Hello. My name is Robert Toppes. You may have heard of me. I built this place. I’m fairly pleased with it really. I hope you like it too. It was all a bit of a gamble I suppose but it’s worked out well. I saw an opportunity and grabbed it. Back then when it was built, in the 1420s, I was a young man, but I managed to find the backers to build it and it’s been a good investment for me ever since. It’s got me to where I am today really.  Didn’t I say? Oh! I’m the Mayor of Norwich now. In fact it’s the fourth time for me. I’ve also been an alderman and sheriff and MP for the city. Quite something for a lad with my humble beginnings, but it was the Hall that gave me the start I needed. All the boats coming up the river from the continent with all manner of goods: cloths, silks, pottery, tiles – everything you can think of. All to be displayed at the Hall for our merchants to buy. Then the boats went back across the North Sea with good Norfolk cloth and all sorts of other things that interested them. So now I’ve got to where I want to be.

There’ve been ups and downs as in any life. I lost my first wife Alice when we were still young, but it means I’ve now got my Joan who’s given me five more children. I was even banished to Bristol for a few years when events and alliances turned against me, but I’m back in Norwich now.

All in all things have turned out well. My son and daughters have all made good marriages, so they’ll have good lives, I hope. I’m taking care of the afterlife as well. I’ve got a stained glass window in St Peter Mancroft and that’s where I’ll be buried. There’s a picture of it here if you want to see it. I’ve left provision in my will for my second wife Joan, and my son and daughters and I’ve left money to some of the parishes around the county which I’ve been involved in. As for the Hall – well. it’s served its purpose so I’ve given instructions for it to be sold and the proceeds used for the Friars to say masses and to pray for my soul. I worked hard and made the most of every opportunity so I hope I’ll get my reward when it’s my turn to die.

Good day to you all. I’m glad to see you. It’s 1891 now and my name is Thomas Sendall and I’m living in Old Barge Yard at the moment.  I’ve got my wife Mary who lives there with me and we have four little children, two boys and two girls. I wasn’t born in Norwich. I was brought up in the country near Dereham but we’ve lived here for a while now. It’s not much of a cottage that we’ve got. We’re all squashed in and sharing the privy and a tap for the water. I’d like to think that I can get somewhere better for us some time but I’m a cow keeper so I don’t get much in the way of pay. We get all the milk we can drink of course if I want to keep it back!

We’ve got a couple of cows which we get milk from and we do our rounds with it twice a day. It’s hard work though. The churns are heavy, but it pays the rent and puts food on the table for the little ones. You have to provide your own jug of course. But there’s plenty of customers. There’re lots of families with lots of kids – 19 households at the last count – so plenty of mouths to feed. I don’t get any time to myself really but just now and again I get a hour or so to go to the public house. The Old Barge is right on our doorstep. It’s a very popular place. Other than that it’s work, work, work for us really. Not a lot of chances for the folks round here, but there’s plenty of work if you want it so that’s what I’ll be doing for the rest of my life, I suppose. To tell the truth I don’t really think much beyond tomorrow. Oh! I’ve a photograph here of King Street taken sometime around when we lived there. You might have seen it before but it gives you an idea of what it all looks like around here.

Good day. It’s nice to see you here at the Hall. It’s quite a thriving community that we’ve got here in King Street, like a little village in the city really. A lot better than it used to be from what I can make out. I’ve always been in the butchers trade and now I run my own shop and have done for some time. Fresh cuts of meat from beasts that are freshly slaughtered. Some of them come up King Street on the way to the cattle market on a Saturday. We see ‘em from the shop and the house.

We’ve got quite a few other shops along here as well. There’s Hayden’s the bakers. and the fish and chip shop next to them. as well as the greengrocers and the chemist on the corner of Rose Lane. There’s even another butcher and of course there’s the pub, The Old Barge. The bakers is always busy, especially on match days when Mr. Hayden ices the buns in the colours of the visiting team. So it’s a busy, every day sort of neighbourhood here. A lot of people were re-housed of course after the war but there are still quite a few about – oh and I mustn’t forget Father Seear in the rectory a couple of doors down. He says he’s happy with his Bible, his beer and his beef (that’s me – that’s where I come in).

I think we’re all a lot better off now after the war what with the National Health Service and the new welfare state that’s supposed to take care of us. and people want a bit more out of life now. They’re talking about these new supermarkets starting in the city. I don’t know what kind of effect that will have on life but there’s still a good community of people round here. We like it that way. I think I’ll be here for a few more years until me and the wife start to think about retirement but we’re happy just now to be part of the local community. I think there’s a photo of us somewhere here, the wife and me – just so you get a better idea of what we looked like back in the 1950s.

References

Archive documents from the Dragon Hall Heritage Volunteers website

Stained glass image of Robert Toppes and wives in St. Peter Mancroft Church, Norwich

Norfolk Family Heritage Centre, 1891 census records for Old Barge Yard, Norwich

British Genealogy website

Dragon Hall Research Group Block Study, ‘Commentary on Census Data 1841 to 1911’, Heritage Centre at Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library

Picture Norfolk

King St. Community Voices

‘Street was like village in the City’, Eastern Evening News, 28 June 1996

Author’s note

It would have been easier just to write a story perhaps, or a poem, but we wanted to do something different that would shine a creative light onto the inhabitants, some well known, some forgotten, of Dragon Hall.

What if we could hear some of those voices from the past talking to us about their imagined lives, not just writing about them. but seeing what they might have looked like? We could listen to Robert Toppes, the wealthy merchant and  builder of the Hall; perhaps someone from the opposite end of the spectrum who lived there when it was a Victorian slum; perhaps someone just within living memory who lived in a world that we would recognise now.

In the end it was three voices that we chose: Robert Toppes himself, and then a poor cowkeeper who supplied milk to the local community at the end of the nineteenth century, and finally a man who kept a butcher’s shop on the ground floor of Dragon Hall after the Second World War. We had to imagine what they would say, and how they might say it. We could give people a brief, imaginary glimpse into the lives of three of the hundreds and hundreds of inhabitants and workers — all now gone, but part of the endless fabric of the Hall and the city as it continues into the future.