clear of the binder. Workers then gathered up the sheaves and stacked them together, eight or ten sheaves to make the stooks which usually remained in the field for a day or two to dry out. Then a large horse-drawn farm cart was used to carry the sheaves to wherever the stack was to be built – usually in the corner of the field, to await the arrival of the threshing machine, which was usually towed by a traction-engine. The threshing machine was operated by a leather belt over the drive wheel which passed over the flywheel of the traction-engine. Then men with pitchforks passed the sheaves from the stack to a man on top of the machine and the man would cut the binder string and push the sheaf into the moving machinery. From one end of the thresher the grains would spill out into sacks and from the other end the stalks would be carried away on a moving belt to form a straw stack. Straw was in constant demand in those days as bedding for horses and cattle and there was no reason for burning it as happens today. Occasionally, if a farmer needed to get on with his ploughing he would set fire to the stubble, but as there was no standing straw there was not the nuisance of smoke as you get today when it is necessary to clear the fields of what seems to be a useless product – straw.

A photo of a steam engine attached by a long belt to another piece of wheeled machinery. Behind that is a high stack of hay and some kind of wide wooden ladder or conveyor leads up to the top of it. There are several men at work, many holding long-handled tools. — Threshing by steam power in Suffolk in the late 1920s. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

The colony had its own shoeing-forge for the large number of horses and on a rainy day I would sit in the forge and watch the two shoe-smiths at their jobs and marvel at the docility of the huge Suffolk horses amidst all that hammering of steel, the smell of burning hoofs and the heat of the fire which was kept going by the blast from hand-operated bellows. There were occasional riding horses to be shod and the governor of the colony was a keen hunting man, as was his son Jack Barton who married one of the daughters of Sir Edmond Vestey, later Lord Vestey, the boss of the shipping line of refrigerated vessels and large cattle interests in Uruguay and Argentina. In 1916, because Aunt Ruth then had three children of her own to look after, our August holiday was spent in Hintlesham at the home of a small-holder named Dyer who supplied Ipswich shops with fruit. He used to get his fruit mainly from the gardens of the surrounding villages – he had some sort of contract with them – and Bess and I used to help him gather the fruit. The small-holding was about 25 acres and included a large field of wheat, a large orchard and two grass paddocks for the horse and the milk-cow. Later during the war these paddocks were taken over as an emergency landing area for aircraft.

Mr. Dyer was a keen Salvationist and played a flute in the Hadleigh Citadel Band and his son George played the trombone, so on Sundays we all cycled to Hadleigh for the services which included open-air meetings in the High Street and a march back to the Citadel behind the Salvation Army band.

A photo of a wet town street with two and three storey buildings on each side. There are two horse-drawn wagons in the distance and a few people dotted around. A sign sticking out from the building closest on the right reads 'THE GEORGE HOTEL. C. MURTON'. — Hadleigh High Street. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

I still recall the framed tract on the dining room wall opposite to where I sat for my meals – God is the head of this house, the unseen guest at every meal, the silent listener to every conversation. One of my daily tasks was the collection of eggs that could be found in many different parts of the farmyard and I would get about thirty a day. On one occasion I went up into a loft from which I had noticed a hen fly down – they really can fly – and I found a clutch of forty-two eggs. Money for the eggs always went to Mrs. Dyer, its a country custom that the farmer’s wife gets the egg money. On our last holiday there in 1917 the threshing machine arrived, supplied by a contractor who served all the neighbouring farms in rotation. This was a new self-contained machine that did not need a traction engine for its motive power, and took only about two hours to do the whole of the small crop. That was my last holiday on a farm as I left school that year.

I cannot recall that either my sister or I had any particular hobby, but we had plenty of interests. I had a small Meccano set but was not very keen on it as I found the small nuts and bolts rather fiddling to handle. I preferred a construction kit called Kliptiko which consisted of thin, hollow metal rods that could be clipped together to form buildings, bridges, lifting cranes or ships. I also had a very good collection of lead toy soldiers, many of them in the correct regimental colours, and some in khaki which had come into general use in the South African war. There was also a gun and limber drawn by six horses. This gun had a pull-spring which fired wooden pellets with enough force to knock down toy soldiers. There was also an ambulance van drawn by two horses which my father said was similar to the one in which as a wounded man he spent several days on the journey southwards to Cape Town. In keeping with this military outfit I had a wooden fort complete with moat and drawbridge.

