Blog Editorial November 2022 

St Neots Boys Bathing

Female bathers in St Neots

SN river 1900

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II lived during a century of incredible development and change and this article looks back at local events during her ninety-six year life. Elizabeth was born in 1926 but although the 1920s were sometimes known as the ‘Jazz Age’ the decade was a time of struggle for many as Europe tried to come to terms with life after the Great War, 1914-18. As the Rev. Knights of St Neots Parish Church said in the St Neots Armistice Day service in 1923 Europe was ‘still desolated by war and stricken by famine’.

In 1926 St Neots was a small market town with a population of around 4,000, the town fire engine was still horse-drawn and although women had gained the right to vote in 1928 local people were scandalised by mixed bathing in the river Great Ouse.

Dr Harrison with the St Neots Quads

After WWI the need for better housing led to slum clearance across the UK including in St Neots, ancient thatched cottages were demolished and new council houses built by the local council. In St Neots and Eynesbury, Cambridge Gardens and Ferrars Avenue were just two of the new developments offering indoor toilets and running water to their inhabitants.   

During the 1930s Britain and the western world experienced the great depression, with significant unemployment and hardship for local people. However, the birth of the St Neots Quadruplets in November 1935 and the story of their survival, although born 7 weeks prematurely, captured the hearts of the nation. But already by 1935 the possibility of another world war was on the horizon and St Neots council had already held a gas mask demonstration and was thinking of purchasing Cressener House as new, larger, council offices.  

Floods in 1947

Floods in 1947

The 1940s were dominated by the Second World War when the town population was greatly increased by visiting servicemen, many from nearby air bases. The one bright spot was the opening of the Little Barford power station which helped to bring electricity to the homes of local people. Then in 1947 the country, including St Neots, experienced the worst flooding in living memory and many people had to be rescued from their homes. But bringing some cheer to the town the first carnival was held in 1948 as part of the St Neots rowing regatta and it became a very popular part of local life until it ended in 2008. 

Regatta pre 1960s

Rowing in the 1950s

During the 1950s house building continued across the town with new housing close to Huntingdon Street and, at last, a new sewage and water treatment plant was built to serve the town, after a struggle stretching back over 80 years. New forms of entertainment arrived with the development of the domestic television set and ownership was given a huge boost when the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II was broadcast live on 2nd June 1953. Bringing new educational opportunities to local children, Bushmead Secondary school opened in Eaton Socon in 1958.

Cinema in the 1950s

Longsands staff 1967

Ushering in the 1960s, the opening of Longsands Secondary school launched a decade of change in the town. While new young pop group, the Beatles, sang ‘Love Me Do’ an open air swimming pool opened in Huntingdon Street, a new bridge was constructed over the River Great Ouse leading into the Market Square and London overspill planning brought the possibility of new industry and new families moving to the town. Eaton Socon and Eaton Ford became part of the St Neots Urban District Council area and plans for the Eynesbury, Shirdley Road and Eaton Socon, Queens Gardens estates were developed. In 1966 England won the Football World Cup, but the Pavilion Cinema closed in 1968 depriving the town of a cinema. The next year 1969, American astronaut, Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon, St Neots Police station moved to Dovehouse Close, and controversial plans for a St Neots ring road were abandoned.

SN Magistrates Court

In 1971 a major new road scheme re-routed the A1 Great North Road and after centuries as a historic route to the north Eaton Socon high street fell silent. Ernulf secondary school opened in Eynesbury and as Britain joined the EU in 1973 plans for a new leisure complex on the old Jordan and Addington Priory Mill site began to develop. Local sportsman, Tony Ekins captained the England men’s Hockey team in the 1972 Olympic Games and in 1974 the Urban District Council was dissolved to be replaced by St Neots Town Council and Huntingdon District Council. 

