Journeying Through Time

Flint Axe Head

This flint axe head was found in the village of Abbotsley, three miles from St Neots. The axe head is evidence of the enormous changes brought about during the Neolithic period, 4, 500 BC to 2,500 BC when early people moved from a hunter-gatherer way of life to a farming economy. Axes, such as this one from Abbotsley, were used to cut down trees and clear scrub in order to create small fields where early strains of wheat and barley could be grown. The enormous number of Neolithic tools found close to the River Great Ouse as it passes through the St Neots area, bear witness to the use early people made of the river and the fertile riverside land.

Field 44

This is the approximate location of Field 44.

Roman Bottle

Past archaeological excavations have revealed our Iron Age ancestors were already living where the houses and shops of St Neots town centre stand today. Although continuous occupation of the town centre since Roman times must have destroyed much of the evidence of Roman style homes built after the Roman conquest of Britain in AD 43, tantalising evidence has been discovered on the edges of the town. In the 1960s burials were discovered on the outskirts of Eynesbury and one of these included a small glass bottle containing a bone needle and a dark powder which may have been used as Roman eyeliner.

This find may be evidence of the changing lifestyles of local people after the Roman invasion of Britain and it certainly suggests that whoever was buried in that place wanted to travel into the afterlife looking their best. The small bottle and its contents are on display in St Neots Museum.

Quarter stater from Kimbolton Coin Hoard

An  Iron Age coin hoard was discovered in 2010  close to the village of Kimbolton, near St Neots. The hoard consists of sixty-seven gold staters, which date to the period 50BC to AD10, and one quarter stater from the period AD10 – 40. This tiny coin was minted by the tribal leader, Cunobelin, king of the Catuvellauni tribe who dominated this area at the beginning of the first century AD. Roman writer Suetonius described Cunobelin as the ‘King of the Britons’. This small coin shows a galloping horse on the reverse, both a Iron Age status symbol and a symbol of the sun god and on the obverse an ear of wheat which may be intended to stress that the wealth of Cunobelin was based on trading the wheat and barley grown across the region during the Iron Age.

This coin also helps to date the burial of the coin hoard which could not have occurred before the coin was minted. In fact the burial of the hoard may have occurred not long after the death of the King as his death sparked a power struggle between the southern British tribes which led to a period of uncertainty and turmoil for local people which ultimately led to the Roman invasion of AD43.     

Anglo-Saxon Silver Pennies of Ethelred

These two Anglo-Saxon coins were found close to the village of Southoe near Little Paxton and St Neots, and are now on display in St Neots Museum.

The coins date from the period when a new monastic Priory had recently been founded in Eynesbury by Leofric and his wife Leoflaed, two local Saxon landowners. It was their search for a sacred relic for their new Priory that led to the translation of the body of the Cornish saint St Neot to Eynesbury in the AD 970s. 

The early years of the Priory turned out to be dramatic times. Ethelred, who ruled AD 978 – 1016, was seen as a weak king, whose attempts to pay off the Viking invaders with huge bribes, led to him being called Ethelred the Unready (meaning ill advised). His weakness encouraged the Danish Vikings to invade England and when Ethelred died in 1016 the Danish King Cnut seized the English throne. These two coins remind us of these important years in the history of the town.

Tempsford Staunch

The 1700s saw Tempsford became a major trading point due to  the Staunch .

The local ford allowed “road” traffic to travel onwards but was too low for river passage. The staunch was built upstream regulating the water levels which were raised during evenings to allow barges from King’s Lynn to access the Tempsford wharfs permitting goods to continue on by river to Bedford or St Neots.  As trains gradually took the freight away the Staunch was demolished in the 1970s.

John Bellingham, assassin

John Bellingham is notorious as the only man to assassinate a British Prime Minister. His mother Elizabeth Scarbrow and her family came from St Neots and he spent much of his childhood in the town after his father was confined to a lunatic asylum and died in 1781.

By the mid-1790s John Bellingham had trained as an accountant and in 180 he moved to Liverpool, and became involved in the valuable but risky import and export trade with Russia. In 1804, aged 33, he travelled with a cargo of timber and iron to Archangel in Russia. Unfortunately the deal went disastrously wrong and he was arrested and imprisoned for debt and not released until November 1809.

