Jon Calver and Helen Weinstein from Historyworks are seeking out singers, and we are being guided by the fantastic choir leader, Rowena Whitehead, and we have set up a special Cycle of Songs choir to rehearse together and sing an anthemic piece for the project.  In addition, we are calling many musicians and choirs across Cambridge to seek out community choirs, primary school choirs, young people and student and college choirs to participate.  In May and June the choirs and musicians will be rehearsing, and Helen Weinstein will be matchmaking the choirs with the compositions, and booking venues and people to record the pieces. We will build a bespoke website where all the pieces will be available as lyrics and sound files so that singers in our community choirs, and children in our school choirs,  can learn the pieces by ear. Once recorded, we will carefully edit the recordings so that they are ready for the app, so that the sound files will complement the history stories we have shaped as a text for each entry on the app. Therefore, in early July an audio app, designed by software services company Calvium, of the performances of all the participating choirs will be available for free. It will be designed to be listened to along the route of the Tour de France, through central Cambridge from Parkers Piece, into town, around the Round Church, up to Great St Mary’s, along King’s Parade and out of town past the Fitzwilliam Museum and Botanic Gardens to Trumpington.  It will have a map and it will be geo-located.  Hooray! 

The aim in the app part of the project is to create two interweaving guides for residents and visitors to Cambridge to enjoy. There will be the Cycle of Songs to listen to along the route, and some historical context and photos for each location.

Both tours will take the visitor around Cambridge using the route of the Tour de France. The first will be a eclectic set of stories, giving the context to the fragmentary lines used for the Cycle of Songs. These stories will be a kind of 'hidden' history, with a focus on entertaining the trail user rather than giving them a comprehensive history of Cambridge. It is during the research for this trail that Helen Weinstein with help from her team of historians and archivists will drill down into original source materials to seek out suitable words for poets and librettists and musicians to inspire the Cycle of Songs compositions.

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DOING HISTORY IN PUBLIC - APPS

Here are some guidance notes for historians researching and writing up these stories. We will work on this project as a team, designing our work to be shareable.  Notes can be hosted on googledocs.  But on this site we will post up the draft entries for the walking trail web app so that our work can be corrected and amplified by a wide group of community historians and activists college archivists and museum experts - with whom Helen Weinstein is consulting in the city.  Most importantly these materials need to be giving support and be useable for the artists. As the process of providing content for the history trail develops, -  Helen Weinstein is match-making stories, locations, choirs, composers - and her focus is to find suitable words for the composers.

Format for #dohistory - for reference on good practice & review of various apps in cities and museums, do use our webapp history trail page and look at the links to York History Trails = http://shadow.historyworks.tv/projects/apps/

OUR task for Cambridge is to translate historical research skills into family-friendly content - we want to tempt residents & visitors to Cambridge to use the sound poems and enjoy the historical locations!

1.i. Summary of story for leaflet/print (60 words max, suitable as an at-a-glance overview)

1.ii. Summary of story for app (60 words max, suitable as an at-a-glance overview)

2. Story-telling (500 words max, suitable as the script, i.e. for audio delivery for the walking trail)

3. Links to sources for potential lines to use in the sound poems for Cycle of Songs: please here be more free-style and less constrained in your suggestions - so give abundant quotations that may be suitable for compositions, but remembering that the composers will probably only use fragments of these sources in their compositions, and our task in the webapp is to give the context and wider story telling for each geo-located story.

4. Suitable photographs to contextualize story for the webapp user to locate themselves (source creative commons flickr)

5. Suitable photographs of objects/manuscripts/places (where specific photographs may need to be taken/ permission from archivists and librarians to enhance the walking trail - esp by showing what is behind closed doors and within the treasures of the libraries and archives - take photos of the items on your iphones and tag to your notes, giving information about what permissions and to whom we will need to request permission for publication on the webapp)

TWO SECTIONS -

1. STORIES RELATING TO COLLEGES, THEIR ARCHIVES AND LIBRARIES

2. STORIES RELATING TO CITY SPACES AND PLACES, THEIR ARCHIVES AND THE CITY LIBRARY

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HISTORY STORIES: SHORT-FORM FOR APP

In early July an audio app, designed by software services company Calvium, of the performances of all the participating choirs will be available for free. It will be designed to be listened to along the route of the Tour de France, through central Cambridge from Parkers Piece, into town, around the Round Church, up to Great St Mary’s, along King’s Parade and out of town past the Fitzwilliam Museum and Botanic Gardens to Trumpington.

The audio in the app will have accompanying text which provides teh user with the historical context that inspired the song. The stories listed below are the draft short-form versions of longer historical pieces that the Historyworks team researched for the Cycle of Songs project. These short-form drafts will become the content for the app. The longer pieces are individually hosted on this page below the short-form stories.. 

The Stories

 

Why We Ride

This piece and its historical context are closely linked with 104 Regent Street, Cambridge, CB2 1DP.

 

From the “Velocipede” to the “Boneshaker” to the “Granta”, the family firm of John Howes & Sons supplied Cambridge with top of the range bicycles for 173 years. Established in 1840 on Regent Street, Howes & Sons were among the pioneers of 19th century bicycle design, supplying citizens with bicycles for racing, leisure, and work. They helped shape Cambridge as the cycling city we recognise today.   It is alleged that this was the first bike shop in the country, developing out of a wheelwright’s shop who adapted tools to service the cycle rather than the wagon.

Howes & Sons’ success can also be attributed to their affiliation with University scholars and the Cambridge University Bicycle Club. Set up on the 28th February 1874, the club appointed John Howes (son of the original founder who died in 1849) as a supplier, repairer, and on-hand technician for race days. There were few other traders during this period and by 1887 only three other firms were registered. This had grown by 1896 to six but by 1913 forty six companies were trading in bicycles.  

By 1900 cycling had grown enormously and it was much more accessible due to more reasonable pricing. The upper classes had turned towards motor cars, and those who could afford them, the motor cycle, but the bicycle remained for many of the population in Cambridge an accessible and affordable option.

The emergence and innovations of Howes & Sons, aided by the increased interest in cycling in the 1890s, ensured that the people of Cambridge had access to a range of cycling services and established the city’s identity as a cycling hub.

Many bike shops proliferate around Cambridge today, and the app song “Why We Ride” is located at the old Howe’s shop to mark the important legacy of this place for the city. The business continued to thrive through the generations but after 173 years of trading, the shop closed for the last time on December 31st 2013.

To find out more about the history that has inspired this composition and its lyrics you can visit the Historyworks website.

 

Reality Checkpoint - Parker's Piece

This piece and its historical context are closely linked with Parker's Piece, Cambridge.

On 16th December 1587 Edward Parker, a college cook, leased the area that has come to be known as Parker’s Piece. In 1613 it was passed onto the Mayor, Bailiffs, and Burgesses of Cambridge as part of an exchange with Trinity College. Then, in 1831, the university requested permission to create a cricket pitch. This was granted but on the condition that it had to be for the use of the public as well as the university. Parker’s Piece has since become one of Cambridge’s most fondly used areas of public land, nurturing great sporting talent, accommodating public celebrations and long-held traditions.  A selection of these games and leisure pursuits are named in the song called “Reality Checkpoint” which is the poignant name for the lamp at the centre of Parker’s Piece as it importantly provides a meeting point between town and gown, both in the past and the present.

As a schoolboy in the late nineteenth century, the famous cricketer Jack Hobbs would practice at Parker’s Piece. Hobbs described it as “probably the finest and most famous cricket ground in the world; it is certainly one of the best.” Cricket was, at that time, particularly popular, with between thirty and forty clubs keeping nets on Parker’s Piece. In 1930 a pavilion was built and named after the early master of English cricket who’d began his career there: Jack Hobbs. If you look carefully above the clock tower you can see the weather vane depicts a cricketer at the wicket.

It was also here that the modern rules for association football were established, before then, the rules from differing clubs meeting up to play would cause tensions.  In 1848 the teams in the area met to establish one uniform set of rules as a way of preventing fights and disagreements. These rules were fixed to the trees on Parker's Piece and, later, when the Football Association was founded in 1863, they used these Cambridge rules.

Parker’s Piece has always been widely used by the communities in Cambridge, providing a location for all sorts of celebrations and remarkable events. On the 28th of June, 1838, the Municipality of Cambridge organised one of the largest banquets ever prepared at Parker’s Piece to celebrate the Coronation of Queen Victoria. The total number of participants was 32,000, with 15,000 diners and 17,000 spectators, at a time when the population of Cambridge was less than 30,000 people. In total, the diners consumed 1,015 stones of meat, 72 lbs of mustard, 140 lbs salt, 125 gallons of pickles, 4,500 loaves of bread, 1,608 plum puddings of 6.5lbs each, and 99 barrels of ale. What was truly remarkable about this event, was not just the scale, but that it was organized in just 13 days! 

To find out more about the history that has inspired this composition and its lyrics you can visit the Historyworks website.

 

Infinity

This piece and its historical context are closely linked with Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge.

 

John Wallis was a gifted mathematician who lived between 1616 and 1703 and enrolled at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, at the age of just fifteen. Whilst studying from 1632 to 1640, Wallis read medicine, anatomy, and mathematics. He wrote a large number of mathematical, theological, and linguistic works and is known for his introduction and popularisation of the infinity symbol, commonly used in mathematics today.

In his work Arithmetica infinitorum (1655), he described a line as being made up of many small points that go on forever, in this case going on until infinity. This work on the infinitesimal quantity laid the foundations for the founding of infinitesimal calculus by Leibniz and Newton in the 1660s. Notable for his astonishing mental arithmetic ability, it was regular behaviour for Wallis to solve square roots before he fell asleep. 

On the night of 18 February 1671, exhausted by a year-long illness and alone in his bed, he began to test how big a number he could calculate the square root of in his head. Initially trying smaller numbers and succeeding, Wallis required a greater challenge.  A friend then suggested that Wallis calculate something large, leading Wallis to try to square root a fifty-three digit number. Two days later, he recited the square root to 27 places from memory to his friend. However, after this feat of mental arithmetic, Wallis felt he couldn’t do any better and didn’t attempt any further large number calculations.

To find out more about the history that has inspired this composition and its lyrics you can visit the Historyworks website.

 

Freedom

This piece and its historical context are closely linked with St John's College, University of Cambridge.

 

Cambridge was once home to two of the most prominent campaigners against the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797), a former enslaved African and author who married locally in Cambridgeshire, and Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846), a graduate of St John’s College,  who were both early activists. They devoted their lives to the cause and were pivotal in the eventual Bill which abolished the Slave Trade within Britain (1807).

Olaudah Equiano, also known as Gustavas Vassa (1745-1797), was an author and campaigner against the Transatlantic Slave Trade. In his hugely influential biography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African (1789), he records the appalling conditions of slavery and how youngsters would be snatched from their families in their homes in agrarian regions in Africa, marched to the coast, shipped to the Americas and sold if they survived this arduous ordeal.  Unusually, in Equiana’s case, , after 16 years of enslavement, he had a quaker owner who allowed him to earn small wages, and to save sufficient money to buy his freedom.

Equiano then began a series of actions and campaigns to better the conditions enslaved people had to endure. He first visited Cambridge in 1789 to campaign, then three years later returned to the region, albeit for a very different reason. On the 7th April 1792, he married Susannah Cullen at St Andrew’s Church, Soham, and had two children, both baptised in the same church. Equiano it seems lived closeby the centre of Cambridge, in Chesterton, but his family later moved away and he died in March 1797 , yet the work of other early activists continued the fight against the Slave Trade.

Thomas Clarkson was born in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, on 28th March 1760. As an undergraduate at St John’s College, Cambridge, he had planned to join the church but an academic task completely altered his career path.In 1785, Clarkson entered the Members' Prize for a Latin Essay, writing on the subject of 'anne liceat invitos in servitutem dare?' ('is it lawful to make slaves of others against their will?').

Deeply affected by what he read whilst researching, the essay transformed his life from academic practice to activism. In May 1787, Clarkson, along with 11 other men, established theSociety for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. With the support of William Wilberforce, the MP for Hull, speaking in Parliament, they were able to instigate a Parliamentary investigation into the Slave Trade. He worked tirelessly at this, travelling 35,000 miles around the country meeting with people involved in the trade, writing pamphlets and speaking publicly about the horrors of slavery.

In 1807 the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act was passed in the House of Commons by 283 votes to 16, marking the end of slave trade within Britain. Although this landmark event was a significant victory, it wasn’t until 1833 that Parliament passed an act that abolished slavery throughout the Empire.  It is little known that two such significant figures were both activists for human rights in Cambridge, and this piece commemorates their fight for justice and celebrates the importance of freedom today.

To find out more about the history that has inspired this composition and its lyrics you can visit the Historyworks website.

 

Unsung Women

This piece and its historical context are closely linked with the area near Senate House and St Mary's Street.

 

On St Andrew’s Street there once stood a building where no Cambridge woman would have wanted to end up - the Spinning House. It was first known as Hobson’s House, due to Thomas Hobson being one of the eleven partners who founded it on the 30th July 1628. It was a place where the poor, both men and women, were put to work spinning wool, giving it its more common name of ‘the Spinning House’.

However, it soon became an institute specifically for punishing young girls and women, symbolising a big tension between the town and the gown, with the University employing its own force, known as bulldogs, to arrest local girls who were then locked up. Conditions inside the building were terrible, punishments handed out were harsh and strict rules of confinement were maintained. To many of the citizens of Cambridge, the Spinning House came to symbolise  the University’s hold over the city, as girls were often arrested for little reason and tried by the Vice-Chancellor’s Court, not through the normal system of justice. Eventually the Spinning House was shut down in 1894.

The university also treated its female students with little more respect. Girton and Newnham Colleges for women had been established in 1869 and 1879 by Emily Davies and Anne Jemima Clough but despite being able to attend lectures, many restrictions were placed on them. They couldn’t work in the laboratories, or have full access to the library and were unable to receive degrees. By 1897 their growing dissatisfaction resulted in the Women’s Degree Syndicate proposing to the Council of the Senate that full membership be awarded to women.

The poll was scheduled for Friday 21st May in 1897. This resulted in absolute outrage from the male students. The Cambridge Weekly News reported between 15,000 and 20,000 people surrounded the Senate on the day of the vote, mostly men intimidating those that wanted to vote in favour. They could be seen and heard at every window and roof in the area, even perching themselves on the top of St Mary's Church. Banners were hung out from Caius College and an effigy of a female student was suspended from the windows above Macmillan’s bookshop, now the Cambridge University Press bookshop. When the signal for commencement of the vote was given, a second effigy of a woman in a cap and gown was lowered from the upper windows of Caius College.

When the vote was announced the opposition had won with 1,713 votes to the 662 of those in favour, the male students tore down and burnt the effigies. The women of Girton and Newnham took the news of the poll and the behaviour of the male undergraduates with surprising stoicism and resolution. Another attempt was made in 1921 but this failed when Oxford agreed for women’s equality to take degrees, and so for Cambridge it wasn’t until after the second world war and the huge social changes that ensued, that on May 1948 women won their campaign for parity with the men at Cambridge, and could officially wear gap, gown and hood, and receive their degree.

To find out more about the history that has inspired this composition and its lyrics you can visit the Historyworks website.

King’s Anthem

This piece and its historical context are closely linked with King's College, University of Cambridge, CB2 1ST.

 

On the 25th March 1441, King Henry the Sixth (1421-1471) laid the foundation stone for  what was called then the King's College of Our Lady and St Nicolas, more commonly known  today as King's College. This was the first of many steps towards creating the College that currently exists. The history of how King's College came to be as it is today is one that spans many centuries, monarchs, and architects.

Located north of the current college, between the Chapel and Senate House Passage, was the original site where Henry VI laid the foundation stone for King's College. The King envisioned this to be part of a larger complex, requiring the surrounding land and property to make way for an accompanying Chapel. The area that the King intended to develop contained the parish church of St. John Zachary and was densely covered by shops, houses and hostels. All of these were granted to the King in 1445 by the Mayor, but it took some long legal battles to move some of the shopkeepers who refused to move to make way for the  ‘new build’ of King’s Chapel.

Although contemporary building-accounts no longer exist, the Chapel’s first stone is believed to have been laid at the Altar by the King on St. James' Day (25th July), 1446. The chapel was the only part of the design for King's College that was carried out during the reign of King Henry VI, but it was not ready for use until at least half a century after his death. Identifiable by its white colour, the limestone masonry provides a visual indication of how work stalled on the chapel as a darker sandstone, visible above it, was used later to complete the structure.

In commissioning the plans for King’s College and acquiring the land required for its construction, King Henry VI began a process that transformed Cambridge, moved the townspeople and their trades from along the river, creating the backs and the quads and gardens along the river.  For this song on the app, we have called it the “King’s Anthem” to marvel at the passage of time, the lives and deaths of those who have experienced Cambridge. In 1728 Maurice Greene composed a piece entitled ‘Hearken Unto Me Ye Holy Children’ to be performed as part of the the Founder’s Day service which takes places each year on the 25thMarch, and these form the basis for the lyrics for Michael Berkeley’s composition.

To find out more about the history that has inspired this composition and its lyrics you can visit the Historyworks website.

 

Hooray for Hobson

This piece and its historical context are closely linked with St Catharine's College, University of Cambridge, CB2 1RL.

 

The story of ‘Hobson’s choice’ dates back to the 17th century when Thomas Hobson (1544-1631) was the manager of a stable behind the George Inn, located outside what are now the gates of St. Catharine’s College on Trumpington Street. Hobson’s main job was to transport mail between Cambridge and London. A lucrative way to make money was to hire the horses that he did not use for mail delivery to the students and academic staff of the University.

Most of Hobson’s customers wanted to hire the fastest horses in the stable. Hobson soon realized that this would result in overworking his best horses so he established a rotation system and only offered the next horse in the queue, rather than letting customers choose the best one available. He had a strict policy, immortalized for posterity by the poet John Milton, who wrote that Hobson’s Horse choice was always ‘This one or none’. The policy does not imply that there was no choice, there was one, the choice between ‘take it, or leave it’. This type of choice in life became known by the concept, handed down through generations by the phrase ‘Hobson’s choice’.

Thomas Hobson in his own time was a prolific figure in Cambridge and like many philanthropists of the period he funded a number of social projects. In 1628 he contributed to a Workhouse known as Hobson’s House. This would later become the notorious Spinning House, a  ‘house of correction’  specifically for young girls and women, notoriously used by men of the university to police  the behaviour of women of the city. This was a problematic institution and a source of tension between men and women, town and gown in the city, characterized in our app by  “Unsung Women of Cambridge”.

Hobson also established Hobson’s conduit, a watercourse that aimed to bring fresh water into the city. Fresh water was necessary because increasing numbers of students and university staff were dying of plague, due to the unsanitary conditions. The conduit was built between 1610 and 1614, running along both sides of Trumpington Street towards St. Catharine’s College. If you walk along Trumpington Street, you can still see the conduit running the length of the street, particularly deep and hazardous outside the Fitzwilliam Museum, characterized in our app by the “crash” sequence in our song “Hooray for Hobson”.

To find out more about the history that has inspired this composition and its lyrics you can visit the Historyworks website.

 

Lions Go Walkabout

This piece and its historical context are closely linked with the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, CB2 1RB.

 

In 1837 sculptor William Grinsell Nicholl (1796-1871) became involved in the task of creating the monumental lions that overlook Trumpington Street, when he was commissioned to realise the vision of the museum’s architect George Basevi (1794 – 1845).  Nicholl started work that year carving decorative details of Basevi’s designs for the museum and in 1939 he sculpted the four iconic lions that guard the south and north steps to the Fitzwilliam Museum’s portico entrance.

According to local folklore, when the Church of Our Lady and the English Martyrs’ clock strikes midnight, the Fitzwilliam Lions rise from their plinths and make their way to drink from the gutters that run along Trumpington Street, a few metres from where they sit, sometimes walking as far as Hobson’s Conduit. According to different versions, they are also said to enter the museum, passing through the walls and occasionally letting out a roar. This is the inspiration for the poem, possibly called “Lions Go Walkabout”, which is located at the Fitzwilliam Museum steps.

 

You can see how the history project for Cycle of Songs is developing by going to the Historyworks website here: http://historyworks.tv/news/2014/03/13/cycle-of-songs/

 

To Seek a Dream

This piece and its historical context are closely linked with the Botanical Gardens on Trumpington Street, CB2 1JE.

 

At the Backs of King's College is a memorial stone to the renowned Chinese poet Xu Zhimo. On this stone is inscribed a few lines of his 1928  poem which has various translations, such as "On Leaving Cambridge" and "Saying Goodbye to Cambridge, again". Here we are taking the title "Taking Leave of Cambridge Again" and we are pinning the song further up the river, to where it meanders through the meadows at a place enigmatically called “new bit”, opposite the botanic gardens on Trumpington Street.

 

Taking Leave of Cambridge Again

By Xu Zhimo

 

Softly I am leaving,

Just as softly as I came;

I softly wave goodbye

To the clouds in the western sky.

 

The golden willows by the riverside

Are young brides in the setting sun;

Their glittering reflections on the shimmering river

Keep undulating in my heart.

 

The green tape grass rooted in the soft mud

Sways leisurely in the water;

I am willing to be such a waterweed

In the gentle flow of the River Cam.

 

That pool in the shade of elm trees

Holds not clear spring water, but a rainbow

Crumpled in the midst of duckweeds,

Where rainbow-like dreams settle.

 

To seek a dream? Go punting with a long pole,

Upstream to where green grass is greener,

With the punt laden with starlight,

And sing out loud in its radiance.

 

Yet now I cannot sing out loud,

Peace is my farewell music;

Even crickets are now silent for me,

For Cambridge this evening is silent.

 

Quietly I am leaving,

Just as quietly as I came;

Gently waving my sleeve,

I am not taking away a single cloud.

(6 November 1928)

 

To find out more about the history that has inspired this composition and its lyrics you can visit the Historyworks website.

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PARKER'S PIECE

Parker’s Piece: The City’s Playground

These stories are in development and are copyright to the team at Historyworks. If you want to use them for press or for other purposes please contact the producer Helen Weinstein: 07974827753.

 

SHORT SUMMARY:

 

Parker's Piece is one of Cambridge's most famous open spaces. Originally part of Trinity College, it was acquired by the town of Cambridge in 1613 as pasture land and named after a college cook, Edward Parker. In the 19th century, it was used as a first-class cricket-pitch and a sports ground for Varsity matches between the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford. In 1838, a feast for over 15,000 people was held in honour of Queen Victoria's coronation. There were bands, choirs, sports and games, fireworks, and even a hot air balloon. In 1911, local history was made when former Cambridge undergraduate and aviator W.B.R. Moorhouse made an emergency landing in Parker's Piece. Today, this green space is a place football, cricket, fairs, and picnics.

 

STORY CONTENT:

 

On 16thDecember 1587 Edward Parker, a college cook, leased the area of pasture south of Trinity College which has come to be known as Parker’s Piece. Parker leased the area, measuring 25 acres, until 1613 when it was passed onto the Mayor, Bailiffs and Burgesses of Cambridge as part of an exchange with Trinity College. Then in 1831 an initiative from members of the university requested the council’s permission to level 60 square yards to make a cricket pitch. This was granted by the council, but on the condition that it had to be for the use of the public as well as the university. Parker’s Piece has since become one of Cambridge’s most fondly used areas of public land, nurturing great sporting talent, accommodating public celebrations and long-held traditions.

As a schoolboy in the late nineteenth century, the famous cricketer Jack Hobbs would wake at 6am and walk half a mile from his home to Parker’s Piece to practice. His mother remembers him hurriedly finishing his homework in the evenings so that he could return to the Piece to play some more, always returning after dark. Hobbs himself writes in his memoirs that Parker’s Piece is “probably the finest and most famous cricket ground in the world; it is certainly one of the best.” Cricket was, at that time, particularly popular, with famous players such as Ranjit Sinhji practicing there and between thirty and forty clubs with nets on Parker’s Piece. In 1930 a pavilion was built and named after the early master of English cricket who’d began his career there: Jack Hobbs. The pavilion also provided a service for other sports that took place on Parker’s Piece. It meant that teams playing football on the Piece no longer had to get changed in tents. It was also here that the modern rules for association football were established. Prior to the drawing up of these regulations the teams would play on the Piece and each game would be played with varying sets of rules. The teams in the area met in 1848 to establish one uniform set. These rules were fixed to the trees on Parker's Piece and, later, when the Football Association was founded 1863, they used these as their basis.

Parker’s Piece has also been widely used by communities in Cambridge, providing a location for all sorts of celebrations and remarkable events.

In July, 1893, during the festivities at Cambridge to the occasion of the wedding of Prince George and Princess Mary, a thousand of Cambridge’s “aged poor” were entertained to tea on the park. The event also included the flight of a hot air balloon. Then in 1911 the community had the opportunity to view another aerial display as W.B. R. Moorhouse emergency landed his Blériot monoplane on the Piece. TheCambridge Daily Newsdescribed the event as follows:

“It was travelling at a rapid pace, but very low…The machine came over the top of Lensfield Road close to the house-tops, and well below the top of the spire of the Roman Catholic Church. It was feared that the airman would not be able to clear the house-tops in Regent Street, but he just did it, and passing over that thoroughfare near Hyde Park Corner, effected a beautiful descent upon Parker’s Piece…not far from the large electric lamp standard in the centre…A large crowd gathered as if by magic, and the monoplane was quickly surrounded.”

He was the first man to land an aeroplane in Cambridge, and would later used it to travel between the city and his home in Huntingdon. He was also yet to gain his aviators certificate at the time of his first landing.

Until the 1940s, many families would spend Good Friday on Parker’s Piece, partaking in a tradition of skipping. From 10am families would travel to the Piece prepared with long ropes (often washing lines), food and drink. There would be traders set up alongside the park selling sweets, ice-creams, toys, and lemonade, and he skipping would go on until early in the evening. The men traditionally turned the ropes with the women jumping, although children often skipped with adults too. One resident, a Mrs Hannah Gawthrop, aged 82, recalled in 1964 the song that the baker boys from across town at Castle End would sing as they sold their wares on Good Friday morning:

‘Hot Cross Buns, Hot Cross Buns,

Full of sugar, full of butter,

Full of little plums.’

 

 

 

POTENTIAL MATERIAL: FOR POETS AND COMPOSERS

 

1. CN. April 14/04/1963

“Parker’s Piece Was Once Filled With Many Skippers

 

‘Hot Cross Buns, Hot Cross Buns,

Full of sugar, full of butter,

Full of little plums.’

 

This was the cry which would arouse Cambridge citizens in the past early on Good Friday morning as the bakers’ boys went from door to door ringing hand bells and selling their spicy wares from the baize-covered trays balanced on their heads.

Later in the morning, the first instalment of buns having been eaten at breakfast, the move to Parker’s Piece would be made.