In 1915 I paid sixpence for my first camera bought from the former penny bazaar, later re-named Domestic Bazaar, at the corner of Providence Street and Westgate Street. This camera was a black cardboard two inch cube with a photographic plate inside opposite to a pinhole in the front. Moving aside the cover to the pinhole, exposed the plate for a few seconds and resulted in quite a good photographic negative. The drawback was that you had to break open the box to get at the negative so a new camera was needed for each picture. I read up all about the development and fixing of negatives and the printing of pictures from a library book and was so successful that I saved up five shillings to buy a real camera. This again was a box camera with the trade name of Clincher, and it held six photographic plates one behind the other and when the foremost was exposed a lever could be pulled and it was dropped to the bottom of the camera so it could be removed and developed without waiting for the other plates to be exposed – or of course, all six plates could be exposed one after the other if required. I had quite a lot of success with this camera and much regret that all this photographic apparatus and pictures, together with my toy soldiers, etc., disappeared when we moved from Fore Street to Hatfield Road after the war.

My sister Bess had a large Teddy Bear who sported a very good tailor-made waistcoat made by a professional tailoress, a Miss Lillie who was a Salvation Army comrade of my mother’s sister, Hannah. Bess also had a large sleeping doll whose eyes closed when it was laid down – that was a novelty then – together with a cradle and a large furnished dolls’ house of four rooms, a hall and a staircase. My sister also wore at times a nurse’s uniform with a red cross on the bib of the white apron, and she had a good cooking stove and oven on which she actually cooked fried chips – Dad ate some of them but Mother wouldn’t touch them. Both my sister and I had regular piano lessons for four or five years and at one time we had a harmonium as well as the piano. The harmonium had bellows operated by foot pedals, and was played for hymns on Sundays. That also disappeared in the move along with my sister’s toys – and mine.

In 1914 when I reached the age of twelve I was able to join the School Scout Troop. Our uniform was dark blue shirt, shorts and stockings with a khakhi neckerchief and the regulation broad-brimmed hat, a scout-knife and a whistle and of course, the five-foot wooden pole carried by all Scouts in those days. This pole was very useful to help in vaulting ditches and low hedges. In 1915 we camped in Woolverstone Park, along the Shotley Road, near to Freston Tower, along the bank of the River Orwell.

A photo of a seven-storey square brick tower with one window on each side per floor. There are trees around it, almost as tall as the tower. — Freston Tower around 1860. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

Much of this area appears in Constable’s paintings, especially the Boot Inn at Freston and the one of Landguard Fort near the mouth of the Orwell. I believe that this latter painting really put Constable onto artistic success when it was exhibited in London. However, back to the Scout camp. There were forty of us in five bell tents, a sixth tent for the scoutmaster, Mr. Mossman and his assistant and a small marquee as a dining tent. It was here that I first took a real interest in cooking – sausages and mash mostly, but that’s what boys like; porridge and bacon and eggs for breakfast; toast, cheese and jam for supper and tea or fizzy lemonade. There was a very cheap fizzy drink in those days called Monsters – twice as large a bottle as any other kind and a penny back on the empty bottle. We had a small drum and bugle band and on the way home from camp I was sufficiently capable of playing one of the drums on the way home – a proud moment. Scouting instruction was quite practical and I learned a lot about erecting a tent, tying rope-knots, and elementary first-aid and identification of various birds especially the wading birds along the River Orwell. Unfortunately I was in the Wood-pigeon patrol whose call – book-a-ooo, book-a-ooo – might be all right in a town but in a country area where there were dozens of pigeons it was just hopeless. The Scout troop closed down when the Scoutmaster and his assistant were called up for Army service, and was replaced by an Army Cadet Force for which I was too young.

One wonders what it is that creates the start of a new activity such as the spinning of tops season. Suddenly one morning it would be top-spinning time as all the rage. There were two main kinds of tops – the mushroom one and the inverted circular cone known as a Dutch top. Both types could be made to spin by winding the string of a whip around them and then jerking the whip and keeping the top spinning by furious whipping which also propelled the top several yards if you were lucky. Some people were expert enough to spin the top by a twist of the fingers as the top fell to the ground. Roads and pavements were the usual areas for top-spinning, as school playgrounds were considered danger areas. Of course, there were very few motor cars about then, but I should have thought that the horses, carts and tramcar were serious difficulties. Perhaps we kept mainly to the side roads. There was also a much larger type of metal Dutch top which could be propelled by a wound-up spring and which made a humming noise but this was really an expensive toy – about a shilling I should think.

Then suddenly the season would change – the girls would take up skipping and the boys were all for leap-frog on the way to school and around the playground. One particular type of more stationery leapfrog was known as ‘uppa-giddy, uppa-giddy, one, two, three’. This was played by opposing sides of up to six boys. One boy stood against a wall and his team mates bent down before him in a line jutting out from the wall. The opposing team, one at a time, leapt on to the line of boys as far up to the wall as possible and when all were in place they chanted “uppa-giddy, uppa-giddy, one, two, three” and if the line had not collapsed by the time they had finished, the team below had won.