After five years in a Russian prison Bellingham blamed his problems on the failure of the British Ambassador to help him, and he petitioned the British Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, for compensation. When he was refused help he blamed Perceval personally and perhaps with the assistance of Liverpool merchants who hated Perceval’s attempts to end the slave trade, he made a plan to murder him and finally receive his compensation.

At 5.15pm on the 11 ^th  May 1812 John Bellingham waited in the House of Commons for the Prime Minister, and then shot him dead as he arrived in the lobby.

Bellingham made no attempt to escape and was arrested at the scene and taken to Newgate prison. He was found guilty at his trial three days later on the 15 ^th  May and was hanged on the 18 ^th  May 1812 outside Newgate, in front of a large crowd.

Cambridge to Coventry, via the Worlds End

Scientific developments in the Tudor and Stuart period, including new measuring tools and the telescope, meant that more accurate maps became possible. However, it would not have been very easy to find your way from Cambridge to Wellingborough if this section of an Bowen and Owen map from 1720 was your only guide. The map is intended to show the road from Cambridge to Coventry, but the section in our collection only covers the route from Cambridge to just outside Wellingborough, at a place near Ecton noted as ‘the worlds end’. The road between Cambridge and St Neots seems clear enough as it follows the route of the current A428, a very ancient route, but after St Neots cornfields take over from villages and the way is less clear. The map is part of a collection made by St Neots local Post Master, Mr. Donald Wills, in the 1960s and 1970s and donated to the St. Neots museum in the 1990s.

Child’s Shoe

This small child’s shoe from the 1820s or 1830s was found hidden in a chimney in the small hamlet of Duloe west of St Neots. In the St. Neots museum catalogue it is recorded as originally containing a ‘witch deposit’, perhaps some hair or nail clippings, and this tells us that the shoe was hidden in the chimney to protect the house from witchcraft, evil spirits or bad luck of any kind. In the early 1800s Huntingdonshire was still a very rural county with a long tradition of belief in witchcraft and so protecting your home and family in any way you could would have come naturally to many local people. But why a shoe?

Since biblical times shoes have been a symbol of power and authority, an expensive item seen as a status symbol even today. Shoes were also thought to take on the character of the wearer and so perhaps the shoe of an innocent toddler was thought to hold special power to ward off evil. Indeed around the world shoes have often been seen as good luck charms, so for example you might throw a show after someone or tie a shoe to a wedding car to bring ‘good luck’.

£1.00 Bank Note printed for the St Neots Bank

This early banknote dates from the Regency of George IV, who took over as ruler of Britain and the British Empire after his father George III became mentally ill, 1820 – 1830. It was a period of dramatic changes in society with growing prosperity for the better off, but also terrible poverty for many workers. This rare £1 bank note was issued by the St Neots Bank in 1824, one of the many provincial banks that sprang up across Britain in the early 1800s to meet the demand for more cash and investment in businesses.

The St Neots Bank was established in 1807 by three local businessmen; George James Gorham, Francis Rix and John Inkersole. They had their bank premises at 16 Market Square, one of the many buildings around St Neots Market Square which were given new ‘Georgian’ brick frontages to reflect the new prosperity. Unfortunately the bank went bankrupt in 1824 when it was said that poor investment of the banks funds led to its collapse. The engraving of the Market Square in 1824 shows how the market square looked at that time.

Tempsford School

This photograph dates to the summer of 1906. The first mention of  education in Tempsford  can be traced to the 1500s.

By 1877 Tempsford school was run by the Church of England and had 88 children registered. By 1925 the number was reduced to 70. In the 1970s comprehensive education was introduced and it was known as Tempsford Lower School. However, by 1983 the school closed, and the children transferred to nearby Roxton School. It had played huge part in the education of several generations of local families, some of whom continue to live in the village.

St Neots Market square

St Neots market square stands beside what was once the main road from Cambridge to Bedford and the north, at the point where the road crosses the river Great Ouse and marks a route which has been in use for several thousand years. The market square is one of the largest in the country and was laid out in the later 1000s or early 1100s when  St Neots Benedictine Priory  was rebuilt close to the river crossing, where Waitrose supermarket and the Priory Centre stand today.

