RUFFLE, William Giles
William Giles Ruffle, sometimes Ruffell, was baptised at All Saints church, Sudbury, Suffolk on 8 September 1796, son of John Ruffle and his wife Esther. As a single man, son of John Ruffle, fisherman, was admitted to the Freedom of Sudbury on 17 June 1818. From about 1820, a bookseller, printer, and engraver, who was granted a licence for a printing press on 29 October 1834. There is a drawing by Wm. Ruffell, of the Sudbury Dissenting chapel, built 1823 and a drawing of St Peter’s church, Sudbury by William Ruffell which was engraved and printed by E. Brain of London and published in March 1826 by W. Ruffell. He printed a Sudbury election broadside against George Williams Fulcher, Sudbury Mountebank (Sudbury c. 1835). He married at St Margaret’s church, Ipswich on 2 February 1820, Emma Salmon, who was born at Rushmere near Ipswich and buried in Sudbury cemetery on 9 August 1863, aged 68 and must have had close connections with Ipswich as he was a member of the Ipswich Society of Professional & Amateur Artists from 1832. He was of Friars Street, Sudbury when he voted in the 1841 Sudbury elections and in the minutes of evidence on the Sudbury Election Petition of 1843, one of the witnesses was Emma Ruffle, a cook at ‘The Swan’, when she described her husband William Giles Ruffle as a ‘labouring man of Sudbury’. William was buried, as Ruffell, in Sudbury cemetery on 28 October 1863, aged 67. On 26 May 1857 two of his sons were admitted to the Freedom of Sudbury; John William Ruffle, groom, and David Giles Ruffle, hostler, when their father was still described as a labourer, he had another son William Giles, junr who was born in 1827 and a daughter Hannah born in 1834, both at Sudbury. (Copsey-Suffolk Book Trades-2012)