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Cambridgeshire (Cambridge, Wisbech, Ely, March, Whittlesey, Chatteris, Linton) 

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• Historical notes about The English Administrative County of Cambridgeshire
  CAMBRIDGESHIRE in 1950
  Those who, very properly, seek to know from the reports of the Land Utilization Survey how Cambridgeshire lives, will be confronted, in the one dealing with Cambridgeshire proper (that is, excluding the Isle of Ely) with Rupert Brooke's verse, which must be quoted:
• God! I will pack, and take a train,
  And get me to England once again!
  Where men with Splendid Hearts may go.
  And Cambridgeshire, of all England,
  The shire for Men who Understand."
  This is a good beginning, for, truth to tell, the county in question is by no means among the larger or more populous of all England, and is further reduced by its division into two jurisdictions, Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely, and still further by the fact that, perhaps partly from ancient sentiment, and partly from the nature of its soil, the centres of population on which its villages depend are nearly all just outside its boundaries. When you still further deduct the adventitious presence of a university which has nothing to do with the character of the soil, and is a possession of the English-speaking world and a good deal beyond that Cambridgeshire should have as much distinctive character as it has, and none could possibly grudge Rupert Brooke's generous tribute to the rather accidentally chosen site in which he spent his happy undergraduate days. In fact, the danger is, that any easy-going inquirer will find out a lot about King's College Chapel and Grantchester and Ely Cathedral, and other international, literary and archaeological matters, and miss the real Cambridgeshire altogether.
• Let us begin, therefore, with the ordinary school atlas. The double county you will find there depicted is a shire of England, in all some forty-five miles from north to south, just missing the Wash, on the shores of which Lincolnshire and Norfolk meet, and just losing Royston, at the southern extremity, to Hertfordshire. It is some twenty-five miles broad at its widest, from Newmarket Heath (the town is in Suffolk, but not the railway station) to just outside St Neots, which is in Huntingdonshire. It is, therefore, very roughly, oblong. It is cut into two fairly equal parts by the course of the Great Ouse through Ely, which is a kind of minor capital of the northern half. The area of the whole is just over half a million acres (half the size of Norfolk) three hundred and thirteen thousand three hundred and ninety-two acres in the Cambridge part and two hundred and thirty-nine thousand nine hundred and fifty in the Ely part. The countryside is entirely agricultural. In the Cambridge area you can see some signs of cement works, but ninety percent of the land is under crops and grass. In the Ely part the proportion of agricultural land is lower there are sixty thousand acres of wild fen, and immense artificial waterways. We had better establish here and now the little-known fact that this, north Cambridgeshire, legally known as the Isle of Ely since the Norman Conquest, is the real fen. Cambridgeshire, where this Fen country really is, is a deeply interior part of England, with a belt fifty miles broad separating it from the North Sea. Norfolk and Suffolk have little part of it, and that only for administrative convenience. The Isle of Ely merges insensibly into southern Lincolnshire, the appearance, cultivation and climate of which it shares.
• Prehistoric Marsh
  The Isle of Ely is quite unmistakable to anyone who has to cross it by road or rail. It is prehistoric marsh, which has been embanked and drained on various occasions dating from Roman times; a more vigorous effort was made under expert Dutch supervision in the seventeenth century, and later still - in the later nineteenth century. Wentworth Day (whose family has owned land in the district for centuries), described in his Farming Adventure how his mother, visiting cottages in what were even then inaccessible fastnesses, found conditions that might have seemed more natural in Asiatic Russia. It is maintained, as you see it, by power pumps and constant vigilance and expense.
• Ely's Prosperity
  Today the appearance, save for Ely Cathedral, Thorney Abbey and a few old-fashioned houses, is entirely modern extremely prosperous. The farms and houses scattered along the immense artificial drains (the Bedford River is so long and straight that is one of the stock means of demonstrating the roundness of the earth's face) are all new. The population clusters in little Ely, perfect example of a cathedral town, which has more cathedral than town and in the "islands" of Thorney, Whittlesey, March, Chatteris, Littleport, to which Wisbech and Soham really belong by nature, trade, appearance and communication. Only March and Wisbech exceed the ten thousand population mark. But I should say that the general level of prosperity, both for its wide distribution and lack of fluctuation, is easily the highest in all England, the Boston division of Lincolnshire excepted. Many fields are under highly specialized crops which run a great risk for the sake of great profits, as the climate is markedly Continental, being entirely different from that of East Anglia, only twenty miles away. The cold can be so extreme that the more celebrate skating events take place on the regulated waters of the drains, and very late and heavy frosts are always possible. But the general economy appears well able to stand up to it, and has completely forgotten and outgrown the loss of the ancient inland navigation that used to serve six counties. The district is not easy to describe; it is not spectacular. The best way to get an idea of it is to stop for a few hours in Wisbech, and look at the majestic range of merchant houses lining the Brinks, or in little Chatteris to observe the traffic. Or again, survey it all on a map which marks its mighty embankments as "twelve-food drain," "sixteen-foot river," and "Parson's Eau," and so on.