Longsands 1968

New Street 1950s

In 1979 Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister ushering in the 1980s, a decade of national protest and further local changes. 1982 brought an unexpected war when we fought Argentina for control of the Falkland Islands, a strategically important base for the British Navy. In 1983 local schoolboy, John Gregory joined the England football team, and during 1985 the new St Neots Bypass opened, re-routing the A45 from the Market Square and High Street south of the town and renamed the A428. Also in 1985 the Ekins livestock auction in New Street closed and only two years later Paines Brewery on the market square brewed its last pint, while supermarket Waitrose opened in 1987. In 1989, far from St Neots, a little known scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, at CERN in Geneva invented a new information sharing system for computers, the World Wide Web, which was to revolutionise communication across the world. The decade ended with the spectacular demolition of the Little Barford power station cooling towers in 1989 and the ending of the sittings at the Victorian Magistrates Court in New Street, St Neots which now moved to Huntingdon town centre. 

Paines Brewery

The economic crash of Black Wednesday in September 1992 brought a decade of hardship in some parts of the world, but it was a decade of mixed fortunes for St Neots and the surrounding area. New supermarkets arrived as the town grew with a Co-op Rainbow store opening in Eaton Socon in 1991, a Tesco’s in Eynesbury in 1995 and a Lidl in the town centre in 1998. In 1995 a new Museum opened in the old Police Station and Magistrates Court telling the story of the town. The Market Square was thought to be languishing during the 1990s, until as a new Labour party leader, Tony Blair came to power in 1997, the refurbishment of the Market Square and Brook Street began. After the tragic death of Princess Diana in a car accident in 1997, the 1990s ended on a more positive note when Britain and Ireland ended decades of conflict by signing the Good Friday agreement in 1998. 

During the early 2000s St Neots began to experience a building boom, with almost 3,000 new homes built at Loves Farm on the eastern outskirts of St Neots.  Before building started archaeologists were surprised to discover that the site had been home to Iron Age Farmers who had lived on the hillside 2,000 years ago. Local sports stars also came through in the 2000s, with Longsands pupil, Robbie Grabarz becoming the European High Jump champion in 2012 and winning a silver medal at the London 2012 Olympics. 

Loves Farm

In 2014 a new railway bridge with lifts finally opened across the east coast railway line linking Loves Farm pedestrians to St Neots. By 2017 further housing was planned for the farmland south of Loves Farm and development at Wintringham began. Work was held up in 2020 with the arrival of a devastating pandemic when the Covid-19 flu like virus spread across the world. In 2022 Elizabeth II passed away aged, 96 and a new era opened with her son Charles III on the throne.   After almost a century of incredible invention, drama and disaster what will the next century bring?

This article has been prompted by a recent donation to the museum of some Edwardian glass plate negatives which show local people swimming in the St Neots stretch of the River Great Ouse and also by the arrival of some very warm summer weather.

Top Boardings about 1910

People must have been swimming in the river close to St Neots and Eaton Socon for many hundreds, if not thousands, of years. One of the new images shows women and children swimming beside the bathing shed once situated at the Little Paxton end of St Neots Common (Lammas Meadow) and known as ‘Top Boardings’.

The image reminded me of the struggles St Neots Urban District Council (UDC) had with the bathing places over the years. Once the UDC was established in 1894 they quickly tried to regulate swimming or ‘bathing’ in the local river and by 1895 bye-laws were being drawn up to control bathing.  Until the later Victorian period men and boys would have swum naked in the river, but as bathing at spa’s or the new seaside resorts developed during the Georgian period bathing costumes began to be considered necessary and by the mid Victorian period nude bathing and (horror!) mixed bathing were considered immoral.

Swimming in Eynesbury at the Conygeare ‘Bottom Boardings’ 1920s

St Neots UDC decided to erect changing sheds beside the popular bathing places on Lammas Common in St Neots and on the Coneygeare in Eynesbury.

