The weather had changed while Alan had been in the marquee and what had promised to be a nice clear Bonfire Night was shaping up to be fairly typical of late autumn so far: drizzle, patches of fog and low cloud. Put another way, Alan thought, bloody miserable. The wake had left him feeling very low: both tired and fed up. He wanted to be out and about; get the blood circulating. He sighed heavily. An oncoming car swerved slightly and sounded its horn. Suddenly Alan realised he was driving a grey vehicle on a grey foggy day and the light was starting to fade. Quickly he flicked on the headlights.
Although it was only a short distance away, it was getting quite murky as he drove into the car park at Smiley’s Mill. Lane’s car was parked close to the footbridge and Alan could see he was drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. Not a good sign. He glanced at his watch. Twenty minutes late. He sighed heavily: too bad.
Lane and Alan went back a long time together and Alan had helped him untangle at least a couple of difficult cases after their first meeting on what was the very beginning of Forensic Archaeology, the now famous Saltaire Forensics MSc. course of 1996–8. Alan had been a part-time tutor on it, following his failure to complete his PhD. It had been a two-way process for them: Lane raised Alan’s spirits after his doctorate debacle and Alan taught Lane the basic skills of archaeological excavation. They’d been very close for those two years, then their lives had gone their separate ways. But last year they had come together again to sort out a difficult investigation in Leicester. In his heart of hearts, Lane was very keen to work on another case with his old friend.
He looked over towards the four-storey stone mill with the central arch leading to the internal waterwheel. A couple of fallen branches were snagged against the mill race’s heavy iron protective grill.
Lane got out of his car, as Alan drew up alongside him.
There was no small talk, just a perfunctory handshake, before Lane said, ‘Let’s get along to where we found the body while the light’s still with us.’
For a moment Alan hesitated. He had very little dress sense, but he was slightly worried that the thin, black Oxford lace-up shoes that he’d bought the previous day to go with the only smartish pair of trousers he possessed, might not be ideal footwear for a muddy walk. Should he slip on some wellies? But Lane was already halfway across the footbridge and rapidly heading north. Sod it, he thought, it’s only money.
They strode along the path, through the gate and into the woodland, where it was now very much darker. In the reduced light of the wood, Alan realised why Lane had been in such a hurry. After a further short walk they arrived at the spot and Lane indicated where the body had snagged against the wire.
‘Which suggests it floated downstream from the mill, because the tail-race bypass channel rejoins the main cut down there.’ He pointed to a gap in the opposite bank of the cut, about 50 yards downstream of where they were standing.
‘Yes, that makes sense, especially as even the mill race was in spate after all that rain in September and October.’
Alan tried to make this sound conversational, but in his mind he could see Stan being washed into the mill wheel. A hand reached out weakly to grab at a railing – his last effort to hang onto life –but it failed. Alan didn’t want to think about what happened next. To his relief, Lane distracted him from his thoughts by showing him press pictures of the collapsed willow tree and the smashed grill.
‘That’s what it looked like the day before the body was found.’
Alan’s reply of ‘Horrible’ was feeble.
Thankfully, Lane spoke again. ‘Yes, the Fursey Estate fixed it for them double quick. That new grille was up just two days after the accident.’
‘Ah, so that’s why it looks so freshly painted.’ Alan was glad they were discussing screens and paint. It was reality. He must keep a clear head. Still, it was hard, so hard, when a close friend was involved.
‘And I’ve just had the results of the post-mortem: his blood alcohol count was massively up. About three times the legal limit for driving.’
For a sad moment Alan recalled Stan proudly sipping his Virgin Mary. No, he sighed, it didn’t add up. ‘And they’re certain of that, are they? It’s just that the body starts to produce alcohol as part of decomposition …’
Lane smiled. ‘You’ve got a good memory, Alan. But this doesn’t happen when the body’s in the water for such a short time. And it was cold water, too.’
‘So you’re in no doubt, Richard?’
‘No, none. And neither are forensics.’
Alan was shocked. So he really had been back on the booze again, poor sod. ‘Bloody hell. Poor old Stan. What on earth was he thinking of? Why come to a mill when the rivers are all in spate? It’s madness.’
Lane could see Alan was upset, and paused before saying gently. ‘Unless, of course, he wanted to put an end to his misery.’
