Walking. Gossip. Travel.

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  • Thetford – Oddfellows Hall

    The Odd Fellows were craftsmen who didn’t fit into the usual trades, so they weren’t part of a guild. Well, that’s probably how they were formed, some historians seem to argue a bit with that and much is lost to history unfortunately.

    The hall in Thetford was constructed in 1891 and more recently from 1985 until 2017 it was used as a snooker hall. The building was used for theatrical purposes from shortly after its opening and was being used as a cinema by the First World War.

    Oswald Mosley spoke at the hall on Saturday 7 September 1935 in a meeting organised by the South West Norfolk Fascist Constituency Association, with tickets being free of charge.

    The building is currently being sold for £350,000, which seems a little on the low side, and hopefully it won’t be turned into housing. There is perhaps a better use for the building than that, something which ensures that the public can still gain access to this interesting structure.

  • Thetford – Thomas Paine Statue

    Thomas Paine is one of the best known sons of Thetford having been born in the town on 9 February 1737. He was educated at Thetford Grammar School and for a while lived in Lewes. He sailed to the United States in 1774, nearly dying with illness during the journey. He became involved in the American War of Independence and wrote numerous books and pamphlets about the political situation in the country. Later known as one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, although he wasn’t directly involved with the establishment of the new American Government.

    A meeting took place at Thetford Guildhall in February 1937, marking 200 years since Paine was born. Sir William Gentle, the Mayor of Thetford, made a speech and said:

    “It is appropriate that the people of Thetford should assemble in their guildhall tonight in these days when democratic government is once more in danger, when according to General Goering, its foundations are on sand”.

    The town’s statue of Thomas Paine dates from later on, designed by Charles Wheeler and unveiled in 1964. I hadn’t previously noticed this, but the book in the sculpture is upside down, apparently as a way of getting people talking about the new artwork in the town.

  • Thetford – Joseph Emms

    There might be quite a lot of posts about Thetford over the next few days, which is primarily linked to my walk in the town in a few months…..

    This man, Joseph Emms, attracted my attention as the court record says that he is “dissolute and depraved”, being sent to prison in January 1842 for the crime of larceny. He was sent immediately to Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight and he was sentenced to seven years.

    This in itself is of some interest, because Parkhurst then wasn’t a prison, it was a children’s asylum. Which means that Joseph Emms, this “dissolute and depraved” man was actually a child. And indeed, he was, he was 15 and he had stolen a decanter. The officials at Parkhurst decided that he was “indifferent” and so they tried something else. They sent him to what was then known as Van Diemen’s Land, but is now known as Tasmania.

    History doesn’t tell us what his parents Joseph and Mary thought of this decision. But he set off on a ship called Barossa on 17 May 1844 and arrived in Tasmania on 6 September 1844. And the record of his arrival in Tasmania has survived and as can be seen above, he was 5’5″ tall, he had an oval head, brown eyebrows, brown eyes and no beard. It even details the scars on his fingers.

    Emms became a blacksmith and he later married in Tasmania in 1861, with their first child John William being born in 1864. He had a second child, also named Joseph, in 1867 which sadly died of pneumonia before he reached six months old.

    Joseph Emms died in 1893 at the age of 65 and I imagine that he never returned to Thetford or England again after being transported. His father, Joseph Emms in Thetford, died on 17 July 1885 and is buried at London Road Cemetery in Thetford. I’m intrigued to know whether he ever heard from his son, whose relatives are incidentally still living in Australia today.

  • Thetford – Good Woman Public House

    Copyright of Google Streetview

    This building at 51/53 Old Market Street in Thetford was once the Good Woman public house from the mid-nineteenth century to 1909 when it lost its license. The pub was owned by Greene King and today the building is residential and is Grade II listed. The core of the building dates to the sixteenth century, with many later additions. The section of the property on the right of the photo was formerly an outhouse and has now been turned into a garage.

    But, back to the license issue. The beginning of the twentieth century was when the Government decided that there were too many pubs in the UK, so they decided to shut down thousands of them by making it easier to end their licenses. The Good Woman was one of the pubs that was closed, with the Government having to pay compensation to the brewery.

