So at one time, there were four passenger railway lines running out of Wisbech. Now the town has none, though the old tracks that linked it to March still exist. Branch lines which used to feed the villages around Wisbech have all gone, though I always find it moving to see evidence of them - pubs with such names as 'The Locomotive', or Station Road, or old gates that were obviously part of railway crossings. Just occasionally, you come across a signal box that has been converted to some other purpose, but most have been pulled down.
Even in the days before the railway, it was reasonably easy to travel to London, which is about 100 miles south of Wisbech. In the 1770s, for example, you could go in the mail coach which left daily at 4pm. The fare was twenty-five shillings (inside) or half-price outside. Or you could travel in the stage coach which operated on three days of the week (eighteen shillings inside; nine shillings outside).
The pioneer photographer Samuel Smith (1802 - 1892) lived on the outskirts of Wisbech, in the village (or rather suburb) called Leverington. Just a decade after the invention of photography, he set up as a photographer in Wisbech. One hundred and ninety of his negatives are in the Wisbech Museum. The importance of his work was not fully recognized until an exhibition of it was given in London in 1973. A book of his photographs has been published, showing many daily scenes in Wisbech one hundred and fifty years ago. In those days, long exposures (fifteen minutes!) were needed, so he had to persuade people to keep very still while they posed. Often he would set the exposure going and then walk round to get into the picture himself. Usually, with his street scenes, the roads look completely empty. This is because people would walk past and not be seen for long enough to be picked up by the camera! Here is such a picture from 1857.
Smith was also a collector of shells, coins, insects and geological specimens. He did much work for Wisbech Museum in its early days, even making cases and arranging displays.
Wisbech has had a Post Office since 1793. The first was in Upper Hill Street. In 1851 it moved to Cornhill. There is a Samuel Smith photo of Mr. Goward, the Post Master, standing outside this office in 1854. In 1887, the Post Office moved to its present site in a pseudo-Gothic building, near the river and facing the Clarkson Memorial. There has been a telephone service in Wisbech since 1898.
A curious thing happened to the local economy in 1823. Wisbech Corporation was forced to make massive financial cutbacks. (How history repeats itself!) They made a plan to reduce the number of street lights from 237 to 37 and also to make several watchmen and 'scavengers' redundant. We do not know whether the plan was thoroughly carried out.
The history of formal education in Wisbech is interesting and exemplifies the developments that occurred in country towns throughout England before the great Education Acts of the Nineteenth Century.
But before going back further, I must give one detail of personal interest to me. During the Second World War, the boys from The Stationers' Company's School in North London were temporarily evacuated to Wisbech and educated there. I missed this experience, as I became a pupil at The Stationers' Company's School a little later.
We have some figures for Wisbech's early school rolls. In 1710, Wisbech had 50 boys and 40 girls attending its two schools. There were also some 'dame' schools. By 1798, there were 250 boys being taught reading, writing, arithmetic and catechism, while 30 girls were receiving lessons in reading, sewing, knitting and - yes - catechism. In those days, a child attended such a school for just three years.
There were other schools. The Unitarian School in Deadman's Lane was established in 1803 and took up to 240 boys.
The girls' school was at the junction of Lower Hill Street and Nene Quay: 'Lower Hill Street School' was opened in 1814. After 1874, it also accepted infants. This school closed in 1928.
The boys' school was rebuilt in 1874 (as 'St. Peter's School') on the north side of Stermyn Street. Its premises are now occupied by an estate agency.
There was a Boys' British School, opened in 1803. It became an infants' school in 1840, when the 'boys' were moved to Victoria Road. Then in 1879 it became the School for Art, Science and Technology (a forerunner of the Isle College of Further Education which later occupied a large campus half a mile outside the town centre). In 1947 the little School's use changed again when it became part of the Wisbech Library. Today it is the box office section of the Angles Theatre.
On the south side of Norwich Road, about half a mile from the town centre, there was a small 'Lecture Hall' (an inscription saying so was still to be seen over its entrance in the 1970s, when it had long been part of a shop.
The original Wisbech Grammar School (a building with stepped gables) is in Hill Street and operated as a school between 1549 and 1898. Today it is a social club.