‘What – suicide?’
Alan still found this impossible to accept. It was so unlike Stan. And not at this stage in his career when everything was starting to look so good. But then, he thought, what if he couldn’t shake the booze? He’d never do the site or its report justice. And he must have known that.
Lane gave Alan some time to think before continuing. ‘It’s not uncommon to drink a lot first, just before you jump. Dutch courage.’
‘Well …’ Alan hesitated; such a simple explanation still didn’t feel right. ‘I suppose you might be right. But even so …’ He trailed off.
Alan couldn’t think of an alternative. But he knew Stan well and he had never seen him as the sort of person likely to kill himself. When he was drinking he was usually fairly cheerful, and often outrageous. He was never one of those self-focused, introspective, maudlin drunks. But on the other hand, Alan knew he had been under a lot of pressure from Flower and the Fursey people to produce his report on the Fursey surveys for English Heritage. He must also have known that the future of the project depended on it. But even so, suicide? He shook his head. No, Stan would never have done it. Not in a thousand years.
‘I don’t know, Richard.’ Alan sighed heavily. ‘You’re right, it’s the explanation that fits the facts best. But I still can’t believe it. It’s just not like the Stan I knew.’ He thought for some time, then took a deep breath. ‘Well, you’ll probably be proved correct, but right now I can’t see it. I honestly can’t.’
They were crossing the footbridge. Lane, who was walking in front, stopped and turned to his friend. ‘Alan, if you only knew the number of times I’ve heard that from grieving friends and relations. The worst thing about suicide is the terrible effect it has on those left behind.’
‘I know he was close to his parents, too, and he must have known how it would have affected them.’ He paused, before finishing. ‘No, I just can’t see him doing such a thing. Ever.’
They were looking towards the cut, with the sound of water in the background. Eventually Lane spoke. ‘I know this has been difficult for you, Alan, but I’m afraid there’s another unfortunate factor, too. Stan worked for the Crippses, and the family have a terrible reputation locally. I haven’t checked any of it out, but according to local gossip it seems that over the years people who have close connections with them often end up dead in the river …’
‘Sounds a bit Hollywood. D’you think there’s truth in any of it?’
‘Again, it’s only a guess, but I’ve come across similar tales and long-running feuds when I first worked here over ten years ago, and so far as I could see, in those cases the roots of the rumours and the hostilities seemed to lie back in the drainage schemes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when different landowners and engineers sometimes had to be very ruthless, or else their entire fen would have flooded.’
‘Yes.’ Alan nodded. ‘It really was a case of co-operate or drown in those days. Of course, the history books stress the co-operation, but we also know the feuding could be fierce.’
There was a short pause while they both considered this unpleasant aspect of Fen history. Then Alan continued, ‘So you reckon Stan’s death will set the rumour mills grinding again?’
‘Oh, yes. In fact, my desk sergeant told me that a couple of people had already said that “the Cripps Curse” had been revived, and that was only a day after we’d pulled your friend from the water. Word travels fast round here. And of course there was that terrible case of the drowned banker.’
‘What, around here?’
‘I suspect so. The man was called Hansworth. He was found at Denver Sluice back in 2004 – early summer, May, I think it was – but he was a tenant of the Crippses and we suspect he fell in the river. It was probably an accident when fishing. Then his body drifted downstream. It was quite a big case when I first worked for the Fenland force.’
‘You said “probably an accident”. Did you mean that?’
Lane drew a deep breath. ‘I don’t know, Alan. The body was very decomposed, so it was hard to do any useful forensics.’ There was a pause. ‘Well, anyhow, I’ll certainly take another look through the Hansworth files when I return to the station.’
In the Lincolnshire Fens where Alan grew up, the folk memories were all about feuding abbeys and priories, fighting to extend their estates by building ever-larger flood banks. King John’s treasure may well have vanished as a long-term consequence of one of those feuds. Down here, in the Black Fens of the south, it was more a story of individual entrepreneurial landowners and family rivalries. The great estates of the higher land reaching out into the richness of the unclaimed, newly drained peats. Usually it was the poor owner-occupier who suffered at their hands. For these people, drainage meant a slow, impoverished death. At the time of the English Civil War the Black Fen was the landscape with the richest potential of any in England. No wonder, Alan thought, that resentments were so deep – and long-lasting. Alan was also aware that each feud was different. They were all closely linked to the landscape and the people who lived in it. Quite literally, the devil lurked in the detail – and he knew exactly where he could uncover his telltale traces.