• Plainly, such a place was once fever-haunted swamp, and I have heard the late W. G. Clarke describe how the great floods of 1849 drowned the vipers, of which many could be seen, he had been told, hanging in trees into which they had contrived to climb. Today drinking water is still a matter for careful thought. I heard long and anxious discussions in 1940 as to the possible result of the water tower near March being hit by a German bomb.
• The next most important industry is the railway. There are approximately one hundred and eighty-five miles of the L.N.E.R in Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely, these being served by forty-three stations. The two marshalling yards at Whitemoor are amongst the biggest in this country.
• The area administered from Cambridge lies south of that town and of the roads from it to Huntingdon and to Newmarket. It has much in common with the neighbouring parishes that happen to be in Hertfordshire or Bedfordshire and nothing whatsoever in common with the Isle of Ely, or indeed with the basin of the Cam north of Cambridge. Anywhere around Melbourn and Linton you find farms of about two hundred acres, two-thirds under plough. The labourers live in picturesque thatched and plaster-faced or brick cottages, and intelligent preservation has done much, as might be expected in the orbit of university influence, to make agriculture look at its best. Above all, the people of the region have the advantage of quite exceptional educational and cultural facilities in the Village Colleges.
• This remarkable group of institutions, first mooted in 1925, was finally launched in 1930 when Sawston village school (seven miles south-east of Cambridge), rebuilt to form a college, was formally opened. The money needed was raised from many sources, largely voluntary. The original venture gave facilities for nine neighbouring villages, but since then several other village colleges have been opened, chiefly those at Bottisham, Linton, and Impington.
• The curricula are both interesting and varied, ranging from craftsmen guild's work to lectures on current affairs. Recreational and sports facilities are extensive and, under the aegis of various societies connected with the colleges, visits are regularly paid by students to centres of occupational interest and educational value, such as cattle breeding stations and model farms.
• A library, common room ad games room are features of each college, which is controlled by a warden, supported by a freely elected council of the students. This sends a representative to the board of managers convened by the county authority. Nothing is given free, but costs are kept within the compass of the wage-earner's pocket. Sometimes premises have to be hired, but the only paid staff consists of the warden, adult organizer and caretaker. Much of the effort is voluntary, a rota of seventy women helping at Impington canteen, for instance. Linton has an organized but service and celebrity concerts; transport for villages lying at some distance is general, and averages over forty persons per night. Such is part of the background of Young Cambridgeshire in the post-war era. Will it keep them on the land?
• Westward, along the Bedfordshire border, the characteristic chalky soil is replaced by a much stiffer border clay, which presents many additional difficulties to the farmer and renders cultivation expensive and arduous. There is also a portion of similar distinctive soil in the extreme south-east of the county.
• The typical Cambridgeshire countrymen is a farmer or farm labourer, working on the normal type of mixed farm averaging about two hundred acres, cropped until the First World War on the Norfolk four-course system of variations of it. Even at that date a considerable progressive modification could be observed by the traveller moving north from, say, Melbourn. As soon as he passed Cambridge town he found himself descending from the chalky ridges, of which Gog Hill forms the best known, to flat alluvial marsh. As he progressed he found himself in an increasingly artificial landscape, where many of the fields where below the level of the water in the great dykes that are far more numerous than roads or railways. Farms were isolated, and built mainly on the "islands," those relics of the time when all this fertile land was swamp more impassable than the remote Highlands, joined by causeways running between deep wet ditches.
• It is difficult to estimate how far the average farm worker drew any comfort from the loveliness of the towers of Ely Cathedral. One has the impression that the worker in this district was far worse off, less independent and able to stand up for himself than his brother in Norfolk. How far this rose from lack of the strong Scandinavian strain found in the districts nearer the coast, how far it resulted from the translation of marsh-men living on the margin of civilization into farm workers, it would be hard to trace. It seems to the writer that a great change has taken place well within the last fifty years which has raised decisively the status of Cambridgeshire agricultural labour. This change, of course, is not peculiar to Cambridgeshire alone.