Hop-skotch was mainly a girls’ game, but marbles was essentially for boys. It was possible to play a moving game of marbles on the way to school by bowling a marble along the gutter in an attempt to hit the previous marble of your opponent. If you made a hit, then you kept the other marble. There was also a more stationary game where you crouched around a shallow hole in the ground and with a flick of your thumb knocked someone else’s marble into the hole which entitled you to another shot at a third marble and so on until your own marble went into the hole and someone else took over. A third game was a real business affair for which you needed a piece of wood about a foot long which had four or five half circles of wood cut out. Above the semi-circle was a number, 4, 3, 2, 1 and zero. You were charged one marble a go and you bowled a marble in an attempt to pass through one of the numbered tunnels. If you went through zero you lost your marble. If through no. 1 you were entitled to another go. If through no. 2 you had another go plus an extra marble. Through three, then two extra marbles. I think the ownership of such a marble block was akin to a bookmaker’s licence – you couldn’t lose.

A photo of two round wooden sticks, tapering towards the far end where they have a piece of string tying them together, through holes in their ends. There's a dark metal thing, round, like two circular cones joined at their apexes. There is black rubber around the circular edges. The visible end has a five-pointed star in the centre and the word 'DIABOLO' embossed on it. — Criss Gyford’s Diabolo, in 2026.

Two other games with which my sister and I were supplied were Diabolo and Ping-Pong. Diabolo consists of two sticks joined by a four foot piece of string and you held one stick in each hand. The diabolo was a cylindrical piece of wood about three inches long and two inches in diameter with its centre portion cut away so that it looked like two circular cones joined at the apex. With the sticks held a few inches apart the diabolo was balanced on the hanging string – that took some doing to begin with – then the sticks were jerked apart, tightening the string and propelled the whirling diabolo up into the air and then came the difficult part of catching it on the outstretched string before it reached the ground. Not at all easy. I still have the two sticks and string and the diabolo.

Another game was the original ping-pong, now upgraded to a more professional status as table tennis. The net was stretched across the dining table and kept in place by a screw-type vice at either side. The bats were sixteen inches long, nine inches of handle and seven inches of blade which was five inches wide and three-quarters of an inch thick. I know these exact measurements because I still have the original bats impressed with the words ping-pong. The bats are at least seventy years old. Each face of the hollow blade is covered by parchment. I don’t think my sister or I played with them very much but you can still hear the distinctive ping when you strike the ball and the pong when the ball strikes the table. They are still very much capable of further play, but probably not at the furious pace of today’s table tennis.

Sunday afternoons were times for family excursions during the summer months. On several occasions we walked to the paddle-steamers berthed in the New Cut which was ‘over Stoke’. ‘Over Stoke’ meant that you had to cross over the Gipping at Stoke bridge to reach the steamer which left at three o’clock after the pubs closed and sailed down river to Pin Mill to pick up further passengers and then on to Parkestone Quay at Harwich where most of the passengers alighted and visited the quayside shops for plates of oysters, winkles, whelks, shrimps or mussels. Meanwhile the paddle steamer went across river to Felixstowe pier and sometimes on to Walton-on-the-Naze.

A photo looking across grass at a stretch of water. Moored at a jetty is a long, low ship with a tall, straight funnel. A semi-circular shape indicates the position of a paddle wheel. — The paddle steamer Woolwich Belle at Ipswich in 1900. It was used mainly on feeder services from Ipswich and Harwich to Clacton. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

The return journey began at about five o’clock and there was usually music and dancing on the upper deck and the bar below was well patronised – the bar opened as soon as the steamer left the quayside. What interested me most of all was to stand on a platform in the engine-room and watch the pistons rising and falling with accompanying outbursts of steam, and the steady churning of the two paddles and the ringing of the engine-room telegraph as the Captain signalled for one or other paddle to be slowed down, as that was the method of steering the vessel rather than the usual use of a rudder.

This going down river reminds me of the only time my father took me fishing. He hired a rowing boat from the ship yard at Cliff Quay and rowed out to mid-stream down river and threw out the fishing line and it was not long before we had a bite and whatever it was began to tow the boat this way and that so that I got quite worried as to what was happening. Meanwhile Dad was hauling in the fishing line as well as he could and eventually we saw our catch – a wriggling eel about three foot long, it looked bigger to me – which was hauled inboard and then began threshing about in the boat. Dad was trying to hit the eel with the boat’s baling-tin but the more he struck at it the more it thrashed about, and the vessel was rocking about dangerously and the fishing line was in a terrible tangle. I think I was scared stiff and eventually father cut the line and threw the eel overboard and rowed back to the shipyard. That was our only fishing expedition.

Another Sunday excursion – usually a full day out for which we took a picnic lunch – was a wagonette from the Old Cattle market. A wagonette was a four wheeler horse-drawn vehicle where the passengers sat on two seats facing one another – about twenty people or so. We went over Stoke Bridge along the Wherstead Road and the Strand through Freston and Pin Mill and Chelmondiston to Shotley Pier where we disembarked for the day. There was a large naval barracks at Shotley in those days and in the river was the old training ship H.M.S. Ganges.