Like so many other institutions, the old Grammar School owed much of its existence to the generosity of one philanthropist. In this case, it was John Crane, an apothecary, who left much property to the town in 1651, some of it to provide a salary for the Master of the Grammar School. As late as 1837, the Master was still receiving £20 per annum from this bequest. Originally, the school had been set up by the Guild of the Holy Trinity in the Sixteenth Century. Land for it was acquired in Hill Street in 1549. There was a projecting wing at the back for supplementary use as a meeting place for the burgesses, so it doubled at the time as a Town Hall.
Regarding windmills, the remains of one (in Lynn Road) were converted into an unusual home in approximately 1980. Another windmill (Neal's Windmill - long gone) was in Hill Street.
Like most places, Wisbech suffered frequently from the Plague. Particularly bad outbreaks are believed to have occurred in the 1580s, one of them killing 140 residents. A 'pesthouse' was set up on the north-western outskirts of the town.
In the cholera epidemic of 1849, there were 66 deaths in Wisbech. Because of this and the outbreak in 1854, water supplies and sewerage were massively improved. A special extension to the town centre's graveyard had been opened in 1832, mainly to accommodate cholera victims. This little patch of green is today treated as a very small park. (I taught my daughter to ride her bike there in the 1960s.) There was once a chapel on the site but that has gone. The only evidence left of the site's former use comprises two tombstones - both without legible markings and both within rosebeds.
If you head north-west from Wisbech Town Centre, you reach in less than a mile (and after crossing the River Nene) an interesting, small disused and overgrown cemetery. It was known as the Leverington Road Cemetery and was opened in 1835. It is currently hidden away behind the Asda Store. It had a chapel designed by William Adams in the Doric style. From the fragment that remains of the chapel, it seems to have been unusually magnificent. On the crumbling tombstones, one can discern such family names as Hotson, Lankfer and Dawbarn (still very common in the area) and it is said that the photographer Samuel Smith was buried there.
In the Sixteenth Century, there were disputes between the inhabitants of Wisbech and those of March (a small town 10 miles to the south) over whose sheep and cattle could graze on the common land between. This resulted in fights, malicious killings of animals, and rebukes from the Bishop of Ely. A similar dispute between Wisbech and Long Sutton (a few miles to the north) had occurred in the Fifteenth Century.
There was a gallows on the river bank, a little below Horseshoe Terrace, so presumably public executions were carried out. A gaol, which existed from 1846 until 1878, had 43 cells. Gaol Road is still there.
A local newspaper - 'The Fenland Advertiser' (founded 1845, though as ‘The Wisbech Advertiser') - had its headquarters in Union Street. As we can see from Smith’s photos taken in 1858, the name 'Gardiner' was right across the top of the shop. John Gardiner was proprietor and editor of the paper. Gardiner's son and successor, F.J. Gardiner, in 1898 wrote a book called 'A History of Wisbech'.
The town has been well served by newspapers. The early 21st Century rival to 'The Fenland Advertiser' is 'The Wisbech Standard', which was founded in 1868. Other titles (now gone) were 'The Lynn and Wisbech Packet' (founded 1800), 'The Wisbech Observer' (of 1813), 'The Star in the East' (1836), 'The Wisbech Gazette' (1837) and 'The Telegram' (1877). 'The Wisbech Standard' now operates from a small office in the Market Place but not many years ago it had larger premises in Hill Street and (even earlier, as I have seen from old photos) it was on the Nene Quay, in premises now occupied by Grounds Estate Agents.
A few houses in the area are very old. For example, No. 97 Norfolk Street (very close to the town centre) is dated 1701 and has the remains of a Dutch gable. No. 29, Market Place (now a shop), conceals a medieval vaulted cellar, believed to have religious origins. In Hill Street, there is an unusual shop: it is strangely long and ostensibly impractical. This is because it used to be the Fire Station! A new Fire Station was built half a mile outside the town centre in the 1980s.
Norwich Road, which stretches for about a mile away from the town centre in the general direction of Norwich, was originally Marshland Road. It developed as a pleasant suburb from the end of the Eighteenth Century. The earliest known house (now white cottages) dates from 1793. Alas, this road is hardly a pleasant suburb today.
