Arthur W. Purchas

Situated behind a long trail of sand banks, marram dunes and reclaimed flats, Wells-Next-The-Sea exudes a sense of a very different past from today`s holiday haven. The life of the town has always been centred on the sea, but formerly it was a thriving working port and home to a large local fishing fleet.

Purchase evidently went to a lot of effort to research the town's past, which he presents in a series of short chapters each dealing with a specific subject, eg fishing, floods, railways, personalities, places of refreshment etc. As such, therefore, the book does not constitute a sequential history, nor does he stray far from his raw data! Most of it consists of direct quotations or extracts of this data as he found it, perhaps with explanations of interesting or difficult points and sometimes dressed up in his own words.

Of course, the clue is in the title - "Some History Of .... "! Clearly, this is not a conventional 'story' written in a flowing prose for the general reader. But for those who wish to develop a stronger sense of the town's past, Purchase's little book [just 119 pages of main text] is interesting and informative.… (meer)