Search by topic
- archaeology
- architecture
- bricklayer
- Building of Local Interest
- carpenter
- church
- crime
- dressmaker
- fire
- Great Eastern Railway
- listed building
- medieval
- oral history
- Public House
- Rattee & Kett
- Religious House
- Roman
- scholar
- school
- Then and Now
- tudor
- women
- work
- world war one
- world war two
Search by text
Crosses Boat Houses
History of Crosses Boat Houses
See Enid Porter: Boat Building
1851
John Cross, 76, boat builder, b Cambs
Mary, 76, b Hunts
Sarah, 50, b Cambs
Mary Buckell Dunham, granddaughter, 26, annuitant, b Chatteris
Rowland Godfrey, grandson, 4, b Thetford
Simon Godfrey, 40, boat builder master, b Thetford
Elizabeth, 43, Chesterton
Ebenezer, 14, b Thetford, blind
Victoria, 7, b Chesterton
According to A Disorderly House, Godfrey had worked as a boat builder in Chesterton in the late 1820s for John Cross. He married John’s daughter Elizabeth and they had three children in Thetford, the youngest, Ebenezer, born blind. Godfrey ran a pub for a brief spell in Kings Lynn at the end of the 1840s. When he returned to Cambridge in 1851 he was an insolvent debtor.
The local press reported his prosecution and imprisonment:
7/6/1851 Cambridge Independent Press
Another press story:
28/1/1854 Cambridge Chronicle
records how Godfrey reported his own blind son Ebenezer for fraud in a local shop but then withdrew the charge. However Ebenezer was clearly determined to do something of this sort and two press accounts
23/2/1856 Cambridge Independent Press
8/3/1856 Cambridge Independent Press
report how Ebenezer was convicted of the theft of a watch and sentenced to three months hard labour.
However Simon Godfrey had his own problems with the law. The local press reported how he had been bound over to keep the peace at the request of his wife:
23/8/1856 Cambridge Independent Press
The circumstances involved the attentions on his wife of Mr Chalk, a Chesterton grocer.
In November 1860 the couple are reported to have taken on the Crown (late ‘Engineer’) Inn.
Contribute
Do you have any information about the people or places in this article? If so, then please let us know using the Contact page or by emailing capturingcambridge@
License
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