From houses all over the town emerged men, women and children laden with packages of food and bottles of water or lemonade and carrying the family clothes line, ail eager to begin the annual skipping ceremony.

2. Probably the Finest Cricket Ground in the World

 

Jack Hobbs described Parker's Piece as "probably the finest and most famous cricket ground in the world" and certainly such household -names as Dan Hayward, Hobbs and Ranjitsinghi played cricket there.

 

4. Cabridge Rules

The off-side rule adopted by the Cambridge rules stated that:

"If the ball has passed a player and has come from the direction of his own goal, he may not touch it till the other side have kicked it, unless there are more than three of the other side before him. No player is allowed to loiter between the ball and the adversaries' goal." (1856, probably earlier)
from Carosi, Julian (2006), The History of Offside.

'The Cambridge Rules appear to be the most desirable for the Association to adopt'
C. W. Alcock 1863, FA committee member and founder of the FA Cup.

'They embrace the true principles of the game, with the greatest simplicity'
E. C. Morley, F.A. Hon. Sec. 1863.

Cambridge Rules circa 1856
No copy of the 1848 rules survives but the following set of University Rules, circa 1856, still exists in the Library of Shrewsbury School.

The Laws of the University Foot Ball Club
This club shall be called the University Foot Ball Club.
At the commencement of the play, the ball shall be kicked off from the middle of the ground: after every goal there shall be a kick-off in the same way.
After a goal, the losing side shall kick off; the sides changing goals, unless a previous arrangement be made to the contrary.
The ball is out when it has passed the line of the flag-posts on either side of the ground, in which case it shall be thrown in straight.
The ball is behind when it has passed the goal on either side of it.
When the ball is behind it shall be brought forward at the place where it left the ground, not more than ten paces, and kicked off.
Goal is when the ball is kicked through the flag-posts and under the string.
When a player catches the ball directly from the foot, he may kick it as he can without running with it. In no other case may the ball be touched with the hands, except to stop it.
If the ball has passed a player, and has come from the direction of his own goal, he may not touch it till the other side have kicked it, unless there are more than three of the other side before him. No player is allowed to loiter between the ball and the adversaries' goal.
In no case is holding a player, pushing with the hands, or tripping up allowed. Any player may prevent another from getting to the ball by any means consistent with the above rules.
Every match shall be decided by a majority of goals.
(Signed)
H. Snow, J. C. Harkness; Eton.
J. Hales, E. Smith; Rugby.
G. Perry, F. G. Sykes; University.
W. H. Stone, W. J. Hope-Edwardes; Harrow.
E. L. Horner, H. M. Luckock; Shrewsbury.

5. CC.39 Enid Porter,Cambridgeshire Customs and Folklore

 

FOOTBALL

‘both cricket and football were played on Parker’s Piece [Befor Hobbs’ Pavillion was erected on the Piece in 1928, tents were erected for use as changing rooms by players], part of which had been levelled by some of the Colleges and relaid as cricket pitches.

The playing of football was rendered difficult in the early nineteenth century by the fact that members of the various public schools were accustomed to different rules. Finally one set of rules was drawn up in Cambridge for the convenience of players.

In the sixteenth century the game had been forbidden to be played outside the colleges following a fight in in 1579 between undergraduates and inhabitants of Chesterton at a football match played in the village.’p.294.

 

SKIPPING

About ten o’clock in the morning families would make their way to Parker’s Piece [Good Friday] armed with long ropes (usually clothes lines) and packets of food and drink. Until early in the evening the skipping went on, the men traditionally turning the ropes and the women jumping…children often skipped with adults. Tradesmen selling sweets , icecreams, toys, lemonade, etc., set up stalls alongside Parkside. ..

…Mrs Hannah Gawthrop, aged 82, recalled in 1964 the chant of the bun-sellers in the Castle End district of Cambridge’ pp108-9.

-        TWO PHOTOS AVAILABLE

-        V.F. K33, amust-use photoof four people skipping – great community photo.

 

 

5. K11.0101 Moorhouse, W.B.R Cambs Branch Newsletter [national assoc of retired police officers] July 2008

He flew into Cambridge on the afternoon of 11thOctober 1911.

“By about 5:30pm PC Naylor had reached Sheep’s Green, when he heard a droning sound in the air, which increased in volume… Looking up he saw a small Bleriot type flying towards the town from the direction of Trumpington…

It was described in theCambridge Daily Newsas follows.

‘It was travelling at a rapid pace, but very low, and the Constable fancied from the misfiring, and feared that disaster might overtake the intrepid aviator. The machine came over the top of Lensfield Road close to the house-tops, and well below the top of the spire of the Roman Catholic Church. It was feared that the airman would not be able to clear the house-tops in Regent Street, but he just did it, and passing over that thoroughfare near Hyde Park Corner, effected a beautiful descent upon Parker’s Piece…not far from the large electric lamp standard in the centre…A large crowd gathered as if by magic, and the monoplane was quickly surrounded.

A young man, with keen, clear-cut features, wearing one of the now familiar airman’s helmets, with ear-flaps, and a short, khaki-coloured, woolly overcoat, cycling knickers and shoes, stepped out of the well of the machine…

…In order to avoid being hampered by a crowd, Mr Moorhouse made an early start from Cambridge the next morning, leaving the Piece about ten minutes past six…

… ‘I want 200 yards starting room, and 200 feet of air-space under me when I reach the trees and houses and therefore I don’t want the time to be known as a crowd would collect and hamper me, and I might not have enough room under me when I reach the houses, and a sudden gust might mean disaster.’…

…the pilot..had yet to gain his aviators certificate

 

6. Pictures in Cambridgeshire Collection

 

Cricket

1. 1.     J.P. KO. 13895A, Cricket & spectators on Parker’s Piece
2. 2.     J.P. J42 227 Students Playing Cricket, 1842, postcard
3. 3.     S.1814 25, A Dinenr Given…Peace celebrations July 12th1814, 6000 in attendance
4. 4.     C 66.1. x1905150 Views of Cambridge, great photo of people watching cricket on Parker’s Piece p.43.
5. 5.     S1893 3169 74/22/24A Picture of Crowds on Parker’s Piece July, 1893 with accompanying text:

“A picture taken in July, 1893, during the festivities at Cambridge, on the occasion of the wedding of our present King and Queen. The scene is Parker’s Piece, where a thousand of the aged poor of Cambridge and Chesterton were entertained to tea, and the photograph was taken shortly after a balloon ascent, an event of very great interest in these days. The aeronaut was Mr Pillrow, assistant to Messrs. Spencer and Sons, who accompanied by the late Ald. Deck, then in his 68thyear. Amid enthusiastic cheers, we read in theChroniclefiles, the balloon, the City of London, was let go. The aerial monster rose steadily and hovered round the piece for some time. Eventually it reached an altitude of about 3,000 feet…Ballast reached 8,000 feet…remaining in the air for an hour and fifteen minutes, the aeronauts arrived back in Cambridge at 9pm….

…after the marriage in the Chapel Royal at ST. James Palace, the Royal couple…en route stopped at Cambridge to receive and address from the Mayor and Corporation.

Moorhouse Aviation

1. 1.     CC44.17Victorian and Edwardian Cambridgeshire from old photographs, F.A. Reeve

“Second-Lieutenant W.B. Rhodes Moorhouse landing his Bleriot monoplane on Jesus Green, 1911. He was the first man to land an aeroplane in Cambridge, and later used it to travel between the town and his home in Huntingdon. During the First World War he was awarded the Victoria Cross as an officer of the Royal Flying Corps, and later died of wounds received in action”

PRINT VERSION: 86/16 15  8706

1. 2.     Q.C. K11. 42717 Photograph of the plane on the ground.

 

7. C. 52 My Cricket Memories, jack Hobbs

 

As a schoolboy: late 19thcentury

“To give you an idea of my keenness, let me tell you that I used to rise at six and walk half an hour to Parker’s Piece to get a bit of practice. [would play 5pm til 9pm]

Parker’s piece is probably the finest and most famous cricket ground in the world; it is certainly one of the best. It cost a team a shilling a match to play on a prepared pitch…between thirty and forty clubs had their nets there…

…It was on Parker’s Piece that I caught my first glimpse of Ranjit Sinhji – Ranji, the idol of the cricketing public for so long.” P.5.

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CORONATION FESTIVAL

These stories are in development and are copyright to the team at Historyworks. If you want to use them for press or for other purposes please contact the producer Helen Weinstein: 07974827753.

SUMMARY:

On the 28th of June, 1938, the Municipality of Cambridge organised something that truly went down to history; one of the largest banquets ever prepared, hosting 15000 diners and 17000 spectators, was set up at Parker’s Piece to celebrate the Coronation of Queen Victoria.

The total number of participants was 32000, at a time when the population of Cambridge was less than 30000 people!

 

STORY CONTENT:

The “Coronation Festival” is even more impressive if we consider that the plan was finally approved on the 15th of June, only 13 days before the event. At first, the Organising Committee wanted to simply put on some fireworks; but mayor Charles Humfrey aimed to organise something unique that would engage the entire population of the town, from the aristocracy to the poorest classes. Mr. Bond, a member of the Committee, proposed the idea of a collective dinner at Parker’s Piece, arranging the tables in circles with an orchestra at the centre. The Committee liked this plan, but with provisions needed for 15,000 seated diners and 17,000 spectators they thought it would not be feasible, both because of the logistics and for the exuberant costs. However, the citizens were immediately in strong favour of this idea and in a few days they collected £920 in subscriptions, around £63,300 in today’s terms.

After the plan was approved, the people of Cambridge were immediately involved in the organisation. Eighteen subcommittees were formed to take care of all the different tasks: from bread to beer supplies, from flowers to the orchestra. Every parish in town was in charge of distributing the tickets and to keep a list of the subscribers, updating the number of participants from their area of the town. Local businesses offered to print the flyers and admission tickets for free, others provided mustard and salt, others took care of the decoration.

As the Municipality was well aware of the uniqueness of the event, a special committee was appointed to keep record and then publish a book on the preparation of the event.

Mr. Bond, who fathered the idea of the banquet, offered to erect the orchestra and the tables at his own cost, in exchange for the ticket revenues. But the prices he would charge was too high and the committee decided to finance the event directly, to allow as many people as possible to participate. Ticket prices varied between 2 and 5 shillings (roughly today’s £7/£14) for premium places and 1s or 2s (today’s £2.5/£5) for normal places.

The sentiment of inclusion was such that two shillings were given to every citizen incapable of attending the event because of age or illness; but because the festival was organised for the inhabitants of Cambridge, it was also decided that only people who had resided in town for at least 14 days before the festival could participate.

As the excitement mounted, fear for bad weather was increasing; the days right before the banquet were miserable, with cold and heavy rain. On the eve of the event it was decided that if in the morning of the 28th it would still be raining, the dinner would be postponed.

Eventually though, as the local newspaper reported, “On the morning of the Coronation the sun arouse bright and glorious, like a giant to run his course […] all nature seemed to sympathize with the joyous occasion”.

From early morning, people started to pour into Parker’s Piece from every parish in Cambridge, singing chants and holding the forks and knives they brought from home.

One newspaper reported that the “Streets chocked up with people, all in their holidays clothes; thousands wending their way to one point; men, women, children – happy and merry; not an angry word to be heard…The parts of the town distant from Parker’s Piece seemed to be in danger of being wholly depopulated. There appeared to be many whole streets without a single individual in them – we mean even the houses”

Those with the tickets entered the circle, the others stayed out and watched.

After dinner the ‘Rustic Sports’ began. These included a range of events such as a pig races, donkey races, ram races along with whistling matches, sack races, a biscuit eating competition, a wheelbarrow race, and bobbing for oranges for the guests themselves. Prizes ranged from new shoes, hats, trousers to copper tea kettles and tobacco.

At 2pm, the major announced the grace would be sung, and the chronicles report that all 15000 people at the tables sang together. After that, dinner began: meat, bread and pickles, some water and a lot of ale; last but not least, plum-pudding “in a supply that has never been witnessed in this kingdom before”. In total, the diners consumed 1015 stones of meat, 72lbt of mustard, 140 lbs salt, 125 gallons of pickles, 4500 loaves of bread, 1608 plum puddings of 6.5lbs each and 99 barrels of Ale. Naturally, the only toast allowed for the whole night was “The Queen”.

Everything happened quietly; despite the record number of people, not a single incident was reported for the whole night. At 10pm, even though the Committee had originally decided against it, illuminations were carried out and fire-works were lit. As one commentator has described it, “Thus terminated the most brilliant scene that was ever witnessed in this place.”

 

POTENTIAL QUOTES: FOR POETS AND COMPOSERS

 

- the Grace

- God Save the Queen

The music programme was chosen by Rev. Pratt of Caius College

  

LIST OF BREWHOUSES INVOLVED (from Tamsin - has the recipe for the plum puddings i think)

Brewhouses
400 in Mr Elliston’s, 400 in Mr Foster’s, 130 in Mr Hopkins 40 in Mr Deightons, 20 at the Bath house, 60 at the Red Lion Inn,
Colleges:
100 at Trinity College, 100 Christs College, 30 at Sidney Sussex college and 260 in other private establishments

Food

1608 plum puddings of 6.5lbs each
1029 joints of meat for a total of 1015 stones
72 lbt mustard
140 lbs salt
125 gallons of pickles
4500 loaves of bread, 2lbs each
99 barrels of Ale, 36 gallons each barrel
100 lbs of tobacco
6 lbs snuff

List of Rustic Sports

Pig races

2x Donkey races - with riders

Ram races

Whistling matches

jumping in sacks

"Rooting Extrordinary, By boys in a tub of meal for sixpence"

[eating] Penny Loaves and Treacle with their hands tied behind them

dipping for eels

biscuit eating competition

a wheelbarrow race

bobbing for oranges

roling match

"Grinning Match or which is the ugliest"

Prizes ranged from new shoes,, waterloo waistcoats, hats, velveteen trousers to tea, copper tea kettles, and tobacco.

CAMBRIDGE CORONATION FESTIVAL PROCEEDINGS – 1838 (C 02)

 

Held in honour of Queen Victoria’s Coronation, at Parker’s Piece

“General excitement is only produced by great occasions” (p.i)

 

Wanted to have “a general and collective entertainment of the whole population” (p.iii); it was agreed that the poorer classes in districts should be given public entertainment

 

The idea at first amazed many but doubts over practicality and high costs. But the public feeling was strongly in favour of the plan

 

Mayor of Cambridge at the time: Charles Humfrey, Esq.

 

Initial idea is to organise an “Illumination” but the Mayor did not want to have people pay for that

 

People seated at the dinner: 15000; 17000 spectators (including stewards and waiters)

 

At the centre of the coronation an orchestra (20ft), then a rotunda for 1600 people (10 feet each circle of tables), then a promenade that could contain 6000 people (60ft), then the Sunday School Children Tables (2700) (15ft), then 60 dining tables to contain 12000 people (120ft) and then the outer circle to separate tables from the spectators (30ft).

 

The tables were divided by parishes (13): table 1 Holy Sepulchre, 2-3 St Mary the Less, etc.

 

13/06/1838 an open Committee was help to get the help of the inhabitants; the amount of subscriptions already made was £920.

 

15/06: the plan is approved (only 13 days before the event!) and sub-committee are formed. Every parish was in charge of distributing the tickets and to report how many people would participate. Only people who had resided in Cambridge for at least 14 days before the festival could participate: it was really for the local population.

 

The only toast allowed to the dinner was “The Queen”

 

Children not on the Sunday School would stay with the parents

 

Mr. BOND, who had proposed the project, offered to erect the orchestra, rotunda, tables, forms, etc. at his cost, provided he could get from merchants and builders the loan of the timber ad that he would get the ticket revenues from the rotunda and promenade.  Eventually though the price he would charge for the tickets was too expensive and the Committee decided to finance the event in order not to exclude many people.

 

2 shillings (1 for individuals below 14 years of age) were given to people incapable of attending the event because of age of illness.

 

Local businesses offered to print the flyers and admission tickets for free, others provided mustard and salt, other flowers

 

The music programme (graces to be sung before and after dinner + the national anthem) was chosen by Rev. Mr. Pratt of Caius College

 

There was also a balloon (paid 70 guineas); 50 men protected it

 

Because of the large number of domestic servants applied to participate, the Committee deliberated that the banquet was for the “poorer classes”, but not for the “domestic servants” and therefore the upper and middle class should not encourage them to participate. However, they could apply to have free tickets of admission to the outer circle.

 

Subscribers

Inner circle tickets: 1s.

Rotunda: 2s 6d

Outer circle: free

 

Non-subscribers

Rotunda: 5s

Inner circle: 2s 6d

Outer cicle: 1s

 

80 people in the Organisation committee and sub-committees. 18 sottocomitati (bread, beer, music, etc)

 

FOOD SUPPLIES:

1608 plum puddings of 6.5lbs each

1029 joints of meat for a total of 1015 stones

72 lbt mustard

140 lbs salt

125 gallons of pickles

4500 loaves of bread, 2lbs each

99 barrels of Ale, 36 gallons each barrel

100 lbs of tobacco

6 lbs snuff

 

The weather on the days immediately before the banquet was very bad – on the 26th, the committee deliberated that if at 10am  on the 28th it would rain, the dinner would be postponed to Friday. But eventually the 28th was a very sunny day. “On the morning of the Coronaton the sun arouse bright and glorious, like a giant to run his course […] all nature seemed to sympathize with the joyous occasion” (p.12)

 

“Never, indeed, in the annals of Cambridge, had preparations been made on so grand scale for celebrating any important event. Public interest was highly excited, and private curiosity was extreme” (p.10) 

 

A special committee was appointed to keep record and then publish a book on the preparation of the event

 

Because of the vast number of participants, it turned out to be impossible to accommodate the children of the Poor-Houses, so 1s for each child was assigned to provide them with meat and pudding inside the houses, and then free tickets for the Inner Circle

 

Total number of presents: 32000

The orchestra could 100 musicians

The day of the 28th starts at 1030am with the divine service at Great St Mary’s.

 

At 11, the children from the Sunday Schools were decorated with a Coronation medal and then each school started a procession around town to gather in Parker’s Piece.

 

Then from each parish the procession commenced and people started to find their sits on the venue. “Streets chocked up with people, all in their holidays clothes; thousands wending their way to one point; men, women, children – happy and merry; not an angry word to be heard; not the least pressure ad confusion; not an attempt of any one to mend his position; not the slightest interference of policemen or constables, and no necessity for it! The parts of the town distant from Parker’s Piece seemed to be in danger of being wholly depopulated. There appeared to be many whole streets without a single individual in them – we mean even the houses” (p-17-18, but it’s an excerpt from the “Independent Press”)

 

People brought their own mugs, knives and forks.

 

At 2pm the major announced that the grace would be sung. All 15000 people at the tables sang.

 

Then dinners began “Immediately the presidents, stewards, and carvers, at the several tables commenced their labours: joint after joint of the primest meat disappeared; bread and pickles were supplied in abundance; water in the casks was provided for the few who chose to ask for it; and ale plentifully supplied to those who presented their tickets. To the meat succeeded such a supply of plum-puddings as never has been witnessed in this kingdom before”.

 

During the meal, the Overture and Choral Finale were executed by the choirs of Trinity’s and King’s. At the end of the meal, after the national anthem, the balloon was raised up in the air.

 

Then again, grace was sung by 15000 people altogether.

After dinner, Rural Sports; at 10pm fire-works; and even if in the beginning the Committee had decided against, eventually illuminations were carried out.

“Thus terminated the most brilliant scene that was ever witnessed in this place” (p.27)

“the 28th of June will henceforth be a day much to be observed in the annals of Cambridge  a day to be marked ‘meliore lapillo’” (p.24)

 

NB: the book contains the lyrics of the songs sung during the feast and a complete list of the subscribers’ names.

 

NB: dark red book, beautiful image of the feast

 

NB: brown book, “Rural Sports” programme and manifesto, very beautiful

Green book: proceedings of the meetings (nothing too interesting at a glance)

 

NB: the final red book, which is a second edition, says that the diners were only 14000.

 

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HOWES & SONS BICYCLE SHOP

Howes Bicycle Shop

These stories are in development and are copyright to the team at Historyworks. If you want to use them for press or for other purposes please contact the producer Helen Weinstein: 07974827753.

SHORT SUMMARY:

From the “Velocipede” to the “Boneshaker” to the “Granta”, the family firm of John Howes & Sons supplied Cambridge with top of the range bicycles for 173 years. Established in 1840 on Regent Street, Howes & Sons were among the pioneers of 19th bicycle design, supplying citizens with bicycles for racing, leisure and work. They helped shape Cambridge as the cycling city we recognise today.

 

STORY CONTENT:

 

Howes Cycles of Cambridge was first set up as John Howes & Sons in 1840 at number 13 Regent Street and was the first cycle trading firm in the country. When the founder of the shop first moved to Cambridge he was trading as a coachbuilder but he soon turned his attentions to the velocipede. The velocipede was an early form of what we recognise as a bicycle today, although it looked very different, often having three or four wheels. This marked John Howes’ emergence into a career that his family would continue for 173 years.

Over the 173 years that Howes & Sons were operating they had a great impact on the development and growth of cycling in Cambridge. They not only sold some of the earliest forms of bicycle, such as the ‘boneshaker’, whose name refers to the extremely uncomfortable experience one had whilst riding it, and the ‘penny-farthing’, but they also hired them, as a series of articles from theCambridge Chronicleof September 1858 illustrate:

‘A young draper’s assistant’ hired an ‘iron-framed machine with a cane seat which had wheels of 2ft 10inch and 3ft respectively’. The youth failed to return it after an hour, and John Howes reported it missing to the police.”

The police did arrest two men who were in possession of a velocipede, albeit the wrong men and wrong machine, given the rarity of them. The next step for Howes & Sons was to manufacture their own machines. TheCambridge Chronicleof the 31st May 1916, in an article entitledA Centenary of Cycling,gives the following account of how the company first came to be manufacturing their own bicycles:

“About the year 1867, the ‘French Bicycle’ was brought out, and Chancellor Leeke, returning from a visit to the Paris Exhibition of that year, described to Mr Howes the mechanical ideas of the new vehicle. ‘Why’ said Mr Howes. ‘that is simply a “dandy-horse” with cranks and pedals’ and he promptly proceeded to make one on the description given by Mr Leeke.”

Howes & Sons’ success can also be attributed to their affiliation with University scholars and the Cambridge University Bicycle Club. Set up on the 28th February 1874, the club appointed John Howes (son of the original founder who died in 1849) as a supplier, repairer, and on-hand technician for race days. There were few other traders during this period and by 1887 only three other firms were registered. This had grown by 1896 to six but by 1913 forty six companies were trading in bicycles.  

By 1900 cycling had grown enormously and it was much more accessible due to more reasonable pricing. The upper classes had turned towards motor cars, and those who could afford them, the motor cycle, but the bicycle remained for many of the population in Cambridge an accessible and affordable option. A bicycle could now be purchased a more achievable price of £7 7s. In 1902 F.W. Lawrence, a competitor of Howes & Sons, was advertising second-hand cycles for sale and was accepting old machines for part-exchange. The Post Office had also begun to equip their postmen and telegraph boys with bicycles, bringing the bicycle into daily working life. Howes’ ownGrantabicycle was selling well with an average of 3 being sold a week, a massive rise compared to the twenty that sold in 1890 when the model was first launched.

The business continued to thrive through the generations but after 173 years of trading, the shop closed for the last time on December 31st 2013. The emergence and innovations of Howes & Sons, aided by the increased interest in cycling in the 1890s, ensured that the people of Cambridge had access to a range of cycling services and established the city’s identity as a cycling hub.

 

POTENTIAL QUOTES: FOR POETS AND COMPOSERS

 

1. Oldest bike shops in the world survived challenge from ‘the internet’ of the 1890s

http://www.roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com/bike-shops-versus-sears-roebuck-1897/

 

Store and family historian Richard Howes says:

“Family legend has it that one of the [Howes family] went to Paris to an exposition in 1868, saw this strange two wheeled thing and thought ‘I could make that with the equipment we already have in Cambridge.’ So he did. We still have one of the high wheelers we made back then.”

 

2. C.26.485 – J. Green,Bicycling in Cambridge c1850-1914(2006)

 

“…From theCambridge Chronicleof 4 and 11 September 1858 we have a series of articles concerning the theft of a velocipede. ‘A young draper’s assistant’ hired an ‘iron-framed machine with a cane seat which had wheels of 2ft 10inch and 3ft respectively’. The youth failed to return it after an hour, and John Howes reported it missing to the police.” – the police arrested two men with a velocipede albeit the wrong men and wrong machine, given the rarity of them. P. 20.

 

Cambridge Chronicle 31stMay 1916 ‘A Centenary of Cycling’ article, “About the year 1867, the ‘French Bicycle’ was brought out, and Chancellor Leeke, returning from a visit to the Paris Exhibition of that year, described to Mr Howes the mechanical ideas of the new vehicle. ‘Why’ said Mr Howes. ‘that is simply a “dandy-horse” with cranks and pedals’ and he promptly proceeded to make one on the description given by Mr Leeke.

 

Bicycle Advertisement Slogans: p.29

 

"Revolution Cycles: The cream of Cycling, only obtained by riding this Cycle...We don't sell auctioneer's scrap or second-hand done up rubbish, but guarantee a Cycle of the HIGHEST standard of Perfection."

 

"FAMOUS NEW CHESTERTON BICYCLES: STILL KEEN TO THE FRONT

 

Photographs:

·        P.19 – Regent Street Shop, undated, black & white

·        P. 26 – JHS Trades Fair Exhibit 1886

·        P. 30 – The Granta bicycle 1890

• P. 32 - JHS Workshop 1900
• P. 22 - JHS Workshop team 1900
• P. 75 - Cambridge Town Bicycle Club outside W.J. Irson's cycle shop c1895s

 

3. Sara Payne,Down Your Street, Cambridge Past and Present - 1 Central Cambridge, 1983

 

"When John Howes moved to Cambridge in 1840, he set up a business as a coach builder and wheelwright at 13 Regent Street; at that time there was a workshop and smithy with an open yard at the front. John Howes was the first business tenant of Downing College, and the first cycle trading firm in the country. His great-great-grandson John Howes, who is in business with his two sons at 104 Regent Street, the shop to which the firm has moved during the imminent redevelopment of the site to the south of the Porter's Lodge, carries on the story: 'We are told that in 1868, John went to the Paris Exposition, saw the two-wheeled things with a saddle and pedals, came home and built one, and so the 'bone shaker', as it was called, was introduced to this part of the world.'

...By 1873, it was decided a show-case was needed to display the products, and so a shop with a large window was built in front of the workshop. The street number was changed to 44 around the turn of the century and the shop still stands the same today....The firm [now ran by his son Charles Clarence] took out a thirty year lease in 1897 on the piece of land next door and built a self-contained shop, no. 42." p. 148.

