RootsChat.Com

hi ron,
what was your greatgrandfather;s surname. got relatives that moved from diss to Halifax and Brighouse.

Their surname was Banham. It was my GG-grandfather's half-brother, Henry William, who moved to Halifax. He was a brushmaker. Oddly, he had a reasonable job in the brush factory in Diss but still decided to move; maybe he lost that job. I gather that was a regular occurrence when boys got to the age at which they would be due to be paid men's rates.

Jeremy Paxman's Who Do You Think You Are? programme related how his ancestors took part in a scheme to relocate from Framlingham, just over the border in Suffolk, to Bradford to take up guaranteed offers of work in the mills.

I recently came across a report from the Bury & Norwich Post in 1830 that said: '78 men women and children passed through Bury [St Edmunds] from Diss, Palgrave and Wortham and 59 from Winfarthing and Shelfhanger in two stage wagons on their way to London to take shipping to America.'

These towns and villages were all areas where there were Riots during the 1820s. I understand that there was a scheme by which the parish helped emigration as a response to these riots. Some emigrants ended up in the East Coast cities of the USA, where conditions where little better than at home. Others went to agricultural areas, acquired land, and prospered.

So I think that the answer to your question must be: quite a long way.

My great-grandfather moved from Diss to London in about 1880. His elder brother had moved to Burnley before 1871 and then to Halifax.

Does anyone know the name of a railway that would be going through/near Hadleigh in 1851 with the initials E U?

To simplify a somewhat complex situation -

The first railway to head from London into East Anglia was the 1836 Eastern Counties Railway (ECR) which planned a line from London to Norwich and Yarmouth via Ipswich. Unfortunately, by 1843 it had only reached Colchester but had run out of money. In a second attempt to achieve its objectives, the ECR proposed to extend its line to Thetford. This would have run via Hadleigh and Bury St Edmunds, with a branch to Ipswich from Hadleigh.

The business community in Ipswich was none to keen on their town being served by a mere branch line and came up with their own scheme for a Eastern Union Railway (EUR) running from Colchester to Ipswich (which opened in 1847) with a later extension on to Norwich. This left Hadleigh unserved by rail, so the idea of a branch line to the town was put forward. This became the ponderously named Eastern Union & Hadleigh Junction Railway, following the great British railway tradition that the shorter the line, the longer the name. The branch also opened in 1847, but not before it had been taken over by the EUR.

In 1862 most of the railway companies operating in East Anglia merged to become the Great Eastern Railway.

The Hadleigh branch, as it became known, closed to passengers in 1932, the victim of more convenient direct bus services to both Ipswich and Colchester. Freight services lasted until 1965. I have recently been tracing the remains of the line; my photographs will shortly appear at: http://ronstruttsrailwaypics.fotopic.net