Walking. Gossip. Travel.

Category: Thetford

  • 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.

  • Thetford – Stocks

    The Thetford cage and stocks were located over the road on Cage Lane and were originally opened in 1581. The building was larger and it’s infuriating to know that the council demolished it in 1968, salvaging only the window arch and placing this in its current location over the road as part of a new public toilet complex.

    The cage remained in use until the nineteenth century and the council then decided it would flog off the stocks, which had long since fallen out of use, at the local market. Their whereabouts were unknown for some time, but it transpired that they Mr. Barclay’s Park in Norwich, and they were fortunately returned again to the cage.

  • Thetford – Thetford Mill

    Thetford Mill, located on the appropriately named Watermill Lane, which was used as a corn mill and closed in the late 1950s. It was originally built in the early nineteenth century on the site of a former pit mill. It’s also known as the Coffee Mill which most reliable sources suggest is just because of what was stored there, but some web-sites are saying that coffee was also ground here. Anyway, it’s one of those two options no doubt…..

    Although all of the machinery has now gone from within the building, the mill bridge structure still performs the role of regulating the flow of the River Thet.

  • Thetford – Church of the Holy Sepulchre

    This priory was founded in 1148 and it takes its name from the Augustinian order of the Holy Sepulchre, of which there are no other remains in the country. The order didn’t have the wealth of other religious establishments, such as St. Mary’s Priory, and failed to grow in size and power. They did own the comb of Thomas Becket though as one of their most holiest of relics.

    The Reformation inevitably wasn’t kind to the order  and the building was seized by the Crown and the order dissolved in 1536. The nave survived and was turned into a barn, but the structure of the building continued to decline.

    This entrance was built in the eighteenth century when the building was used as a barn, and then subsequently blocked off. Parts of the building were also used as ornamental gardens.

    There was a lot of structural work going on when I visited in 2018, with some of the information signs being inaccessible. The site is now managed by the English Heritage, with no charge being made for admission.

  • Thetford – Thetford Grammar School

    Thetford Grammar School is, as the plaque notes, one of the oldest schools in the country. It has been educating children for over 1,400 years, which is quite a claim for any educational establishment to have.

    The actual date of the school’s foundation is rather unclear, which is inevitable given the sort of periods of history that are being referred to. There are some who claim it was founded in 631AD as it’s known that Sigebert, the King of the Angles, wanted a school creating in his court.

    Some date the school to the late eleventh century and relate the school to being run by Herbert de Losinga. He is an important figure in Norfolk as he was the first Bishop of Norwich, but he had previously been the Bishop of Thetford. The Cathedral of Thetford, which is a strange concept to write, existed from 1072 to 1094 and Thetford Grammar School was built on the site of the building.

    The school had some turbulent times around the period of Reformation, but it continued in operation in its one room until the late eighteenth century. The facilities were improved at that point, in conjunction with the Victorian Girls’ Grammar School which was opposite, with the two schools later merging.

    Perhaps one of the most well-known of the school’s former students, and I’m sure many would disagree, is Thomas Paine. A controversial figure who went from a quiet upbringing in Thetford to being one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, before he upset lots of Americans with his religious views.

  • Thetford – Captain Mainwaring Statue

    This statue of Captain Mainwaring from Dad’s Army was unveiled in 2010 and it was located next to the Anchor Hotel in Thetford, where many of the actors stayed when filming. This was a wonderful (although admittedly a little run down) eighteenth century building which appeared in the opening scene of the first episode of Dad’s Army, so it was a very suitable location.

    There had been a hotel and pub on the site for 400 years, so Breckland District Council bought the site and knocked the hotel down. The site is now home to a bland Travelodge, but not to worry, they’ve put a plaque up in the hotel to note the area’s history. And at least the area is decently landscaped now.

    A close-up of the statue and visitors to the area can sit next to it on the bench. The statue was unveiled in the presence of Bill Pertwee, who sadly died in 2013, who played the ARP Warden Hodges in the series.