Downham Market History

A walk through Bridge Street. Soon after 9 am on Thursday , 10th June 1841 , 33 year old solicitor Edward Hett, left his elegant double fronted house in Bridge St , and made his way across Market Place to the High St. It was raining and he was anxious to get to the Union Workhouse before the gentlemen of the Board of Guardians arrived and without his file of papers being soaked . The weekly meeting was scheduled to start at 10 in the forenoon. The first planning and building meetings had taken place in the upper room of the Castle Inn, but since its opening , the Guardians had met in the grand fireplaced, half panelled Board Room over the front entrance of the Workhouse .

MARTIN COULCHER , CORONER .

MARTIN cOULCHER : cORONER.

The Wikipedia

The VAD Auxiliary Hospital was opened in May 1915. The buildings used were the Towers , and the Church Hall or St Edmunds Hall also the School room. The school room is more or less as it was then but is now a private house . The Towers burned down on August Bank Holiday in 1968 , and all that is left now is the Billiard room and the stables .

High flight

Oh !   I have slipped the surly bonds of earth , 
and danced the skies on laughter silvered wings ;
Sunward I've climbed , and joined the tumbling mirth 
of sun split clouds  --- and done a hundred things
you have not dreamed of  --- wheeled and soared and swung 
high in the sunlit silence . Hov'ring there 
I've chased the shouting wind along , and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air ....
Up, up the long , delirious , burning blue
I've topped the wind swept heights with easy grace 
where never lark or even eagle flew  ..
And while with silent lifting mind I've trod 
The high untrespassed sanctity of space , 
Put out my hand and touched the face of God .

This poem was written by John Gillespie Macgee , junr ,, of the Canadian airforce . He was killed in an air accident in 1941 .

By the year of Herbert’s birth 1888 , George Eastman had invented the Kodak camera . It took 100 individual images and then had to be returned to the factory for developing . The big glass plate cameras used by professional photographers which were in evidence here in 1911/1912 Trade Directories , would have been both heavy and unwieldy and possibly very expensive to buy . There is a story of Herbert using a bicycle to carry his tripod and camera from one job to the next . But the heyday of the bellows plate glass camera was over by the 1920s superseded by more modern equipment . Perhaps at this time both Herbert and his neighbour Royal Watson were able to buy slightly obsolete cameras to use commercially . 100 years on we are lucky to have so many Herbert Raby photographs of the town and various celebrations .

Bell being removed for cleaning and refurbishment . 1979 .

Copyright EDP , via DMDHS

This is a photograph from Taylors of Loughborough. There are others from Taylors but I am not certain they are all of our bells . It is apparently an almost impossible tower to access all 8 bells and so the bell founders had difficulty .

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Pevsner ( and Wright) North West and South Norfolk , 2 , Yale Uni 2002.

This photograph is the property of Marlborough College . Charles was born on 16th March 1897 in London , and baptised 25th July 1897 in Bebington , Cheshire . His parents were Charles Wilton Prangley and his wife Elizabeth Richardson , who were married in Hastings district in 1890 . His father was the son of an agricultural chemist and was for a time a silversmith’s clerk living in Liverpool , but between 1881 and 1890 he took Holy Orders and became curate of Holbrook in Suffolk . He was ordained priest in 1890 from Highbury Theological College and initially was curate of Brancaster .

Land Tax Assessment 1791 . NRO ref .

Land Tax Assessment 1810. NRO C/SCD2/2/28.

Land Tax Assessment 1830. LAND TAX ASSESSMENT 1830. C/SCD 2/2/48 1830.

CAPT RICHARD WOODGET OF CUTTY SARK AND BEXWELL ROAD

Burnham Norton church. June 2015.

Richard Woodget was born on 21st November 1845 at Burnham Norton in Norfolk. His parents were Richard and Celia Woodget ; he had seven siblings at least three of whom died in infancy ; his brother William died aged 21 and his uncle Henry died in Docking workhouse in 1842 aged 51 . His mother Celia was Celia Gage and his father’s second wife. They married in King’s Lynn in 1831 . His father’s first wife had been Lydia Bensley who he married in Burnham Norton in 1823 . Although Basil Lubbock and other sources say his father was a farmer, implying a land owning or tenanting family , in fact all the records show Richard senior was a labourer. By 1861 on census night , Richard was living aged 16, with his older brother Charles who was 26 and a bricklayer . Charles and Emily ( Thirtle) were recently married and had a baby daughter Emma . Richard was still described as an ag lab. Richard senior had been born in Burnham Norton in 1797 the youngest child of eight children of William and Susanna . In places in the Bishop’s Transcripts and the registers it says William Woodgatt aka Woodgate aka Woodgett . The name seems to have morphed from Woodgate to Woodget between 1780 and 1810 . He was bapt as Richard Burcham Woodgett his mother Susanna’s maiden name being Burcham . She and William were married at Burnham Norton in 1779. After her death aged 52 in 1807 he remarried to another Susan (Brown) a widow in 1810. William was buried in Burnham Norton in 1812 aged 62, a married man .

RAF Downham Market has long been abandoned . The runways overgrown and the buildings mostly derelict with a few saved and adapted to small industrial units . The farmland has been reclaimed and the whole airfield has returned to private ownership .

The most recent over winter searches , with the farmer’s permission , ( Dec 2014-March 2015) have been on the field adjacent to the airfield where Lancaster D -Dog crashed in 1944. One day we hope to have a plaque placed somewhere near where D-Dog crashed . The most recent finds were uncovered in the dormitory area of the airfield in June 2016 . They are a razor, a tiny handmade lighter from a spent bullet case and a well used Macleans toothpaste tube . These can be seen in the photograph of Flt Lt Colin Bell DFC.