* * *
They were sitting in Lane’s car in the mill car park, sharing a flask of warmish tea. The late afternoon had given way to a misty twilight and in the distance they could already hear the first few pops and cracks as bonfires were lit. Lane was the first to speak, as he handed the mug to Alan.
‘Personally, I think the coroner will enter a verdict of death by misadventure. For some reason he got drunk and decided to take a dip …’
‘In a swollen stream? With his rigger boots on?’
‘I agree, but people do strange things when they’re so drunk.’
Suddenly Alan had a thought: that broken grille. It was so coincidental, or was it? ‘Could it have been murder?’
Lane thought for a moment. ‘That had crossed my mind. Of course we can’t rule anything out entirely. But who on earth would have had a motive? Did anyone hate him in archaeology?’
‘Hate Stan?’ Alan laughed. ‘Absolutely not. He was one of those people who everyone liked. Sure, he could be irritating sometimes – can’t we all? But no, I think he was one of the most popular people around. We all liked old Stan.’ Alan reflected for a moment. ‘But what about the family, those “Cursed Cripps”, would any of them want to get rid of him?’
‘No, absolutely not. It was in none of their interests to raise that old myth. In fact, I can assure you that the baronet …’
‘Barty?’
‘So you’ve met him?’
‘Yes, I could see he was looking after – assisting even – Stan’s parents at the wake. I must admit, he struck me as a quiet, no-nonsense, intelligent man.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Lane replied. ‘He’s all of those things and a very good businessman, besides. I didn’t know it when I worked here before, but it was he and his wife Molly who established the restaurant and farm shop. It was all part of raising the money to pay off his father’s death duties.’ He paused. ‘Funny thing, Mary and I often went to the restaurant. They did proper vegetables that tasted of something – unlike that supermarket rubbish you get everywhere now. All grown on the estate.’
‘So did you know him when you were here before?’
‘Not as a personal friend, no. But he was a magistrate on the Ely bench and I got to know him then. He always struck me as scrupulously honest. And open. But at the same time, he was nobody’s fool. He could cut through slimy solicitors and crooked witnesses like a hot knife through butter. His pet hate was those whiplash cases. He loathed them!’
‘Do you think he was aware of the family’s local reputation?’ Alan asked.
‘Interesting you should ask that. But, yes, he was. I first met him at a grand official reception in the cathedral.’
‘When was that?’ Alan asked.
‘It was my first year with Cambridgeshire, so it must have been Christmas 1997. Actually, I remember that conversation quite well. Barty was talking to an earnest schoolboy, who was doing research into Fenland drainage. It’s a standard topic in these parts, as you might imagine. Anyhow, to my amazement, he described how his family had changed from Royalist to Roundhead in the Civil War and then something about drainage disputes in the eighteen century. I can’t remember all the details, but he said that people in the Fens have very long memories and that the Cripps had never been very popular locally. I remember he said something like “We’re the Campbells of the Fens”.’
‘Do you think there was ever a Glen – a Fen – Coe?’
‘No, I’m sure there wasn’t. Although I would image that people weren’t too polite to each other during the Civil War.’
No, Alan thought, they most certainly weren’t. It was a bloody conflict with high casualties. Much worse than it was portrayed at school – if, that is, it was taught at all.
‘Do you think these myths, these stories, had any effects on the Cripps’s businesses locally?’
‘It crossed my mind, too. Of course, Barty couldn’t produce any good solid proof, but he said that John – that’s his younger son—’
‘Married to Candice, right?’
Lane nodded. ‘Anyhow, John had access to the White Delphs shop receipts, which he said were growing very much faster than Fursey’s. Worse than that, most of the Delphs’s visitors were locals and they weren’t known as far away as Cambridge, even – where the real money lay.’
Alan was looking puzzled. ‘Sorry, Richard, but White Delphs?’
‘I thought you’d have known about it. It’s that Second World War visitor attraction on the old railway line, by the bank just off the Littleport Road.’
Alan thought for a moment. Then nodded. Yes, he knew where it was.
