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.