‘Top boardings’ women swimming, about 1900

‘Top boardings’ with diving boards about 1900

The Eynesbury shed cost £24. 9s 6d to erect and diving boards were also erected until the shallow depth of the water at Eynesbury, only 3’6” to 4’ in depth, led to the removal of the boards. By 1902 the UDC had introduced specific time for women and girls swimming, so the photograph, which only shows women and children, must have been taken after this time. River bathing was very popular during the hot summers just before the Great War, although not without its dangers and the tragic deaths of two young men Ernest Wotton in 1904 and Scottish soldier Walter Taylor in August 1914 prompted extra safety measures at both sites. These included keeping ‘grappling irons’ at both places and in 1915 employing two young men of good character, who could swim, at the cost of £1 per week to be bathing attendants. Unfortunately while proving very popular with local swimmers the bathing sheds soon attracted vandalism and already by 1904 the UDC became aware that ‘indecent practices’ were taking place at the sheds (no details are given). In 1917 a seven foot high fence topped with barbed wire was placed around the Eynesbury shed, but stopping gambling at the sheds proved to be impossible even after the police agreed to keep an ‘eye’ on them.

St Neots was proud of its swimming facilities and celebrated them in the town’s 1938 official guide, stating ‘The river is clean, not too rapid and off sufficient depth to satisfy the requirements of good swimmers’. However, this was not the whole story and already by the mid1930s the local Medical Officer of Health was taking samples to check how clean water really was. Unfortunately it was obviously not that clean as during the summer the bathing attendants were asked to add bleaching powder to the river water every night. By 1939 the water at the Eynesbury coneygeare was considered suitable for swimming but the water from the ‘Top Boardings’ was said to be polluted. By this time the UDC were actively planning a new sewage treatment works to solve the pollution problem, but this had to be delayed in the lead up to the Second World War 1939 – 45 and in 1939 the UDC closed both bathing places and put up notices telling the public that they bathed at their own risk. 

Entrance to St Neots outdoor swimming pool, about 1970

When the pollution of the river first became a serious problem in the later 1930s (the stench from Hen Brook was said to be a scandal) the river was no longer considered safe for swimming and local people started a campaign for a swimming pool. These plans were halted by the outbreak of war in 1939 but revived in the later 1940s. From 1960 profits from the carnival, started in 1948, were put towards the cost of building a swimming pool and in 1961 the new St Neots Lido opened, removing the need for river bathing. The pool was run by St Neots Swimming Pool Trust and at the height of its popularity it attracted up to 800 people per day. However, the pool was not run commercially and the rising running cost meant it was unable to become self-supporting and it was eventually taken over by the UDC in 1974.

It finally closed in 2003 although its demise may have been sealed many years previously, when the need for a heated indoor pool had been recognised in the 1960s, although the Ernulf School indoor pool did not open until many years later. Much more recently plans for a new outdoor ‘splash park’, on the site of the old outdoor swimming pool, have been discussed and with support from St Neots Town Council may go ahead in 2023.

St Neots Swimming Pool in 2002

Blog Editorial April 2022

It has often been said that the only thing we can learn from history is that we are unable to learn anything from history. However, one thing a study of history certainly does teach us is that human beings can’t resist arguing and fighting with each other. As a terrible war has suddenly broken out in Europe with the Russian invasion of Ukraine it seemed appropriate this month to look back on British involvement in wars of the past.

Of course this is not the first time that European powers have fought over Eastern Europe. The Crimean War (1853–6) saw several European countries battling to prevent Russian expansion into what was then part of the Turkish Empire, with Britain and France in particular anxious to preserve the balance of power in Europe to protect their own empires. The Victorian Crimean war has been seen as one of the first ‘modern’ wars with new technologies such as the railway, the telegraph and explosive shells changing the way battles were fought, and photography allowed the war to be documented as never before. It was also the Crimean war which transformed European nursing when Florence Nightingale, ‘The Lady with the Lamp’, demonstrated that hygienic nursing conditions could dramatically reduce soldier’s death rates from infection.

As an island nation the British have a long history as sailors and traders who explored the world looking for new opportunities and natural resources they could exploit. As the British Empire developed during the Tudor and Stuart period Britain became known for its naval power and military might and today we are still coming to terms with the consequences of our actions in other countries and an understanding that a hero to one country can be a tyrant to another.