‘Anyhow,’ Lane continued, ‘Cambridge, especially the university, was where most of the Fursey restaurant’s customers came from. Barty said that John was sure of that because they could often be found sipping a pre-dinner G and T while they strolled round the abbey ruins. He laughed – said that was where he did most of his customer research.’
Alan could picture the scene. ‘So despite attracting richer people from Cambridge …’
‘They were doing less well than White Delphs who were mostly attracting locals.’
‘And presumably lots of them.’
‘Yes. That’s what he seemed to be saying. He reckoned the local market had to be cracked if Fursey was ever to be sustainable.’
‘Tell me more about White Delphs? Its fame certainly hasn’t spread as far north as Lincolnshire.’
‘I took a stroll round there last week. It’s a strange place, obviously run by volunteers, who were everywhere. But in essence it’s part of an old marshalling yard that includes about a mile of the old Ely-Bedford line …’
‘Which was axed by Beeching in the early 1960s, wasn’t it?’
‘That’s right, but like many railway lines and larger dykes in the Fens, it was used in early wartime defences. It became part of what they called the Fenland Command Line, which was established in the summer of 1940.’
‘A defensive line, not a railway line?’ Alan wasn’t too clear.
‘A bit of each …’
‘So it’s got pillboxes, that sort of thing?’ Unlike some of his colleagues, Alan didn’t consider himself a ‘concrete anorak’, but he had to admit that wartime remains did have a strong appeal to him. His last case with Lane had involved a huge hangar where Lancasters had once prepared for bombing missions over Germany. In many ways its dark interior put him in mind of echoing cathedrals. And as for those myths about wartime airfields being haunted by the spirits of long-dead airmen: they weren’t so strange to him now. Everyone said that place was haunted, too. But one thing he did know: ghosts don’t exist in the past. They’re all around us, in the actions and minds of the living.
‘Yes,’ Lane continued. ‘There are several pillboxes and two very much larger field-gun emplacements, plus several spigot-mortars and a jumbled mass of anti-tank cubes that had been bulldozed to one side after the war. But I was struck by one thing: they weren’t quite as amateur as I’d imagined.’
‘In what way: their displays? Their facilities?’
‘Both actually. They had quite a smart coffee shop with a souvenir and small bookshop alongside it. Both were housed in what looked like pre-fab wartime barracks. And the display panels were new and well-done; professionally, I reckoned. No, I was quite impressed.’
It was now almost night-time and as the temperature dropped, the mists cleared. Suddenly the evening sky was ripped apart by a dozen large rockets. As if synchronised, they arched gracefully high above their heads. There was half a second’s pause, then simultaneously they exploded into showers of glittering celestial confetti. Briefly Alan caught sight of Lane’s face staring up. In the fireworks’ light, he seemed far happier, more confident and at ease now that he was back in the Fens.
As Alan drove away his resolve strengthened even more. Lane was only doing his job, following the most obvious leads. But Alan knew Stan, and Lane didn’t. He had to do the right thing by his friend. And to do that, he needed to use Stan’s own methods. Begin with the research. Find out about the place and the history. Take it step by step. The devil would be in the detail.
* * *
The financial crisis, bankers’ bubble, call it what you bloody like, Alan was thinking as he drove into Cambridge, happened two years ago, but you wouldn’t know it here; this is as prosperous as London – maybe even more so. And very, very different from the small towns and scattered villages around his brother’s house in south Lincolnshire. He’d been in Grantham the other day and was shocked to see how many shops were closed, with ‘For Sale’ or ‘Lease’ boards in their windows. One glance at the local paper’s property pages told the same tale: prices were falling and quite a few places had been put up for auction by the building society or bank. Alan sighed, it was depressing: a foolish investment for a banker was a ruined life, shattered dreams, for an ordinary family. But not here, not in Britain’s fastest-growing city. He was driving through the northern industrial suburbs, known by locals as Silicon Fen, and already the road was packed with Lycra-clad executives cycling their way to their offices. For a moment he wondered how they displayed their wealth to their peers. Was it fancy helmets (wired for sound and vision), high-tech shoes, or just flashy suits and bicycles? He didn’t know, these were other worlds, but on the whole he preferred them to the old ways of Rolls Royces and vast SUVs.
