John Ernest Crane was born in 1890 in Woodbridge. He was the second son of Joseph and Laura Anne (née Stimpson) was born in 1890 in Woodbridge. His name was John Ernest Crane. John had six siblings; brothers Joseph, Albert, Frederick and Herbert and sisters Edith and Ella. His father, Joseph Sr., was a baker in Castle Street, Woodbridge and John followed in his footsteps—by the time he was twenty-one in 1911, he was running his own bakery at 32 The Street next door to the Burness Rooms. In the summer of 1915, he married Mary Adeline Cleveland in Woodbridge and a year later their daughter Nancy Marion was born.

It is probable that John was conscripted into the services, joining “C” Company of the 9th Battalion, Suffolk Regiment, and posted to France. In January 1917, John was treated for a hernia at the No.58 Casualty Clearing Station at Lillers. On 3rd January, he was taken by the 31st Ambulance Train to one of the general hospitals in Etaples. John was probably returned to Britain for further treatment, as he was later transferred to the 15th (Yeomanry) Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment when they were posted to France from Egypt in May 1918. For his war service, John received the British War and Victory Medals.

In 1921, after John was discharged from the army, he and Mary had a second child named Derrick, in Melton. The same year, John was initiated into the Doric Lodge of Freemasons in Woodbridge. Kelly’s Directory for 1925 records that John was still running a bakery in Melton. When he died, aged forty, in 1931, he was still living in the Street, Melton. His widow, Mary, died in 1939, while living with her married daughter, Nancy, in Ipswich