The size of the square reveals the aspirations of the Priory monks to create a thriving market right next to their new monastery. A charter to hold a weekly market was granted by King Henry I by 1135 and the market has been in existence for almost 900 years.

The market square has been the site of many important local events across the centuries. During the English Civil War the brief Battle of St Neots of 1648, took place on the square, when parliamentarian troops surprised royalist soldiers sleeping in the square after a retreat from an earlier skirmish. In 1814 to celebrate the end of the Napoleonic wars a feast of roast beef, plum pudding and ale was held on the square for working people. In 1897 Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee was celebrated on the square with running races, decorated bicycles and a tug of war. More recently, on VE Day, 8 ^th  May 1945, the end of the Second World War was celebrated with a religious service and dancing into the night.

Methodist Chapel

One of the first Wesleyan Methodist chapels registered in Bedfordshire was Tempsford Chapel in 1794.

As the congregation grew Tempsford became part of the St Neots Circuit and better premises were required. Eventually land was purchased, and the  current chapel  was built in 1804 and named Ebenezer. It continues to play an important role in the village where services are regularly held but is also used by community groups for meetings and is the Polling Station for Tempsford.

The first image dates to 1925, the second to 1903.

James Toller, the Eynesbury Giant

James Toller was born in a small cottage in Eynesbury, St Neots in 1798 (see second image). Although both his parents were of average height, by the age of ten James was already five feet or 153 cms tall, and by the age of eighteen he was said to be over eight feet or 244 cms tall. He was suffering from the illness, Gigantism, but this was not understood at the time.

As news of the young man from Huntingdonshire who had grown into a giant spread across the country, James became famous. In 1814 he exhibited himself in London and was presented to the Emperor of Russia and the King of Prussia. His great size was noted in various publications and in one drawing he was shown next to a Dutch man called Simon Papp who was only 28 inches or 70 cms tall. After touring the country he enlisted in the Life Guards, but his health was not good and he had to leave the army and return home to Eynesbury. 

James died on the 4th February 1818, when he was only 20 years of age. It was rumoured that a doctor had offered £20.00 for James's body, so that it could be dissected, and his family feared that his body might be stolen by body-snatchers once he had been buried. For this reason he was buried inside Eynesbury church where he still lies today.  

Paines Brewery

The brewing of ale and beer has a long history in the St Neots area where the raw ingredients, barley and other grains, were grown by local farmers. After the dissolution of St Neots Priory by Henry VIII in 1539, the Priory was dismantled and the materials and land sold off. By the later Georgian period the Fowler family had established the Priory brewery on the old monastic site, incorporating an existing barley malting kiln that still stands today. In 1814 the brewery was sold to John Day & Son of Bedford and the Day family continued to run a very successful business on the site until Frank day died in 1919 and the site was acquired by Jordan and Addington’s, seed merchants.

Across the road on the south side of the market square William Foster had purchased the Bull Inn with a small brewery attached in about 1800 and by 1824 he had rebuilt it as an imposing business premises. It was this building which became Paine’s Brewery when local farmer James Paine purchased the premises in 1831 and a successful brewery was managed here until the business was sold in 1987 and over 500 years of brewing in St Neots town centre ended. 

Buckden village, about 1905

Mr Donald Wills came to St Neots Post Office in the 1960s as the new Post Master. His hobby was collecting stamps and local post cards and post marks. In his will he left his collection to St Neots museum and his postcards provide a wonderful record of life around St Neots before the First World War, 1902 to 1914. They reveal a rural Huntingdonshire just before the rise of the motor car, when despite the major roads crossing the county people could still pose in the roads and streets without fear of injury.

In this photograph of Buckden, despite the fact that Buckden is on the Great North Road, the photographer has asked people from local houses to pose beside the deserted road, suggesting that the photograph may have been taken on a Sunday. Within a few years of this photograph cars were racing up and down the road and Buckden became a well-known speed trap for unwary drivers.

Mr. Edwards Shop

This 1930 picture shows Mr Edwards shop next to his shop was the Black Horse pub heading towards the blacksmiths.

At its peak, Tempsford supported a butchers, a draper, post office, general store, blacksmiths, farmers and 7 pubs! Currently it only has a relatively new farm shop, showing that the current idea of buy local worked very well not too long ago! Despite the shop now being a private residence, many of the older villagers still refer to it as "Mr. Edward's Shop".

