Episode 67

Yaxley Farcett sat down at the desk in Reg Dixon's study and opened up his diary to the 31st of January from earlier that year. He flattened the pages out with his hand and read on:

Met Annie today at the library, and she confirmed again to me what a wonderful and misunderstood lady she is. She has been doing some research into the pubs of Banham for a small booklet she is hoping to produce. At one time there were fifteen pubs dotted about the village; in the Main Street, The Lanes and down in the Fens. It was while doing some investigation on 'The Peacock's Show' in Cauliflower Drove that she discovered something quite disturbing and I am unsure what she (or I, for that matter) should do about it.

 

Annie told me that she uncovered far more than she expected to whilst researching a small pub that had last served a customer in 1914. Apparently, the pub served, at the time, all the farm workers that plied their trade in Cauliflower Drove, which during harvest time could be a huge number. Hummer Thompson's Grandad, Amos, owned vast acres of land down there at the time and it was mostly his labourers that used The Peacock's Show. Hummer's Dad spent a lot of time helping in the fields down at Cauliflower Drove as a youth and had fond memories of sitting with the men in the yard of the pub enjoying a beer or five after a hot day in the fields.

Anyway, when Hummers Dad had died in 1980, he had left the field which the pub had been closest to, to the village. He had the noble idea that the 14 acre field should be turned into a wood, so that future generations would be able to enjoy the field in the same way that he had done as a boy, although the pub was already a distant memory. There was a ceremony performed at the time when the land deeds to 'Thompson's Wood' were handed over by a grinning Hummer to the, then, land officer for South Fenland council Cedric Morgan. This of course was in his days as a local councillor, long before he made his famous 'Think not what your county can do for you, but what you can do for your county' speech at Shire Hall in Cambridge. Anne knew most of that from village folklore of course. I had vaguely heard some of it but it all came back to her when she dug further into the files.

The field in question was the subject of more administration in a file she found in amongst a pile of papers concerning the pub. The building was eventually demolished in 1922 and a barn built in it's place. There were no further alterations to the deeds until 1980 when the ownership of the land transferred from the Thompsons to Barnham Council. However, and this is the part where Annie began to get suspicious, there was a further document in the file for 1982. The land then transferred from the Council to a company called 'Lorimer Holdings'. A token fee of one pound had been paid for the land and a grand statement proclaimed that 'the land has been passed over to a professional group dedicated to the preservation of an assett that should be overseen by like minded individuals, free of the fluctuations of local politics'.

From there, Annie checked out the historical records for the council meetings from that period of Barnham Council. After climbing many steps and dragging out dusty files, she eventually came across the yellowing and faded minutes for a meeting of the Land & Property Sub Committee, dated the fourth of June 1982. Under 'any other business', there was an item marked 'Sale of land: Grid Ref 142A/624D'. It said quite simply, that the ownership of the land had been passed from the council to 'Lorimer Holdings'. The sale had been approved unanimously by all those present. And, for this is the crux of the matter; those present consisted of only three people; Councillor C.Morgan, Mr. G. Trent and the clerk, Mrs. A.Morgan !!!