• Modern Agricultural Methods
  All modern mechanical means have been in his favour. The intensive cultivation of relatively small holdings in the Isle of Ely and as far south as Soham, could only be made profitable with highly modern means of communication. As swift road haulage has been increasingly provided it must have a lot to do with the prosperity which is obvious here. Perhaps it only began in the mid-nineteenth century with the increasing demands for better food from swollen town populations. But it has certainly been advanced by the ultra-modern establishments of the great jam-producing firm at Histon, north of Cambridge, and the sugar-beet factory at Ely. This, however, does not explain Wisbech, which must be one of the richest places, for its size, in the kingdom. Nor, indeed, does any modern mechanical advance explain the presence of three ancient chatedrals - Ely, Peterborough and Lincoln - all on the shores of the same fen, and the fact that Ely is one of the richer bishoprics. We are left with the fact that such places sheltered the arts of peace, and commanded the only means of transport for centuries. Wisbech has a castle, but the chief reason for its importance was the fact that it gave access to sea-going craft.
• Reclaiming the Fen
  The great advance in drainage of the fen seems to have been made in the early half of the nineteenth century. A survey was made by Vancouver in 1794 and another made for the Royal Agricultural Society in 1846. From comparison of these two emerges the significant fact that, while in the portions of the county of older cultivation the progress of enclosure has not been unlike that of neighbouring counties, all the newly won land was enclosed as soon as it was drained.
• We may, I think, take a reasonably bright view of the future of the agricultural worker in Cambridgeshire. All modern developments, any move towards greater facility of transport, or finance, every regulation of the townsman's diet, will help to improve the position of agricultural labour. Even the pockets of heavy and heartbreaking clay in the south-east and south-west of the county could be brought into useful cultivation by organized public effort. The seriousness of the food situation will almost certainly call this effort into being.
• But what does the other half of the Cambridgeshire population do, which is not concerned with any sort of agriculture? The answer is that the two main industries of the chief town are the railway, already noted, and the university. It is no business of this text to trace the history of one of the most ancient and honourable seats of learning, but only to describe one of the means by which many of the inhabitants of the place in which at least half the people who live in Cambridgeshire proper, earn their living. Even those who do not, cannot go far from their doors, whatever their occupation, without being aware of such an institution in their midst.
• Cambridge University
  It is best to approach the matter in this way, and to get rid at the outset of the idea that Cambridge owes its origin to the university. Trevelyan, who should know, states that the first colleges, or the nucleus of them, "inns," "halls," groups of scholars following some teacher with no discipline and small resources, came to Cambridge from Oxford, where they had just grown into recognizable units, as a "result of town and gown feuds of a more murderous kind than usual." The choice of Cambridge resulted from its being "a meeting-place of water-ways and Roman Roads convenient for the North and East of London . . . just over fifty miles from London, which has no University." (Roman Roads were the only metalled roads outside towns until Stuart times) " . . . the first Colleges were started . . . (Balliol, Oxford 1261, Peterhouse, Cambridge 1284, that is all the "seniority" Oxford enjoys) . . . to provide food and maintenance for scholars." Paris and Padua also had many colleges "which have since disappeared with very few exceptions . . . .But they never attained to the size, wealth and importance eventually reached by corresponding institutions in England . . . until in Stuart times they devoured their mother University."
• The town to which the refuges from Oxford came was already a very considerable market, with its great Statutory Fair known as the Stourbridge Fair, which was held just outside its eastern gate. The nucleus of the town lay round about Magdalene Bridge, with the castle on the high land just to the west, and the Templars' circular church a few yards to the east.
• Since the object of this account is not archaeology, but chiefly explanation of the daily life of the man or woman who lives in this town of Cambridge, it is pertinent to ask, as would any intelligent inquirer:
• "Why on earth is the nucleus of a fairly important provincial centre, a market town, (which, you tell us, has almost accidentally had this venerable university planted upon it five and half centuries ago) at an extra-ordinary corner like this, where two intolerably narrow main streets meet at an angle, one to the other, before a ridiculously narrow bridge?"