 

4. Ted Tyndall and John Green,Howes Cycles: Britain’s Oldest Cycle Shop

 

“The family firm of John Howes & Sons with its roots set deeply in the past, can truly claim to have been among the pioneers of today’s mammoth cycle industry in this country. The business was founded in Regent Street, Cambridge, in 1840 by John Howes…but in 1869 with commendable foresight, the firm turned its efforts to the development of the ‘velocipede’.

From the early days which hsaw the birth of the original “boneshakers” the firm has been prominent at every stage of the developing cycle industry.

…Then in 1980 tehre were further changes – the premises at 46 Regent Street were closed and replaced by the present shop at No. 104.

 

 

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SPINNING HOUSE

The Spinning House – House of Correction

These stories are in development and are copyright to the team at Historyworks. If you want to use them for press or for other purposes please contact the producer Helen Weinstein: 07974827753.

 

Short Summary

 

St Andrew’s Street once contained a building where no Cambridge woman would have wanted to end up – the Spinning House. Home to “profligate and disorderly women, and common prostitutes” (Morning Chronicle, 1851), the threat of ending up there was used by parents until the late 19thcentury to scare their young girls away from bad behaviour. The Spinning House was founded in the 17thcentury by Thomas Hobson, the man who had become famous for ‘Hobson’s Choice’, and was initially called ‘Hobson’s Workhouse’. It was a place where the poor, both men and women, were put to work spinning wool and this was how it came to be given its more common name of ‘the Spinning House’. However, it soon became an institute specifically for young girls and women, also called a bridewell. The Spinning House was embroiled in many controversies over the years it was in use. Conditions inside the building were terrible, punishments handed out were harsh and strict rules of confinement were maintained. To the citizens of Cambridge, the Spinning House came to symbolise all that was corrupt with the University, which employed its own men to arrest local girls who were then locked up there. Girls were often arrested for little reason and were trialled by the Vice-Chancellor’s Court, not through the normal system of justice. Eventually the Spinning House was shut down in 1894.

 

OR SHORT SUMMARY

 

St Andrew’s Street once stood a building where no Cambridge woman would have wanted to end up – the Spinning House. It was founded in the 17th century by Thomas Hobson and was initially called ‘Hobson’s Workhouse’. It was a place where the poor, both men and women, were put to work spinning wool, giving it its more common name of ‘the Spinning House’. However, it soon became an institute specifically for young girls and women, symbolising all that was corrupt with the University, which employed its own men to arrest local girls who were then locked up there in terrible conditions and suffered dreadful treatment.

CONTENT FOR STORY

 

The Foundation and Conditions of the Spinning House

The grant of the land and buildings for the Spinning House was given on 30 July 1628 to six University members, including Thomas Hobson, and also to six citizens of the town. This was an attempt to make it a joint project, but it also acknowledged the very division between ‘town and gown’ which would ultimately lead to so much anger against the Spinning House. Conditions in the Spinning House were very poor. Although regulations were intended to govern the state and treatment of the inmates, these seem to have often been disregarded. Rooms were cramped and dirty. A Dr. William Ewin visited in January 1776 and revealed that the girls had no fire despite the harsh weather and were sleeping on straw on the floor. Almost a century later, when a reporter visited in 1851, things had not changed. He claimed that the building itself was “in a most dilapidated condition” and that it was both cold and damp without fireplaces. “The cells are six feet in width by about eight feet in length” the reporter notes, “there are no glazed windows to the cells, the only light that is admitted being through an aperture of about three inches square in the iron shutters which are placed on the outside of the window frames. There are no means of warming the cells, either by hot air or by fires, as in other prisons, for there are no fire-places in them…In winter the floors of the cells are often covered with the snow which drifts in through the casements.” Due to these conditions Illness was rife and sometimes led to death. One woman, Elizabeth Howe, died of rheumatic fever in 1846 after catching a violent cold whilst she was held in the Spinning House.: The Borough Coroner’s inquest stated that she had died as a result of neglect and the poor conditions within the cell. He also declared the jury’s “abhorrence at a system which sanctions the apprehension of females when not offending against the general law of the land, and confining them in a gaol unfit for the worst of felons.” The Proctor, a William Towler Kingsley, was also examined and admitted that Elizabeth had not been disorderly, indecent, or acted improperly, and despite the “piercingly cold” night and her begging, the keeper had refused her a fire.

 

 

The Proctors and the Vice-Chancellor’s Court

The job of finding badly-behaved girls and taking them to the Spinning House was the role of “Proctors”. They were men employed by the University who patrolled the streets of Cambridge during term time, often flanked by two other employees called “bulldogs”. The proctors’ powers, dating back to a charter originally given by Queen Elizabeth I to the University, allowed them to arrest any local girls suspected of misbehaviour. This was intended to keep the undergraduate students in order by removing the temptation of bad women from them. However, the proctors caused great offence and anger by also arresting innocent women whilst they were doing harmless things such as shopping in the town, or walking by themselves to meet their husbands. In addition, because the police were not involved in the process at all, it bypassed town justice and implied that the local rights of Cambridge citizens were beneath those of the University and its members.

 

After girls were arrested, a trial was carried out at the Vice-Chancellor’s Court. This was also highly controversial since it meant that young girls were tried by university men behind closed doors, so they could not have friends or family there for support. One unnamed inmate recalled that ‘I have often seen the girls dragged by the hair of their heads from the sitting-room into their cells…Once, when they took me in the streets, they tore nearly everything off me: the proctor twisted my arm almost out of its socket, and I bit a piece out of his.”

 

Punishments handed out could involve periods of imprisonment in the Spinning House between one day and six months. In addition, some girls had to suffer whippings which were often carried out publicly. Elizabeth Faddock received a whipping in October 1775 which was ordered to be carried out during the busiest time of the market whilst she was naked from the waist up.

 

Local hatred for the system turned to national outcry due to events such as those in February 1860. Female milliners (hat-makers) from Cambridge were on their way to a dance with two undergraduates when their car was stopped by the proctors. They dragged the girls from the car and took them to the Spinning House. Cambridge citizens tried to start action to change the system but a counter petition in favour of the Spinning House got 360 signatures, so it remained. However, at the time, unsatisfied townspeople did some digging and found out that, of the 360 signatures, 54 were University members and 160 were college staff or tradesmen. These figures were turned into posters which were pasted on buildings across Cambridge, outing university members who were in favour of the system. The petition hadnotbeen signed by the Mayor or any of the Aldermen or Councillors.

 

 

The end of the Spinning House

Two key cases helped to bring about the end of the Spinning House. The first involved Jane Elsden, who had been released on 10 February 1891 but was sent to the Spinning House again a day later. After escaping she went to her father’s house in Dullingham and was re-arrested again. Her trial brought attention to the system because, for breaking bail, she was tried publicly in the Assizes Sessions. The result, although not in Jane’s favour, did mean that all subsequent Spinning House cases had to be tried in public. The second case took place in December 1891 when Daisy Hopkins was arrested and sentenced to two weeks in the Spinning House. She got public opinion on her side and her story even came to international attention when it appeared in the New York Times. Six days after she was arrested, the Lord Chief Justice ordered her release.

 

Finally, an Act of Parliament was passed to abolish the Spinning House on 18 June 1894. At the same time, the process of justice was changed so that all women arrested in future would be taken to the Police Station and tried by the Borough Magistrates. The Spinning House was pulled down in 1901. The building where so many women had been denied their right to justice and a fair trial was replaced by a modern police station which would attempt to ensure, in future, that they would receive better treatment.

 

POTENTIAL MATERIAL: FOR POETS AND COMPOSERS

 

From the Indenture of Feoffment, 30 July 1628, for the foundation of the Spinning House:

Thomas Hobson founded the place “in acknowledgement of God’s mercies and blessings upon his labours, and in testimony of his earnest and fervent wish to do good to the poor of the University and town wanting means to live upon, and settle themselves in some honest calling, and that they might thereafter be employed and set to work, and brought up and instructed in some trade or occupation, and thereby not only enabled to live of themselves, but by their labours become profitable members of the commonwealth”

 

From the Corporation Accounts:

“Paid Horner Johnson, by order of Mr Vice-Chancellor, for whipping 10 women…….10s.”

 

The dietary for persons confined in the Spinning-House, Cambridge, for periods not exceeding one month:

Breakfast                                                      6 oz. Bread, daily

                                                                        2 oz. Tea, 7 oz. Sugar, and 1½ pint milk, weekly.

Dinner                                   

for 4 days in the week                                    5 oz. cooked meat, 6 oz. Bread and ½lb. Potatoes.

for 3 days in the week                                    1½ pint Soup, 6 oz. Bread if more than three Inmates

                                                                        12 oz. Suet Pudding, if less than 4 Inmates.

Supper                                                                        6 oz. Bread, or 1 pint of Oatmeal Gruel, daily

 

Cambridge Spinning House, Rules and Regulations, 21 February 1854 – The Matron:

“4. She shall exercise her authority with firmness, temper, and humanity; and abstain from all language and remarks calculated to irritate an Inmate.”

“8. She shall see the Inmates locked up every night in their cells not later than Eight o’clock; and shall have the outer gate of the house locked, and the key placed in secure keeping.”

“21. She shall endeavour to acquire the confidence of the Inmates and obtain influence over their minds by frequently visiting and conversing with them. She shall also make it her object to ascertain their previous habits and dispositions, and communicate freely with the Chaplain respecting them for the purpose of more effectually promoting their moral and religious improvement.”

“22. She shall inspect every letter to or from an Inmate, except such as are addressed to the Vice-Chancellor or other Governor, or to the Chaplain or the Medical Officer.”

“24. Upon every occasion when two or more Inmates are together, as in taking exercise, or in cleaning the house, or in any other employment, the Matron or Assistant Matron shall be present with them, for the purpose of keeping order.”

 

Cambridge Spinning House, Rules and Regulations, 21 February 1854 – The Inmates:

“7. The meals shall be served at such hours as the Governors from time to time may direct.”

“9. The inmates shall not be allowed to see their friends during their period of confinement unless by order in writing signed by the Vice-Chancellor or some other Governor.”

 

Reporter relating a story from an inmate of the Spinning House, ‘The Cambridge Spinning House’, by the Special Commissioner of theMorning Chronicle, Cambridge, 27 January 1851.

“It is,” said one of the unfortunate creatures, who had upon several occasions endured the horrors of the place, “a dark, damp, filthy, dirty, wretched, badly-managed place. There is no order kept, and no one man can keep ‘em in order…You are all huddled together, and sit among yourselves, talking and hearing all manner of bad language, blackguard stuff and slang”

 

Discussion of repeat offenders in a report on ‘The Cambridge Spinning House’, by the Special Commissioner of theMorning Chronicle, Cambridge, 27 January 1851:

“There are several females in the town who are well known both to the proctors and their men as persons of abandoned character, who are nevertheless allowed to continue their course with impunity; for they have been in the place so often, that the proctors will not take them any more. One of these individuals has been in, at different times, for not less than 103 weeks; and many others have passed nearly as long a period in it.”

 

The role of the Proctors, discussed in ‘The Cambridge Spinning House’, by the Special Commissioner of theMorning Chronicle, Cambridge, 27 January 1851:

“Owing to the absurd and perplexing manner in which the University accounts are kept, it is impossible to ascertain accurately the expense of the Proctors, the Pro-Proctors, their men, and the Spinning House, but it is believed that the charge to the University for these useless and noxious establishments is not less than £1,500 per annum; and this is the more observable, as the Senate of the University has twice rejected proposals for contributing to the expense of the Borough police.”

 

Reynold’s Newspaper, 10 December 1876:

“proctors are clergymen appointed by the university authorities to scour the streets of the town, and with the assistance of their men (or, as they are termed, “bulldogs”) to take into custody any unfortunate girls they may meet with…Proctors have no magisterial authority vested in them, and yet they do things that policemen would be immediately discharged for.”

“Two Friday nights since an unfortunate was stopped in the street at a little past eleven p.m. She was ordered by the proctor (the Rev. A. E. Humphreys) to accompany the bulldogs to the spinning-house. She refused…Upon this refusal to accompany them, the Rev, Humphreys ordered the bulldogs to bring her along by fair means or foul. The orders were obeyed to the letter. She was seized by the legs, and dragged bleeding and torn to the spinning-house. She was subjected to this brutal treatment for forty minutes.”

 

‘Daisy Hopkins’s Charge’,The New York Times, 25 March 1892:

“For supper at 7 o’clock she was given some weak tea. That was the average diet every day during her confinement. The bed she had to sleep upon was a coarse matting hammock slung from the walls. She was compelled to wash at the pump, and, although she complained of being ill, she was made to scrub out the court and an outhouse with cold water and a brick. Immediately after the arrival of the doctor, who visited the Spinning House while she was at work, he ordered her to desist, as she was not well enough to do it. She also complains that she was made a public show of, and that a lady visitor insulted her by suggesting that she was a notorious character and was suffering from the evil effects of her life.”

 

 

Sources

 

Burchall, Michael J., ‘A Cambridge Woman of the Town in the Late 18thCentury: The career of Elizabeth Faddock’,Genealgists’ Magazine, Volume 29 Number 8 (December, 2008), pp.299-302

Oswald, Janet, ‘Girls of the Spinning House – a Social Study of Young Cambridge Streetwalkers, 1823-1894’,Thesis (Doctor of Philosophy) – Open University, 30 September 2008

Porter, Enid M., ‘For Unruly and Stubborn Rogues’,East Anglian Magazine, Volume 18 Number 2 (December, 1958), pp.72-7

‘The Cambridge Spinning House’, by the Special Commissioner of theMorning Chronicle, Cambridge, 27 January 1851

 

 

SJ Additions

 

1. C34.9The Cambridge Spinning House, Special Commissioner ofThe Morning Chronicle, 1851

 

“The cells are six feet in width by about eight feet in length…There are no glazed windows to the cells, the only light that is admitted being through the an aperture of about three inches square in the iron shutters which are placed on the outside of the window frames. There are no means of warming the cells, either by hot air or by fires, as in other prisons, for there are no fire-places in them…In winter the floors of the cells are often covered with the snow which drifts in through the casements.” P. 5-6.

 

“It is,” said one of the unfortunate creatures, who had upon several occasions endured the horrors of the place, “a dark, damp, filthy, dirty, wretched, badly-managed place. There is no order kept, and no one man can keep ‘em in order. I was put in twenty years ago; and I was put in when my last little boy was three months old- he is nearly three years old now-and it was as bad the last time as it was the first. You are all huddled together, and sit among yourselves, talking and hearing all manner of bad language, blackguard stuff and slang”

 

“Once when the proctor came to see us, he went into one of the cells, and we locked him in, and while he was there we called him ‘a wretched prostitute,’ and asked him if he was not ashamed of himself for following such a wicked course of life. One of us gave him a long lecture on the impropriety of his conduct”

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ROUND CHURCH

Cambridge's Round Church

 

These stories are in development and are copyright to the team at Historyworks. If you want to use them for press or for other purposes please contact the producer Helen Weinstein: 07974827753.

SHORT SUMMARY

The church of the Holy Sepulchre and St Andrew has stood at an ancient junction in Cambridge for almost nine centuries. Commonly known as the Round Church, it is one of only four round churches which survive in the country, and is thought to have been built some time before 1130AD by a Fraternity with links to the Crusades.

 

STORY CONTENT

The church of the Holy Sepulchre and St Andrew has stood for nearly nine centuries at a key junction in the City, where two ancient routes meet: the old London road and the Via Devana, which ran from Colchester to Chester. This striking Norman building, known as the Round Church, was already more than a century old by the time the first college was founded in Cambridge in 1284AD.

 

The church is thought to date to some time before 1130AD, when a document records that Reinhold, Abbot of Ramsey, granted land from St George’s Churchyard to Randolf, Robert and Auger and others of the Fraternity of the Holy Sepulchre to build a church “in honour of God and of the Holy Sepulchre”. The Fraternity had their origins in the Crusades of the 12thcentury, and they built this church to emulate the sacred church of Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. This connection to the Crusades led some historians in the past to incorrectly link the foundation of the church with the legendary Knights Templars.

 

The Round Church is entered through an impressive Norman doorway, composed of six pillars decorated with an intricate design. Once inside, you are confronted immediately with the round nave, encircled by eight massive pillars surmounted by a beautiful triforium. Of the other round churches which survive, the Middle Temple chapel in London, built c.1185AD, is perhaps most well-known, due to its links with the Knights Templars. Northampton and Little Maplestead, Essex are where the other round churches are to be found. It is generally considered that the Cambridge church is the oldest.

 

One of the most unusual occasions to be found in the Parish Registers is the Baptism record for quadruplets born to Henry Coe, a shoemaker, and his wife on 5thNovember 1766. The records show William, Henry, Elizabeth and Sarah were the children of this remarkable birth. An account of the baptism in a Cambridge newspaper noted, “the procession to the Church was attended by a great concourse of people as there were 16 sponsors, besides the father, nurses and others. The mother is there stated to be in a fair way of recovery, and it appears that she did recover”. Unfortunately records tell us three of the children did not live to see their second birthday, and only one child reached adulthood.

 

Although a Norman construct in origin, the Round Church we see today is due to the restoration by a group of Victorian enthusiasts. By the nineteenth century, the church was in a terrible condition and was severely damaged in a storm in September 1841. Part of the aisle wall fell in, already weakened by the weight of the Belfry, or upper storey, which contained five bells.

 

In 1842 the Cambridge Camden Society restored the church to an early Victorian vision of a Norman church, under the direction of architect Anthony Salvin, who had also carried out work on nearby Trinity College and the development of Whewells Court. The most obvious change to the church’s appearance was the removal of the Belfry, its tower replaced with a conical roof. A new, octagonal bell tower, with one bell, was built at one corner of the church.

 

Following restoration, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert made a visit in October 1843 and were said to have greatly admired the church and the recent restoration programme. However, an unexpected and less welcome result was a long and difficult dispute within the Church over the erection of a stone altar and credence table by the Cambridge Camden Society. This led to a lawsuit and the temporary closing of the church between 1843 and 1845. The Protestant ‘cause’ was victorious and the church re-opened after a wooden altar was installed.

 

A lovely reminder of further Victorian restoration work was found by a builder in 1966 while working on the ceiling of the Round Church. In between two beams, he found a scrap of paper bearing a pencilled note from decorators working there in 1892:

“This chancel was decorated in paint for the first time by W. Ridley, house decorator,

of 2 Brunswick Place, H. Thurber, decorator, H. Driver, decorator, A. Driver, apprentice, October 21 1892, ta, ra, ra, boom, de, ay.”

 

In more recent times, further changes have taken place. In 1973, the church was amalgamated with All Saints, a decision which united the two oldest churches in the City. For more information on the Round Church today go to:

www.roundchurch.organdwww.christianheritage.org.uk

 

MATERIAL FOR POETS & COMPOSERS

 

Thorp, T, “The Church of the Holy Sepulchre Cambridge” (1844)

“Perfectly awed by the dim and solemn light scarce admitted into the vacant naive, and more sparingly still into its cloister like Aisle.” (p.13)

 

“We let the eye wander through the maze of endlessly intersecting arches, and plain or chevroned groinings.” (p.13)

 

 

Hatt, J, “A History of the Church of The Holy Sepulchre” (1847)

[Of the link between the Fraternity and The Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem] “That sacred structure was revered by the holy knights above all earthly objects”

“It seems highly probably that they would imitate that structure whenever they built a new church, and this appears to have been one of the first – perhaps the very first – they built in this country” (p.8)

 

The old Register books record:

“Four children of Henry Coe, a shoemaker, two male and two female at one birth on 5thNovember 1766. A Cambridge newspaper of taht date says that the procession to the Church was attended by a great concourse of people as there were 16 sponsors, besides the father, nurses and others. The mother is there stated to be in a fair way of recovery, and it appears that she did recover. One of the children died at 2 months, another at 15 months, a third at 20 months and the other grew up and was living. William, Henry, Elizabeth and Sarah.” (p.14)

 

 

Adams, W T, “The Round Church of Cambridge” (1930)

“But this is a church of churches; a church almost unique; a church which breathes romance from its every stone; in fact, a church to view which it were well-nigh a crime to neglect.” (p.1)

 

 

Cambridge News (June 1966)

Note found in Round Church beam tells of 1892 decoration

One of the builders at work restoring the ceiling made an intriguing discovery. A pencilled note on back of a scrap of paper reads:

“This chancel was decorated in paint for the first time by W. Ridley, house decorator,

of 2 Brunswick Place, H. Thurber, decorator, H. Driver, decorator, A. Driver, apprentice, October 21 1892, ta, ra, ra, boom, de, ay.”

 

 

IV.          Suitable photographs from Cambridgeshire Collection

M.Sep.J42.663A                        Illustration showing restored Church

 

 

 

 

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CROMWELL'S HEAD

These stories are in development and are copyright to the team at Historyworks. If you want to use them for press or for other purposes please contact the producer Helen Weinstein: 07974827753.

SHORT SUMMARY:

The English military and political leader Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) began his studies at Sidney Sussex College at the age of sixteen. After his death in 1658 and the restoration of Charles II in 1661, Cromwell’s body was exhumed and decapitated. The head eventually ended up on London Courier Market in 1710, and by the mid-18th century the Master of Sidney Sussex College received a visitor trying to sell the head to him. Refusing to buy it, the head passed hands until it was eventually donated to the Cromwell family and relatives to the college for proper burial. It was subsequently buried in Sidney Sussex College in 1960.

STORY CONTENT:  

Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) began his studies in Cambridge at Sidney Sussex College. His life was devoted to politics and as a leading military figure in the English Civil War he was the main figurehead for overturning the monarchy. He served as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland until his death in 1658.

After the restoration of Charles II in 1661, Cromwell’s corpse was exhumed and posthumously executed. His head was then chopped off rather poorly, requiring more than one swing of the axe, and placed upon a metal pike which was positioned on the roof of Westminster hall where it remained for at least thirty years.

The legend of how the head left Westminster Hall states that a high wind blew the head and spike from the roof, where a guard found the head, removed the spike and took it home. On hearing that a large reward was being offered to find the person in possession of the head, the soldier became scared and hid it. Here it remained until his death, when it was passed down to his daughter. This is the only story of how the head came to leave Westminster Hall.

In the 18th century Cromwell was viewed more charitably by people, as those who had lived during that time had passed on. As such, possession of Cromwell’s head became much sought after. There are two stories by which the head is said to have returned to Cambridge: bought by a Swiss-French collector of curiosities named Claudius De Puy or passed by marriage to “comedian” Samuel Russell from Cambridge. In the first story, Du Puy gained possession of the head of Oliver Cromwell through the London Courier Market in 1710 and showed it to visitors in his museum. It was after Du Puy’s death in 1738 that the head may have ended up in the possession of Samuel Russell. In the second instance, Russell received the head by marriage to the daughter of the soldier who had originally found the head.

Hoping to make money off the prized heirloom, Russell attempted to sell it to the Master of Sidney Sussex College, a Dr. Elliston. He tried to persuade the Master to buy it, as he happened to have the bag with him at the time. The master refused to buy it, and Russell was able to sell it to Samuel Cox for £118 (in today’s currency worth around £15,000). Cox intended to make money by showing the head in an exhibition, but it ended in failure.

In 1814, Cox sold the head to Josiah Henry Wilkinson, who was convinced it was real. Wilkinson insisted upon studying the head and used it for research, sometimes presenting it to guests at dinner parties. The Scottish man-of-letters, Thomas Carlyle, mentioned in a letter dating from 1858 that he had heard of Wilkinson’s head:“Here, however, it reappears with flesh and hair on it; and the Hon. Wilkinson has purchased, a good many years ago; and exhibits, once a quarter (I was told) to a select dinner party, who are friends of human progress, all of them, and interested in Cromwell, this satisfactory acquisition of him.”

It was only in the twentieth century that the idea of laying the head to rest became a subject of discussion. In 1911, Cromwell’s head was studied once again and it was brought to attention by theDaily Mail. Many readers wanted to put the head to rest, but it wasn’t until Cromwell’s living family decided this in 1960 that the head was reinterred. It was placed in an unmarked grave in Sidney Sussex College, although it wasn’t until 1962 that the college confirmed the head was buried there. 

POTENTIAL QUOTES: FOR POETS AND COMPOSERS

http://carlyleletters.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/long/34/1/lt-18581214-TC-EC-01

“Here, however, it reappears with flesh and hair on it; and the Hon. Wilkinson has purchased, a good many years ago; and exhibits, once a quarter (I was told) to a select dinner party,7 who are friends of human progress, all of them, and interested in Cromwell, this satisfactory acquisition of his.—Weigall,8 who had cut an excellt Likeness of Cromwell (to my knowledge), had the curiosity to go to Beckenham; found no feature of Cromwell's (except the cut of the hair), and a face belonging to God (and probably the Devil) knows whom. “

From advertisement, 1799 to view Cromwell’s head:

“Narrative relating to the real head of OLIVER CROMWELL now exhibiting”

http://carlyleletters.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/full/23/1/lt-18490221-TC-TF-01

Letter by Carlyle : “In short, this whole affair appears to be fraudulent moonshine,—an element not pleasant even to glance into; especially in a case like Oliver's.”

Translation from Latin from the radio programme by BBC4 “The Strange Case Of Oliver Cromwell’s Head” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shpNvGYYXnk

• Could be possible to find the actual page from the matriculation book for picture of the source

Matriculation page of Cromwell was altered in 1660 by the then master, Richard Minshull, after the restoration of the monarchy. He stated: “This was that great imposter, the most accursed butcher who after the most pious King Charles I had been put to a most shameful death himself usurped the throne and for the space of almost five years vexed the free kingdoms with unrestrained tyranny under the name of protector.”

4. Images:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oliver_Cromwell%27s_head_advertisement,_1799.jpg

Advertisement for his head

Picture of plaque for the remembrance of Oliver Cromwell in Sidney Sussex college

Image of the chapel of the college

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CREATING INFINITY

CREATING INFINITY

These stories are in development and are copyright to the team at Historyworks. If you want to use them for press or for other purposes please contact the producer Helen Weinstein: 07974827753.

SHORT SUMMARY:

Here is a unique Cambridge story, that of John Wallis, a former member of Emmanuel College who lived between 1616 and 1703. During the year 1670 Wallis endured a long illness and one night, whilst lying sick in bed and responding to a friend’s request, he began to figure out the square root of a fifty-three digit number. He was able to square root it to over 27 significant figures. According to Wallis, two days later he was able to recite the calculation he had made a couple nights earlier to his friend. Overall, Wallis’ mathematical skills in figuring out squares and their roots was astonishing. Wallis was not only a mathematician, but also an ordained minister and was appointed to a Professorship of Geometry in Oxford by Oliver Cromwell. Importantly, he created and introduced the symbol for infinity (∞)in his Arithmetica infinitorum (1655).

