14 (11) Emmanuel Road

History of 14 Emmanuel Road

1851 (11)

David Impey, 62, widower, college servant, b Foxton

Charles, 35, college servant, b Thriplow

Sarah Flack, 46, servant, b Thriplow

1861

1871

John Wright Neville, 25, articled clerk to solicitor, b Cambridge

Mary Jane [Smith], 19, b North Littleton Worcs, d Cambridge 1918

Emma, mother, 54, monthly nurse, b Essex

Matilda, aunt, 63, housekeeper, b Essex

Frederick John, 2 mos, b Cambridge

[The family had three further children, Henry Wilfred b.1872, Florence b.1874 and Percy b.1876]

Eliza North, servant, 24, b India

Samuel E Perry, lodger, 29, curate of St Andrew the Less, b Bristol

On 4th August 1877  Josiah Chater reported in his diary the case of J Neville, a young local solicitor, who had embezzled about £700 of the Improvement Commissioner’s money. The affair caused a great stir in Cambridge and was reported at length in newspapers. It was discovered that this was part of a much larger fraud that had involved the Borough Surveyor, George Wilfrid Stephenson, going back ten years and involving up to £5,000.  Neville was sentenced to six years penal servitude. The account in the Cambridge Chronicle and Journal follows:

CCJ18771103

John Wright Neville died in 1878 on the Isle of Wight, presumably while serving his sentence.

Mary Jane  John Fynn in 1886 and went on to have three children by him. In 1881 she is recorded in the census as a teacher of dance living with her step parents at 22 Kings Parade.