    The compensation payable to the Good Woman public house was contested by Greene King and their managing director of the time, EW Lake, went to the Norfolk Licensing Committee to state his case. Greene King wanted £702 3s 6d because in the previous years they had been selling an average of 86.5 barrels and 486 dozen of bottled beers. The tenant of the pub, John Clarke, thought that he should get more than the 10% usually payable to him, and the committee agreed to that, meaning he would get £85 of the £702 3s 6d.

    Incidentally, this is a ridiculous sum of money in compensation, especially given how many pubs were refused licenses. In today’s money that’s around £55,000 and the tenant received the equivalent of £6,700. Much of this money was recovered by charging the remaining pubs more in taxation, with the intention being to close around 35,000 pubs across the country from the 100,000 that existed in 1900.

    This was the last census that took place when the building was in use as a pub, in 1901. At that time the licensee was Charles John Pear and he also worked as a house painter. The only other occupant in the pub was his wife Adelaide. By 1911, he was working as a plumber and had moved to Norwich, living at 42 Trafalgar Street in the city.

  • Thetford – Henry Balaam

    On 24 July 1835, Henry Balaam was sentenced to seven years imprisonment at Thetford Court. It was the prison which he was sent to that interested me, as Balaam was imprisoned at York Convict Hulk at Portsmouth.

    The hulk was formerly the ship HMS York which had been turned into a prison in a bid to alleviate space in other prisons around the country. The ship was converted for use as a prison ship in 1819 and it remained in use for this purpose until 1848.

    There were a number of prison hulks around the country and they were usually moored up near dockyards, where the prisoners could be rowed ashore to work during the day. This whole process was hardly efficient and proved to be rather challenging during inclement weather. The ships often weren’t split into separate cells, so the prisoners could meander around the deck as they pleased at night, making for a different sort of prison environment.

    This convict hulk got something of a reputation at the time, with one newspaper calling it “the theatre of some of the most bloodthirsty attempts at violence and successful escapes on the part of the convicts confined therein”. The Scotsman noted in 1848 that fifty prisoners had to be removed from the ship due to their violence, and they were marched through Gosport under guard. The paper wrote that “their ribaldry and yells were the most filthy and revolting human ears could be insulted with” and the accompanying soldiers had to charge at the prisoners to regain control.

    The ship was broken up in 1854, but primarily because it was about to fall apart rather than for any other reason. The initial decision to use military ships as prisons was made in 1776 and this was meant to be for a maximum of two years. Politicians got a little behind with this schedule and rather than two year it transpired to be nearly 80 years, finally being banned in 1857.

    One thing that the prison ship didn’t do is steer Henry Balaam away from a life of crime. A decade later he’s showing up in the records of the Brixton House of Correction, which is still in operation today as HM Prison Brixton.

  • Arminghall – Robert Breeze

    I haven’t spent much time looking at this data set before, but they’re the lists of habitual criminals during the nineteenth century. I’m focused on Arminghall at the moment (for anyone wondering why there is a flurry of posts about Bixley and Arminghall, it’s because I’m leading a walk there), so Robert Breeze caught my eye.

    The document above tells me that he was born in 1847, he worked as a labourer, he was single, he had a fair complexion, he had blue eyes, he was stout in shape, 5″3′ tall and had an oval shape head. For anyone who is doing their family tree then hope for a criminal, there’s certainly lots of information about them and many even have photos.

    Further than that, the document tells me that he was born in Wymondham and that he spent the period from 19 February to 18 June 1891 at Norwich prison. Norwich prison on Mousehold Heath had opened in 1887, replacing the prison within Norwich Castle, so he was located in a more modern building.

    As can be seen above, he also had four previous convictions (and some acquittals) and was planning to live in Trowse, which is near to Arminghall, on his release. Some of this crimes are breaches of the Elementary Education Act, so I assume from this he has children. Incidentally, what on earth was happening in Kenninghall and Mr. Hurrell? Probably best not to know.

    A little digging in the Norwich Mercury covering the assizes (or trials) showed that the judge in charge was Sir Charles Edward Pollock, the Baron of the Court of the Exchequer. He sentenced our (I call him our, I feel I nearly know him now) Robert Breeze to his four months in prison, with hard labour, for stealing fowl in Arminghall on 28 January 1891. Breeze pleaded guilty to the crime, with the fowl belonging to Arthur Stimpson and it was valued at 2s 6d.