SCRIPT FOR APP:  

John Wallis lived between 1616 and 1703. It was an interesting life filled with the heated mathematical, medical, and philosophical debates of his time. Wallis’ life, which contained multiple intense phases, fell within a time of disturbance in England (the Civil War) and also a time of renowned contemporary scientific endeavour in Europe (Galileo and Newton).

Wallis, at the age of thirteen, already felt that he was a suitable candidate for university, as he commented in his autobiography, “I was as ripe for university as some that have been sent thither."  It was in 1631, during the Christmas period, that Wallis discovered his love for mathematics. The following year, Wallis enrolled in Emmanuel College at the age of just fifteen.

Whilst in Emmanuel College from 1632 to 1640, Wallis read medicine, anatomy, and mathematics. In 1640, he became an ordained minister and served as a decipherer during the Civil War, during which time he was given the Savilian Professorship in Oxford by Oliver Cromwell. After the Restoration of the monarchy, Wallis was able to keep his position and wrote a large number of mathematical, theological, and linguistic works. In addition, Wallis had a strong dislike for the political philospher, Thomas Hobbes, and wanted to do whatever he could to disprove Hobbe’s theoretical position that life was bloody and cruel.

It was typical of Wallis to solve square roots before he fell asleep. In a letter dating from between 24th April and 4th May 1658, Kenelm Digby, a correspondent of Wallis’ wrote of this seemingly legendary nightly mathematical contemplation:

“I professe unto you as I do also to all men else, when the occasion presenteth itself, that I do much admire the great stock you have, which furnisheth you (as appeareth by your sudden replies) with such a strange abundance of matter, that in a nights space you deliver out more than would employ another man whole Months.”

In other words, Digby is astonished at the amount of mathematical thinking and writing Wallis could do so quickly. Many of the letters Wallis wrote to his friends and other academics were typically in Latin, but letters to him were often written in English.

On the night of 18 February 1671, tired with being sick for a whole year, alone in his bed, in the desperation of sheer boredom, according to Wallis himself, he began to test how big a number he could calculate the square root of in his head.

Initially trying smaller numbers and succeeding, Wallis required a greater challenge.  His friend then suggested that Wallis calculate something large, leading Wallis to try to square root a fifty-three digit number. Two days later, he recited the square root to 27 places from memory to his friend, having calculated this number “without any other method of extracting roots, than what is commonly taught in books of arithmetic.” The tone, quite possibly, could have been fairly smug. However, after this feat of mental arithmetic, Wallis felt he couldn’t do any better and didn’t attempt any further large number calculations! 

In addition, Wallis is known for his introduction and popularisation of the infinity symbol, commonly used in mathematics today. In his work Arithmetica infinitorum (1655), he described a line as being made up of many small points that go on forever, in this case going on until infinity. This work on the infinitesimal quantity laid the foundations for the founding of infinitesimal calculus by Leibniz and Newton in the 1660s. Wallis’ other work, Treatise of Algebra (1685) exemplifies how he does all of his calculations to the larger academic community.

John Wallis was a gifted mathematician, who spent eight years of his life studying at Emmanuel College. Lying sick in bed and counting the square root of a fifty-three digit number for fun makes him not only a quirky, quintessential Cambridge alumni, but a founding figure of integral calculus.

POTENTIAL QUOTES: FOR POETS AND COMPOSERS

 http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/15/167-178/1269.full.pdf

Quotes from the paper of the night in 1670-1671, written in 1685:

“ That, even we, that have our ey-fight, can yet with more advantage apply our Memory by Night, in the Dark, when all things are Quiet; than by Day, when fights and noises are apt to divert our thoughts. And gave instance of his own application of his memory, by Night, (in performing Arithmetical Operations in great numbers) ...” (p. 1269)

“ Having had the curiosity, heretofore, to try, how far the strength of Memory would suffice me, to perform Arithmetical Operations without the assistance of pen and ink…” (p. 1269)

“And when he further pressed me to so to do; I did, that same night (by dark, in bed, without any other assistance than my Memory) propose to my self (at all adventures) this number, of 53 places.

2,4681,3579,1012,1411,1315,1618,2017,1921,2224,2628,3023,2527,2931

and found its Square Root ( of 27 places)  to be

157,1030,1687,1482,8058,1715,2171” [pp. 1270-71]

Scott, J.F. 1981. ‘’The Mathematical Work of John Wallis, D.D., F.R.S. (1616–1703)’’. Chelsea Publishing Co. New York, NY. p. 18. Wallis stated: “I suppose any plane (following the Geometry of Indivisibles of Cavalieri) to be made up of an infinite number of parallel lines, or as I would prefer, of an infinite number of parallelograms of the same altitude; (let the altitude of each one of these be an infinitely small part,  of the whole altitude, and let the symbol ∞ denote Infinity) and the altitude of all to make up the altitude of the figure”

4. Image of Wallis from the National Portrait Gallery: http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait.php?search=ap&npgno=578&eDate=&lDate=

See folder for excerpts from his works

5. See 4.

Maybe picture of Emma college?

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THE LIONS OF THE FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM

These stories are in development and are copyright to the team at Historyworks. If you want to use them for press or for other purposes please contact the producer Helen Weinstein: 07974827753.

SUMMARY & SCRIPT FOR APP:

The lions that decorate the outside of the Fitzwilliam Museum were built in 1839 by William Grinsell Nicholl and are said, at the stroke of midnight, to come to life, walk down from their plinths, and drink from the guttering in the street, before returning to the museum.  

App Content:

Since the very early years of the Fitzwilliam Museum’s existence four stone lions have been positioned outside the museum, two at the north steps and two at the south steps. In 1816 Richard, VII Viscount Fitzwilliam of Merrion, bestowed his library and collection of art to the University of Cambridge as well as £100,000 to construct a building that would house them. His aim was to further "the Increase of Learning and other great Objects of that Noble Foundation".

It was not until 1835, after a process of discussions and land acquisition, that the Syndicate overseeing the project selected an architect who would design the building. After advertising the tender in the newspapers the Syndicate selected George Basevi (1794 – 1845), a London-born architect, from a group of 27 architects who had sent in plans to be considered. Two years later, on the 4th November 1837, the the Vice-Chancellor, Gilbert Ainslie, laid the foundation stone of the Fitzwilliam Museum, below where the northern lions rest.

In that same year the sculptor William Grinsell Nicholl (1796-1871) became involved in the task of creating the monumental lions that overlook Trumpington Street, when he was commissioned to realise Basevi’s architectural vision. Nicholl had started work that year carving decorative details of Basevi’s designs for the museum, working on the Corinthian columns and the decorative aspects of the façade. Then in 1839 he sculpted the four iconic lions that guard the south and north steps to the Fitzwilliam Museum’s portico entrance.

According to local folklore, when the Church of Our Lady and the English Martyrs’ clock strikes midnight, the Fitzwilliam Lions rise from their plinths and make their way to drink from the gutters that run along Trumpington Street, a few metres from where they sit, sometimes walking as far as Hobson’s Conduit. According to different versions, they are also said to enter the museum, passing through the walls and occasionally letting out a roar. This is the inspiration for the poem, possibly called “Lions Go Walkabout”, which is located at the Fitzwilliam Museum steps.

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ON HER BIKE: WOMEN'S FIGHT FOR DEGREES

Woman on the Bicycle: Degrees for Women, Friday May 21st 1897 Protests

These stories are in development and are copyright to the team at Historyworks. If you want to use them for press or for other purposes please contact the producer Helen Weinstein: 07974827753.

 

SHORT SUMMARY:

Girton and Newnham Colleges for women had been established in 1869 and 1879 by Emily Davies and Anne Jemima Clough so that women could study in Cambridge. Despite being able to attend lectures, many restrictions were placed on them. They couldn’t work in the laboratories, or have full access to the library and were unable to receive degrees. By 1897 their growing dissatisfaction resulted in the Women’s Degree Syndicate proposing to the Council of the Senate that full membership be awarded to women. The male students responded with open outrage and huge protest.

 

STORY CONTENT:

 

TheCambridge Weekly Newsreferred to May 21st1897 as “a date that will become historic in the annals of Cambridge University – [on it] was fought the first big fight on the question of Degrees for Women.” It was on this day that the Council of the Senate held a poll on whether full degrees would be awarded to female students.

At that time women studying at one of Cambridge University’s two female Colleges, Girton and Newnham, were not able to matriculate, despite being able to attend lectures and sit the Tripos examinations. Women students were perceived as over-stepping the mark. This was an anxiety that related to broader concerns about women’s rights and suffrage. Direct links were made about the implications of Cambridge granting women degrees in the national Press, asThe Pall Mall Gazettereported on March 31st 1897: “It is just like the Suffrage question, we may observe; give a few propertied women votes and the whole deluge will follow sooner or later." In the face of this opposition, the two women’s colleges would co-operate to drive the campaign, and, in the words of Emily Davies, founder of Girton College, she hoped “their zeal will to some extent infect others and rouse the lukewarm to greater earnestness”.

 

The poll was scheduled for Friday 21st May. This resulted in absolute outrage from the male students. A ballot was organised by the undergraduates, pre-empting the official ballot by 11 days. This was an act that had not happened since 1771 and shows how resistant the male students were to the prospect of women being awarded official degrees. A Mr J.P. Thompson said the following in his speech at the poll: “If [I] gave a beggar [my] coat, he had no right to demand [my] trousers too. If [I] gave a beggar a sixpence, he has no right to demand the shilling, and these ladies were demanding the shilling.” Not surprisingly, the motion against female degrees was passed, with 1,083 votes to the 138 for the motion.

 

This was relatively restrained in comparison to the events that occurred on 21st May when the official ballot took place. Fearing that the motion would be passed, special trains were arranged to bring past graduates who had the right to vote from King’s Cross to Cambridge at 12:15pm. They were met by undergraduates and transported along Regent Street, through the market place, and up to the Senate House. TheCambridge Weekly Newsreported between 15,000 and 20,000 people surrounded the Senate on the day of the vote. They could be seen and heard at every window and roof in the area, even perching themselves on the top of St Mary's Church. Banners were hung out from Caius College with slogans such as:

 

“GET YOU TO GIRTON BEATRICE, GET YOU TO NEWNHAM, HERE’S NO PLACE FOR YOU MAIDS. MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING” and “No Gowns for the Girtonites! Non-plus the Newhamites!"

As well as banners, an effigy of a female student representing the ‘new woman’, dressed in blue bloomers and riding a bicycle, was suspended from the windows above Macmillan’s bookshop, now the Cambridge University Press bookshop. When the signal for commencement of the vote was given, a second effigy of a woman in a cap and gown was lowered from the upper windows of Caius College.

When the vote was announced the opposition had won with 1,713 votes to the 662 of those in favour. If the behaviour of the spectating undergraduates hadn't been abhorrent enough already, the announcement of the result prompted a day long celebration which started with the tearing down of the two effigies. After tearing down the symbolic image of the mobile and independent cyclist, the students, commandeering a cab, made their way to Newnham College with the effigy and tore it apart, thrusting it through the College gates. Two more effigies of Miss Clough and Miss Jex-Blake, Girton secretary for the Committee for Nominal Degrees for Women, were set alight in Market Square. The bonfire continued through the night, as did the fireworks and disorderly behaviour.

The women of Girton and Newnham took the news of the poll and the behaviour of the male undergraduates with surprising stoicism and resolution [Insert Emily Davies Quote]. In the years following the poll no more campaigning was made to gain full membership but in 1904 Trinity College Dublin allowed women from Cambridge to apply for a Dublin degree. In the three years that this was available nearly 700 women took the steamboat to Dublin to make use of this. This earned them the nickname ‘Steamboat Ladies’. Another attempt was made in 1921 but this failed, and it wasn’t until May 1948 before women could officially wear gap, gown and hood, and receive their degree.

 

 

POTENTIAL QUOTES: FOR POETS AND COMPOSERS

 

1.Cambridge Weekly News, 28thMay 1897.

A selection of sentences captured from the crowds on the day of the poll.

 

Voices in the Crowd

 

What a lot of straw hate.

Did you ever?

Who’d have thought it?

Awfully good fun.

Positively disgraceful.

This settlestheirhash for a long while to come.

Look at his coat.

They’ll get it yet.

Indecent,Icall it.

What’s the betting?

Like a church congress.

Newnham and Girton have the blinds down.

Better put their shutters up.

History will be ashamed of this.

Let them get a University of their own.

Cambridge is a century behind the age.

In other respects as well?

Where’s the reserve of the police?

Sensational news for London readers.

Ah, well! All’s well that ends well.

 

2. Girton College – “That Infidel Place...”

http://www.tcs.cam.ac.uk/?p=0022678

 

Edythe Lloyd's book A Memoir gives the account of a priest on a railway carriage approaching Hitchin declaring "Ha! This is Hitchin, and that, I believe is the house where the College for Women is: that infidel place!"

Prior to [May] 1948, women at Cambridge were not given degrees, despite attending lectures and sitting the Tripos exams. Essays and exams were marked voluntarily by good-willed Fellows in the town Colleges. The Council of the Senate declined permission for women to sit exams and be awarded degrees but did not object to examiners looking over papers in their spare time.

 

One of Girton's College Songs, ‘The Girton Pioneers' (to the tune of ‘the British Grenadiers') celebrates the first women to take Tripos exams in Cambridge; Rachael Cook, Sarah Woodhead and Louisa Lumsden:

"Some talk of Senior Wranglers,

And some of Double Firsts,

And truly of their species

These are not the worst;

But of all the Cambridge heroes

There's none that can compare

With Woodhead, Cook and Lumsden,

The Girton Pioneers!"

 

 

3. Suzanna Chambers,At last, a degree of honour for 900 Cambridge women

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/at-last-a-degree-of-honour-for-900-cambridge-women-1157056.html

 

Women in the class of 1936 were not the first to be denied the honour of graduating with a full Cambridge degree that would make them members of the university.

From the first intake of female students in 1869, until 50 years ago, women had to make do, at best, with mailed university certificates. Now Cambridge is at last to recognise those women's achievements with a ceremony in July, to be attended by more than 900 of them…

… When the first vote on the issue was taken, in 1897, there was a "tremendous wave" of anti-women feeling. A second vote was in 1921, when men were still reeling from the fact that women had done their jobs while they were fighting for their country; it, too, was lost. Finally, third time lucky, full membership was approved in December 1947, with no contrary votes.

 

4. Lady Cyclist Effigy at the Cambridge University Protest, 1897

http://www.sheilahanlon.com/?p=292

 

In 1897, a proposal was put before Cambridge University’s Senate to grant full degrees to female graduates. Male students responded with outrage.

The image above shows the scene in the market square on the day of the debate. An effigy of a woman on a bicycle was suspended out of the window of a building opposite the Senate. Banners reading “No Gowns for Girtonites” and “Varsity for Men” flew alongside it. The lady cyclist in her rational costume was a readily recognised symbol of the new woman whose entrance into higher education the male students resented.

At the time of the protest, women were permitted to study at Cambridge, but were not granted full degrees. Newnham and Girton Colleges for women opened in the 1870s, and in 1881 women gained the right to write the Tripos examination. The 1897 ruling would have admitted women as full members of the university.

The resolution did not, however, pass. Upon hearing this result, the triumphant mob tore down the effigy. They then savagely attacked the mannequin, decapitating and tearing it to pieces in a frenzy. What remained of the poor lady cyclist was stuffed through the gates of Newnham College.

Women studying at Cambridge University were not to receive the titles of full degrees until 1921, and even then it was without associated privileges.

 

Sources:

Image: Cambridge Daily News, 21 May 1897. Newnam College Archives also hold the image shown of the protest and effigy in their collection.

Kathleen McCrone, Sport and the Physical Emancipation of English Women, 1870-1914. (London: Routledge, 1988)

Jane Robinson, Bluestockings: The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education. (London: Penguin, 2009)

 

5. J. Robinson,Bluestockings. C. 36.9

 

“I want girls educated to match their brothers. We work in hope.” Frances Buss, quoted in Kamm,How different from us, 104.

 

‘No women actuallygraduatedfrom Cambridge until 1948; they just passed through the university as more or less welcome guests, sitting the requisite exams (if they chose to) without the right to formal recognition.’ P.23

 

‘Cambridge – the first to host women students, and the last to give them a degree’ p.xxi

 

‘at the close of the nineteenth century…some 15 per cent of undergraduates in England were women…when the first women’s college was founded, the total of female university students in the country was a lonely five. Then a woman was politically classed with infants, idiots, and lunatics’ p.xxii

 

‘At Cambridge there were riots in 1897 when the Senate addressed a vote on whether or not women students should be allowed official membership of the university, including the right to a degree. Oxford and Cambridge were by now the only universities in the country not to confer them…Special London to Cambridge trains were laid on by the opposition.’ p. 78.

 

‘…someone rigged up a caricature bluestocking, immodestly dressed in her underwear, on a bicycle suspended high above the crowds. According to Winifred Pattinson, up at Newnham at the time, things got very nasty very quickly. Effigies of Miss Clough and Miss Jex-Blake, the Girton secretary for the Committee for Nominal Degrees for Women, were set alight in the Square and burned, to whoops of atavistic glee from the men…When the results were declared – 662 for allowing women ‘in’, 1713 against – all hell broke loose. To great cheering and jeering, the cycling mannequin was torn down by crowds of crazed undergraduates and marched to the locked gates of Newnham, where it was ripped to pieces and poked through the railings…More fireworks were lobbed at the girls’ windows, with threats and obscenities, until at 10.pm. men from Selwyn College lit a huge bonfire outside..then went to bed.’

 

6. C. 36.9. Teaching and Learning in 19thCentury Cambridge, ed. J. Smith & C. Stray

 

‘The management of the lectures was formalised with the creation of an Association for Promoting Higher Education for Women (AHEW) in Cambridge, in 1873, which negotiated with the University for the renting of lecture rooms.’ P. 143

 

In 1879 both Newnham and Girton agreed to formally amalgamate – women had been excluded from laboratories and the University Library.

 

Social responsibility:

‘In November 1885 her [Winnie] family, anxious about her asthma, insisted on taking her away. Just before she left, she reminded herself of her reasons for coming:

“My first object was to learn history well and thoroughly, that I might be able (should I prove capable later) to write it for the working classes. Secondly, I thought after a year or two here I should be better able to judge whether I was likely to be capable of any work of this sort. Thirdly, I hoped to learn self-reliance, judgement and self-confidence.’ P. 148.

 

7. C. 36.9Fireworks andFlour by Wendy Mann in R. Arthur’s NastyForward Minxes(1998) p.6-7

‘In 1895 the Council of Newnham College passed…a resolution stating that “the senate should be asked to admit women to membership of the University and to University Degrees.”…Newnham and Girton would co-operate, so that, in the words of Emily Davies, “their zeal will to some extent infect others and rouse the lukewarm to greater earnestness”.

 

“Undergraduate opinion had taken a definite turn against women. They conducted their own ballots, with over 2,000 petitioning against women’s degrees. A debate was held on the subject in the union Society, where the motion against female degrees was carried by 1,083 votes 138…an editorial inThe Grantabegan: “the Harpies are upon us, this time with vengeance.”

 

‘According to an anonymous writer:

“Up until 2pm, nothing worse than confetti and flour had been thrown…[then] someone threw a cracker over the palings and this was the signal for the commencement of a general bombardment. Cooped up like sheep in a pen, the devoted dons, some thousands in number, were pelted with fireworks of every description.”

 

‘Finally the result was announced: the final vote was 1,707 against the Graces, 662 in favour. To celebrate, the undergraduates ran the mile to Newnham. They dragged with them the effigy of a woman on a bicycle, and tried to storm the college gates. The men then returned to the market place and had a huge bonfire; Winifred Pattinson (a student at Newnham) says “[we] thought it most kind of them to provide us with so much amusement.”

 

8. Text from Banners, Posters, Placards, & Shouts

“WHAT SHAKESPEARE SAYS. ‘I SEE SHE’S LIKE TO HAVE NEITHER CAP NOR GOWN’ TAMING OF THE SHREW, IV. 3, 93. ‘NO WOMAN SHALL COME WITHIN A MILE OF MY COURT’ LOVE’S LABOUR LOST, I, 1, 119.” Published inThe Granta, 1897.

 

“GET YOU TO GIRTON BEATRICE, GET YOU TO NEWNHAM, HERE’S NO PLACE FOR YOU MAIDS. MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING” Banner held by opposition positioned in the building opposite The Senate.

 

Following from Cambridge Weekly New, 28thMay 1897.

“The Varsity for Men and Men for Varsity”

“No Gowns for the Girtonites! Non-plus the Newhamites! Frustrate the Feminine Fanatics! Prudent Proctors prance on physical impossibilities! Satisfied Angels want to supersede beaten Apollos!”

 

 

9. CC35.8,Women at Cambridgeby Rita McWIlliams-Tulberg

 

‘On 11thMay, the rules of the Union Society were suspended to allow a debate on the motion “this House strongly condemns the recommendations of the Women’s Degree Syndicate” to be open to all junior members of the University…The conclusion drawn from all this feeling was that if women were given privilege at Cambridge, all the men would exit to Oxford’ p.134.

SJ: This was an anxiety that related to broader concerns about women’s rights and suffrage. Direct links were made about the implications of Cambridge granting women degrees across the national Press, asThe Pall Mall Gazettereported on March 31st1897:

“It is just like the Suffrage question, we may observe; give a few propertied women votes and the whole deluge will follow sooner or later.”p. 30.

 

“special trains of the Great Northern Line would leave King’s Cross for Cambridge at 12:15pm and return at 3:50pm and 9pm. The station being on the very outskirts of town,non-placetMAs were met by excited undergraduates in fliers…and conducted at breakneck speed along Regent Street, through the market place to the Senate House.

 

…banners were strung out from Caius College and an effigy of a woman student on a bike in blue bloomers, riding a bicycle was suspended from the windows above Macmillan’s bookshop.”

 

“An anonymous writer left a vivid description of the scene in front of the Senate House that afternoon:

…the spectators at every window and on the tops of houses and St Mary’s Church, and fireworks in the Senate House Yard, all formed a most memorable event…A vigorous cock crow emanating form the roof of Caius Collge and done with marvellous fidelity, was the signal for the commencement of operations. Forthwith, the occupants of the front rooms at Caius began to hang out their banners on the outer walls and a roar of laughter went up as there slowly descended from the upper window the lay figure of a woman with aggressively red hair dressed in cap and gown….When the vote was announced, 1,713 against the Graces, 662 in favour, pandemonium broke loose.” P. 137-8

 

“In only one college, Emmanuel, did those in favour of degrees for women exceed those against (12-7)...The night’s festivities were recorded in an extra-special edition of theCambridge Weekly Newsentitled “The Triumph of Man” [28.5.97]” P. 139.

 

10. Cambridge Weekly News, 1897

 

Friday 14thMay, 1897, article reporting the Tuesday 11thMay Undergraduate Debate at the Debating Hall, Cambridge University Union:

 

Discussions about the damage it will do:

 

“Mr V.C. Home, Trin. Hall, said…Those women whose object was to get degrees, could get them in London. He thought that the University of Cambridge ought to be kept as it had been in the past.”

 

“Mr J.P. Thompson…If [I] gave a beggar [my] coat, he had no right to demand [my] trousers too. If [I] gave a beggar a sixpence, he had no right to demand the shilling, and these ladies were demanding the shilling.”

 

 

May 28, 1897

 

“On May 21st-a date that will become historic in the annals of Cambridge University-was fought the first big fight on the question of Degrees for Women.”

• Great hand-drawn sketch of the effigy being torn down in Market Street, by a R.H. Lord: photograph taken on iPad.

 

“The Lady Cyclist Came Down

A moment or two later from the corner of Trinity Street… The figure lost its head and hands and showed what it was made of. It was rushed away and on the Market Hill appeared on the top of a cab, an excited surge of undergraduates below…the cab with the remains of the figure, the bicycle, and the cabby on the top proceeded on a journey round the town, accompanied by horn blowing, wooden rattles, and the discordant noise from human throats.”

 

“…the dense crowd of people, estimated at 15,000 to 20,000.”

 

11. Girton College, Cambridge: A college like a man’s

http://herstoria.com/?p=535

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CHIMING BELLS

Chiming Bells: Great St. Mary’s Church

These stories are in development and are copyright to the team at Historyworks. If you want to use them for press or for other purposes please contact the producer Helen Weinstein: 07974827753.

SHORT SUMMARY:

Great St. Marys has been at the heart of Cambridge since its earliest days in 1205. Over the centuries it has witnessed ceremonies, lectures, debates, public unrest, and riots, but most importantly it has remained a place of worship for the town’s people and the University. Its musical heritage claims authorship over the well-known ‘Westminster Quarters’, made famous by Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. Originally this piece was composed in 1793 by Joseph Jowett, Regius Professor of Civil Law, for the church’s new clock.

 

STORY CONTENT:

 

The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, known after 1352 as Great St. Mary's, has existed on the same site in various forms since 1205. In their early years the church and the University developed a strong link. In 1209 when scholars were first arriving into Cambridge they used the nave for meetings, storing documentation, and up until 1730 degrees were conferred there. This resulted in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin becoming the University of Cambridge’s official church, and in 1546 the advowson (the right to appoint a priest) and rectory passed to Trinity College. The church’s association with the University resulted in it being targeted in 1381 during the Peasants’ Revolt when townsfolk ransacked the church, burnt the University Chest and its documents. A reminder of the past animosity between the townsfolk and scholars is identifiable in the two organs that the church has, one for ‘town’ and one for ‘gown’.  

Great St. Mary's has been central in many significant historical events, notably the role it played in the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Many reformists such as Thomas Cranmer, Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, preached at the church, and the German Reformer Martin Bucer was buried in Great St Mary’s on the 30thFebruary 1550 before a congregation of 2,000 people. In the following years, during Mary Tudor’s reign (1553-1558), the leading figures of the reformation were persecuted and despite being dead, Bucer was not exempt from this. In 1557 his coffin was removed from the church, taken to the market place and burnt at the stake. A documentation of the proceedings that day records the following:

The dead bodies bounde with ropes and layd upon mens shoulders in chesters were borne into the middeds of the markjett steade where was sett fast a great post in the grownde to bynde the carcasses unto the chestes.

Once Elizabeth I had come to power, Bucer’s ashes were returned to the church. A brass tablet at the right of the high altar marks the place where they were buried.

