Burroughes
Bros revealed!
Corn, Flour & Meal
The weathering of this obliterated
cartouche painted on the rear wall of The Lamden Gallery at 137-143
Felixstowe
Road (several shops knocked into one) has raised it from our Vestiges
page, where its unreadable state can be seen, to its own page in our Trade
lettering section.
As of 12.12.12, we are indebted to Simon Knott
and his indefatigable band of
snappers-up of unconsidered trifles around Ipswich:
'BURROUGHES
BROS.
CORN
FLOUR & MEAL
...............'
The letterforms curve and swell to occupy the space.
Burroughes Brothers' mill was apparently at Shelfanger, just over the
Norfolk
border, and it was thought that this was the lost writing at the
bottom. Simon writes that by 1966 this building at the corner of Felixstowe Road and
York Road was a branch of Tooks the Bakers, and
it is
not
impossible that it was a bakery during the time this advert was made.
2013
images
The slightly enhanced image
below gives the best opportunity of
decoding the lettering below the buff paint and repointed brickwork to
the right of the cartouche. We have traced the outlines of the visible
characters and the only degree of extrapolation relates to the 's' of
'Bros' (which is self-explanatory – however the full stop is
an
assumption), the 'al' of 'Meal' and the word 'Stores', of which we're
pretty confident. This results in the retouched version of the sign
below.
We assume that the flat
roof extension which runs along the rear
of the premises is fairly recent and would not have obscured the sign
in its heyday. The letterforms are somewhat eccentric in their shape,
skew and sizing. After the arching, condensed capitals at the top of
the sign – difficult to pull off, the 'OR' in 'CORN' is
enlarged
to fill the arc and the inter-word spacing of "Flour & Meal'
seems
uncomfortably close.
Burroughes Brothers were a
Norfolk milling and cereal products
company, appearing in the records for Cley-Next-The-Sea towermill. In
1892 Stephen Barnabas Burroughs also had a baking business in Langham
and a coal & corn merchant business in Holt. In 1912, Kelly's
directory only lists the Burroughs Brothers as bakers in Cley and
Stephen Barnabas Burroughs as agent to Lt. Col. T. F. A. Watson Kennedy
JP & farmer. However, Sydney Stephen Burroughes was also
running a
large milling business from Holt towermill. The Burroughes Brothers
company is still listed in the 1920s, but we don't know when the
company ceased to trade.
More Felixstowe Road lettering.
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