are spiritual heirs to the legacy of great East Anglian
brewers.

So many people have helped me in so many ways with
the compiling and production of this book some with advice
and  material,  others  with  proof  reading  -  the
acknowledgments which I should like to make would take a
few hundred words.

 But as I have only a limited number of them, I must
restrict myself, first to thanking Tom Hastie, for allowing
me to have sight of material he has collected over the last
twenty years and which forms the nucleus of this book.

Louise Wells generously lent me private material
including family letters and photographs. My grateful
thanks to Barbara Freeland and  Elizabeth &  John
Harrington; Ashley Cooper, whose valuable assistance
made the publication of this book possible; Andrew Clarke
for his immense generosity, typesetting skills, occasionally
pointing me in the right direction and contacts which
include Mark Holborn at Random House; Alan Fitch and
the Foxearth District History Society for their boundless
enthusiasm for this project; Kate for her patience in
reading the first drafts; the Sudbury Mercury and East
Anglian Daily Times in the persons of Will Wright and
Patrick Lowman for finding me people to speak to and
especially Anne Bigelow, Ian Peaty; Carol and Roger Hobbs
for allowing me to tap into their resources. Thank you also
to Doris Mitchell, Linda Marsh and Jeff Sorrell.

 Finally, it would be ungrateful of me to miss this
opportunity of thanking a group of ex-Ward’s employees
including Wilf Braybrooke, Ted Heathcoate and Cliff Arbon
for telling me, with much patience, their recollections of
times at the brewery. Special thanks to Ian Hornsey and
the Nethergate Brewery for brewing a copy beer to
celebrate the publication of this book - proving that they