Old Post Office Cottage, Low Road

The site of Old Post Office Cottage originally formed part of Nethergate Green, an area of common land which stretched along Low Road from the Flordon turn to Saxlingham Lane and down to the river. The map attached to the Enclosure Award of 1818 indicates that the site was part of an orchard, which was divided up between 7 owners. Two strips represent the site of The Firs, with five strips facing onto Flordon Road, one of which was awarded to William Wright, by right of his father who owned Thatched Cottage. William then acquired the adjoining strip and built Waterloo Cottage for himself and Mill View which he let. It is not clear whether he also bought two of the other strips on which to build Old Post Office Cottage or whether he bought the property after it had been built, presumably by either Henry Buck or Simon Rayson to whom the strips had originally been awarded, but in any event, by the time of the Tithe Apportionment Award in 1840 William Wright owned all the cottages on the corner of Low Road and Flordon Road.

Old Post Office Cottage was originally built as a pair of cottages, one of which was occupied by Charlotte Archer, a widow, who in the 1841 census is recorded as a shopkeeper. As most village properties in those days didn't have addresses, it can't be said for certain which of the two cottages was used as a shop but certainly by the end of the 19th century, the right hand cottage was the shop and post office, so logic might suggest that Charlotte Archer' shop had operated from that cottage as well. She died in 1859 and the 1861 census names John Barnes as a grocer and draper so again, likely to have been from the same half of the property. There is no record of a shopkeeper in the 1871 census but the occupant in 1881 was a fancy goods hawker or door to door salesman from Norwich called Joseph Kirby. However, it was his brother George who by 1991 had restarted the grocery business, and then in 1892 took over the role of postmaster from Mr and Mrs Cann who had lived in Wayside Cottage, the first post office in the village as recorded on the 1882 Ordnance Survey map. George Kirby was succeeded in 1904 by Herbert Ellis who ran the shop and post office for fifty years before retiring in 1954, aged 79, when the post office moved to Commerce House, but he and his wife continued living in the cottage.

Photographs show that the shop was brick built and attached to the front of the building with a corrugated iron roofed veranda reaching out as far as the road. William Moore, who rented the shop as a shoe repairer after Mr Ellis' retirement, described the interior, in his memories of Tasburgh in the 1940s and'50s, as being wooden panelled with a polished mahogany counter and fittings. Unfortunately in 1958 when Mr Moore had gone to lunch, a piece of his equipment overheated, and the fire badly damaged the shop. Although insurance paid for its restoration, Mr Moore never reopened his shoe repair business, and the premises were let to a Mr Barnard who was a builder and used it for storage.

The left hand cottage had a number of occupants over the years including agricultural labours, a bricklayer, a miller's carter and a railway signalman. One of the last tenants, until 1961, was William Moore, it being his first home after he got married. The small building on Flordon Road, now linked to Old Post Office Cottage, was built as a separate dwelling and was shown as such on the map attached to the 1840 Tithe Apportionment Award. William Moore refers to it as one up, two down cottage, and although in his day used for storage, he mentioned an earlier occupant, a coalman by the name of Sayer as living there with five children, which seems difficult to believe by reference to today's standards. Certainly early occupants mentioned in census returns were all either single or couples.

After the original owner, William Wright died, his widow Rachel inherited his properties, and in the 1871 census she was described as living on income from houses. She died in 1872, and the cottages passed to Mr and Mrs Wright's daughter, Rachel Lant, who sold them in 1906 to the trustees of the Rainthorpe Estate, which already owned The Mill and water meadows on the other side of Flordon Road. The cottages remained with Rainthorpe until after the death of Sir Charles Harvey, when the two post office cottages and the building behind were bought at auction in 1929 by Mr Ellis. At the start of WW2 Herbert Ellis was being assisted in the shop and Post Office by his wife, Celia and daughter, Constance, but the building was still split, with Benjamin and Sarah Sayer and family living in the other half, perhaps the same Mr Sayer mentioned earlier, who had relocated. After Mr Ellis and his wife died in the 1960s, the cottages were sold to form a single dwelling, and the shop was demolished, though it was not until much later that the link to the small cottage/storage building on Flordon Road was constructed.