William Godwin grew up in Wisbech. His father was John Godwin, minister of the Unitarian Chapel (believed to have been situated in what is now Hill Street) from 1748 until 1758. Godwin himself (1756 - 1836) wrote 'Political Justice' and 'Caleb Williams'. He married the philosopher and writer Mary Wollstonecraft: their daughter Mary married Shelley and is best-known as the author of 'Frankenstein', though she also wrote other novels considered better.
Octavia Hill (1838-1912) was born in 1838 at 7, South Brink, a house overlooking the river (and now refurbished as a museum in her honour). She was (while inspired by Ruskin and working in London) a housing reformer, a philanthropist and a founder of the National Trust.
But the most famous native of Wisbech was Thomas Clarkson (1760 - 1846), educated at Wisbech Grammar School (where his father was the master), a researcher, writer and campaigner who devoted his life to the abolition of slavery. A splendid 70-foot limestone memorial to him (incorporating his statue) - erected by public subscription in 1880 - stands just south of the River Nene, at the entrance to the Town Centre. It was designed by Sir G. Gilbert Scott and is in Fifteenth-Century Gothic style.
Where the Clarkson Memorial now stands, there was a building called the 'Butter Market' or 'Butter Cross'. It was built in 1801. It had an upper storey supported by open arches. Magistrates held court there; and it also served for a time as the Customs House. The building was removed at the time of the bridge development in 1856.
People today think of Wisbech as an agricultural and fruit-growing region but in fact, fruit growing (mainly apples and strawberries at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century) was introduced by immigrants from Kent only in the Nineteenth Century. Mr. H.H. Bath in about 1850 employed 1000 fruit-pickers in the season at his 600-acre orchards.
It is hard to believe today that Wisbech was - in the 1850s - the second busiest corn market in England (Wakefield was the first). Having at the time both the port and a railway station must have been important in this respect.
In the early Nineteenth Century, land could be bought for between 15 shillings and 40 shillings an acre: the best-drained fetched the highest prices. In 1837, you could rent a labourer's cottage at the edge of the Horse Fair (now the Bus Station and part of the town centre's shopping area) for £6 per annum, or a better-class house in The Crescent for £28 and 10 shillings.
The streets of Wisbech were not paved until 1810. Street cleaning dates only from 1721. Early street lamps were powered by whale oil.
Law was maintained (until 1836) by paid watchmen. Their superintendents carried a cutlass, a pistol and a lantern. In 1836, a Wisbech Police Force (of eight men) was established. By 1900, there were ten policemen. The original Police Station and Sessions House still exists on the South Brink but has in recent years been used the local authority for various purposes. A modern police station is now situated next to the Freedom Bridge.
Jane Stuart, said to have been an illegitimate daughter of James II, sought refuge in Wisbech after her father's downfall. She earned a living as a worsted spinner and became a Quaker. She is believed to have been buried in the grounds of the Friends' Meeting House - one of the fine buildings on the North Brink.
Peckover House (now administered by the National Trust) is Wisbech's most famous and most visited building. Constructed in 1722 (with its low wings added in 1878), it stands picturesquely facing the River Nene from the North Brink. The house is a splendid, elegant example from the period but today it is the two-acre Victorian-style walled garden that attracts most tourists. It is rich in specimens and interestingly laid out. There is one of the largest maidenhair tress in the country. Three orange trees in the conservatory fruit regularly.
The Peckovers were a Quaker banking family who had a great influence on the history of Wisbech. Peckover House was bought by them in the Nineteenth Century.
Near Peckover House and designed by Algernon Peckover is the Friends’ Meeting House (mentioned above) of 1854.
Further along the North Brink are other houses designed by the Peckovers. These feature curiosities popular with the Victorians: crow-stepped gables, mock Tudor chimneys, fish-scale tiles, hexagonal slates, for example. Two of the houses on the Brink have little towers – gazebos – alongside them, viewing points from which the ladies used to watch the shipping.
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| Fine properties overlooking the River Nene. |
Harecroft House (1844) – further along the North Brink – was built by Algernon Peckover in the style of an Italian villa for his son Alexander. In 1904, the building became the Girls’ High School and is now part of Wisbech Grammar School. The Grammar School became a private, fee-paying school in the final quarter of the Twentieth Century, when its governors declined to let it become part of the state's 'comprehensive' education system. So its pupils today tend to come from wealthy families, some of them bussed in from twenty miles away.
