Cottage, Burnt Fen, Prickwillow c.1890 (photo F L Harlock) (Cambridgeshire Collection)

Burnt Fen, Prickwillow

History of Burnt Fen

Houses in the fens were often very remote from each other. Rev. Claude Kingdon in Prickwillow in the fens, Home Mission Field, May 1893, wrote: Many of the wooden dwellings are mere hovels, and with them, as with the more substantially built ones, there is an almost entire absence of straight lines owing to the quaking ground on which thy are built, cracks being visible everywhere, and chimney pots so precariously crooked as to seriously threaten the inmates on gusty nights. These houses are terribly overcrowded, many of them having only two rooms and containing as many as a dozen occupants.

See also, The Urgent Hour – a history of the drainage of the Burnt Fen District by John G A Beckett, 1974.

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In 1991 Harry Bye reminisced about his childhood at Burnt Fen to Fenland Past and Present:

MR HARRY Bye, 74, of Ely, who recalls his days as a boy in the Fens:

When I attended Burnt Fen School in the period 1926-1931 at one time there were 114 children in attendance and I remember at that time at Christmas, each child received a present from Santa Claus valued at about 2/6 (twelve and a half pence).

The vicar always paid a visit before and after Santa’s visit. The money was raised from the proceeds from whist drives and dances. Mr and Mrs Crowther were the teachers up to 1930.

There was a busy railway station with passenger and goods traffic and horse railways conveying farm traffic to and from Shippea Hill Station.

The Chivers family, who owned the local estate, had their own railway and locomotive conveying railway trucks to their siding to be picked up by the main line locomotives.

There were many bakers. butchers and grocers with their horses and carts delivering in the Fens. A boy from WH Smith at Ely would cycle around with the newspapers.

Doctors and insurance agents would drive from Littleport and Ely with their cycles on the side of their cars and where they could not drive, they would ride their bikes. And if they could not ride they walked.

If you wanted a tooth out, you dropped in at the dentist and he would make an extraction for half a crown.

The local policeman from Prickwillow would keep law and order from his cycle and there were buses on Thursdays and Saturdays.