Great St. Mary's Church also has a significant musical history. This started with the rebuilding of the church between 1478 and 1519. The first stone of the tower was laid in 1491 and was not completed until 1610 but for a considerable time bells hung in a detached wooden tower in the churchyard. Four bells were placed in the new structure in 1515 despite it being nowhere near completion. Documents record that Elizabethan civil authorities and the church were fined 2s. 2d. in 1564 for failing to ring while the Queen was visiting Cambridge. Enough of the building work had been done by 1595 to allow the bells to be positioned in their intended space and the churchwardens recorded that ‘in this yere the great bell was sett up & Runge & never before’. In 1611 a fifth bell was added, and then a sixth in 1622, followed by a further two in 1668 to complete the octave. There is an inscription on the treble bell which reads ‘Cum sono, si non vis venire, numquam ad preces cupies ire’ (if my sound does not make you want to go to the service, nothing will).

Great St Mary’s is also responsible for one of the world’s most recognisable tunes. When the clock was installed in 1724 it did not have chimes so when it was replaced in 1793 Joseph Jowett, Regius Professor of Civil Law, was asked to write the tune. The tune he wrote is based on a variation of an extract from Handel’s ‘I know that My Reedemer liveth’, utilising the third, fourth, fifth, eighth and tenor bells. Until 1859 this was a familiar sound in Cambridge alone, sounding out every quarter of an hour, when it was adopted at the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, becoming known as the ‘Westminster Quarters’.

On Monday 20 February 1967, Duke Ellington and his Orchestra performed the first of their Concert of Sacred Music Tour at Great St. Mary's Church. This was the highlight of the tour for Ellington, and his son, Mercer Ellington, recalls the effect that Great St Mary’s had on the great jazz musician:

“When we got there he walked off to the side, stood and stared at the building for the longest time. I think it was Tony Watkins who started to go over to him. Fernandae grabbed his arm, and said quietly, ‘Leave him alone for now.’”

In more recent history, Great St Mary’s has hosted some of the twentieth century’s most iconic figures. This includes Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who spoke to the full capacity audience and the many listening in the churchyard via audio relayed outside. Other significant speakers have included President Kaunda of Zambia, and Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls, as well as cabinet ministers, members of both Houses of Parliament, and Prince Philip, in his role as Chancellor of the University, has visited the Church, and Princess Anne, as President of the Save the Children Fund.

 

 POTENTIAL QUOTES: FOR POETS AND COMPOSERS

 

1. C.38.01 ed. J. Binns,Great St Mary’s, 2000

 

Introduction:

“Great St. Marys has been the church of the University of Cambridge since the first students arrived in the town in around 1240. The medieval church was the home of lectures and disputations, as well as of church worship – and even occasional riot.

 

Between market place and Senate House: The parish of St Mary the Greta with St Michael

 

“To the right of the west door of Great St Mary’s is a plaque marking the Datum Point. It was placed there in 1978 to mark the spot from which the distances were measured which were recorded on the first milestones to be set up in England since the departure of the Romans. Some of these milestones are still standing along Trumpington Road. [William Warren, VC of Trinity College, selected this point in 1732 as the centre of the city]..is a pointer to what is the most significant fact about the church for its ministry. This is its location at the heart of the city of Cambridge.” P.73

 

The fabric and furnishings

 

“The church is built out of high-quality creamy-coloured limestone, with a much altered chancel essentially of the early fourteenth century. Nave and tower were rebuilt in the late fifteenth century to a design almost certainly by John Wastell, who was working on King’s College Chapel at the time…

 

Music: the organs and choirs

 

“The Church of St Mary the Great, Cambridge, has the distinction, shared with few other English churches, of having two organs. The university organ is at the west end of the church, built under the tower, and the parish organ is at the east end, to the south of the chapel…

…The parish choir came into existence in about 1870, when the present stalls were erected in the chancel and the parish organ was built in the south-east chapel.

…The parish choir traditionally sand at the main services of matins and evensong. [Organist Alan Tranah remembers his predecessor, the remarkable Dr Douglas Fox, who had been left with only arm after WW2:

“It was unforgettable to watch him skilfully playing much of the standard organ repertoire, using his left hand, often stretched across two keyboards, with both feet simultaneously pedalling, making up for the lost limb, in his own masterly arrangement of the printed music so that aesthetically nothing was lost. I frequently turned pages or drew stops for him, but if not quickly enough for his liking he would do it himself with lightning grabs…He received the OBE for his years of distinguished achievement in the field of music.” P. 179.

…In 1989 a girls’ choir was formed under the direction of Jan Payne [the idea was Director of Music 1986-1992, Christopher Moore]…on a chilly evening in the autumn of 1989, Sarah Haworth, Elspeth Knight and I [Rosie Midgley] met in the choir vestry…The first piece of music we sang that night was John Rutter’s setting of ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ – a piece we have sang innumerable times since….Reactions to us were mixed. People were so used to the idea that church music had to be sung by boys’ choirs – especially in Cambridge with the famous boys’ choirs…Since then the choir has grown a lot.”

 

Bells and ringers

 

“There were bells at GSM even before the building of the present tower. For a time they hung in a detached wooden tower in the churchyard. Construction of their current home began in 1491, the first stone being laid at ‘quarter before seven in the evening’…Even though the four bells were hauled up into the new structure in 1515, the tower had still only reached half its final height by 1550…Elizabethan civil authorities and the church was fined 2s. 2d. in 1564 for failing to ring while the Queen was visiting Cambridge.

The tower was not completed until 1610. However, enough work had been done by 1595 to allow the bells to find their intended resting place. The churchwardens recorded that ‘in this yere the great bell was sett up & Runge & never before’…

…in 1611 the original four bells had been augmented by a fifth, and then a sixth in 1622. In 1668 a further two bells were added to complete the octave…

…[the inscription on the treble bell] Cum sono, si non vis venire, numquam ad preces cupies ire (if my sound does not make you want to go to the service, nothing will)…

…the clock installed in 1724 did not have chimes. However, it was in its turn replaced in 1793 and Joseph Jowett, Regius Prof of Civil Law, was asked to produce a suitable tune…he was helped in this by either Dr Randall, Prof of Music, or by his student, William Crotch, and that tune is based on a variations of an extract from Handel’s ‘I know that My Reedemer liveth’. Whatever the truth, the chime, which makes use of the third, fourth, fifth, eighth and tenor bells, sounded out uneventfully over Cambridge every quarter of an hour until 1859 when it was adopted for the newly installed clock and bells at the Houses of Parliament. As the Westminster chimes from Big Ben, the tune then became famous throughout the world.

 

Photographs:

·        Great St Mary’s from the market Place, c.1870

·        Duek Ellington playing in GSM.

·        Mother Teresa, June 1977

·         

2. Duke Ellington at Cambridge

 

·        “The Duke Ellington Orchestra performs the First Sacred Concert at Great St. Mary's, the University Church of Cambridge, United Kingdom, 20 February 1967” as part of his Concert of Sacred Music Tour.

Duke Ellington's America,p.444.

 

·        “Monday 20th February 1967

…The singers are Esther Marrow, Tony Watkins, The Cliff Adams Singers and Great St. Mary’s Church choir. The dancer is Will Gaines.”

Ken Vail,Duke's Diary: The life of Duke Ellington, 1950-1974,p.310

 

·        “The highlight of the tour for Ellington was the sacred music given at Great St. Mary’s Church in Cambridge, England.

‘When we got there,’ Mercer [manager] recalled, ‘he walked off to the side, stood and stared at the building for the longest time. I think it was Tony Watkins who started to go over to him. Fernandae grabbed his arm, and said quietly, ‘Leave him alone for now.’”

 

3. C.43 - GSM, The University Church: Exhibition of Old Documents (1978)

 

As the University Church, GSM has played an important part in many of the significant historical events of the past 500 years. At the time of the Protestant Reformation many of the great figures, Cranmer, Latymer and Ridley, preached here and in the persecution which followed during Mary Tudor’s reign, the coffin of the German reformer, Martin Bucer, was removed from the church and publicly burned in the market place…Bucer’s ashes were subsequently returned to the church and a brass tablet to the right of the high altar marks the place where they were buried….

…[Transcript  of the proceedings during the Marian visitation of the University in the course of which the bodies of Bucer and Pagius were disinterred and burned in the market place]

The dead bodies bounde with ropes and layd upon mens shoulders in chesters were borne into the middeds of the markjett steade where was sett fast a great post in the grownde to bynde the carcasses unto the chestes.

 

…The relationship between ‘town’ and ‘gown’ has often been turbulent – many of the conflicts have focussed upon GSM’s. A notable example took place during the Peasants Revolt of 1381, when townsfolk ransacked the church and burned the University Chest. The Black Assembly of 1546 is another case in point. Even today there are two organs – one ‘town’ and the other ‘gown’. The latter is used mainly on special University occasions such as the Commemoration of Benefactors – a ceremony that dates from the reign of King Henry VII. The University installed the present galleries and in 1843 accepted certain financial responsibilities which continue to this day.

Agreement with Uni concerning erection of galleries, 1735.

The floor space of the church was not large enough to accommodate those attending the services when both town and gown turned up, and squabbles between parishioners and scholars over the right to seats were not uncommon. When the galleries were built, an agreement was made that the University should occupy the pit and the townspeople the floor of the aisles.”

[More on Peasants Revolt: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=66604]

 

4. J. P. C. Roach (editor),A History of the County of Cambridge and the Isle of Ely: Volume 3: The City and University of Cambridge, 1959

http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=66618#s6

 

“ST. MARY THE GREAT. The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, by the Market, known after 1352 as Great St. Mary's and commonly called the University Church, was the only church whose patronage was in the Crown in 1279. It is first mentioned in 1205, when King John presented Thomas de Chimeleye to the rectory, and Gervase, his chaplain, to the vicarage for life…

… The last presentation was made by the Crown in 1341; (fn. 156) on 15 July 1342 Edward III granted the advowson to his new foundation of King's Hall, with licence to appropriate. (fn. 157) In 1546 the advowson and rectory passed with the other possessions of King's Hall to Trinity College, which still owns them.

… St. Mary's was completely rebuilt between 1478 and 1519, University meetings being held for the time being in the churches of the Austin or Grey Friars. Subscription lists are extant and include the names of Richard III and Henry VII, but most of the funds came from the University. (fn. 169) The contract also survives for the building of the magnificent rood loft in 1522–3, the scale of which was made possible by the great height of the new nave. (fn. 170) The loft was demolished in 1562 by Parker's orders. (fn. 171) The tower, the first stone of which was laid in 1491, was completed as far as the belfry in 1596, when the parish books record that 'this year all our bells are rung out and was never before' [sic]. (fn. 172) The corner turrets were completed in 1608, (fn. 173) when John Warren, churchwarden and acting clerk of the works, was killed in an accident. An inscription on the tower wall, copied from his former monument, records:

Here John Warren sleeps among the dead, Who with the church his own life finished.

 

… The five bells hung in 1596 were originally intended to be chimed every four hours, but it was not until 1671 that chimes were installed, (fn. 185) perhaps in connexion with the visit of Charles II. (fn. 186) When, in 1722–3, the bells were recast (for the fourth time) and increased from eight to ten the chimes were replaced by change-ringing, and the society of bellringers was founded. (fn. 187) The quarter-hour chimes now sounded from St. Mary were composed and installed in 1793 by Joseph Jowett of Trinity Hall, Professor of Civil Law. He may have been assisted by William Crotch, a former pupil of the organist of St. Mary. Having been copied at the new Houses of Parliament in 1859, the Cambridge chimes have been widely adopted by the name of the Westminster Quarters. (fn. 188) Since 1769 the bells have numbered twelve; they are considered perhaps the finest toned in the eastern counties.

 

3. Wikipedia

 

Various leading philosophers of the English Reformation preached there, notably Erasmus. Martin Bucer, who influenced Thomas Cranmer's writing of the Book of Common Prayer, was buried there. Under Queen Mary, his corpse was burnt in the marketplace, but under Elizabeth I, the dust from the place of burning was replaced in the church and now lie under a brass floor plate in the south chancel.

 

4. GSM. Cambridge Website

 

Historical notes on Great St Mary’s

Great St Mary’s has a remarkable history and role at the centre of both the city, and the university, of Cambridge. Our Heritage project will focus on:

 

• Great St. Mary’s as the first home of the University: scholars came from Oxford to Cambridge in 1209 and established themselves in the Church. Here lectures were given, degrees conferred and celebrations held, for some 200 years.

• The leading part played by Great St. Mary’s in the history of Reformation. Erasmus and other influential figures preached here. This period had an enduring influence on social reform, education and culture.

• Royal patronage and benefactions. These include: King John, Edward III, Richard III, Henry VII and Henry VIII. During the rebuilding of the present church in 1478-1519, ten bishops, thirty heads of religious houses, members of the University and students also contributed. Queen Elizabeth I visited the Church in 1564.

• The history of the bells. There has been bell-ringing since 1516 and the “Cambridge Quarters” were the model for the “Westminster chimes” of Big Ben which daily ring out worldwide. It is the birthplace of the oldest bell-ringing society in England, which rang bells using the old English art of change ringing. Great St. Mary’s is the only church in the county with 12 bells.

• Remarkable Churchwardens’ accounts dating back to 1504, including reference to the purchase of the King James Bible in 1612.

• The changing layouts of the Church over the centuries, reflecting the life and use of the Church by the University and City.

Great St. Mary’s is a Grade I listed building with distinctive features:

- Two organs, one at each end of the building; the Church is one of the few locations where double organ concertos can be played.

- “The nave arcade of five tall, slender bays leading to the wide chancel arch. All have tracery in their spandrels and a sumptuous frieze in stone” (writes Simon Jenkins). John Wastell who was responsible for this work was the royal architect for the completion of King’s College Chapel.

- Oak roof beams with carved bosses donated by Henry VII. The galleries added in the 18th century resulted in the Church being the largest public building in Cambridge with a seating capacity to over 1,200, thus providing an excellent high profile location for major events.

-  17th century font.

-  The first English milestones were measured from the datum point set in the wall of the tower in 1732.

-  The tower is the tallest building accessible to the public in the city and offers panoramic views of Cambridge.

-  Clerestory windows illustrating the 4th century hymn, the Te Deum.

Centre for debate and social change

Great St. Mary’s has played a significant part in the history of both the University and the City. Furthermore, through its high profile platform for lectures and debates about innovative and controversial ideas, it has also played a significant role in influencing education, culture, and social reform, over the centuries. Many leading national figures both religious and secular have been involved in the debates, from a wide range of professions and walks of life.

The famed Renaissance scholar, Desiderius Erasmus, preached in the Church, as did many Reformers including Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer and Calvin. Martin Bucer, considered to be one of the three leaders of the Reformation, was buried in the Church before a congregation of 2,000 people (and later, under Queen Mary, exhumed and burned in the market square.)

In more recent times, iconic figures such as Mother Teresa of Calcutta have spoken here (with the Church full to capacity and her voice relayed to the many listening in the churchyard). Other prominent speakers have included President Kaunda of Zambia, and Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls, as well as cabinet ministers, members of both Houses of Parliament, scientists and medics.

Prince Philip, in his role as Chancellor of the University, has visited the Church, and Princess Anne, as President of the Save the Children Fund, has also spoken here. Social initiatives launched from the Church have included Emmaus in the UK (communities for the homeless) by the then Archbishop of Canterbury, and Bridget’s Hostel for disabled students. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York based their first joint three-day teaching event in the Church in 2008.

 

6. ROSIE’S MATERIAL

 

HISTORICAL TOPICS STILL AVAILABLE FOR RESEARCH:

 

1. CAMBRIDGE THROUGH TIME – from fenland crossroads to celebrated university city

·      Early Cambridge – fenland crossroads – Iceni battleground and Roman camp – Gateway to the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of East Anglia – A bishop, a bridge and buried treasure – Viking Cambridge – Prosperous Inland Port – Norman Conquest

 

·      Medieval Cambridge – religious houses – Jewish Quarter - fairs – guilds and Corpus Christi - river trade – market - parish churches – shops outside GSM – street names – prison - charity

 

·      Disease - King’s ditch – Slaughterhouse Lane - sanitation and plague – malaria – leper houses and hospitals – Bucer’s complaints – Fen Drainage – Hobson’s Conduit

 

·      The University Town – main phases of College foundation – development of college sites – King’s college clearances -  the Backs

 

·      C19th expansion – enclosure of common land – rapid expansion – Mill Road – railway – Fellows allowed to marry – 1849 great fire – sanitation and public baths – Garden of Eden – Workhouses and Spinning House – an American in Cambridge

 

·      Cambridge at War – First World War – GSM War memorials – First Eastern General Hospital – Second World War – bombing raids

 

·      City of High Technology – science parks – knowledge economy – West Cambridge development - significance of Cambridge in intellectual and technological advances

 

 

2. THE UNIVERSITY CHURCH – Great St Mary’s was Cambridge University’s first home, hosting lectures, debates and ceremonies

·      The medieval university – Oxford influx – colleges - curriculum – academic ceremony – regulations – town vs. gown

 

·      GSM as heart of the new university – preaching – three mile rule – 1361 riot and destruction of records – lectures and disputations – bells - consistory court of the bishop of Ely – rebuilding by university in late C15th

 

·      Reformation changes – suppression of religious houses – scandal of St Radegund’s – new colleges in C16th – Trinity as patron of GSM and St Michael’s – political importance of theological practice at GSM as university church

 

·      The migrating pulpit – brief account of shifts in the organisation of sacred space reflecting theological disputes – central pulpit – cockpit – university sermons – galleries and controversy – completion of the belltower – contrast between GSM and high-church college chapels à this section needs looking at

 

·      Celebration of religious and political events

 

 

3. INSIDE GREAT ST MARY’S – Explore the medieval survivals, hidden features and famous bells of this beautiful church

·      The basics – intro to church layout – discussion of sacred space – key dates in building and rebuilding of the church

 

·      Medieval survivals – piscina, sedilia, tomb recess, statue niches

 

·      Font – 1632

 

·      Poppyhead benches

 

·      Clock

 

·      Roof and stonework – nave bosses – string course, animal corbels – blind tracery in spandrels – 1783 hidden roof

 

·      Memorials – Martin Bucer – Thomas Lorkin – Jolly Landlord Michael Woolf – Ann Scot’s ‘womb as tomb’ – John Warren – William Butler – war memorials

 

·      Galleries and pulpit

 

·      Glass – outline of medieval stained glass techniques – possible analogues to GSM’s earlier glass in other churches – Reformation destruction – key figures, stories and symbols in the C19th glass

 

·      The organs – how do they work – pre-reformation organs and their sale - parish and university organs – town vs. gown

 

·      Bells – Cambridge society of youths – bells in churchyard – Westminster Chimes – 2009 bells

 

4. KINGS AND QUEENS – As a great centre of learning, Cambridge has always captured royal attention

 

·      John I – grant of GSM’s revenue to Thomas de Chimelye in 1205 is the first recorded mention of the Church – John’s reign – war with France – Magna Carta – coming of the university

 

·      Edward III – Foundation of King’s Hall, granting GSM’s revenues to them - may have rebuilt the chancel – granted licence for foundation of the Guild of St Mary which founded Corpus Christi College

 

·      Henry VI – founded King’s College in 1441, visited Cambridge to lay the first stone of Old Court himself aged 19 – link with Eton – King lays chapel foundation stone in 1446 – demolition of houses – Henry’s plan for the College in the Founder’s Will – Margaret of Anjou founds Queens’ College in 1448 - Wars of the Roses – chapel unfinished - Henry’s imprisonment (1461) and death (1471)

 

·      Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville – Elizabeth re-founds Queens’ College in 1465 – Edward cuts revenues of King’s – chapel building stalls

 

·      Richard III – 1478 GSM rebuilding contribution – commemoration of benefactors – patronage of King’s allows chapel building to continue

 

·      Margaret Beaufort – early motherhood – ascent of Henry VII - relation with John Fisher – patronage of GSM – foundation of John’s and Christ’s – heraldic imagery on gates

 

·      Henry VII – patronage of King’s (visit in 1506), Wastell worked on GSM too - provision of oaks for roof – obiit mass and hearse cloth now in Fitzwilliam

 

·      Henry VIII – Trinity links with GSM – brief Reformation account – William Butts, his physician was a prominent member of GSM

 

·      Edward VI – decline of university – Oxbridge exception to the suppression of chantries and colleges – Book of Common Prayer and uniformity in services – riots and enclosures – alienation of College and Church property – roodloft - 1548 visitation – planned colleges of medicine and civil law – Ridley and Latimer appeal - Bucer and Fagius

 

·      Mary I – Chancellor and High steward freed from Tower and reinstated – rood loft - Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley – Bucer and Fagius disinterred

 

·      Elizabeth I – visited GSM in 1564 – disputation in GSM

 

·      James I and VI – two visits to Cambridge 1614/15 - visited GSM – disputation – edicts on attendance of students at GSM sermons – King James Bible

 

·      Charles I - visited GSM as prince in 1612/13  and with his father in 1614/15– disputations

 

·      Oliver Cromwell – legend of burning prayerbook in GSM – MP for Cambridge – King’s College Chapel housed soldiers

 

·      Victoria and Albert – Albert installed as Chancellor in GSM in 1847 – archival photo – contested election (the last contested election until 2011) – Albert’s visit to Cambridge to admonish son for philandering blamed for his death - Victoria’s Jubilee celebrations on Parker’s piece

 

·      Modern royals – Charles at Trinity – Queen’s visit - Duke and Duchess of Cambridge – William studying at Cambridge

 

 

 

5. REFORMATION TURMOIL – Famous theologians and martyrs preached here; their ideas transformed the church and Christianity itself

·      Reformation debate – basic introduction – Fisher – Great Bible - Cambridge reformers – Erasmus - Cranmer

 

·      Pre-reformation Church – eight altars plus the high altar – reliquaries and statues – roodloft – glass – vestments – pre-reformation services – 1290 fire - beginning of the total rebuilding – late C15th rebuilding of nave and aisles – monkeys, fools and foxes in the stonework

 

·      Pendulum swings at GSM – changes in Church fabric and furnishings – sale of Marian statue furnishings and reliquary – rise and fall of the roodloft – whitewash - stained glass – Henry VII’s obiit mass

 

·      Post-Reformation Church – whitewashed windows and wall paintings – roodloft and Marian altar removed – Decalogue boards – decline of organ music – Puritanism – William Dowsing – civil war – legend of prayer book destroyed – altar screen defaced by Cromwellian troops

 

·      Martin Bucer – shifting royal and ecclesiastical attitudes – lavish funeral – disinterment and burning with Paul Fagius

 

 

 

 

6. MICHAELHOUSE – Town and Gown unite at St Michael’s: an ancient parish church which was also the chapel for three colleges

·      Medieval Michaelhouse – Hervey de Stanton – Michaelhouse College – college chapel – St Michael, the Virgin and St Gregory of Pity

·      Early Modern Michaelhouse - Fisher - Trinity – Chancel – misericords - income at time of dissolution – Glass – Wall paintings – Cromwellian iconoclasm

·      Remodelling and renewal - 1849 fire – 1870s remodelling – reredos imagery - 1908 amalgamation with the parish of St Mary’s – 1960s conversion to church hall – 2000 conversion – ministry, café and community centre

---

THE GREAT FIRE

The Great Cambridge Fire of 1849

These stories are in development and are copyright to the team at Historyworks. If you want to use them for press or for other purposes please contact the producer Helen Weinstein: 07974827753.

SHORT SUMMARY:

 

At half past twelve on the night of Saturday 15th September, 1849, a fire burnt through Cambridge's Market Hill, destroying many of the buildings in the area. The Great Cambridge Fire significantly damaged the old market and in doing so it made way for the council to create the market that is recognisable today.

 

STORY CONTENT:

 

In 1849 the arrangement of Cambridge's market was very different to the way it currently looks. The market was much smaller in size, with stalls confined to the space in front of the Guildhall and between Market Street and Petty Cury. The central area where today's traders are situated was densely packed with tradesmen's houses and shops, which backed tightly to St Mary's Church. It was these tradesmen's properties that were at the greatest risk during the fire.

 

On the night of Saturday 15th September at 12:30am the alarm was raised as a Mr Lodge's clothier shop had caught fire, a site now approximately occupied by G. David Books. A great number of fire services quickly arrived at the scene. These included the engines ran by the police, by multiple Insurance Offices, and by Trinity and St John College.

Despite the number of emergency services on hand to help, the fire could not be fought immediately as the keys to Hobson's Conduit, a resource which provided clean supply of water to residents, could not be found. Then, as the keys were located, this only complicated the process as A. Gray cites inThe Great Cambridge Fire of 1849:

 

"The final discovery of the keys only increased the prevailing excitement and confusion, for the firemen were soon vigorously squabbling over the limited water supply".

 

Fortunately many of the people present were on hand to assist in fighting the growing fire. One such individual was Josiah Chater, an apprentice in the counting house of Eaden Lilley, who captured the event in his diary.

 

"I ran at once to the Engine and began pumping, then handed the buckets for a long time; after that I went to the Chronicle pump and helped to pump and hand buckets there for half an hour. All the time the flames were rapidly advancing to Orridge's (the chemists) shop.'

 

By the time St Mary's Church struck two o’clock Mr Lodge’s shop had collapsed and the fire was advancing across many of the surrounding buildings. Chater records that "the fire raged till about 6 o'clock, burnt down 8 houses and seriously damaged several more, all tradesmen's. I went home about seven...and slept till ten, and went before church to look at the ruins, and surely it was dreadful...i must confess that whilst it was burning it was a glorious sight, and when the chemist's was on fire every time a bottle cracked there was an explosion superior to fireworks. "

 

Fortunately nobody was killed that night and by the end of September the remains of the ruined buildings were being removed. Hobson’s Conduit was relocated to the corner of Trumpington Road and replaced by another in the centre of the enlarged market place. A new fountain was put up in the centre of this space in 1851, but in 1953 it was declared unsafe and taken down by the council. The four figures which adorned the fountain can be seen at the Cambridge and County Folk Museum.

 

The Great Fire of Cambridge marked the beginning of Cambridge’s modern day market and the many ongoing debates about how to adapt, modify and revamp the central market.

 

POTENTIAL MATERIAL: FOR POETS AND COMPOSERS

 

 1. Cambridgeshire, Huntindon and Peterborough Life Oct 1966 - Jan 1968, p.44.

 

Josiah Chater:

"I ran at once to the Engine and began pumping, then handed the buckets for along time; after that I went to the Chronicle pump and helped to pump and hand buckets there for half an hour. All the time the flames were rapidly advancing to Orridge's (the chemists) shop. There were very soon 5 or 6 Engine's there - most of them no better than squirts...the fire raged till about 6 o'clock, burnt down 8 houses and seriously damaged several more, all tradesmen's. I went home abut seven...and slept till ten, and went before church to look at the ruins, and surely it was dreadful...i must confess that whilst it was burning it was a glorious sight, and when the chemist's was on fire every time a bottle cracked there was an explosion superior to fireworks..."

He was once again that year to assist in putting out a fire, this time at St. Michaels Church on Sunday, November 11th when he helped to pass buckets of water to extinguish the flames.