Slowly he drove his way through the rush-hour traffic to the Downing Street site at the heart of the city. He left his Fourtrak in the multi-storey car park that had been built over the remains of the Saxon city. Alan was fascinated by place names. The fact that he was saying words that he knew people a thousand years ago would probably have understood fired his imagination. So Cambridge or Grontabricc, to give it its eighth-century Saxon name, meant the bridge over the River Granta. The ‘bridge’ part of the name was Early English, or Saxon, but the name of the river was very much older: Celtic, with roots going back to prehistoric times. It was so old, in fact, that it had lost its original meaning. His interest in place names had taught him that rivers run very deep in people’s consciousness: the Thames, or Tamesis, had been named for centuries before London was founded by the Romans. It probably meant ‘Dark River’ in Celtic, the Iron Age tongue. Dark River. How different from the foaming torrents of the hill country: slower, deeper, darker and more deadly. For an instant he saw Stan’s face beneath the swirling brown waters. Then it sunk away.
He crossed Downing Street and joined the throng of students heading towards the large courtyard which housed the department of archaeology, where he turned sharp right and made his way to the Haddon Library. Just inside the door were pictures of past Disney Professors of Archaeology; among these distinguished, serious faces, his eye was caught by the warm smile of Dr Glyn Daniel. As a boy, his father had been a fan of Glyn Daniel who chaired the very popular TV show, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral. Alan frowned ruefully, Test Pit Challenge still had a very long way to go before it matched their viewing figures, but never mind, TPC was a much better programme. Then he remembered that Daniel had written the standard history of Fisher College. He made a mental note to check it out.
First, Alan enlisted the help of the assistant librarian to assemble as much information as he could find about the Cripps family. The sun was just starting to shine through the Haddon’s tall windows when Alan looked at the books around him on the table. When he’d discussed the Cripps family with Lane in the mill car park he’d determined to reveal the devil in the detail of their family history. And this was the place to do it. But he’d need to keep his wits about him. Such research wasn’t just about reading words in a book; it was about using reason to get at what the author was originally thinking. And that took imagination. But now he had the motivation for the task and, as if to give him a further boost, he remembered working closely with Stan the previous autumn, sorting out levels in the site notebooks. They’d made a good team.
He began reading, every so often stopping to tap on the Notes app and jot something down. In the past he would have taken notes in longhand, but recently he had been persuaded to try a tablet and now he swore by them. By one o’clock his tummy had started making loud gurgling sounds. People were even turning to look. Time for a beer, pie and chips. But before that, he read through what he’d written that morning:
1650: Cripps family acquire the lands that previously (pre-1538) belonged to Fursey Abbey (Benedictine). During the Civil War, the main family under Colonel Crowson Cripps began by supporting the Royalists, but then switched to Parliament when they started to rise after Naseby. For his loyalty, Cromwell gave him a grant of land at ‘Fursbea, near Eley’. This was seen by many locals as the ‘Devil’s Due’. Crowson was known to have played an active part in the ‘Fursey Massacre’, when the (Royalist) vicar, a local squire and the congregation of the parish church was locked in and the timber building set alight. The squire who, like everyone else, died in the fire, was Edward Cripps, Crowson’s first cousin. Local legend (see Powis (’49) Cambridgeshire Folklore and Legends, pp. 78–81) reported that Crowson’s men stopped townspeople from taking water from the river to quench the blaze. Powis (p. 80): ‘This inhumane act, if true, probably explains the persistent local myth of the ‘Cursed Cripps’ and the associated, and possibly equally ancient, link of that family to the river.
Alan set the tablet aside and stared up at the ceiling. He was beginning to understand why the Crippses had been hated so much. And it wasn’t as if they were outsiders, the equivalent of rich London second-homers today. No, they were Fen folk, born and bred. That must have made it ten times worse. His brain was now working at double speed. No time to go to the pub, he’d grab a quick bite instead. The pie and pint could wait.
Fifteen minutes later he returned, still licking the grease of a doner kebab from his mouth. He sat down again and resumed reading, but now his fingers were working overtime.
c. 1695: Surface of the ground in Fens around Ely lowered as result of earlier drainage. Celia Feinnes, riding through England ‘on a side-saddle’ noted that Ely was ‘ye dirtiest place I ever saw, not a bitt of pitching in ye streetes’. Cripps family established six-horse gin scoop wheels, which discharged their waters onto the common land of the parish, or so it was suggested by the villagers. This was disputed by David Cripps, Crowson’s son who had inherited the estate by then. Thereafter, this common reverted to summer grazing. D. Cripps was the magistrate who judged the case.