Houses, warehouses and cottages accreted along the Brinks beside the River Nene over hundreds of years. Before planning laws were as strict as they are today, architects did not have to think much about relative aesthetic effects. The result is the current higgledy-piggledy picturesqueness. In fact, an extraordinary harmony is achieved: each building is different but they blend together. Many types of architectural detail are visible, for example urns, friezes, pilasters and columns. Such details may not be considered necessary today but they enrich the historic landscape of Wisbech and help make parts of it very attractive.
Those splendid Georgian fronts of the North Brink are deceptive. There were houses in those places in Tudor times. What happened was that the Georgians 'did up' those Tudor houses, in particular giving them the attractive facades. There stands between two of them an ancient warehouse probably belonging to one of the original Tudor houses but not renovated in Georgian times. It continued to be used as a warehouse or storage space right up to the present day. I have been told it was once used as a sailmaker's premises.
Along the North Brink, not everybody before 1800 built their properties to front on to the river. There are some other such warehouses (and houses) which are built sideways on to it or whose fronts face away from the river.
Everyone knows that in England there used to be a Window Tax. This meant that householders had to pay a tax based on the numbers of windows in their home. Most owners therefore bricked up some of their windows in order to reduce the amount of window tax. This crazy tax was repealed in 1851. However, all over England, you still see thousands of buildings with some window spaces bricked up before that time. Sometimes the bricked-up windows have later been painted to look like windows! There are plenty of them in Wisbech and they include several on the North Brink.
The famous Georgian Crescent was laid out from 1793 until 1816, forming a circle round where the site of the medieval castle walls once stood. The first part to be developed was York Row, a short road that leads from the river to the Crescent. Nos. 6-8 York Row are known to have been there in the 1600s. Similarly, No. 7-9 York Row (believed to have been built by Thurloe for his sons in 1658) is a preserved gabled house of some standing.
On the opposite side of the Crescent is Castle Lodge, facing the Museum. It incorporates a balcony of diagonally set corbels taken from Thurloe's 'Castle'. (A corbel is a block of projecting stone, supporting something on its horizontal top surface.)
The present Westgate (a moderate-sized Co-Op department store including a bank and a restaurant) stands on the site of the United Methodist Church, which was built in 1862. The road is still called 'Little Church Street'.
There was a playhouse in Wisbech (at North End) in 1792. Evidence of this is a map in the Wisbech Museum. However, the better-known little Angles Theatre was built in 1793, the year in which Louis XVI was beheaded. The famous actor Macready played there in 1836. Cobbett addressed an audience of 220 there in April 1830. The last theatrical performance in the Nineteenth Century was in 1847. The building became a Wesleyan Methodist Church and later a little school and later still a Spiritualist Church. But in the 1970s some young enthusiasts, headed by my immensely-talented old friend Mike James (who has long since left the area), set about restoring and re-opening the place as The Angles Theatre. It has been in operation as a performance centre ever since, greatly helped by grants from authorities and funding councils.
In 1793, John Baxter left £1220 for the benefit of the disabled church-going poor. This was known as 'Baxter's Charity'. In 1837 there were 18 recipients. Baxter's tomb is one of the most sumptuous in Wisbech. It is in the town centre graveyard of St. Peter’s Church.
Another charitable resident was Mrs. Judith Mayer, who left £1900 in her will of 1811 to provide for a Mrs. Mayer's Asylum - a two-storey grey-brick building, which she envisaged as a kind of hospital for the infirm. The courts insisted on making it an ordinary almshouse taking five inmates. It was built in 1815, south of Stermyn Street, alongside the division of the river which at the time ran south from the Nene Quay.
Adjoining Mrs. Mayer's at a right angle were Stermyn's Almshouses - four houses built in 1614, thanks to a bequest of £100 by Mrs. Jacomin Stermyn. These were replaced by two-room almshouses in 1813.
In addition, a Dr. Henry Hawkins in 1631 had left £300 for the establishment of almshouses. Six were built and they were used from 1632 until 1835, when they were demolished. The Corporation built six double almshouses in King's Walk to replace them. There are now apartment flats on the site.