 

 

2. C 34.75, A.B. GrayGreat Cambridge Fire 1849

 

 

During the progress of the fire curiosity and excitement were aroused by the sound of the Crier's bell, which Isaac Moule (the crier) was vigorously ringing and publishing lustily on all parts of the Hill...the Crier's "Oyez".

 

 

3. C 44.4 By-ways of Cambridge History by F. A. Keynes

 

It was not until 1855, after a serious fire in 1849, that the west side was cleared of buildings - a great enterprise - and the conduit was then removed to the corner of the Town end of Trumpington Road, and replaced by another in the centre of the enlarged Market Place.

 

4. C.F. 21.4. 2011, Press article

 

A new fountain was put up in the centre of the market in 1851, but in 1953 it was found to be unsafe and taken down. It was removed to the yard of the Cambridge and County Folk Museum, which is on the site of the White Horse Inn in Castle Street.

 

 

5. CN 15.9 2008, Water source brings to mind loo fittings, press article

 

For most of that time [nineteenth century] what is now the market hill was packed with shops and houses, the stalls being confined to the area in front of the Guildhall and a strip along the eastern edge. ...Faced with such devastation the council debated what to do before finally deciding to clear the site and start again, creating a square market area.

Hobson's old Conduit would be out of place in such a redevelopment and was relocated to its present home on the corner of Lensfield Road and Trumpington Street. But there had to be some centrepiece to the scheme.

At that time a new Cambridge University and Town Waterworks Company had been established to supply better water so it was though t a fountain would be appropriate. A number of schemes were put forward before Gordon Hill's design for an ornate stone-canopied structure was agreed.

 

6. From the news of April, 1897 CEN 15.4.1997

 

Some inhabitants of Cambridge were in favour of covering the Market Hill with a permanent covering of iron and glass was read by the Town Clerk.

Councillor Nichols thought the state of their present market was a disgrace to civilisation.

They were paying at least £400 a year for putting up and taking down those wretched wooden structures and the cloths that covered them were of no use whatsoever. (The council voted against the proposal.)

 

 

7. CEN 19.4.1990 Press article

 

Until that time [1849 fire] the market itself was L-shaped. Back-to-back houses and shops occupied what is part of the present square, crowding up against St Mary's Church to such an extent that worshippers were said to have an excellent view right into one of the bedrooms. These houses covered the area where the present fountain stands.

The market stalls extended along Market Hill between Market Street and Petty Cury and in front of the area where the present Guildhall stands...

 

...The year 1855 saw the erection of the new gothic-style Market Cross above the fountain. The figures that adorned the structure included Thomas Hobson, the carrier born in Bunting in 1544...

 

...In 1953, the city council was told that defects in the cross would cost £2,200 to restore. Later, that figure was increased to £4,000. The city surveyor of the day, Mr Thomas Burrows, said: "We are asked to consider spending £4,000 on something which is not necessary."

- article includes an accompanying photo of the demolition in August, 1953.

 

8. CEN 24.3 1984, newspaper article 'History Revisited: Rodney Tibbs'

 

[Gray takes from Chronicle] ...another very good eye witness account comes from Josiah Chater [apprentice in the counting house of Eaden Lilley's] who kept a diary which has since been edited and published by Enid Porter.

 - CHECK NUMBER 1 FOR CHATER'S ACCOUNT

 

...On the Sunday morning crowds came in from the surrounding villages to take a look at the disaster while firemen continued to damp down the charred buildings and remains..."there was no evidence as to its origin."

---

HOBSON’S CHOICE

HOBSON’S CHOICE - TAKE IT, OR LEAVE IT. 

These stories are in development and are copyright to the team at Historyworks. If you want to use them for press or for other purposes please contact the producer Helen Weinstein: 07974827753.

SHORT SUMMARY:

On the same ground where the St. Catharine’s College chapel has regular services for College students today, Thomas Hobson (1544-1631) rented out horses to University students in the 17th century. Hobson’s consumers had to make a special choice when they wanted to hire a horse, the choice between the first horse in the line, or none.  ‘Take it, or leave it’, this is Hobson’s choice.

SCRIPT FOR APP:  

The story of ‘Hobson’s choice’ dates back in the 17th century when Thomas Hobson (1544-1631) was the manager of a stable behind the George Inn, located outside the gates of St. Catharine’s College on Trumpington Street. Hobson’s main job was to coordinate mail from Cambridge to London and back. In total he owned around 40 horses although the mail delivery did not require all of the horses. Another lucrative way to make money was to hire the horses that he did not use to students and academic staff of the University.

 

‘Take it, or leave it’

 

Most of Hobson’s customers wanted to hire the fastest horses in the stable. Hobson soon realized that this would result in overworking his best horses so he established a rotation system. He placed all of his horses in a line so that the students and academic staff were only offered the next horse in the queue, rather than choosing the best one available. The first horse in the line would always be the one which had spent the longest time in the stable. The customer could no longer choose which horse they wanted to hire anymore, it was all ‘Hobson’s choice’. Sometimes customers were not satisfied with the horse Hobson provided for them, but he had a strict policy: ‘This one or none’ was always Hobson’s answer. The policy does not imply that there was no choice, there was one, the choice between ‘take it, or leave it’. 

 

In 1712 the newspaperThe Specatorpublished an article in memory of Thomas Hobson describing his policy in the following way:

 

“(...) when a man came for a horse he was led into the stable, where there was great choice, but he obliged him to take the horse which stood next to the stable-door; so that every customer was alike well served according to his chance, and every horse ridden with the same justice: from whence it became a proverb, when what ought to be your election was forced upon you, to say Hobson's choice.”

 

Hobson’s Conduit

 

Thomas Hobson was not only famous in Cambridge as a stable owner. He established the Hobson’s conduit, a watercourse that aimed to bring fresh water into the city of Cambridge. Fresh water was necessary because increasing numbers of students and university staff were dying of plague, due to the unsanitary conditions. The conduit was built between 1610 and 1614, running along both sides of Trumpington Street towards St. Catharine’s College. Hobson wasn’t the only one who constructed the conduit, but he was the crucial figure that endowed the Hobson’s Conduit Trust to ensure the maintenance of the watercourse. If you walk along Trumpington Street, you can still see the conduit running towards Peterhouse.

 

Hobson is still remembered today

 

The expression ‘Hobson’s choice’ was made popular by poet John Milton (1608-1674), who studied in Cambridge from 1625 to 1629 after Hobson’s death in 1631. Milton immortalised Hobson by memorialising him with poems such as “On the university carrier”, “Another on the same” and “Hobson epitaph” which depict his life and death in Cambridge. Today two streets in Cambridge are named after Hobson, Hobson’s Passage and Hobson Street, which show his importance within the city. Hobson lived at number 44 Saint Andrew’s Street and you can find a blue plaque on the building commemorating his work. The play “Hobson’s Choice” by Harold Brighouse made the expression known world-wide.

POTENTIAL QUOTES: FOR POETS AND COMPOSERS

Comment on Hobson in The Spectator

Mr. Tobias Hobson, from whom we have the expression, was a very honourable man, for I shall ever call the man so who gets an estate honestly. Mr. Tobias Hobson was a carrier; and, being a man of great abilities and invention, and one that saw where there might good profit arise, though the duller men overlooked it, this ingenious man was the first in this island who let out hackney-horses. He lived in Cambridge; and, observing that the scholars rid hard, his manner was to keep a large stable of horses, with boots, bridles and whips, to furnish the gentlemen at once, without going from college to college to borrow, as they have done since the death of this worthy man.

I say, Mr. Hobson kept a stable of forty good cattle, always ready and fit for travelling; but, when a man came for a horse he was led into the stable, where there was great choice, but he obliged him to take the horse which stood next to the stable-door; so that every customer was alike well served according to his chance, and every horse ridden with the same justice: from whence it became a proverb, when what ought to be your election was forced upon you, to say Hobson's choice. This memorable man stands drawn in fresco at an inn he used in Bishopsgate-street, with an hundred pound bag under his arm, with this inscription upon the said bag:

"The fruitful mother of an hundred more."

Whatever tradesman will try the experiment, and begin the day after you publish this my discourse to treat his customers all alike, and all reasonably and honestly, I will ensure him the same success.

—"Hezekiah Thrift (Spectator, 10 October 1712)

Epitaph:

On the University Carrier

who sickened in the time of his vacancy, being forbid to go to London by reason of the plaque

Here lies old Hobson. Death hath broke his girt,

And here, alas! hath laid him in the dirt:

Or else, the ways being foul, twenty to one,

He’s here stuck in a slough, and overthrown.

‘Twas such a shifter that, if truth were known,

Death was half glad when he had got him down:

For he had any time this ten years full

Dodged with him betwixt Cambridge and the Bull.

And surely death could never have prevailed,

Had not his weekly course of carriage failed:

But lately, finding him so long at home,

And thinking how his journey’s end was come,

And that he had ta’en up his latest inn,

In the kind office of chamberlin

Showed him his room where he must lodge that night,

Pulled of his boots, and took away the light.

If any ask for him, it shall be said,

“Hobson has supped, and’s newly gone to bed”.

Sources:

http://ebooks.cambridge.org/pdf_viewer.jsf?cid=CBO9781139162784A028&ref=false&pubCode=CUP&urlPrefix=cambridge&productCode=cbo

http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2010/jan/11/walk-guide-hobsons-conduit-cambridge

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KING'S COLLEGE

King's College: The Foundations

These stories are in development and are copyright to the team at Historyworks. If you want to use them for press or for other purposes please contact the producer Helen Weinstein: 07974827753.

SHORT SUMMARY:

On the 25th March 1441, King Henry VI (1421-1471) laid the foundation stone for the King's College of Our Lady and St Nicolas, more commonly known as King's College. This was the first of many steps towards creating the College that currently exists. The history of how King's College came to be as it is today is one that spans many centuries, monarchs and architects.

STORY CONTENT

Located north of the current college, between the Chapel and Senate House Passage, was the original site where Henry VI laid the foundation stone for King's College of Our Lady and St Nicolas on the 25 March 1441. The King envisioned this to be part of a larger complex, requiring the surrounding land and property to make way for an accompanying Chapel.

The area that the King intended to develop contained the parish church of St. John Zachary and was densely covered by shops, houses and hostels. All of these were granted to the King in 1445 by the Mayor. This also included the common land beside the river, the Salt Hythe quay, and a number of private properties. Only one individual, a draper who owned two properties within this area, was able to delay the purchase of his property until 1452, when he finally sold them for a higher price.

Although contemporary building-accounts no longer exist, the first stone is believed to have been laid at the Altar by the King on St. James' Day (25th July), 1446. The chapel was the only part of the design for King's College that was carried out during the reign of King Henry VI, but it was not ready for use until at least half a century after his death. Identifiable by its white colour, the limestone masonry provides a visual indication of how work stalled on the chapel as a darker sandstone, visible above it, was used later to complete the structure.

By 1515 the chapel had been completed with contributions from Edward IV, Richard III, Henry VII and Henry VIII, but little else was built on the site until 1724 when James Gibbs designed the Fellows’ Building.

Although the foundation stone for this building had been laid on the 25th March 1724, the site was only ready to receive woodwork at the beginning of 1729. A slow process of construction, largely affected by problems surrounding funding, continued throughout the century and by 1822 no attempt had been made to complete the quadrangle. Gibbs’ design was abandoned and architects were invited to tender for the project. An advertisement was published on 22nd March, 1822, in a number of prominent newspapers and read as follows:

"Architects who may be disposed to furnish Plans and Elevations for the new Buildings of King's College, Cambridge, are requested to send the same with their names sealed up on the 10th October next, to Mr Gee, Solicitor, Cambridge, who will show the Ground-plan."

The contract was given to a committee of architects consisting of William Wilkins, Jeffrey Wyatt and James Nash. On the 19th April 1824 the excavations for the foundations began, albeit with no formal ceremony.

In commissioning the plans for King’s College and acquiring the land required for its construction, King Henry VI began a process that transformed Cambridge. Land and property along the south of the river was soon being obtained to develop Queens’ College (1465) and later St Catharine’s College (1473). A monument to the founder, depicting him raised on a fountain and accompanied by figures representing Religion (back towards the Chapel) and Learning (back towards the Library) was placed in the court in 1879.

POTENTIAL QUOTES: FOR POETS AND COMPOSERS

1. C8V/66 (2 of 3) Service Book vol. 2, Chaplain.

i) Founder's Hymn

Ye holy saints of yore,
Who wore an earthly crown,
And now, God's throne before,
Have cast your glances down,
Teach us to sing,
As best we may
One this his day,
Our Founder King!

Ye humble men of heart
Who lived to praise your Lord,
And bear to-day your part
In Heaven's all-blest accord,
His praise acclaim,
Whose deeds have brought,
By him unsought,
A deathless fame!

Ye mourners, who on high
Lift up your joyful head,
Your tears for ever dry,
Your sorrows comforted,
Praise him who trod
Through grief and pain
The pathway plain
That leads to GOD!

But chiefest thou, his Lord,
His praise attentive hear,
Who strove to keep thy word
And share thy sufferings here:
For all he willed
Be glory thine,
His great design
In thee fulfilled!

C.A. Arlington, D.D. 1921
Tune - Darwell's 148th

ii) Remember O Lord, for good all who have gone forth from this College to labour elsewhere in thy Kingdom. Grant that by the light of they divine guidance, and the gifts of thy bountiful Providence, they may fulfill thy purpose for them, wheresoever thou shalt appoint unto them their work...
[page 12]

2. The King's College of Our Lady & S. Nicholas of Cambridge order of service.
CSV/46

i) God of our Fathers, who of old didst move thy servant, King Henry Sixth, to build an house of prayer for the offering of eternal praises to thy glorious majesty: Grant to us, and to all who herein call upon thy holy name from age to age, that, by the offering of our lives and the praises of our lips, we may ever seek the increase of thy glory and thy Kingdom; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with thee and the Holy Ghost liveth and reigneth one God, the same yesterday, to-day and for ever. Amen.
[page 15]

3. King's Charter Translation: emailed by King's College Archivist

• Henry, by the grace of God King of England and France and Lord of Ireland, greets those whom the present letters reach...
• ...our University of Cambridge, like a well-spring, has sprinkled our kingdom of England most eminently with the dew of liberal knowledge, and like an abundant vine has produced many fruitful shoots in the vineyard of its Master, men of great learning, through whom the kingdom itself...has been decorated and strengthened in manifold ways.

• We, directing the gaze of our contemplation towards the most prolific fruit which this very University of ours, mother and nurse of men wonderfully steeped in divine and human law and all the liberal branches of knowledge, has by its own fertility, brought forth in the Church of God

• our...University has continuously preserved itself immaculate; to enhance the Clergy and the grace of Holy Mother Church, whose services must be entrusted to suitable people, to provide light in their own watch like stars and to instruct the peoples by teaching and example alike.
• upon some ground of ours beside the New Schools of Theology and Canon Law, on Schools' St. in our town of Cambridge...for building and and creating a College of this kind on this same ground, to be had and held by us and our heirs in perpetuity, we have drawn up plans for elevations and do now actually, by realised dint of the present letters, erect, found, create and establish, to last through times to come.

4. KCAR/7/GIB/5 [Coll 35/14] -
NOTE: A copy of the MSS of the music (dated 3.26.17) is in lock-up A-B, Shelf 3. - This is visually interesting and would be well worth photographing.

1.
An Anthem
For the 25th of March,
Being the Anniversary
of the dedication
of
King's College Chappel.
And likewise, on the occasion of Laying the first stone,
for the Foundation of King's College, in the
Year 1724.
Composed by THO. Tudway, M.D.

Ecclesiasticus Chap. 39.

Solo: Hearken unto me ye holy Children, sing a song of praise, bless the Lord in all his Works.
vers 2 voc: Magnify his name, and shew forth his praise, with the songs of your lips, and with Harps, and in praising him ye shall say,
vers 3 voc: Blessed be The Lord God of our Fathers, who hath put such a thing into the Kings heart.
vers 3 voc: o build this House, and set up a holy Temple of The Lord, which was prepar'd for everlasting Glory.
Chorus: For everlasting Glory.
vers.3. voc: To be a Father to the Fatherless, to feed them with the bread of understanding, and give them the Water of Wisdom to drink;
Solo: Therefore shall he receive a glorious Kingdom, and a beautiful Crown from the hand of the Lord.
Vers 3. voc: How is he number’d among the Children of God, and his Lot is among the Saints.
Solo vers 3 voc: His name shall endure for ever his name shall remain for ever among the Posterities, which shall be blessed thro him
Cho: Blessed be the Lord God of our Fathers, who hath put such a thing into the Kings Heart, to build this House, and set up an holy Temple to the Lord.

5. NW CU VB Wil/1: The Architectural History of the University of Cambridge and of the Colleges of Cambridge and Eton. Vol 1. 1886.

[Page 465 - 6, History of King's College Chapel]

The first stone is believed to have been laid at the Altar by the King in person, on St. James' Day (25 July), 1446. A record of the event has been preserved in the following verses ...

"Altaris petram quam Rex superedificauit
Henricus. vj. hic sacrificando dicauit
Annis. M.CCCC. secto quater. x.d.
Regis et. h. regni quarto iungendo viceno

In festo sancti Jacobi sanctam stabiliuit
Hic vnctam petram Regia sacra manus
Ex orientali medio, si bis septem peditimtim
Mensurare velis inuenies lapidem.
Astiterant Regi tunc pontifices in honorem
Actus solennis Regis et ecclesie."

[Page 560 to 566 - on construction of the [James] Gibbs building]

the work was not begun [on the college] until 25th March, 1724, though the College Orders shew that it had been in contemplation for nearly two years; for at the beginning of 1723 (10 January) it was agreed to pay fifty guineas to the architect, James Gibbs, "for his journeys, designing and drawing plans, surveying and laying out the ground for the intended building;" and on 14 January in the same year it was resolved "that the west side of the intended new College be begun to be built." According to the new plan the buildings were all to be arranged round a quadrangle, which was to measure from east to west 240 feet from north to south. Each side of this quadrangle was to consist of a detached and independent mass of building, a space of twenty-two feet being left free at each angle. The style adopted was the Italian then in fashion...The architect thus describes he portion erected [1727], and the arrangements for the rest of the design :

"It is built of Portland Stone, and is detach'd fro the Chappell as being a different kind of Building...The Court could not be larger than express'd in thePlan, because I found, upon measuring the Ground, and the South East Corner of the intended East Side of the Building came upon Trumpington Street. This College, as design'd, will consist of FourSides, The Chappell, a beautiful building of Gothick Tast, but the finest I ever saw: opposite to which is propos'd the Hall , with a Portico. ..."

...a description of the ceremony of laying the first stone , were published by Mr Gregory Doughty, one of the senior Fellows, as an appendix to the sermon he preached on the occasion in the Chapel:
"...Accordingly (the Ground having been first laid out, and the foundation dug for the Westside of the Square, pursuant to a PLAN design'd by Mr Gibbs) on the 25th day of March last, being the Anniversary of commemorating the Founder, and the University being met, as usual at Kings College Chapel; after the sermon, and an Anthem compos'd on the Occasion [THO Tudway]; The Provost, accompanied by the Noblemen, Heads of Colleges, Doctors, and other members of the University, proceeded to the corner of the Foundation, next to the Chapel, where the first Stone was to be laid...

The inscription on the stone is given by the same authority :

"QUI ANTIQUITATIS OLIM STUDIOSUS,
DUM RUDERA PERSCRUTABITUR,
HANC LAMINAM SAXO INCLUSAM FORTE ERUET,
SCIAT HUNC LAPIDEM,
TEMPORIBUS HENRICI SEXTI
HUJUS COLLEGII FABRICAE DESTINATUM:.."

The tradition about the stone has been preserved by Cole [MSS. Cole, i. 110.]:

"When ye News cam of ye Founders Deposition ye Labourers who were sawing ye stone in halves and not having finished it, imagining that there would be no further proceeding in ye design by his Successors left of yir work and ye Stone remaining half sawed in two..."

6. Hh 13.4., Cambridge Antiquarian Communications, Volume IV 1876 - 1880 (1881), pp.298 - 301.
• lovely accounts of the renovations done for royal visit to King’s - listing renovations to the Provost Lodge etc..

The Hall may be identified with the part of a large building, with a high-pitched roof, extending from the north end of the gallery to Trumpington Street...These portions of the Lodge were used for the entertainment of Queen Elizabeth in 1564. The narrative of her visit says "The Guard Chamber was he Lower Hall of the Provost's Place; the Chamber of Presence, the Lodging over that; the Gallery and other chambers served for the Queen's Lodging."

7. CSV/46 = 8 items in sleeve = repetitions of editions of King’s College Our Lady & St Nicholas of Cambridge… Order of Services …Feast of St Nicholas and the Birthday of Henry the Sixth…

Booklet “The Ceremony of the Lilies and the Roses” Tower of London, 1947
INTRODUCTION “King Henry VI, the founder of Eton College and of King’s College, Cambridge, was in 1471 a prisoner in the Tower of London. There he was murdered at his prayers, between eleven and twelve o’clock on the night of 21 May, in the Oratory of the Wakefield Tower. His body rests in St George’s Chapel at Windsor, where he was born in the Castle on 6 December 1421.” &c

8. CSV/66 - SERVICE BOOKS VOL 1

RUPERT BROOKE
Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.
Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,
And paid his subjects with a royal wage;
And Nobleness walks in our ways again;
And we have come into our heritage.

9. FOUNDER’S DAY
Offering of the Roses & Lillies at Evensong with prayer after the Office Hymn “Rex Henricus, sis amicus”

Almighty God, Kings of all Kings, Author of all wisdom, we magnify thy Holy Name for that thou didst endue thy servant King Henry Sixth with a deep longing for thy courts and a most liberal mind toward such as loved good learning; and we beseech thee that the College & School which he established, here and his College at Eton, may serve continually his royal design for the profiting of virtuous science and true religion; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

SERVICE OF COMMEMORATION - Dec 6th and 21st May Founders Obit
ANTIPHON
PRAYER OF HENRY THE SIXTH
Domine Jhesu Christe, qui me creasti, redemisti, et preordinasti ad hoc quod sum, tu scis quid de me facere vis; fac de me secundum voluntatem tuam, cum misericordia. Amen

Passage to be read by a Fellow: “Hear the praise of our pious Founder written in an early chronicle of our Land.
King Henry raignyd xxxviii yeres, and after he receavyd the kingdome agane, vi monthes, he lyvyd Lii yeres. He beyot of quene Margaret Edward, his onely soone, prince of Wales. He was taule of stature, sclender of body, whereunto all his members wer proportionably correspondent; he was of coomly visage, wherin did glister continyally that bowntefulnes of disposition wherewith he was abundantly endewyd. He dyd of his owne natural inclination abhorre all vices both of body and mynde, by reason whereof he of honest conversation eaven from a chylde, pure and clene, partaken of non evell, ready to conceave all that was good, a contemner of all thosethinges whiche commonly corrupt the myndes of men, so patient also in sufferin of injuryes, receavyd now and then, as that he covetyd in his hart no revenge, but for the very same gave God Almighty most humble thankes… POLYDORE VERGIL

Or this:
“Here is told the good life of King Henry VI our Founder, drawn from the book of John Blakman sometime the King’s confessor and Warden of King’s Hall at Cambridge (OCCUPY MESSAGE?!)
….”Against the pest of avarice with which so many are infected and diseased, even princes of the earth, this King Henry was most wary and alert. For neither by the splendid presents given to him nor by the ample wealth which he owned was he ever entrapped into the unlawful love of them, but was most liberal to the poor in lightening their wants. Never did he oppress this subjects with unreasonable exactions as do other rulers and princes, but behaving himself among them as a kind father, relieved them from his own resources in a most comely sort, and contenting himself with what he had, preferred to live uprightly among them, rather than they should pine in poverty, trodden down by his harshness.”

PRAYER FOR STUDY
“Vouchsafe thy grace, O Lord, to those who teach, that they may rightly impart knowledge, and to those who learn, that they might diligently seek it; so that in all their study they may attain unto the wisdom which blesses mankind, and the truth which reveals eer more and more thy glory; through him who is the very Truth and Light of men, our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen

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EQUIANO, CLARKSON & ABOLITION

Olaudah Equiano, Thomas Clarkson & the Abolition of the Slave Trade

These stories are in development and are copyright to the team at Historyworks. If you want to use them for press or for other purposes please contact the producer Helen Weinstein: 07974827753.

SHORT SUMMARY

Cambridge was once home to two of the most prominent campaigners against the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797), enslaved African and author who married in Cambridgeshire, and Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846), a graduate of St John’s College, were both early activists. They devoted their lives to the cause and were pivotal in the eventual Bill which abolished the Slave Trade within Britain (1807).

 

STORY CONTENT

 

Enslaved African Olaudah Equiano, also known as Gustavas Vassa (1745-1797), was an author and campaigner against the Transatlantic Slave Trade. In his hugely influential biographyThe Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African(1789),he records that he was born in what is now Nigeria, kidnapped, separated from his family and sold into slavery at the age of 11. In this text Equiano describes his passage aboard a slave ship to Virginia although the research of Prof Vincent Caretta shows that Equiano was actually born in the Carolinas. The Middle Passage descriptions are for narrative purposes to share with the British public what he learnt on his plantations from the stories of recently enslaved Africans from Nigeria. He was eventually transported to the West Indies, purchased by a naval captain named Captain Pascal and travelled extensively on Pascal’s naval missions. After 16 years of enslavement he had saved enough money to buy his freedom.

Equiano then began a series of actions and campaigns to better the conditions that those who were enslaved had to endure, culminating in 1788 with him leading a delegation to the House of Commons in support of William Dolben's bill to limit the number of enslaved Africans that a ship could transport. Understanding that his own life story was one of the most powerful tools in fighting the Slave Trade, he published his autobiography in 1789 and travelled the country promoting it. A letter dated July 9th1789 from fellow campaigner and Cambridge graduate, Thomas Clarkson, shows that Equiano intended to visit Cambridge for this reason: “I take the Liberty of introducing to your Notice Gustavus Vasa, the Bearer, a very honest, ingenious, and industrious African, who wishes to visit Cambridge.  He takes with him a few Histories containing his own Life written by himself, of which he means to dispose to defray his Journey.”

Three years later Equiano would return to the region, albeit for a very different reason. On the 7thApril 1792, he married Susannah Cullen at St Andrew’s Church, Soham.  Shortly after the wedding he returned to the important work that he was doing. Prior to the wedding he wrote, “I now mean to leave London in about 8 or 10 days and to take me a wife (one Miss Cullen) of Soham in Cambridgeshire. When I have given her about 8 or 10 days comfort, I mean directly to go to Scotland…I trust that my going has been of much use to the cause of Abolition of the accursed Slave Trade.”