Tempsford Station

 The Station  opened on 7th August 1850. This first photograph dates to 1935 and the second photograph dates to c1880.

To begin with the service operated from Maiden Lane in London, before the King’s Cross terminus opened in 1852. Like the river it offered the chance to increase trade and travel for the village and this continued until closure on 5th November 1956. The goods yard stayed open until 1965 allowing local market garden produce to come in and out including potatoes coming from Scotland.

Local farmer, Stephen Gosling, remembers the bustling good yard "... (I was not surprised) potatoes were being brought to Tempsford from Scotland as it was easier for suppliers to collect them from here rather than go into London, and Station Road was busy with people collecting”.

As we look to the future, there is the potential for another station at Tempsford as part of the new Varsity Line between Oxford and Cambridge.

Stuart Memorial Hall

 This building  was given to the village in 1925 by the Stuart Family from Tempsford to commemorate their only child, William, killed aged 20 in WW1.

 This was also the site of the village war memorial until very recently when the villagers sought permission to not only move the memorial into a quieter position more central to the village but also fund raised to build a new memorial to the SOE operatives, which was unveiled in 2013 by Prince Charles. The hall continues to play an important role in village life, being used by many community groups, is home to the popular village show and is home to  Tempsford Museum .

Lyons Pola Maid, advertising Ice Cream Cone

This large vintage  ice cream  advertising sign is now on display in St Neots Museum. In the 1930s this ice cream cone stood outside Thawley’s shop on the Great North Road in Eaton Socon. The photograph shows the shop in May 1935 decorated for the Silver Jubilee of King George V and Queen Mary. Although the shop was demolished in the 1960s to make way for the Shakespeare Road housing estate many people still remember the ice cream cone and recall giving the ‘ice-cream’ a lick as they went past!

The Miles Quadruplets

The Miles quadruplets, Ann, Ernest, Paul and Michael, were born on the 28 ^th  November 1935 at 13 Ferrars Avenue, Eynesbury, and were the first British multiple birth babies to survive for more than a few days. They instantly became national celebrities and famous around the world. The local doctor, Dr Harrisson, who had delivered the quads, quickly realised that the babies would need specialist long term care and he moved them to his own home in Church Street, St Neots. This was to enable them to be to be kept free from infection and to provide a warm and humid atmosphere in a dedicated nursery. A team of four specialist nurses were sent from Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, to care for them, free of charge.

At first the babies could only drink diluted breast milk but by February 1936 they were able to move on to a new Cow & Gate milk for premature babies and this began a longstanding connection with the company who supported the Miles Quads for over twenty years. The Quads appeared in many Cow & Gate advertising campaigns and the income this provided helped Mr and Mrs Miles to bring up their miracle babies. The St Neots Quads remained local celebrities throughout their childhoods, appearing in newsreels, opening fetes and posing for photographs.

The Great North Road or A1

This bucolic, rural scene in this 1958 picture is The Great North Road.

The building is still pretty much unchanged, but the road seen here is actually the north bound carriageway of the current A1 and the tree and fields on the opposite have been swallowed up by the southbound carriageway. The A1 was actually to split the village in two during the rebuilding in the 1960s with Church End on the north bound side and Station Road on the sound bound side. Despite this physical division, the two sides maintain a wonderful community spirit using the Stuart Memorial Hall.  

This photo was selected by Steve Cooney as it shows  how the A1 cut through the village and is in such massive contrast to the four lanes of sometimes bumper to bumper traffic now.

WW2 Special Operations Executive

The new Tempsford Memorial commemorates 75 female secret agents, including Violet Szabo.

Secret missions were coordinated by the Special Operations Executive flying from Tempsford Airfield during WW2. Churchill’s instructions were to “Set Europe Ablaze”. Many of the agents were arrested facing interrogation and some were executed. They left Tempsford Airfield, flown in Lysander aircraft by moonlight. Missions were so secret that villagers did not know the truth until several decades later.  The villagers fundraised  for the memorial which was unveiled by  Prince Charles in 2013  keeping up the tradition of royal visits and a part of history the villagers are very proud of.

You can read more about Special Operations Executive on the  Imperial War Museum website  and the  National Army Museum website.