1720: Horse gins replaced by windmills, Further complaints from locals.
1781: Act of Parliament enclosing all land within the Parish of Fursey. The Cripps family acquire Fursey Common, which they drain first with windmills, then (1813) with steam. They establish the Fursey Main Engine and its Engine Drain. Most village landholders now confined to poorly drained grazing on edges of Parish.
Blimey, Alan thought, little wonder they weren’t loved locally. But he also had to concede they could get things done – just like today. And if there’s one thing that local people resent, it’s the success of others when, that is, they achieve things they should be doing themselves. That’s pure poison – and it lasts. Boy, Alan sighed, does it last … But how did this all fit in with Stan’s work on the site? Was there someone out there who resented the work that he was doing? Alan realised he was in danger of getting ahead of himself. Step by step. He returned to his notes.
C18–19: The Cripps family estate grew steadily. By WW1 it amounted to 3,000+ acres.
1922: 1st Baronet Cripps created. Close friend of Lloyd George.
1949: 1st Baronet RIP.
1949: 2nd Baronet takes over running of the Fursey Estate.
Hmm, Alan mused, the 2nd Bart could have claimed that Lloyd George knew my father. By now the family history had become very predictable and typical of Britain in the post-war decades.
1949–1960: 2nd Bart sells off land and Smiley’s Mill to pay death duties and maintain the hall and farm buildings. Sells Isle Farm and its land. Fursey Abbey Farm is now too small to be profitable as an agricultural enterprise alone. The Fursey Abbey Farm is 250 acres and Woolpit Farm, 400 acres.
1971: 2nd Bart RIP.
Alan looked up from the tablet. Reading between the lines, it seemed that Barty, now the head of the family, came to his senses after the 2nd baronet’s death. Barty realised that the Cripps had come down in the world, but he didn’t panic. Instead, he set about joining the late 20th century; making practical choices and connecting with the people around him. But what about his offspring, Alan mused? Had Sebastian and John made their father’s journey, or had he shielded them from the new reality? And what about Candice? Was she shielding John by taking on the practicalities of the Fursey project, while he swanned around in the elite circles of tourism consultancy? The longer he thought about it, Alan realised that it takes more to change whole families than just one progressive individual. He sat back in his chair and sighed: there were so many devils in these details.
1971: 3rd Baronet (Barty) takes over much reduced (2 farms and the park) estate. Estate much reduced by successive deaths and payments of death duties. The hall is very run down, so they get bank loan to do it up and convert into apartments. Bart and Molly move in to Abbey Farm.
1977: With the estate slowly recovering, 3rd Bart becomes a Magistrate on Ely Bench.
1978: 3rd Bart and Molly set up successful farm shop and restaurant at Fursey Home Farm, which they rename (probably as part of local marketing?) Abbey Farm.
Alan could never spend much more than about two hours reading in libraries before his concentration began to flag. And now he was feeling distinctly drowsy. So he got out of his chair and took a stroll to the shelves where the books on Cambridge colleges were held. To his surprise there weren’t very many, then he paused. Of course, this was Cambridge and each college would still hold the best material themselves. Nonetheless, there was quite a lot on Fisher, most of it written by Professor Daniel. He went straight to what he knew was the definitive volume, Professor Daniel’s A Short History of Fisher College. It weighed fully 10 kilos. Thank God, he thought, he never wrote an extended version. As he lifted it off the shelf, his eye was caught by another, slimmer volume, The Cambridge Murders, by Dilwyn Rees, Daniel’s pseudonym.
He scanned the pages by the learned professor. The college had been founded, like St John’s alongside it, by Lady Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII’s mother, and John Fisher, senior proctor of the university, whom she ‘admired’ hugely. By all accounts the college buildings had been completed by 1595, apart, that is, from the fine, delicate, Wren bridge over the river Cam, which still provided such a slender foil to the same architect’s magnificent library for the much richer Trinity College, a few yards upstream. The college’s history in post-Tudor times was undistinguished and overshadowed by the two larger colleges, St John’s and Trinity, on either side. Daniel even quoted an example of undergraduate humour, then current in St John’s and Trinity: ‘Undergraduates at Fisher are truly unique; unlike everyone else, they have chips on both shoulders.’ Alan winced: it would be cruel, even today.