    In August 1892, the Norfolk Chronicle reported that a Robert Breeze had been charged with being drunk whilst in charge of a horse and cart on St. Stephen’s Plain in Norwich. At the time this Robert was living at Villa Gardens in Lakenham, a pub which closed in 1895, which might not have been ideal. The newspaper also noted that Robert Breeze was also known as Robert Woods, although our Breeze was definitely his real name as I’ve found his birth records.

    In March 1896, the Norfolk News reported that a Robert Breeze was found in Ber Street in Norwich rather under the influence at just before eleven at night. Police Constable Coleman suggested that he stopped swearing and went home. Our Robert “refused to do anything of the kind and he made use of some disgusting language”, to which he found himself “marched to the police station”. He was fined 15 shillings for his behaviour which is around £65 in today’s money if we use the National Archives currency converter. For someone who was “of no fixed residence” I’m not sure how that was paid.

    The problem with these two drunken cases, and also from here is that there are two men called Robert Breeze in Norfolk who commit crimes in the last few years of the nineteenth century and also into the early twentieth century. They are two men, our Robert and a much younger one. Unfortunately, the records don’t make it clear which individual the court papers and newspaper reports are referring to, so I’d like to think that things went well for our Robert. They probably didn’t given the time and social conditions when he lived, but I can’t find his death details to be able to work out what happened.

  • Arminghall – St. Mary’s Church Arminghall (Wall Paintings)

    The historic record for Arminghall Church notes that there was a sixteenth century wall painting of St. Christopher which was destroyed. I was intrigued to know exactly when this little piece of destruction took place, and I have been able to narrow it down to the summer of 1876.

    It was during late 1876 that a group from the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society decided to take a trip to numerous locations across the county. One of them was a visit to St. Mary’s which they discovered was “undergoing repair”. This was indeed the case, as John Pollard Seddon was leading a large restoration and rebuilding of the church, changing it to reflect Victorian requirements.

    I can imagine the group’s irritation when they discovered that Seddon had done away with what was apparently a beautiful wall painting, replacing it what he must have thought was a delightful white wall. The report from the time says that the group discovered that the painting on the south wall had been “stripped” and added “much to the chagrin of a few of the party”. I’m surprised he managed to only upset a few of the party….

    Fortunately a copy of the murals had been drawn before they had been destroyed, I’ll have to at some point look for that…..

  • Arminghall – St. Mary’s Church Arminghall (Tunnels)

    There is a story in the Norfolk Chronicle in 1898 that an elderly local countryman had told their correspondent that there was a tunnel which led from Caistor camp to Arminghall Church. The correspondent didn’t take that suggestion very seriously, but he noted that the countryman had said that he himself had been in the Caistor end. I still like this story, which is somewhat beyond the realms of possibility, solely because it adds a little extra magic to the church.

  • Bixley – Saint Wandregesilius Church (George Marmaduke Seaman)

    George Marmaduke Seaman was one of the two men from this parish who died in the two world wars. The two men killed were brothers, with George’s elder brother William dying during the First World War.

    George was the son of William Seaman and Catherine Elizabeth Seaman, and was the husband of Marjorie Amy Seaman. During the First World War he served in the Royal Navy, stationed on HMS Royal Oak.

    He died at the age of 58 on Saturday 15 March 1941.

  • Bixley – Saint Wandregesilius Church (Pilgrimage)

    Still on my theme of Bixley Church (I put Bixley as it’s easier to spell than Wandregesilius) I’m intrigued at the scale of the pilgrimages which went on here.

    There are a few references to the pilgrimages which took place to the church, this is the last that I can find before the Reformation. It doesn’t help that generations of locals have managed to spell Wandregesilius in such a wide variety of ways, in this case Wandrede. Although, being honest, that is a lot easier to spell.

    These pilgrimages were made by others to help the soul of the person who had died, helping in their salvation. All a bit of a burden on the living, although if there was a financial contribution in the will then I suppose that made things rather more tolerable.