Down the centuries many local people have been involved in conflicts across the globe. William Humbley of Hail Weston was a professional soldier who served with the 95^th Regiment of Foot (Rifles) during the Napoleonic Wars 1803 – 1815. He fought at Waterloo, where he was wounded in both shoulders, but lived to return home and settle in Eynesbury where he built a new house for himself and his family called Waterloo Cottage, commemorated today by the road name Waterloo Drive.

unknown artist; Lieutenant Colonel W. Humbley; The Royal Green Jackets (Rifles) Museum; 

Alfred Chapman of Eaton Socon had initially joined the Victorian army in February 1889, when he was 18 years old. He was an experienced saddler and horse collar maker, skills which were essential to the army as they depended on horses for most of their transport needs. Alfred served in the Royal Engineers and fought in the Boer War in South Africa before retiring from the Army in 1907. Then in August 1914, he joined up again at the outbreak of the Great War. Sadly, Alfred was injured in France in January 1917 when he was buried by an exploding shell and he was invalided home to Fulbourn hospital where he died in May 1918.

Alfred Chapman of Eaton Socon

Many local men also fought during the Second World War. Bert Goodwin of, of Great Paxton, did not join up at the beginning of the war because he was an agricultural worker and farming was a reserved occupation. However in April 1941 Bert joined the 30^th Artillery Regiment and began training at Fenstanton.  During his army career Bert fought in North Africa at Tobruck and at El Alamain. Later in 1944 he was sent to Italy and helped to drive the German Army north out of Italy – fighting at Monte Cassino on the way. After the war Bert returned to St Neots and lived in Eynesbury for the rest of his life

Victor Ekins, of St Neots, also fought in the Second World War, serving in the Royal Air Force. He completed his pilot’s training just as the aerial Battle of Britain began in July 1940 and was soon involved in defending Britain in the air, flying both Spitfire and Hurricane fighter planes. Eventually Victor was shot down in September 1940, but luckily he was able to parachute to safety. He gradually recovered from his injuries and served in the RAF until the end of the war. After the war he returned to St Neots and managed the livestock auction market that once stood in New Street, where the Market Court flats stand today.

Recalling the lives of these three local men is in no way intended to lessen the contribution of the many hundreds of local men and women who have served since the Napoleonic era, and local war memorials stand as a testament to the sacrifices of local people while also commemorating the millions of ordinary people who have suffered during past wars across the globe.

Wars often have unintended consequences, accelerating technological, social and economic changes. After the First World War women were given the vote in recognition of their work during the war. After the Second World War huge pressure for social change enabled the labour government to launch the National Health Service, improving the lives of millions of people. What changes might this latest war bring?

This month, our curator delves into the history of photography and takes a look at the early photographs taken of St Neots.

The first temporary exhibition of 2022 is ‘What a Beautiful World’ a photographic exhibition by local amateur photographer, Peter Hagger.  Today, almost everyone in the UK carries a camera as a feature of their mobile phone, but just when were cameras invented, and what do the earliest photographs of St Neots show? Here’s a brief history…

Camera Obscura

The early days

The camera obscura, which utilises light passing through a tiny hole into a dark room to produce an image of an outside scene, has been used for at least two thousand years, but the ability to preserve the image by fixing it permanently to another surface was only discovered in the early 1800s

The invention of the Daguerreotype in 1839 made possible small photographic portraits on metal, and these quickly became popular despite the slow production process, and the need for the subject to remain totally still while the photograph was taken! By the early 1850s, a new process using a glass plate to create a negative from which a positive picture could be printed, had been invented and soon grew in popularity. By December 1854, the photographic portrait had arrived in St Neots. Records show a Richard and Ann Spring of Peterborough visited the town and advertised ‘30 second portraits with frame for five shillings’. This new, simplified photographic process meant that wealthy enthusiasts were now able to photograph their local surroundings, and enterprising traders, often chemists who had the technical know-how, set up photography studios.