A panoramic postcard photo of the waterfront. On the left are two two-storey brick buildings. There's a wide almost empty street with one double-decker, open-topped motor bus, and a few people. There's a long narrow, empty pier stretching out into the water. In the distance is an old three-masted sailing ship. — A view of Shotley including the Bristol Arms and the H.M.S. Ganges. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

When we came to a hill and there were four or five hills on the way, men and boys had to get out of the wagonette and help to push it up hill. On the down-hill slopes a metal drag was placed under a rear wheel so the vehicle did not prove too much for the two horses. The drag scoured a trench in the surface of the roadway which was composed of flints – I don’t recall any tarred asphalt or macadamed roads in those days. Whenever a car came by there was a great cloud of dust and the horses had to be calmed down. There was not much for children to do at Shotley except paddle in the river or play in the fields, but we enjoyed the picnic. On the way home in the evening the wagonette was always stopped at the Boot Inn, Freston, and we children had lemonade and biscuits whilst the adults went inside for refreshment. I think some of the most enjoyable part of the trip was the walk home from the Old Cattle Market in the gathering darkness with the lamplighter on his rounds – about the only time my sister and I were out after darkness fell.

A photo of a buysy market with probably more than 100 men, all wearing flat caps or bowler hats. There are various fenced pens, some crowded with sheep. A low building in the background has a clocktower on its roof. The gate posts leading into the market each have a large upturned basket on them. — Ipswich cattle market around 1910. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

Mention of the Old Cattle Market reminds me that there was a rollerskating rink there, where the Post Office sorting department is now. This skating rink was also used for professional boxing events and I recall that the Suffolk champion was Phil Suffling – not that I was allowed to see any boxing. There was a second roller skating rink down by the recreation ground near to Portman Road and I became reasonably good at skating.

A photo of inside a large hangar-like building with a high pitched roof supported by many angled and horizontal beams. Nine adults stand on the flat empty floor facing the camera, all wearing roller skates. The men are wearing suits, three with what look like smoking jackets. The three women are in dresses or long skirts, with wide-brimmed hats. An advertisement in the background is for 'Kirby's Mineral Water'. — The Empress skating rink, around the 1910s. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

Occasionally on a Wednesday afternoon if Ipswich Town was playing a home football match at the Portman Road ground my father would take me there – as a young man he had played for Bury St. Edmunds when he was stationed there as a soldier. Of course in those days Ipswich Town was only in the Southern Amateur League, but even then it was supported by the Cobbold family and there is still a John Cobbold as chairman. My sister and I are still shareholders in the Ipswich Town Football Club.

A photo of eleven men in two rows, the front row of five sat on a wooden bench. They're all wearing probably white tops with a wide, pale vertical stripe. Their shorts and socks are a variety of shades. — Ipswich Town Football Club team 1911. (Courtesy David Kindred on Flickr)

§ Postscript

In August 1917, a few months short of his sixteenth birthday, Criss Barrington Gyford entered the Merchant Navy. The following year he enlisted in the Royal Army Service Corps in which he served during the final months of World War One.

After the war he returned to the sea and during the 1920s sailed on a wide variety of ships including those of the P & O Line. In 1932 he married Ethel Florence Roper, a friend of his sister. He became a mature student at London University and after graduation began a second career as a teacher and lecturer in the London area. Meanwhile he was also pursuing a third career in broadcasting and writing, often drawing on his world-wide travels for radio talks, articles and books.

In 1940, as a Royal Naval Reserve officer, he was captain of one of the ‘small boats’, the M.V Lucy, during the Dunkirk evacuation. In later years he was an officer in both the Air Training Corps and the Home Guard. Politically he maintained his parents’ Liberal loyalties, serving as Liberal Party agent, council candidate and constituency president in Twickenham in the 1940s and 1950s.

He retired from teaching in 1960 and enjoyed a long retirement, marred only by the death of his wife in 1980. He died on April 30th 1987, survived by his sister Bessie, his children John and Christine and his grandchildren Philip and Susie.

J.G.

§ You can download a PDF of the typed version of this memoir on the Internet Archive.

It is also available at the Suffolk Archives with some additional material, accession number HD2050:

Gyford Family of Ipswich: ‘Goodbye Victoria’ An Edwardian childhood in Ipswich by Criss Barrington Gyford with copies of related family photographs and documents 20th cent; Six issues of Fourth Form Magazine, Ipswich Secondary School c 1915

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step 1: cut it open

step 2: remove the screws

step 3: get the circuit board out

step 4: desolder the battery

step 5: identify the battery

step 6: buy the battery

step 7: solder the new batteries in and glue it back together

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§ Goodbye Victoria:
An Edwardian Childhood in Ipswich