It can be assumed that he returned to Cambridge and took up residence in Soham as their two daughters Anna Maria Vassa (born 1793) and Joanna Vassa (born 1795) were baptised in the same church that he and Susannah were married in.

Equiano died in March 1797 but the work of other early activists continued the campaign against the Slave Trade. Thomas Clarkson was born in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, on 28th March 1760. As an undergraduate at St John’s College, Cambridge, he had planned to join the church but an academic task completely altered his career path.

In 1785, Clarkson entered the Members' Prize for a Latin Essay, writing on the subject of 'anne liceat invitos in servitutem dare?' ('is it lawful to make slaves of others against their will?'). One of the books that he read whilst researching this essay was Anthony Benezet’sHistorical Account of Guinea.Deeply affected by what he read, the essay transformed from academic practice to activism:

“It was but one gloomy subject from morning to night. In the daytime I was uneasy. In the night I had little rest. I sometimes never closed my eye-lids for grief. It became now not so much a trial for academical reputation, as for the production of a work, which might be useful to injured Africa.”

The essay won the prize and was read in the Senate House, University of Cambridge, in June 1785, received tremendous praise, and was published the following year. Returning from the reading of the essay at the Senate House, Clarkson, troubled by the subject of his writings, paused on the roadside and contemplated the reality of his subject matter. This marked the beginning of an undertaking that would last until his death in 1846. “…the subject of it almost wholly engrossed my thoughts. I became at times very seriously affected while upon the road. I stopped my horse occasionally, and dismounted and walked. I frequently tried to persuade myself in these intervals that the contents of my Essay could not be true…I sat down disconsolate on the turf by the roadside and held my horse. Here a thought came into my mind, that if the contents of the Essay were true, it was time some person should see these calamities to their end.”

In May 1787, Clarkson, along with 11 other men, established the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. With the support of William Wilberforce, the MP for Hull, speaking for them in Parliament, they were able to instigate a Parliamentary investigation into the Slave Trade.

Clarkson’s role required him to research and collect as much evidence as possible about the mistreatment of enslaved Africans. He worked tirelessly at this, travelling 35,000 miles around the country meeting with people involved in the trade, writing pamphlets and speaking publicly about the horrors of slavery.

In 1787, Clarkson visited Bristol to meet two surgeons formerly employed on the ships, James Arnold and Alexander Falconbridge. Both men gave him detailed descriptions of life on those vessels. Clarkson writes that Falconer’s testimony “confirmed the various violent and treacherous methods of procuring them in their own country; their wretched condition, in consequence of being crowded together in the passage; their attempts to rise in defence of their own freedom, and, when this was impracticable, to destroy themselves by the refusal of sustenance, by jumping overboard into the sea, and in other ways; the effect also of their situation upon their minds, by producing insanity and various diseases; and the cruel manner of disposing of them in the West Indies, and of separating relatives and friends.”

Equiano also recounts the atrocious conditions of those who were forced to travel on the middle passage in his autobiography – details he would have received from other Africans. “The air soon became unfit for breathing from a variety of loathsome smells” he recalls “and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died. This wretched situation was made worse by the chains. The shrieks of women, and the groaning of the dying, created a scene of horror almost unbelievable. Three desperate slaves tried to kill themselves by jumping overboard. Two drowned, the other was captured and beaten unmercifully.”

The work that these men were carrying out was threatening to many individuals working within the trade, and in the case of Thompson it marked him as a target. When leaving Bristol in 1787, Clarkson moved onto Liverpool where he was attacked by eight or nine men, who, pushing him towards the end of the pier, aimed to throw him into the sea and make it look like an accident. Clarkson was able to force one of them to the ground, and breaking through a barrage of blows he was able to escape. He continued his campaign overseas. Travelling to France in 1789, he attempted to persuade the French Government to abolish the Slave Trade. Ill health forced him to retire from his work in 1794 but he returned to the cause in 1804. Three years later the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act was passed in the House of Commons by 283 votes to 16, marking the end of slavery within Britain. Although this landmark event was a significant victory, it wasn’t until 1833 that Parliament passed an act which abolished slavery throughout the Empire.

 

MATERIAL FOR POETS & COMPOSERS

 

1. Olaudah Equiano’sThe Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African(1789)

 

Olaudah Equiano, describes being captured and enslaved in his autobiography:

One day, when all our people were gone out to their works as usual, and only I and my dear sister were left to mind the house, two men and a woman got over our walls, and in a moment seized us both. My sister and I were separated and I ended up in the hands of a slave dealer who supplied the Atlantic slave ships. Six months later I found myself on board a slave ship. …

… Thus was I like the hunted deer:

—"Ev'ry leaf and ev'ry whisp'ring breath

Convey'd a foe, and ev'ry foe a death."

 

Olaudah Equiano views on slavery:

Such a tendency has the slave-trade to debauch men's minds, and harden them to every feeling of humanity! For I will not suppose that the dealers in slaves are born worse than other men—No; it is the fatality of this mistaken avarice, that it corrupts the milk of human kindness and turns it into gall. And, had the pursuits of those men been different, they might have been as generous, as tender-hearted and just, as they are unfeeling, rapacious and cruel. Surely this traffic cannot be good, which spreads like a pestilence, and taints what it touches! which violates that first natural right of mankind, equality and independency, and gives one man a dominion over his fellows which God could never intend!...

… Why do you use those instruments of torture? Are they fit to be applied by one rational being to another? And are ye not struck with shame and mortification, to see the partakers of your nature reduced so low? But, above all, are there no dangers attending this mode of treatment? Are you not hourly in dread of an insurrection? Nor would it be surprising: for when

 

"—No peace is given

To us enslav'd, but custody severe;

And stripes and arbitrary punishment

Inflicted—What peace can we return?

But to our power, hostility and hate;

Untam'd reluctance, and revenge, though slow,

Yet ever plotting how the conqueror least

May reap his conquest, and may least rejoice

In doing what we most in suffering feel."

 

Description from Olaudah Equiano autobiography describing the middle passage.

At last, when the ship we were in, had got in all her cargo, they made ready with many fearful noises, and we were all put under deck, so that we could not see how they managed the vessel. ...The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome....The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died -- thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers.

 

Description from Olaudah Equiano autobiography describing the middle passage:

The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. The air soon became unfit for breathing, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died. This wretched situation was made worse by the chains. The shrieks of women, and the groaning of the dying, created a scene of horror almost unbelievable. Three desperate slaves tried to kill themselves by jumping overboard. Two drowned, the other was captured and beaten unmercifully. When I refused to eat, I too was beaten.

 

Olaudah Equiano, describes his arrival in the West Indies in his autobiography:

When we arrived in Barbados (in the West Indies) many merchants and planters came on board and examined us. We were then taken to the merchant’s yard, where we were all pent up together like sheep in a fold. On a signal the buyers rushed forward and chose those slaves they liked best.

 

Olaudah Equiano, describes Life on the plantations in his autobiography:

I have seen a slave beaten till some of his bones were broken, for only letting a pot boil over. I have seen slaves put into scales and weighed, and then sold from three pence to nine pence a pound.

 

Letter to the Queen:

 

March the 21st, 1788, I had the honour of presenting the Queen with a petition on behalf of my African brethren, which was received most graciously by her Majesty[Y]:

 

To the QUEEN's most Excellent Majesty

.

Madam,

Your Majesty's well known benevolence and humanity emboldens me to approach your royal presence, trusting that the obscurity of my situation will not prevent your Majesty from attending to the sufferings for which I plead.

Yet I do not solicit your royal pity for my own distress; my sufferings, although numerous, are in a measure forgotten. I supplicate your Majesty's compassion for millions of my African countrymen, who groan under the lash of tyranny in the West Indies.

The oppression and cruelty exercised to the unhappy negroes there, have at length reached the British legislature, and they are now deliberating on its redress; even several persons of property in slaves in the West Indies, have petitioned parliament against its continuance, sensible that it is as impolitic as it is unjust—and what is inhuman must ever be unwise.

Your Majesty's reign has been hitherto distinguished by private acts of benevolence and bounty; surely the more extended the misery is, the greater claim it has to your Majesty's compassion, and the greater must be your Majesty's pleasure in administering to its relief.

I presume, therefore, gracious Queen, to implore your interposition with your royal consort, in favour of the wretched Africans; that, by your Majesty's benevolent influence, a period may now be put to their misery; and that they may be raised from the condition of brutes, to which they are at present degraded, to the rights and situation of freemen, and admitted to partake of the blessings of your Majesty's happy government; so shall your Majesty enjoy the heartfelt pleasure of procuring happiness to millions, and be rewarded in the grateful prayers of themselves, and of their posterity.

And may the all-bountiful Creator shower on your Majesty, and the Royal Family, every blessing that this world can afford, and every fulness of joy which divine revelation has promised us in the next.

I am your Majesty's most dutiful and devoted servant to command,

 

Gustavus Vassa,

The Oppressed Ethiopean.

 

2. Papers of Thomas Clarkson, GBR/0275/Clarkson, St John's College Library

http://janus.lib.cam.ac.uk/db/node.xsp?id=EAD%2FGBR%2F0275%2FClarkson

Clarkson won the Members' Prize for a Latin Essay in 1785, the subject being 'anne liceat invitos in servitutem dare?' ('is it lawful to make slaves of others against their will?').

…Wordsworth addressed to him a sonnet 'on the final passing of the Bill for the Abolition of the Slave Trade' in March 1807 which began 'Clarkson, it was an obstinate hill to climb'.

 

3. William Wordsworth’s PoemTO THOMAS CLARKSON ON THE FINAL PASSING OF THE BILL FOR THE ABOLITION OF THE SLAVE TRADE, MARCH 1807

 

          CLARKSON! it was an obstinate hill to climb:

          How toilsome--nay, how dire--it was, by thee

          Is known; by none, perhaps, so feelingly:

          But thou, who, starting in thy fervent prime,

          Didst first lead forth that enterprise sublime,

          Hast heard the constant Voice its charge repeat,

          Which, out of thy young heart's oracular seat,

          First roused thee.--O true yoke-fellow of Time,

          Duty's intrepid liegeman, see, the palm

          Is won, and by all Nations shall be worn!                  

          The blood-stained Writing is for ever torn;

          And thou henceforth wilt have a good man's calm,

          A great man's happiness; thy zeal shall find

          Repose at length, firm friend of human kind!

 

4.THE HISTORY OF THE RISE, PROGRESS, AND ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE ABOLITION OF THE SLAVE-TRADE, BY THE BRITISH PARLIAMENT,By THOMAS CLARKSON, M.A.   1839

http://www.thomasclarkson.org/tcfaq.htm#foot3

 

“It was but one gloomy subject from morning to night. In the daytime I was uneasy. In the night I had little rest. I sometimes never closed my eye-lids for grief. It became now not so much a trial for academical reputation, as for the production of a work, which might be useful to injured Africa…

…As it is usual to read these Essays publicly in the senate-house soon after the prize is adjudged, I was called to Cambridge for this purpose. I went and performed my office. On returning however to London, the subject of it almost wholly engrossed my thoughts. I became at times very seriously affected while upon the road. I stopped my horse occasionally, and dismounted and walked. I frequently tried to persuade myself in these intervals that the contents of my Essay could not be true. The more, however, I reflected upon them, or rather upon the authorities on which they were founded, the more I gave them credit. Coming in sight of Wades Mill, in Hertfordshire, I sat down disconsolate on the turf by the roadside and held my horse. Here a thought came into my mind, that if the contents of the Essay were true, it was time some person should see these calamities to their end. Agitated in this manner, I reached home. This was in the summer of 1785.”

Clarkson (1808) History - Vol. I pp 208-9 http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10633/10633-h/10633-h.htm#preface

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XU ZHIMO POEM "ON LEAVING CAMBRIDGE"

To seek a dream? Go punting with a long pole

Composed in 1928, a famous poem about Cambridge internationally, was written by Xu Zhimo, one of China's foremost poets, habitually learnt by Chinese schoolchildren.  This poem translates variously as "On Leaving Cambridge", "Saying Goodbye to Cambridge, again"  & here we are taking the title "Taking Leave of Cambridge Again".  This translation is taken from Peter Pagnamenta (ed.) "The University of Cambridge: an 800th Anniversary Portrait", (London: Third Millenium Publishing, 2008), page 29:

Taking Leave of Cambridge Again

By Xu Zhimo

Softly I am leaving,
Just as softly as I came;
I softly wave goodbye
To the clouds in the western sky.

The golden willows by the riverside
Are young brides in the setting sun;
Their glittering reflections on the shimmering river
Keep undulating in my heart.

The green tape grass rooted in the soft mud
Sways leisurely in the water;
I am willing to be such a waterweed
In the gentle flow of the River Cam.

That pool in the shade of elm trees
Holds not clear spring water, but a rainbow
Crumpled in the midst of duckweeds,
Where rainbow-like dreams settle.

To seek a dream? Go punting with a long pole,
Upstream to where green grass is greener,
With the punt laden with starlight,
And sing out loud in its radiance.

Yet now I cannot sing out loud,
Peace is my farewell music;
Even crickets are now silent for me,
For Cambridge this evening is silent.

Quietly I am leaving,
Just as quietly as I came;
Gently waving my sleeve,
I am not taking away a single cloud.

(6 November 1928)

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NEWTON'S APPLE TREE

Newton's Apple Tree: Myth, Inspiration, Technology

These stories are in development and are copyright to the team at Historyworks. If you want to use them for press or for other purposes please contact the producer Helen Weinstein: 07974827753.

 

SHORT SUMMARY:

 

On a warm evening in 1666, just after dinner, the soon to be famous Issaac Newton sat down beneath this tree outside of Trinity to mull over his thoughts, when all of a sudden he was struck on the top of his head by a large, red apple.‘Eureka’, he cried, and Gravity was discovered. As entertaining as this tale is, Newton was not struck on the head by an apple and he was not underneath this tree. In fact, no such tree existed in Cambridge at the time. But in just half a century, this grand myth was woven by his admirers from its original simple story.  This tree isa grafteddescendantof the original one at the home of Sir Isaac Newton's mother in Woolsthrope, Lincolnshire. On a visit to his mother's garden during his Cambridge days in the late 1660s, heobservedagreenapple fall from a tree and only then began toconsiderthe mechanism that drove what is now termed Gravity.

 

STORY CONTENT:

 

Sir Issac Newton, famous for his work on the theory of Gravity, never kept any record of what happened that fateful day in the late 1660s when he was inspired by an apple falling from a tree. Therefore, there exist numerous accounts from his acquaintances and admirers—each recounting a different experience.

 

The earliest of these accounts was recorded in 1726 in the notes of John Conduitt, a Cambridge student. In this year of Newton's death, Conduitt wrote,‘the first thought of his system of gravitation which he hit upon by observing an apple fall from a tree.’ He didn't specify which tree or where the apple fell. Only a year later, Voltaire used his artistic license to parade Newton's magnanimous discovery, in hisEssay on Epic Poetry(1727), ‘Sir Isaac Newton walking in his gardens, had the first thought of his system of gravitation, upon seeing an apple falling from a tree.’ Again, Voltaire didn't specify how the apple fell, but specifiedhisgardens in Lincolnshire.

 

One of the most reputed accounts of Newton and the apple is in William Stukely'sMemoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life(1752). Stukely was a good friend of Newton's and a scholar of archaeology. He recalled,'After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden, and drank tea under the shade of some apple trees, only he, and myself. Amidst other discourse, he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. "Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground," thought he to himself: Occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a contemplative mood: "Why should it not go sideways, or upwards? but constantly to the earths centre? Assuredly, the reason is, that the earth draws it. There must be a drawing power in matter. And, the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the earth must be in the earth’s center, not in any side of the earth. Therefore dos this apple fall perpendicularly, or toward the center. If matter thus draws matter; it must be in proportion of its quantity. Therefore the apple draws the earth, as well as the earth draws the apple.'

 

The tree referenced in Stukely's account, still exists today. It is over 350 years old, and is protected by the national trust. After the death of Newton's mother in 1679, her property was soon acquired by the Woolerton family, who were tenant farmers. The family cared for both the tree and the house from the 1750s until 1947.  In 1816, the tree was blown over in a storm, but successfully re-rooted, where it still stands today.

 

The Newton Apple Tree at Trinity College, grafted from the original tree, was planted in 1954. Furthermore, the trees are Flower of Kent, which doesn’t produce apples for eating, but cooking apples which are green, not red.

So why did this myth evolve? In an interview with theIndependent, Royal Society head archivist, Keith Moore explained, 'The story was certainly true, but let's say it got better with the telling." The story of the apple fitted with the idea of an Earth-shaped object being attracted to the Earth. It also had a resonance with the Biblical account of the tree of knowledge, and Newton was known to have extreme religious views'.

 

From philosophy to physics, from fairy-tale to fact, Newton's apple tree remains a strong part of  Trinity's heritage.

 

 

POTENTIAL QUOTES FOR POETS AND COMPOSERS:

 

Sir Isaac Newton -Copyright 1997 David Arns 

 

Under a spreading apple tree,

     The village genius stands;

 His mind conceives of wondrous things,

     He writes them with his hands;

 His fame goes forth to all the world--

     He's known in many lands.

 

 A tiny babe on Christmas Day

     in 1642

 Was born to Mrs. Newton

     while outside, the cold winds blew.

 And on the farm, through childhood,

     precocious Isaac grew.

 

 And after chores, he built devices

     to see just how they worked,

 To see what laws of nature

     underneath the workings lurked.

 (When people called them "toys," that's what

     got Isaac really irked.)

 

 His mother saw he was no farmer,

     sent him off to school;

 He quickly showed at Cambridge

     that he was nobody's fool:

 He began to bring to light the laws

     that all of nature rule.

 

 In one chapter in his story

     (though apocryphal, it's said),

 An apple, falling from a tree

     impacted on his head,

 Which drew his thoughts to gravity,

     and we all know where that led.

 

 He wondered if, by any chance,

     the self-same gravitation

 That pulls an apple to the ground,

     affected all creation:

 The moon, the planets, and the sun. . .

     Thus went his cogitation.

 

 He determined that the gravity

     of earth indeed controls

 The orbit of our moon, as 'round

     the earth it ever rolls.

 Now, describing it mathematically

     was one of Newton's goals.

 

 He discovered that the math you need

     to show the laws of nature,

 Surpassed the knowledge of that day;

     the cosmos' legislature

 Required new math, so Newton wrote

     his "fluxions" nomenclature.

 

 He talked of falling bodies

     and his famous Laws of Motion,

 And of colors seen in bubbles

     and the tides upon the ocean.

 And his crowning jewel, "Principia,"

     created great commotion.

 

 Yes, Newton's brilliant mind, it was

     a trunk with many twigs--

 His mind branched out in every way

     (right through his powdered wigs).

 His greatest contribution, though,

     was cookies made from figs.

---

ALICE SPRING/s & TELEGRAPH TODD

Alice Spring - A (true) love story

 

These stories are in development and are copyright to the team at Historyworks. If you want to use them for press or for other purposes please contact the producer Helen Weinstein: 07974827753.

SHORT SUMMARY:

 

Alice Gillam Bell of Cambridge could call herself a lucky women as there’s not many people who have a city named after them. She went to Australia in the 1850s aged 18 to live with the man she loved, Charles Todd, who in turn named the city Alice Springs after her.

 

STORY CONTENT:

 

Alice was the daughter of the well-known Cambridge business man Edward Bell, who worked as a corn merchant. Over the years the Bell family grew rather large and Edward eventually had to feed 11 children. After years of suffering in the 1840s where five of his children died due to illness, the family moved to Free School Lane, where they lived for the longest period, as research states.  In 1851 the census shows only five remaining family members, Mr. and Mrs. Bell with two sons and a daughter. Interestingly, it is also noted in the census that in the early 1848 a young, not insignificant man stayed with the Bell's during his occupation at the University. It was Charles Todd, who married Alice and moved with her to Australia after he finished his work in 1855.

 

"I WILL marry you"

 

When Charles came to live with the Bell family, Alice was only 12 years old. "I WILL marry you, Mr. Todd", was what Alice told him when she first came to see the young men of 22 years. His mothers' sister was Mrs. Charlotte Bell, his aunt. She suggested that Charles, already quite old for this time, should get married as soon as possible. When Charles expressed his fears that "no one would want to marry such a dull fellow", Alice proposed her as a possible wife. Being too young and too closely related to his cousin, she shocked Victorian morals with her Leap Year proposal. But Charles, described as a shy and retiring young man, was not shocked by this statement. He started to send books to Alice over the next couple of years and always left a note in the front page. In the first years he wrote "Alice Gillam Bell from her friend Charles Todd", after knowing her longer he wrote "from her devoted admirer Charles Todd".  Finally seven years and a slow growing romance later, they married in St. Andrews Chapel Cambridge in 1855.

 

"Telegraph Todd"

 

Charles was born in 1826 in Greenwich and came to Cambridge in 1848 to work as an Assistant Astronomer at Cambridge University Observatory with Professor Challis. Interestingly, Charles is the one who constructed the first trans-Australian telephone cable, reaching from Port Augusta to Darwin. That was the reason why he went to Australia with Alice. Charles became famous in South Australia as he connected the colony to the empire. For this reason people called him "Telegraph Todd".

 

Giving names to virgin lands

 

When the freshly married couple moved to Australia, they figured that the country was not very populated. The Outback was unknown and many regions did not have names. Being the first one to discover virgin lands in Australia, he simply named them after his beloved ones. The most well-known is the town Alice Springs, named after his wife Alice. Charlotte Waters, a regain around the town, is named after his newly-born daughter Charlotte. Charlotte came back to Cambridge after she got married to the solicitor Charles Squires and lived here for the rest of her live. The river in Alice Springs, which dries up every summer, is named after her father Charles, it is the River Todd.

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THE CAMBRIDGE DEPARTMENT STORE

THE CAMBRIDGE DEPARTMENT STORE THAT SURVIVED!

 

These stories are in development and are copyright to the team at Historyworks. If you want to use them for press or for other purposes please contact the producer Helen Weinstein: 07974827753.

 

SHORT SUMMARY:

 

John Lewis, Cambridge, formerly Robert Sayle, is at the heart of shopping in Cambridge. From small but entrepreneurial beginnings, Robert Sayle is now part of one of the UK’s biggest brands, yet underneath this glamour and prestige lies a fascinating local history. In its time John Lewis Cambridge really has had everything - a funeral parlour, an in-house carpet-beating factory, a brewery and even an overseas business venture.

[SHORT PARAGRAPH GIVING CONTEXT OF RANGE OF SHOPPING ESTABLISHMENTS IN CAMBRIDGE 1840-2010 esp HISTORY OF DEPARTMENT STORES IN CAMBRIDGE = RIVALS OF ROBERT SAYLE- JOSHUA TAYLOR & EADEN LILLIE]

 

STORY CONTENT:

 

In 1840 at the age of 24, Robert Sayle bought a small drapers at 12 St Andrew’s Street, now the magistrates court. His opening advert in the Cambridge Advertiser and Free Press stated the shop would sell “linen drapery, silk mercery, hosiery, haberdashery, straw bonnet etc etc”. It also stated that Robert Sayle intended to “conduct his business upon the principle so generally adopted and approved, that of selling entirely for READY MONEY”.

 

As his success grew, so did his shop. Between 1851 and 1888 numbers 13-17 St Andrew’s Street (separate buildings at the time) were added. The ground and first floors were used as showrooms, its cellars were workrooms and a millinery showroom, whilst its upper floors were bedrooms for the employees. This hostel accommodation for employees remained in use as such until the 1960s when the hostel was closed.

 

Beginning in 1876, numbers 13-15 were entirely rebuilt to give a whole new front of four storeys and cellarage. This was not cheap: £3,500 (around £4m in today’s money) was spent on the refurbishment, and included a state-of-the-art riveted metal skeleton and new stables for the undertaker’s, which had opened in 1873. The undertaker’s quickly became a key part of Robert Sayle’s business, as its services now provided for all aspects of life, and death. The coffins were made behind the shop, all the mourning clothes were provided, and the horses which pulled the hearse were famous throughout Cambridge due to their distinctive black plumage, until they were requisitioned during World War One.

 

Robert Sayle died in 1883 of a heart attack, and the shop was closed as a mark of respect. His funeral (arranged, of course, by his own undertakers) was attended by thousands of Cambridge citizens who came to pay their respects to his enterprise, public spirit and social conscience. He earned this reputation through investing in many local projects, such as the Perse School for Girls (he was a great believer in female education), the installation of gas street lighting in the New Town, being a guarantor of the YMCA building, and subscribing to the local Royal Albert Almshouse.

 

The business was then bought in August 1884 by Joseph Clark, Arthur Chaplin and Hugh Porter who ran it as Robert Sayle and Co. The shop continued to be a success and was now selling a large range of products, including beer! Originally brewed for the employees, the brewery continued to make beer until the 1930s when the brew house was torn down. Legend has it that six bottles remain buried in the shop’s precinct in memory of the brewery.

 

After the end of the First World War, there was a slump in trade and the new directors decided to expand the scope of the business. In 1925 they installed a new carpet-beating factory which was in use until 1961, when it was sold to a merry-go-round proprietor at Midsummer Fair, followed by a ladies hairdressers in 1927. These innovations helped keep the shop going until 1934 when Selfridge and Co bought the business and added it to their subsidiary, Selfridge Provincial Stores.

 

However the Selfridge Provincial Stores group only remained in charge for 5 years. By 1939 Mr Selfridge and his son had come to the conclusion that their subsidiary was not the kind of business that suited them and they decided to dispose of it. John Spedan Lewis had been interested in the group since 1934 and jumped at the chance to acquire the group. He was particularly pleased to have got his hands on Robert Sayle as he had always wanted the John Lewis Partnership to be represented in the two university towns.

 

Under the innovative John Lewis model of co-ownership Robert Sayle employees became Partners, and subsequently gained longer paid holidays and a staff council to represent them. Additionally, many new social aspects to being a Partner were introduced. For instance, Partners could join the new Amateur Dramatic Club or the choral society, attend French classes or enrol in the rowing club.

[LOCATE MORE INFO ABOUT CHORAL SOCIETY]

 

Following the war, the Partnership developed an extensive rebuilding plan, but Robert Sayle had to wait until 1969 before it got permission to carry out much of its building programme. The most striking change came in 1970 when a modern shop front was built to replace the old arcade entrance.

 

The story of the shop from 1969 to 2004 was primarily one of “trying to squeeze a gallon into a pint pot”. Since the 1970s the Partnership had looked to redevelop, expand, or relocate Robert Sayle. To this end the business acquired numbers 18, 19 and 25 St Andrew’s Street, but eventually it was decided that the shop needed new premises. One proposal was to move Robert Sayle to Duxford but this caused such a storm of protest that the idea was abandoned. In September 2004 the city council approved what was to become the Grand Arcade scheme and with this the famous old store closed its doors for the last time in the same year. For the next three years Robert Sayle operated out of Burleigh Street.