South-east of the present Norfolk Street / Norwich Road junction - that is to say alongside where there once was the south-flowing river, a timber market was situated. Goods were unloaded from the river. The timber market stalls and booths stood where the shops of Norfolk Street are today.
The eastern extremity of Wisbech – one and a half miles from the town centre - is known as Walsoken (the ‘Wal-’ in the name probably refers to what was once the sea wall). That was where I lived for 30 years. In 1933, portions of Walsoken which had been within the county of Norfolk were transferred for administrative purposes to Wisbech. Today, the whole of the eastern side of Wisbech is so built up that Walsoken is hardly seen in any sense as separate from the town.
Wisbech's famous brewery, situated on the North Brink of the River Nene, about a mile west of the town centre, was established in 1795. It was a conversion of an oil mill and granary. It changed hands a number of times and was bought in 1877 by John Elgood. The brewery is still run by the Elgood family.
There used to be another brewery - Boucher's - on the site by the river where Wisbech Police Station now stands! A Samuel Smith photo from 1854 shows it clearly, with the Workhouse in the distance.
When I first lived in Wisbech (1968), the town had a small and cosy library. As explained above, it was substantially what is now The Angles Theatre. But a Methodist Chapel - dating from 1803 - in the Crescent was pulled down and a modern larger library established there. (There are stories that in 1786 early Methodists were pelted with mud when trying to preach in the Market Place.) This modern library – though commendable in what it offers the public - is out-of-sympathy with its Georgian surroundings.
Round the corner from the present library stands Wisbech Museum. It was designed as such by George Buckler and built in 1846-7 at a cost of £2405. Being on the site of the ancient castle's moat, its foundations have tended to sink a little, but it is still a very good museum by small country town standards. Its greatest treasure is the original Dickens manuscript of 'Great Expectations', which was bequeathed to the Museum by Mr. S. H. Townshend.
Some of the pubs and inns of the area date back a very long time. The timber-frames of the New Inn (Union Street) were constructed in about 1500. The Rose and Crown Hotel (still occasionally used as a film set), at the northern end of the Market Place, has a two-storey outbuilding dating from 1601. The Hotel is mainly a seventeenth-century building, with a Regency facade. There is an impressive eighteenth-century staircase.
The Town Hall in use today was built (by Medworth) after the 1810 Improvement Act (which had far-reaching effects - for example it forced the corporation to have all roads paved). It is situated on a site previously occupied by The Nag's Head Inn on the north side of the river, but immediately across the bridge from the town centre. The lower storey, originally with open arches, was intended as a corn exchange but was hardly used as such. Today it has been turned into a room that may be hired for meetings and events. The Council Chamber is on the first floor.
There is in Hill Street a Working Men's Club provided by the Peckover family and dating from 1891. It has a distinctive clock tower which rises high above the roofs near the Bus Station and contains a carillon which still plays tunes on the hour). In 1898 the 'Wisbech Working Men's Club and Institute' was the most financially successful of all English working men's clubs, with nearly £6000 in investments. Known as Alfred House, it had a gymnasium and a library.
In the Lynn Road (so named because it points the way to King's Lynn), a Workhouse was erected soon after the passing of the 1835 Poor Law Act. With twin turrets, it was designed to resemble from the outside an Elizabethan stately home. It catered for 22 parishes and could accommodate 600 people. Each inmate was supported at 31 pence per week. The building included shoemakers' and tailors' workshops, schoolrooms, dormitories and two 'hospitals'. It was called 'The Union Workhouse'. It became known later as the Clarkson Hospital. Later still, it became part of an agricultural processing factory.
It had replaced the old workhouse, built 1720-22, which looked like a row of four terraced houses and was subdivided into other premises in 1835, including the Customs House (transferred from the Butter Cross) and an ale merchant's shop. This former workhouse stood near the river (Albion Place) where the Department of Health and Social Security Office stands today.
In that eighteenth-century workhouse, 80 people were accommodated: they were employed making garments from wool, together with some brewing and baking. In the 1820s, the Workhouse Master was personally making quite a lot of money. Net profits were about £180 per annum. Before there were workhouses, the Corporation was required to find ways of putting the poor profitably to work.