  This, after all, is an everyday matter to Cambridge, and it illustrates a fact about the citizen that you cannot ignore. You may land from the most modern aircraft at the airfield on the Newmarket Road and be driven by high-speed car to the Senate House, or University Library, or some working modern establishment of a progressive university of world-wide fame, but your direct route lies round that awkward corner. Why? Because the easternmost of the two streets that form it is the Roman Road from Colchester to Chester. Today it is called progressively Bridge Street, Sidney Street, and St Andrew Street as it stretches south. The other, long the High Street of the medieval town, today St John's Street, Trinity Street, King's Parade, Trumpington Street, is the way to London by road. That is how the early trading and inland water centre of Cambridge (the bridge over the Cam, today Magdalene Bridge) happened to grow up, along a Roman Road, beneath a Saxon or Danish Castle on a mound just to the west of it (and today the county administration is still carried on there). If you are from overseas you may well say:
• "How ridiculous. It would pay them a thousand times over to pull down St John's College, and this old church of the Templars, double the bridge, and get some space to turn round in!"
  Just so. When you have mastered the fact that no sum of money, no other prospect you could hold out, will induce the people of Cambridge to so as you so wisely instruct them, you will have begun to grasp the cardinal fact about the life of the average citizen of Cambridge. He has got something you cannot buy.
• The thing he has got, and which began to take noticeable shape, so far as anyone can tell, about 1380, transformed the then trading and transport town into the university town. The university did not become an effective corporate body until much later, indeed it only gradually became "present" at all. Today it consists of seventeen Colleges, very loosely and tolerantly banded together with ample autonomy within the organization of the whole. Twelve of them lie along the ancient High Street (or Trumpington Street, King's Parade, Trinity Street, St John's Street) and the River Cam. Only one of the twelve, Magdalene, stands on the left or west bank of the river, and two, Corpus Christi and Pembroke, to the east of the street. The others occupy, with their spacious and lovely courts and buildings, best seen from the "Backs" or back entrances on that same west bank (the choice of prospect of which has been so desecrated by military camps and car parks during this latest war), the space which the older trading town used to fill. You can trace some of the old streets running from the market-place on what they call a "Hill" in Cambridge (meaning that it is not liable to floods), in Silver Street and the various lanes between the colleges.
• Five more colleges are to be found along or beyond the other main street from Magdalene Bridge. Seven of the lot have dedications similar to colleges in Oxford. Otherwise they exhibit most of the utter variety and individuality with which they were dowered at their inception. The titles by which their heads are called, their numbers of students, their private non-state-provided funds their specialities, if we may use such a word, all vary as much as anyone could contrive if he tried. Beyond their appearance, dominating the main streets and any remote view of the town, and the imponderable atmosphere such a mass of medieval influence and slowly stratified progress produces, they are, it has been said, an industry. They house, or should house, some five thousand students from all over the United Kingdom and some few from overseas, under special arrangement. This works out roughly at an average of two hundred and seventy per college, but this is a most misleading way of looking at things, for Trinity has more than double that number, and others less than half of it. The only purpose such a figure serves is to compare it with Oxford, where twenty-one colleges, of equivalent status and age, house considerably fewer students, said to average two hundred per college. This population of students is, of course, a seasonal one. They are in residence for about thirty weeks of the year, ignoring some few who have special business during the ample, leisurely and absolutely essential vacations. They are waited on by a "domestic staff," if one dare coin such a phrase, very difficult to define, but thought to number about two thousand in normal times, and ranging from highly skilled professional caterers and administrators, at substantial salaries, to a regular corps of women "bed-makers." The Land Utilization Report says: "Surely there can nowhere else be so much taking in of washing, or a town where the humble trade of bed-making is of more economic importance."
• Finally, there are what modern nomenclature would call the "teaching staff," possibly the greatest aggregate of celebrated brains within any municipal area whatever. Don is their familiar label. Many of them are Fellows on the establishment of the individual colleges, but the number is impossible to check on account of the wide variety of lectures and other functions which cause which cause them to live in Cambridge all or part of the year.
• The above are what people normally think of when they say "Cambridge colleges," but it must not be overlooked that there are two large and flourishing women's colleges, and a large array of quasi-collegiate institutions, most of them connected with religious bodies, with their staffs from wardens or heads down to domestic retainers. And to the whole tale of colleges must be added the relatively few university non-college librarians, administrators, custodians, clerks, and the famous "bull-dogs" or university policemen.
• Such is the "industry" of the university in which some thousands of Cambridgeshire townsmen and women are engaged, which with its partner, the railway, brings to a close the brief tale of that county.
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