A View From The Boatyard

Below is a fascinating article written by Zoe Crisp. Zoe is a final year PhD student in the faculty of history at Cambridge University. The title of her thesis is: ’The urban back garden in England in the nineteenth century’. 

A punt tour from the Mill Pond in the south to Magdalene Bridge in the north will take you past the great College gardens of the University of Cambridge. You punt first past Darwin College’s cottage-style gardens which run right down to the river. Gliding under Queens’ College’s Mathematical Bridge, you are soon able see the immaculate expanse of King’s College back lawn sweeping down from the soaring chapel to the river. A little further on, making your way under one of the elegant trio of arches that support Clare College Bridge, you can see the colourful herbaceous borders and tall cypress trees of the Clare Fellows’ Garden. Behind the high wall on the opposite side of the river, just before you get to the Jerwood Library, are the gardens of Trinity Hall. Henry James, if ‘called upon to mention the prettiest corner of the world,’ ‘should draw a thoughtful sigh and point the way’ to those very same gardens. Further on, as the river curves round, you can see the Backs of Trinity College to the left, and the lawn that separates the Wren Library from the river on the right. Then there are the gardens of St John’s College to the left, and finally, after you pass under the heavy black and gold ironwork of the Magdalene road bridge, the front gardens of Magdalene College are the last college gardens that you can see from the river.

Less than a mile away in distance (if not in in character) from the College Backs, however, are Cambridge’s other back gardens: the thousands of small square or rectangular plots of land, attached to Cambridge’s Victorian terraced houses. Today, these gardens may be decked, planted, or water-featured but a hundred and fifty years ago, when the houses were first constructed, these plots would have looked very different. The most obviously different feature would have been the privy – an essential in any back garden in the days before mains water or sewerage. A privy was an outside toilet: a simple board with a hole in it, with a cesspit below. At best, this cesspit could be perfectly respectable, regularly emptied by the ‘night-soil men’ with their carts and buckets, but in the worst cases, it could be abhorrent, overflowing with solid and liquid filth. In the smallest yards (most central Cambridge back gardens were around 40-50m², or around half the size of the six-yard box on a football pitch), it was noted by a justifiably fastidious explorer that ‘privies, pigsties, and midden-heaps are crowded together so closely as to prevent the passage of a person of ordinary bulk, without his incurring a risk of contact with some kind of filth.’ Some of the poorest inhabitants in the worst urban areas (the Market Square area of Cambridge used to be a notorious slum) did not even have the ‘luxury’ of a privy: ‘Some persons have not even cesspools or privies,’ noted an 1840s reporter; ‘all their excrements are thrown into a little back yard, where they are allowed to accumulate for months together.’

In addition to the privy, there might have been a pit for the ashes from the inevitable coal fires in the house, and perhaps a water-butt for rainwater. Laundry lines dominated the gardens of the 1850s as they do the gardens of today. In fact, part of the justification for providing working-class houses with their own private back gardens was so that potentially embarrassing articles of laundry (knickerbockers, shifts, corsets etc.) could be hung up to dry in the privacy of the back yard, rather than strung out indecently across the very public street.

Nosing at the knickerbockers on the laundry line might have been a dog, a donkey, or a pig. ‘There is a strong dispensation on the part of the working classes to crowd up their already confined yards with pigsties, hen-roosts etc.’ wrote a critical commentator in the 1880s. Other people would use their yards for ‘tripe, trotter and cow-heel boiling’ – much to the displeasure of their neighbours. Even in the worst slums, however, back yards could be turned to the cultivation of flowers and green stuff, much to the approval of this 1840s moralist: ‘Something may be hoped for in people who can feel “a joy in flowers,” and cultivate roses and geraniums in the polluted atmosphere.’ Even in the most overcrowded parts of Victorian Cambridge you could ‘suddenly come upon a garden so exquisitely arranged and cultivated,’ and be ‘positively startled at its appearance in a region which seems eaten up with dinginess and dun colour.’

It is unlikely that the ordinary back gardens of Victorian Cambridge, however exquisitely arranged or cultivated, were the equal of the great fellows’ gardens of Trinity or Clare, but vegetables, flowers, and shrubs could abound nonetheless. For those modern gardeners looking to plant out their spring snowdrop or crocus bulbs, be advised that, ‘a centre of deep blue, surrounded by a ring of white, then a ring of orange, and a circle of lilac as edging makes a telling bed,’ at least in Victorian eyes. Vegetable-wise, you could grow a ‘mammoth gourd’ or pumpkin, your own ‘salading’ – mustard-and-cress, spring onions, lettuce, radishes, and endive – or rows of cabbages. As for your lawn, the head gardeners of Trinity Hall would be hard-pressed to match the immaculate green carpets of Victorian ‘grass-plats’: nineteenth-century garden writers sternly warned against allowing dandelions, daisies, plantains and cats to thrive in your back gardens. Finally, you could edge your impeccable lawn with a string of ‘Messrs’ Loomes and Co. of Whittlesea’s Cable-Pattern Edging Tiles.’