On the south side of the Lynn Road, half a mile from the town centre, is Wisbech Park, kindly and imaginatively created in 1869 on land bought for £2400 from the Ecclesiastical Commission. It contains lawns, tennis courts, flower beds, walkways and a bandstand in which I sometimes had the pleasure of performing during summer concerts.
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| Audience at a jazz band concert in which I took part, round the bandstand in Wisbech Park. |
There was once a White Cross standing at the junction of North Brink and Chapel Road. Today there is a conspicuously bare space on the pavement where it used to be. In 1585, Wisbech was divided into ten wards for administrative purposes. One of them was White Cross Ward. There are said to be remains of the White Cross in the grounds of Peckover House, about 120 yards from where it stood.
I am told that local dialect words include botty (over-particular, as in 'a botty woman'), flimmocky (fussy), lummox (a clumsy person) and scraunched (grazed or cut). Yet, despite living many years in Wisbech, I do not think I heard any of them, except 'lummox': that word is used frequently by an acquaintance of mine but he comes from Ipswich, not Wisbech.
FOOTNOTES
I am delighted to add these contributions. The first is from my old friend Ian Brakewell, the second from Tuba Skinny fan Chris Rule and the third from Paul in Germany:
Just wanted to say how much Julie and I have enjoyed reading your Short History of Wisbech. It was absolutely engrossing and although it told us many things that we knew already, there were an awful lot of things that had quite escaped us. You must have absorbed a lot of fascinating detail about the town in the years you lived there.
Our own feelings for the town remain ambivalent; we visit once or twice a year ……………… and on a sunny Saturday evening in July the Crescent, The Market Place, St Peter’s Church and Gardens can look magical. There is a peace and tranquillity there that seeps through your bones and reminds me of what life must have been like before motor cars.
On the other hand there is still plenty that dismays me: the never-ending succession of pound shops, an atmosphere of run-down seediness, the menacing characters standing on street corners………..; all of these things still make me thankful to have moved away.
Of famous persons I can add two more. I discovered recently that William Hazlitt’s father, also called William, was a Unitarian Minister who was posted to various parts of the country. He got married in Wisbech in 1766, twelve years before William (the writer) was born. His wife was the daughter of a local ironmonger, but of her name and family I know nothing.
Remember too that Lilian Ream (Julie’s great-great-great aunt) had her photographic studio and business, Crescent Studios, in Wisbech. A commemorative booklet was produced by Cambridgeshire County Council displaying some of her famous pictures of people and places in and around the town. A particular favourite of mine, which I’m sure you will have seen, is of the children in the sweet shop on Elizabeth Terrace. I believe the photographic collection is still housed in Wisbech Library…………….
Hi Ivan,
Fascinating to read your blog about Wisbech. My own bit of fen is considerably South of there, but I too am an exile from the Fens. My father always said that it was originally "Ousebech" or something similar. Certainly that was the exit point for the Ouse for a long time.
If the Wisbech and Upwell tramway was not the inspiration for Thomas the Tank Engine it certainly was for Toby the Tram engine although the only engine of that type I ever saw was on the quayside at Yarmouth. The
line survived on "Coal in, Fruit and Flowers out" for a lot longer than the passenger service, and was one of the earlier lines to be desilised.
I remember the "Friends Meeting House", having been taken there occasionally by my parents. The Peckovers were a Quaker family.
It seems to me that there ought to be a connection between large rivers that have to be embanked and Jazz, but I can't think what it could be. There certainly seems to be between trains and some tunes played by jazz bands.
Regards,
Chris
I just stumbled over your website and your history of Wisbech. I was born there back in 1959 and spent my first ten years in Wisbech before moving away to Germany in 1969. I´m really thankful for all the historic details you have gathered. They brought back lots of memories and a lot of new knowledge. I vividly remember going to Hunstanton by train in the early 60´s. Later, I went to St. Augustine´s Primary School on Lynn Road and then later to Norwich Road School. My childhood was mainly in the 1960´s, my Mum´s kitchen radio always buzzing on "Radio 2" with all the hits of the day. (Later, that inspired me to play the electric guitar.) I´m 63 now, and sadly, my last visit to Wisbech about 8 years ago was a bit disappointing and things had not changed for the better. They all seemed a
pretty unfriendly lot. But still, I have lots of fond memories.
Best wishes from Germany and all the best, Paul.
