At the turn of the twentieth century, my grandmother’s unmarried aunts – sisters Catherine (Kate) and Margaret (Maggie) Simson – ran a guest house at Felixstowe, on the Suffolk coast. It was opened in the mid-1890s and from around 1900 my grandmother Alice Roberts was also listed at the guest house, as a maid.

At this time Felixstowe was fast growing as an attractive seaside resort.

The fashionable status of Felixstowe was sealed in 1891, when Augusta, Empress of Germany visited, staying with her family at South Beach Mansion at the top of Bent Hill. After that, development was rapid. In 1897, the Felixstowe Spa and Winter Garden Company developed a public garden along the seafront, associated with the spa well, although the winning designs were not realised. Then in 1898 the Great Eastern Railway built the Town Station, providing for the first time a through route from London. (from Felixstowe Conservation Area Appraisal 2020)

In the 1890s hotels large and small began to spring up along the seafront and in the roads running from it. 

By 1911 Aunt Maggie had moved to another street in the town: Leopold Road, where she is listed in the census at 1 Leopold Terrace, as a boarding-house keeper, although judging from the visitors’ book she also continued to let rooms each year to holidaymakers. 

My grandmother Alice, aged twenty-five, was still with her, and now also Maggie’s nephew and effectively her ward, Tom Scammell, an assistant butcher.

On 10 August 1911 my grandmother turned twenty-seven. There was a long hot summer that year and temperatures soared across the country, nudging barometers to their limit. The extraordinary heatwave culminated on her birthday, when temperatures of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37+ Celsius) were recorded: the hottest day of the hottest summer on record, at least until the twenty-first century.

In the unrelenting, stifling heat, streams dried up, lead melted on church roofs and, from bank holiday week starting on 7 August, families flocked to the coast, most by train from Broad Street (despite nationwide strikes that summer, which had spread to the rail network). The beach donkeys plodded wearily over scorching shingle and holidaymakers did all they could to stay in the shade, or sought solace in the cliff gardens away from the fierce heat of the promenade. Felixstowe, the quintessential Edwardian holiday resort, burst like a ripe berry that August.

The guests at Aunt Maggie’s during Bank Holiday week were a Mr and Mrs C. Hocking and daughters from Stroud Green, London. The census reveals them to be Charles Morton Hocking, a builder, and his wife Caroline, of 42 Marquis Road, Stroud Green. Their daughters were Gladys (seventeen), Florence (twenty-one) and Elsie (twenty-four). Also booked in that summer were Mrs Alston, Mrs Bird and Miss Smith, all from Bury St Edmunds;  and Misses Light, Allen and Hemmings from Braintree.

By October 1913 my grandmother had left Felixstowe to marry my grandfather. Maggie closed the guest house and moved to Ardleigh, Essex in about 1916, to be housekeeper to her brother George Simson. She died in 1940, aged eighty-seven.