Although it started out as a very serious and almost exclusively masculine pursuit, urban gardening for all, then as now, was a balm to the stresses of city living. As you get off your punt and return to your weekday office grind, remember the words of this 1850s gardener: ‘Our whole life, from infancy onwards, has been spent between these begrimed walls, there is the greater need to be continually reminded that there is a world of perennial loveliness beyond the influence of our commercial hurry, to which if we will sometimes turn for solace and refreshment, we shall escape having our souls crushed out of us by the sharp edge of a shilling.’

The River Cam along the College Backs is set the be lowered on Monday 9th January to enable vital inspection work to be carried out.

As a result, we will not be open at either our Mill Lane or Magdalene Bridge Stations on that day. Customers will still be able to hire craft in the direction of Grantchester, though.

This once-a-year closure of the lower river is a vital part of the conservation of the buildings and land along the College Backs route.

Once the river has been lowered to a sufficient level, engineers from Cambridgeshire County Council will carry out a survey of all of their property along the route.

In addition to being an important process for conservation, the lowering of the river does allow tourist and locals to view the College Backs in a vastly different manner to normal.

Anyone thinking about donning their Wellington Boots and going for a wander along the riverbed should be aware that there will still be a trickle of water left, the river will not be completely drained.

We also advise any prospective adventurers to watch out for the various pieces of debris which will undoubtedly festoon the riverbed, having been jestisoned in over the past months and years – bikes will no doubt be a common sight.

We would certainly be interested in receiving any photographs that you might take of the lowering however, the best entries will certainly find a home on our blog and Facebook page.

Below Ed Hunt, one of our chauffeurs, gives his thoughts on punting through the winter. We get the impression that he is going to become quite attached to those marigolds….

Smack!

I’ve heard that sound, of the pole hitting the river bed, a thousand times.  It seems particularly loud at this time of year.  Perhaps it’s the knowledge that, on the other side of the season’s must-have canary yellow marigolds that I’m sporting, the pole is as cold as ice.  Or perhaps it’s because I know I must push ever harder against the treacherous ground to overcome the powerful currents caused by last week’s rain.

All I know for sure is that the people keep coming to hear me tell them about the college backs.  And when I remember that, the harshness of that Smack! softens.  It softens because I remember the following: that if you’re on a tour at this time of year, you really want to hear what I have to say.  Then I remember what every chauffeur knows: that the best tours are a dialogue.

The Australian lady in front of me asks me how Trinity College got so rich (it’s the third wealthiest landowner in Britain, with assets worth an estimated £1.5 billion), and I smile.  I smile because I get to tell her about the vast tracts of land, stretching across central England, of which Trinity is the owner.  I smile because we can joke about the globulous, womanising King Henry VIII whose murderous acquisitions bankrolled Trinity’s foundation.  The incomparable architecture of Cambridge, and the stories that the buildings tell, are there whatever the weather.

Fast forward to Saturday evening, and I’m on the river again.  This time, I’m taking a ghost tour, the material for which, though hugely entertaining, is complex and narrative-driven.  The knack to a ghost tour is timing.  It’s especially hard now, since the winter winds whistling past the Bridge of Sighs are slowing down my progress.  I wonder whether the story of the Friendly Ghost of St. John’s will last as long as I need it to before I move on to the tale of the poltergeist of Stockbridge Antiques.  But then I smile.  I smile because I remember how much I love these stories.  My smile broadens as I think of the story that I will tell in a few minutes of Waterloo Teeth, dentures made with pearly-whites stolen from the mouths of the war dead of 1815, and the uniformity with which the palms of my guests will fly to cover their faces in horror.  Just like the daytime tour, the ghost tour at this time of year brings only those who really want to hear the tales that I unfold.

The windy night has blown away the clouds and brought a beautiful, sunny Sunday morning.  Everyone at Scudamore’s is in a mood as bright as the glinting sunshine, in the knowledge that the promise of a beautiful day with enthusiastic guests will be kept.  As I don my marigolds for my first tour of the day, I am pleased to be getting on the back of a boat full of people eager to hear about the centuries of trial, tribulation, and glory that Cambridge has endured and enjoyed.  As we glide down the river, I point out Clare Bridge, the only one on the river not torn down by the Civil War leader Oliver Cromwell in the late 1630s.  I’m reminded of Cambridge’s ability to adapt and to survive, no matter what the forces of history may throw at it.  And I’m glad to be a part of it.

And I smile.