The first pictures of St Neots

Market Square in 1855

The earliest known photographs of St Neots are to be found in editions of Gorham’s ‘History of Eynesbury and St Neots’. This was first published in 1820, but later rebound editions contain additional information and images, including early photographs of the town dating from the 1850s. A photograph of 50 – 52 Market Square (currently Caffe Nero) shows the building between 1848 and 1855 when David Tomson, Printer and William Mole, Chemist and Druggist occupied parts of the building (before Mr Mole moved to 30 Market Square in 1855.) Other early photographs in the book show St Neots in 1863. This was the year that Queen Victoria’s eldest son, the future Edward VII, married Princess Alexandra of Denmark on the 10th March, and the entire

Cambridge Street in 1863, during Edward VII’s wedding celebrations

country celebrated the happy event with a national holiday. Local surveyor, architect and photographer, William Jackson of Eynesbury photographed the St Neots street decorations and so gives us a glimpse of the main streets of the town. The photograph of the Cambridge Street decoration shows a large cedar tree, which must be one of the trees that gave the later school and the current doctor’s surgery in Huntingdon Street its name.

During the 1860s, camera ownership was still limited to wealthy families, but photographic studios gave almost everyone access to a photographer, and studios were soon recording weddings, children, sports teams and local events, such as Queen Victoria’s Diamond jubilee celebrations of 1897. In the 1860s, police forces began to get in on the action, recognising the ability to capture portraits of criminals. From the early 1870s, every prisoner entering Huntingdon Goal was photographed, giving us some of the earliest local images of working people.

Jane Gardener, 1871 from Habitual Criminals Returns, Huntingdon Archives

Picture postcards

Postcard from the museum Wills Collection, c.1915

In 1894, the British Post Office decided to accept picture postcards as letters, and the ability to send a postcard for only half a penny made them hugely popular.  In 1902 the divided back postcard arrived, and photographic studios began printing photographs readymade to send as postcards. Postcards became the text messages of their day, with millions of cards sent over the next decade, fuelling an explosion in local views, comic scenes and portraits. Hundreds of St Neots postcards in the museum’s Wills Collection date from this period.

Photography hits the mass market

In the late Victorian period, George Eastman of New York developed photographic film, and in 1901 he launched the Kodak Brownie camera. This introduced photography to a mass market, although general camera ownership did not boom until wages rose in the 1950s.

Portrait of Tom Eayrs 1915

It was the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 that ended the boom in postcard sales, but created a huge demand for portrait photographs. This was fuelled by the wishes of millions of ordinary people to have a photograph of their loved ones whilst separated from them by the war. Millions of families still have these treasured portraits in their photo albums and the museum has a number in its own photographic collection.

This surge in demand for photographs enabled photographic studios to prosper, and James and Sarah Phillips ran photographic studios in both Biggleswade and St Neots. Ernest Albone took over their St Neots studio in 1920 and continued in business for the rest of his working life. Both Phillips and Albone produced photographs of people and places, as well as postcard series of St Neots, which show the town growing across the decades.

The rise of amateur photography

Carnival Queen Denise White, 1970s

The production of a wide variety of cameras for the mass market in the 1950s led to a new era of amateur photography and the introduction of colour film for the general public. Photographs in the museum’s collection from this era show everything from local views to the St Neots Carnival, which took place every summer from 1948 to 2008.

Today, the world has moved on from film cameras to digital cameras and a new way of capturing images has emerged. Research into digital images begun in the 1950s, and the first digital image was sent over the brand new world wide web by Tim Berners-Lee in 1992. The first mobile phone with a camera did not arrive until 2002, when the Nokia 7650 was launched. Today, photography has lost some of its novelty, but photographs remain a precious way of recording our loves and loved ones – yet another debt we owe to the remarkable Victorians!

See our latest photo exhibition in the museum until the 12th March 2022, and join us for Meet the Photographer sessions on Saturday 19th February and Saturday 12th March.

St Neots Common, Peter Hagger