 

In 2007, John Lewis Cambridge, as it had been renamed, re-opened its doors. Three times the size of the previous premises John Lewis Cambridge continues to this day to be one of the Partnership’s most successful stores. Robert Sayle may not be the name emblazoned over the shop door, but the retired staff meet frequently and have recorded their memories in a rewarding project called "The Memory Shop".

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HISTORY OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY

History of the Jewish Community in Cambridge

 

These stories are in development and are copyright to the team at Historyworks. If you want to use them for press or for other purposes please contact the producer Helen Weinstein: 07974827753.

SHORT SUMMARY:

Cambridge has long been a home to Jewish communities. Their connection with the city dates back to 1106 and has links to its business, education, religious and civic heritage.

 

STORY CONTENT:

 

Cambridge’s first Jewish communities lived within the city during the twelfth century. Following the Norman Conquest of 1066, William the Conqueror encouraged the Jews of Rouen, the ancient capital of Normandy, to settle in England. As the Jews were able to lend money with interest, at a time when Christians were forbidden to do so, they were essential to the new ruler’s success. Cambridge was ideal for those relocating to England as it provided both economic and personal security. The good trade routes via access to the River Cam and Ouse made it economically viable and the royal castle and Sheriff meant they had shelter should any hostility be directed at them.

Evidence of the first Jewish settlement in Cambridge is documented in the ‘Fine Rolls’, dating from the “eighth year of Henry III’s reign”. In them we learn that in 1224 the Burgesses (political officials) offered Henry III a fine of 40 marks to adapt a house in Cambridge which had belonged to a Jewish man known as ‘Benjamin the Jew’. The purpose of this was originally to build a gaol in Cambridge but on the 15th of October, the King commanded the Sheriff to convert the building into a Guildhall. The entire structure was called the Tolbooth and the strong stone structures which the Jewish communities built, originally to secure both protection and storage of valuables, proved a great resource. These foundations were so strong that the cellars of this structure existed until the beginning of the twentieth century, as the underground rooms and the wall of a pre-expulsion synagogue remained. ‘Benjamin the Jew’ was a well-known Talmudic scholar also known Benjamin of Cambridge. His name is included in a compilation of the more famous medieval Jewish sagas in Northern Europe and number of significant Talmudic opinions and medieval scholarship are ascribed to him.

The Cambridge Jews moved from the area around the Guildhall to what was officially called the ‘Jewry’ in the late twelfth century. The Jewry existed within a triangular area of land between the Round Church, Trinity Street, Bridge-Sydney Street, and St Mary's market passage, also known as Jews' Street in 1219.

In 1817, work in the cellar of the old Dolphin Inn, located on All Saints' Passage, uncovered a leather bag containing rings, jewels, and silver pennies dated 1266. These artefacts came from period was characterised by great unrest and danger for the Jewish communities in England. During the Second Baron’s War, the Barons, led by Sir John Deyville, raided Cambridge and kidnapped many of Jews and held them for ransom. The Jews were targeted, partly because of hostility from Barons who owed them money, but also because they were perceived as being an extension of the King’s power.

In February 1267, the King came to Cambridge, spending Lent in the town and “alleviating wrongs of loyal citizens and persecuted Jews.” He issued letters patent to the bailiffs of the town, ensuring that "no one under peril of life and members, should damage, molest, or aggrieve the Jews in their persons or property. The baliffs were also directed to maintain, protect, and defend the Jews, their lands, properties, goods, and possessions both within the town and without, as much as they could.'

Henry’s successor, King Edward, proved to be much less accommodating. In 1275 the Statutum de Judeismo was issued at Westminster, forbidding the lending of money at interest, removing the Jewish community’s central livelihood. Then, on the 12th January 1275, there was a grant to Eleanor, the King's mother, that 'no Jew shall dwell or stay in any town which she holds dower' so the Jews of Cambridge were forced to Huntingdon, although there are references of Jewish citizens in Cambridge after the move to Huntingdon, in 1277. Then in 1290, Edward signed the Edict of Expulsion act, ordering all of England’s Jews to leave the country.

It was not until Cromwell passed the Navigation Act of 1651 that Jewish resettlement began again. Earlier, Henry VIII had founded professorships of Hebrew at Cambridge, inviting Jewish scholars to teach but under Cromwell they were now able to reside here permanently. Jewish scholars could participate in university life although they were unable to be awarded a degree, given the presence of Christian doctrine in the ceremony. They could however join a college as a ‘fellow commoner’, making them exempt from academic requirements. Arthur Cohen was the first Jewish student to undertake a B.A. He entered Magdalene College as a fellow commoner in 1849, reading the mathematical tripos and then in 1858 as a ‘non-declarant’ he took his M.A. By 1879, Jews could have the ‘in nomine Dei’ substituted for the traditional ceremonial reference to the trinity. Newnham and Girton Colleges attracted Jewish entry early on, and Hertha Ayrton (nee Marks), the distinguished scientist, was at Girton in 1876

There was also a growing Jewish presence outside the University. A small community of residents worshipped in a rented room on the site of the Union Society’s premises from 1847. After 1873 they moved to Regent St., relocating in 1888 to Petty Cury and moving again in around 1900 to a room over a china shop on Market Place. This remained their site of worship until 1913 when they moved to a premises behind a shop opposite the entrance to Sidney Sussex. Finally, in 1937, a purpose-built premises on Thompson’s Lane was secured.

 

MATERIAL FOR COMPOSERS:

 

 

1. C.81.08Gown & Tallith: In commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Cambridge University Jewish Society

 

“In medieval England the navigable rivers constituted major arteries of communication…Cambridge – on the edge of the fens, but linked to the Cam and Ouse with the Wash at King’s Lynn…It was the credit generated by business, and the availability of a royal castle on the spot in case of trouble, that attracted Jews to … Cambridge early in the twelfth century.

Around the same time there began – first in Paris – a movement in which the cathedral schools emancipated themselves into embryonic universities, and Jew were involved in the financial transactions regarding the foundation of the two earliest colleges…Peterhouse, at Cambridge, in 1265. Jewish scholars were living in … Cambridge until the expulsion in 1290…

Although in the early sixteenth century there was no Jewish community in England…Henry VIII founded professorships of Hebrew at Oxford and Cambridge, and by the time the King James Bible was published (1611) the scholars at Oxford, Cambridge and Westminster who produced it had been able to acquire a Hebrew expertise…Their competence was mainly due to the availability by then of Hebrew grammars in print, dictionaries and Latin translations of a few important rabbinic texts. But it was in part assisted by a few ex-Jewish converts (e.g. Emmanuel Tremellius) from overseas who were occasionally available as tutors.  After Jewish resettlement under Cromwell faithful Jewish scholars sometimes visited Cambridge regularly to teach Hebrew…or resided there permanently [in eighteenth century – Israel Lyons.]

It was not until the nineteenth century that Jews began to aspire to a university education in England…Jewish participation in university life was feasible … provided that one did not seek to take a degree, which involved acquiescence in a Trinitarian formula…

An option open to young men with the necessary social standing was to join a college as a ‘fellow commoner’, sharing the fellows’ table and being exempt from academic requirements. Arthur Cohen, who entered Magdalene as a fellow commoner in 1849…did in fact read the mathematical tripos and took his B.A. – the first Jew to do so – as a ‘non-declarant’ in 1858; he took his M.A. in 1879, by which time Jews could have the wordin nomine Deisubstituted for reference to the trinity. Cohen represents the emergent Jewish professional class of Victorian England…

…The Act of 1856 opened BA degrees at Cambridge to Jews, Muslims, etc. without violence to their conscience.

…Both [Newnham and Girtonb] Colleges attracted Jewish entry early on: Hertha Ayrton (nee Marks) who became a distinguished scientist went up to Girton in 1876.

 

Outside the University there was a small Jewish presence in Cambridge…Since the eighteenth century there had been a few Jewish residents who were, it seems, maintaining a synagogue (perhaps for occasional rather than regular assemblage) before 1778. There was certainly a tiny congregation worshipping in a rented room on the site of the Union Society’s premises from 1847, and after 1873 in Regent ST. About 1888 it moved briefly to Petty Cury and around the turn of the century – by which date students constituted a significant factor in mustering a weekly quorum for worship – to a room over a china shop (Messrs. Barrett) on the south west corner of the Market Place. Thence they migrated to a studio in a garden at Camden Terrace (park Terrace), to move again shortly before 1913 into premises behind a cycle-shop opposite the entrance to Sidney Sussex. That remained their home until the opening of purpose-built premises in Ellis Court (a name now lost) in Thompson’s Lane in 1937. Numbers were always exiguous, and lost in view of rival attractions undergraduates’ attendance at synagogues was variable. It was not until early in the twentieth century, when Israel Hersch opened a boarding-house that attracted Jewish boys from London and elsewhere to the Perse School, that a regular Sabbathminyanduring term-time could be more or less relied upon by those concerned to find one. In 1899 C. Fox and H.M. Adler had led aputschagainst the permanent Jewish residents, the undergraduates thereafter taking over the running of the synagogue.

 

2. C.83.08 Diane S. Claerbout,The Jews of Medieval Cambridge

 

“It appears there were no Jews in England in any number until after the Conquest when William the Conqueror encouraged the Jews of Rouen to settle here. The Jews were a financial necessity for the new ruler as they had money to lend with interest at a time when others were forbidden to do so

…It was in this framework that the Jews first settled in Cambridge in 1106, one of the first settlements outside London…Apart from its economic viability, Cambridge had the advantages of both a sheriff and a royal castle. The castle was available to the Jews as a refuge from angry mobs and the sheriff as a representative of the King was responsible (in theory) for protecting the Jews.

The first Jewish settlement in Cambridge is well documented. From the ‘Fine Rolls [in the eight year of Henry III]’ we learn that ‘in 1224 – the Burgesses offered Henry III a fine of 40 marks to have a house in Cambridge which had belonged to Benjamin the Jew in order to make a gaol for the town. On the 15thof  October, the King commanded the Sheriff to give them the building…[part of the building owned by Benjamin the Jew was converted into a Guildhall] The entire structure was called the Tolbooth. [Distinction between citizens & Jews’ stone structure which allowed both protection and storage of valuables]

The cellars of this structure apparently existed until the beginning of the twentieth century – underground rooms with their massive wall of what was a pre-expulsion synagogue.

It is only recently that ‘Benjamin the Jew’ who unwittingly provided Cambridge with its earliest civic building has been identified as a well-known Talmudic scholar…Benjamin of Cambridge is included in a compilation of the more famous medieval Jewish sagas in Northern Europe. A considerable number of important Talmudic opinions are ascribed to him, and he is felt to be the ‘Rabbi Benjamin’ responsible for opinions in the Sepher haGan and other respected pieces of medieval scholarship.

Other evidence pointing to the existence of a Jewry near the market was the discovery in 1782 of some gravestones near the site of the Guildhall. One bore the a barely legible inscription in Hebrew, which read “the sepulchral stone of Israel…who died…’ perhaps, one should not infer too much …Christian gravestones were discovered on the same site…Historically, any Jewish burial ground in the community would have to have been dated after 1177; before that time, all Jewish burials were in London….

…It was probably around this time [late 12thcentury], the Cambridge Jews moved from the area around the Guildhall to what was officially called the ‘Jewry’ [map available in article]. Using current street names, the Jewry can be described as follows: it was a rough triangular shape with the point at the Round Church, one side was formed by St John’s – Trinity Street, the other side by Bridge-Sydney Street, and the base of the triangle  was St Mary's Market Passage was known as Jews' Street in 1219. [not required to live within the Jewry, evidence shows they lived outside of it and non-Jews lived within]

...In 1817, workmen were digging in the cellar of the old Dolphin Inn which was located on the Bridge Street end of All Saints' Passage. They uncovered a leather bag which held rings, jewels, and silver pennies struck in 1266. The period corresponds with one of great terror for the Cambridge Jewry and one can well imagine the circumstances under which such a cache would be hidden.

...The Jews in Cambridge had a history quite dissimilar from their fellow Jews in neighbouring communities...With the exception of that period known as the Baron's Wars, the Cambridge Jews appeared to have lived in relative peace...

...In Cambridge, under the leadership of Sir John Deyville, the Barons raided the local town and carried off many local citizens and held them ransom. The Jews were particularly vulnerable...enmity between them and Barons who owed them money; but the Jews were perceived as being an extension of the Crown. by killing the Jews and destroying their property and records, it was tantamount to an attack on the King...

On February 1267, we learn that the King (Henry II?) came to Cambridge from Bury St. Edmunds and spent the whole of Lent there 'alleviating wrongs of loyal citizens and persecuted Jews.' He issued letters patent to the

"baliffs and good men of Cambridge to make public proclaimations throughout the town that no one under peril of life and members, should damage, molest, or aggrieve the Jews in their persons or property. The baliffs were also directed to maintain, protect, and defend the Jews, their lands, properties, goods, and possessions both within the town and without, as much as they could.'

 

The year 1275 was a momentous one for Jews of England...the Statutum de Judeismo was issued at Westminster. Under this act Jews were absolutely forbidden to lend money at interest, thus depriving them of the only real means of livelihood they had known. For the first time in English history they were allowed to become merchants and artisans...Jews were only permitted to live in towns under Royal authority. Also, the yellow badge identifying them as Jews (which had been required since 1215) now had to be worn by all persons of either sex from the age of seven upwards...They still could not be part of the guild system, could not travel safely, and if they gave credit, there was not much chance they would be repaid...

...On the 12th January 1275, there wasa grant to ELeanor, the King's mother that 'no jew shall dwell or stay in any town which she holds dower'...the Jews of Cambridge were to be sent to Norwich; but this was changed to Huntingdon...There are references to the Jews for Cambridge after the move to Huntingdon, In 1277, we learn that Joceus, son of Samuelotus has permission to dwell within his household in Chesterton, near Cambridge, so that he may have access to ply his merchandise there and repair the houses that he has in the same town. We also hear of the Jew, Bonenfaunt 'lately hung for coin-clipping'.

...disposition of Jewish property - 'a considerable number of tenements occupied by them in Cambridge were acquired by religious houses...various old leases in college archives speak of houses and land formerly held by Jews.'

 

3. C.45.7Jewish Museum. Faith in Education: the story of the Jews' Free School.2003.

 

On 1st September 1939, JFS evacuated hundreds of children to Cambridgeshire [from London schools]...150 pupils were billeted in Ely, with a further 500 in nearby villages such as Isleham and Soham.

The experience of evacuation varied. It had a profound impact on many children. While it provided some students with opportunity, adventure and fresh air, for others it was both personally terrifying and religiously threatening, as young children were billeted in homes of people who had never seen a Jew in their life.

Maintaining Jewish life in isolated fenland villages was very challenging. The school's welfare committee sent money ad parcels for the festivals, and Shabbat morning services were run in such unusual places as the aisle of the church in Isleham. The boys presented a candelabrum to the villagers, which they made during their stay, using scrap from the local plumbers. It still stands in the church, as a record of the openness of the village for taking in these children...

...

I remember we all filed into the school. I remember somebody running into the school saying "They're all Jews!" and I remember people looking to see if we had tails, to see if we had horns.

Jack Griffiths, evacuee to Isleham.

 

The friendly aliens were doing their best to make us feel at home but it was patently and pathetically obvious that we were not at at home."

Frank Rose, evacuee to Soham.

 

MORE IN IMAGES

 

JFS [had also] admitted a number of refugee children from Nazi Europe on to its rolls in the late 1930s and 70 of these boys were evacuated [to the Ely Jewish Boys' Home]. Children like Chanoch Lerner...arrived without parents and with no English, and found themselves in the 'Free School'.Chanoch remembered that, as he was the first refugee boy in the class to learn English, he was soon teaching the others...

...Refugee children found life as evacuees particularly difficult, Having left their parents behind, they were often in an immense state of shock and some had witnessed terrible events. Dr Bernstein [head teacher] was called out at midnight to the Ely vicarage to persuade three distraught orphan boys to stay there until a kosher billet could be found. With urgency and persistence the vicar's wife, Mrs Hinton Knowles, set up a hostel for refugee boys at 37 St Mary's Sreet in Ely.

 

The boys...were armed with faith that two thousand years of persecution had failed to dim. Exiles in a strange land, hundreds of miles from their homes, they clung tenaciously to the faith, in which they had been nurtured. Their devotedness was a sight to behold.

Dr Bernstein, head teacher of JFS during evacuation.

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DISCOVERY OF DNA: ROSALIND FRANKLIN

DISCOVERY OF DNA - WATSON & CRICK GET THE NOBEL WITH PIVOTAL ROLE OF ROSALIND FRANKLIN NOT PROPERLY ACKNOWLEDGED UNTIL LATER

These stories are in development and are copyright to the team at Historyworks. If you want to use them for press or for other purposes please contact the producer Helen Weinstein: 07974827753.

SUMMARY

Marta to add: story of Rosalind Franklin into bigger picture of DNA - and geolocating it in the App with Eagle Pub and Cavendish Labs (off Benet Street)

SCRIPT FOR APT

Rosalind Franklin was born in London in 1920. Although she died of cancer when she was only 37, in her brief life she was able to achieve extraordinary results. In particular, her research on x-ray crystallography allowed James Watson and Francis Crick to understand the structure of DNA, the molecule that hold the instructions for the development of all living beings.

Since she was a child, Rosalind had a very logical and determined mind. She hated dolls and any game that would involve pretending. She loved Meccano and carpentry, which she learned from her brothers. Her mother wrote that “even as a tiny child, she could never accept a belief or statement for which no reason or proof could be produced”. Already in primary school, she knew she would be a scientist.

After studying at St. Paul’s Girls’ School, in 1938 Rosalind was accepted at Newnham College. Although she always kept fond memories of her university years, it was a terrible moment in the lives of millions of people. War World II started one year later, and even from the protected world of Cambridge academia that experience deeply shook Rosalind. She mentioned the conflict in all the letters to her family. “Thank you for the gas mask – she wrote in October 1939 – we still don’t have to wear them, but we spend hours in the trenches every time there is a warning”. And in 1941: “The whole town is an excellent military objective, as there are RAF lorries and camouflaged charabancs everywhere”.

 

While at Newnham, she became close friend with Adrienne Weil, a pupil of Marie Curie who had fled from France and was a refugee in Cambridge. Thanks to Adrienne, right after the war she accepted a position as crystallographer in a governmental laboratory in Paris, where she stayed for four years.

 

Although she loved her life in the French capital, in 1951 she decided to move back to London to work in the new biophysical laboratory at King’s College. Her experience there was double faceted. On the one hand, she absolutely hated the working condition and the people. Women were not allowed in the MCR, a fundamental place to exchange ideas and information with the colleagues; her research partner, Maurice Wilkins, treated her like an assistant. Especially after the freedom and the positive atmosphere enjoyed in France, she could not accept such a discriminatory situation.

On the other hand though, the work she did at King’s College was the most important of her life. Here she started her investigation on the nature of the structure of nucleic acid, developing a new technique for taking X-ray pictures which showed that the structure of the DNA was best accounted for by a double spiral.

 

However, she was never fully aware of the importance of her research to the work of Watson and Crick. As a result of the awful atmosphere at King’s, Wilkins showed her photographs and reports to Watson and Crick without telling her. In March 1953, one month before the publications of her results on “Nature” alongside an article on DNA structure by Watson and Crick, she decided to move to Birbeck College. The laboratory consisted of a small room at the top of an old-fashioned house, with rain dripping through the roof and no lift; but the colleagues were much nicer and she really enjoyed her time there, especially her work on the polio virus. The mother remembers her carrying small thermos flasks into the kitchen at home, calling out loud “you’ll never guess what is in there – live polio!”.

 

She did not have any recognition for her work at King’s College while alive. When her article was published, “it was a momentous spring – remembers Matt Ridley – Everest climbed, Stalin dead, Playboy born. But the biggest event of all, life solved, caused barely a ripple”. Indeed, at the time no one outside the academic circle was paying any attention to Franklin’s or Watson and Crick’s work on DNA.

 

In 1956 she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer; it is probable that the long exposition to x-ray radiation is a relevant cause for her disease. She died on April 16, 1958, at the age of 37. Had she lived, many say she would have also been awarded the Nobel Prize for the discoveries on DNA, just like Watson and Crick in 1962. Ironically, when she finished her studies at Cambridge she did not even receive a degree, because women were not accepted as full members of the University until 1948.

 

In any case, despite the little time, Rosalind was able to accomplish her mission in life. She continued to work and travel until the end, hoping that her work would be useful to her battle against cancer, although it was too late for her. In one of her letters as an undergraduate, she wrote: “My main aim is to do my best to improve the lot of mankind, present and future”.

She surely did so, by providing a fundamental piece to understand the puzzle of the origins of life.

 

POTENTIAL WORDS - MATERIAL FOR THE COMPOSERS & POETS

 Excerpt from one of Rosalind’s letters (photo available at Newnham College Library)

“Science, for me, gives a partial explanation of life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience and experiment. Your theories are those which you and many other people find easiest and pleasantest to believe, but, so far as I can see, thet have no foundation other than that they lead to a pleasant view of life (and and exaggerated idea of our own importance) […] I maintain that faith in this world is perfectly possible without faith in another world […] your faith rests on the future of yourself and others as individuals, mine on the future and fate of our successes. It seems to me that yours is the more selfish”

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GWEN RAVERAT - CHILDREN'S VIEW OF CAMBRIDGE

GWEN RAVERAT - Children's experience of Cambridge, Writer & Engraver.

These stories are in development and are copyright to the team at Historyworks. If you want to use them for press or for other purposes please contact the producer Helen Weinstein: 07974827753.

SUMMARY: 

Marta to add the geolocation of this story (poss at top of Silver Street & pithily summarize the significance of Gwen Raverat into context of Cambridge: prominent childrens' writer & engraver of her time, gives one of richest insights into a child eye's experience of growing up in Cambridge through her well known memoir "Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood" published in 1952 and still in print today.  

SCRIPT FOR APP:

Gwen Raverat is one of the most important British wood engravers, and the artist who brought this form of printmaking technique into the 20thcentury.

She was born in Cambridge in 1885, as Gwendolen Mary Darwin. Her grandfather was Charles Darwin, the famous naturalist, but she never met him, as he died three years before she was born.

 

The Darwins were a large and united family; Gwen and her cousins were a small but lively tribe, so close that outsiders called them a “sect”. She was very curious as a child and she soon developed a strong interest in drawing and in literature. Her mother taught her how to read at the age of five, and at nine she started to take drawing lessons with Mary Greene, a professional painter based in Cambridge but educated in Paris. As a child, Gwen considered these drawing lessons the most important thing in her life.

 

The other young Darwins were also extremely bright and creative. Her cousin Frances Darwin, later Fances Cornford, became a famous poet. They inspired each other’s work and Frances wrote many poems based on Gwen’s engravings.

The childhood spent between Wychfield, where the cousins lived, and Newnham Grange, where she was born, would remain Gwen’s most important point of reference.

 

Even after enrolling at the prestigious Slade School of Fine Arts in London, in 1908, Gwendolen kept strong links with Cambridge. She was an active member of the “neo-pagans”, the intellectual circle of Cambridge students whose members included Virginia Wolf, John Maynard Keynes and Rupert Brooke.

Thanks to Brooke, she met a French student who had come to England to become a painter, Jacques Raverat. They soon fell in love and got married; their love story inspired Virginia Wolf for her novel “The voyage out”.

 

In 1915 Gwen and Jacques moved to Vence, in Southern France, to live and work together. As an artist, Gwen immediately made a name for herself. “The little woodcuts by Miss G. Darwin – wrote a critic on “The Times” - throwing back to the days of Bewick and Blake, are quite excellent”. Jacques was struggling more for his work to be recognized, partly because of health problems that did not allow him to work and which worsened every year. In the end, he died in 1925 for complications of multiple sclerosis.

 

After her death of her husband, Gwendolen moved back to Cambridge permanently, making the town the centre of her professional and spiritual life. Apart from her activities as an illustrator and engraver, she collaborated to several theatre productions for the New Theatre. Her most famous work is the ballet “Job, a masque for dancing”, inspired by William Blake's “Illustrations of the Book of Job”.The ballet was set up in 1927 by Gwen’s brother-in-law, Geoffrey Keynes (the young brother of John Maynard), to commemorate the centennial of Blake's death. Another member of the extended Darwin family, her second cousin Ralph Vaughan Williams, wrote the music.

 

Perhaps because of the attachment to her family and to her home town, Gwen had also a keen interest in children’s fiction and in childhood memoirs. Her first commission for book illustration was “The Cambridge Book of Poetry for Children” by Kenneth Grahame’s, now a classic anthology. In 1947, when she was 62, she wrote and illustrated her childhood memoirs. “Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood” tells the story of her life as a child in Cambridge and the story of her family. The book was published in 1952 and was never out of print since.

Gwen Raverat died in 1957 at the Old Granary, very close to Newnham Grange. Both houses are now part of the Darwin College complex. One of its student accommodations is dedicated to her memory and on the street, a blue plaque reminds us of her birthplace and of the importance of the Darwin family in the Cambridge community.

 

POTENTIAL WORDS - MATERIAL FOR THE COMPOSERS & POETS

-       “Job: A masque for dancing – Introduction, scene 1”

-       Poems from “The Cambridge Book of Poetry for Children”

-       Chapter “Newnham Grange” from “Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood”

-      Poem by Frances Cornford “Autumn morning at Cambridge”

 

Autumn Morning at Cambridge

I ran out in the morning

when the air was clean and new

And all the grass was glittering and grey with autumn dew

I ran out to the apple tree and pulled an apple down

And all the bells were ringing in the old grey town. ??

Down in the town

off the bridges and the grass

They are sweeping up the leaves to let the people pass

Sweeping up the old leaves

golden-reds and browns

While the men go to lecture with the wind in their gowns

Frances Darwin Cornford

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ADDENBROOKES - CABINET OF CURIOSITIES

ADDENBROOKES - EXTRAORDINARY CABINET OF CURIOSITIES

These stories are in development and are copyright to the team at Historyworks. If you want to use them for press or for other purposes please contact the producer Helen Weinstein: 07974827753.

SUMMARY: 

Janine to add the geolocation of this story - with the old Addenbrookes where the Judge Institute now stands - and the infamous 'VD' clinic cause of much hilarity amongst locals because it is where Brown's Restaurant recently located - opposite the Fitzwilliam Museum. 

SCRIPT FOR APP:

The name Addenbrookes is now known to present residents of Cambridge, because of  "Addies" - the huge hospital and medical research institution on the outskirts of Cambridge.   And Addenbrookes was indeed a pioneering medic, hugely influential in the annals of the history of medicine, is cabinet of curiosities housed at his former college, St Catherine's....