But he was getting diverted. College history was one thing, but the Cripps family was another. How had they become involved with Fisher? More to the point, was drainage or land involved? He checked Daniel’s index for references to Cripps, and found several. The first referred to David Cripps, Crowson’s son, who was a student at Fisher in the very early 18th century. In 1720 he gave his old college £2,000 in cash and almost double that in ‘bonds and promissory notes’ – in other words, stocks and shares. Alan guessed his bequest was probably worth half a million in today’s money. Needless to state, his son and all future descendants would be welcomed by the college with open arms. In those days the extensive old-boy networks that went with a Cambridge college would have given the Cripps family a big advantage over their less privileged neighbours.
There were further, smaller, bequests to Fisher in the 18th and 19th centuries, but one in particular caught his attention. It was made in 1753, by David’s son Harry, and it consisted of a grant of land with rights of access onto Fursey Common. Daniel published a map of the holding, which was still in the college’s possession when he wrote the book in the mid-1950s. Although hardly a major landowner (unlike its two neighbours), Fisher, in common with many other Cambridge colleges, had accumulated quite a substantial portfolio of holdings, which successive bursars had built up in subsequent years. As a result, the college was a significant landlord and Daniel’s map showed their estate, of about 5,000 acres, covering large areas of what is today rural Lincolnshire. Alan could see at a glance that this was excellent agricultural land, which was doubtless why the college had bought it. There were one or two, generally smaller, holdings elsewhere, including Fursey. All were listed in an appendix.
Quickly Alan turned to the final chapter of the book, which described more recent transactions. Here he confirmed that the 2nd Baronet Cripps (Barty’s father) had sold off Isle Farm in 1953 to pay the second death duty assessment. There were two pictures of it: a medium-sized unpretentious Italianate house built about 1850 with an attached farmyard and a walled garden. It looked delightful, even in the monochrome picture in which an elderly lady, with two children playing at her feet, stood in the sunlit orchard of gnarled apple and pear trees.
Alan put his head in his hands and closed his eyes: he could see the house out in the less open fen to the north of the pumping station and its Engine Drain that ran up to the very edge of Fursey Abbey. The fields towards Isle Farm were smaller and less regularly shaped and the landscape was less bleak, with more trees and even the occasional hedge. This would suggest it was drier land; probably a low-lying extension of Fursey island – as indeed its name suggested.
By the end of the 1950s, the Cripps’s Fursey Estate amounted to just over 400 acres, centred immediately north of Woolpit Farm, which in turn was adjacent to Fursey Hall, the large ancestral seat of the Cripps family. Alan checked his notes to confirm that the hall had been sub-divided into apartments in 1971; these included the residence of Sebastian and Sarah Cripps, who now managed what was left of the estate. Alan smiled. He could imagine that the huge Sebastian was inwardly cursing the generosity of his long-dead forebear. An extra 400 acres could come in very handy today. Alan Googled Sebastian to see if he, too, had attended Fisher. But no, although his younger brother John had. Instead, Sebastian had gained a degree (1982–84) in agriculture from Nettlesham College, just north of Sleaford. Funny, Alan thought, that’s where Dad wanted me to go. Indeed, his own brother Grahame had gone there; it was still widely regarded as one of the best agricultural colleges in Britain.
Alan leant back in his chair and looked out at the institutional roofs of Downing Street – and the sunshine. He was starting to feel cooped up.
Time for a pint. He went to a quiet pub he knew in a residential area the other side of the Downing Street complex, where he sat down and opened the local paper. His eye was caught by a story on page two about a big new academy school which was being proposed for Ely. The chairman of the district council, Councillor Sebastian Cripps, was quoted as being strongly in favour of it: ‘It would enhance the life chances of new residents in the neighbourhood and would greatly improve their prospects in the future.’
He reached out for his pint, but his hand stopped in mid-air. His mind was racing. Was Sebastian’s concern for the good citizens of the Cathedral city entirely altruistic?
Or was there more to it than that?