Littleport

In May 1816, with the Napoleonic wars over and the harvest ruined by the summerless year that followed Tambora's eruption, labourers and discharged soldiers met at the Globe on Main Street, mounted two punt guns on a waggon and marched on Ely. The rising lasted three days. Twenty-three men and one woman were condemned to death, and five men were hanged outside Ely on 28 June 1816, then buried the next day in a single grave at St Mary's, Ely, beneath a tablet that names all five and ends "May their awful fate be a warning to others!" The town's history society records two ghosts tied to those days: a dragoon said to walk the riverbank, and whispering rioters' voices in Granby Street.

The Littleport riot began in a pub and ended on a scaffold, and almost everything about it was written down at the time. By the spring of 1816 the fen town was living on the wrong side of two disasters. The Napoleonic wars had ended the previous year and discharged soldiers were coming home to no work, while the eruption of Tambora had produced the summerless year that ruined the harvest and left grain so scarce that bread rose to what the Society calls "exorbitant prices". The Littleport Society, the town's own history society, sets out that chain plainly: a nineteenth-century cost-of-living crisis landing on a village of poor agricultural labourers. On the evening of 22 May 1816 a group met at the Globe, a public house on Main Street, and decided to take their case to Henry Martin, a local landowner and employer. Martin was not at home. His grandmother Rebecca Waddelow, who kept the village shop, and her visitor Mary Cutlack were robbed instead. The Reverend John Vachell, vicar of St George's and also a magistrate, read the 1714 Riot Act to the crowd; the rioter Isaac Harley, carrying a pistol, threatened to shoot him. The vicarage was ransacked and the Vachell family walked the five miles to Ely in the dark. Alfred Kingston, who wrote his account in 1901 with the calendar of prisoners open on his desk, describes what Littleport did next with unusual precision. A man named Walker carried a long pole with "some printed stuff on the end of it, like a flag". Behind him came a hundred to a hundred and fifty people with pitchforks, crowbars, a butcher's cleaver and clubs. Frightened householders stitched banknotes into their children's clothes and sent them out to hide in the orchards and hemp-fields. Overnight the town looted its own gunpowder, mounted two long punt guns — the eight-foot fowling pieces of the fens — on a waggon, put the women in behind them, and at first light marched on Ely with the cathedral towers five miles ahead. Three-quarters of a mile outside Ely two clerical magistrates met the column and heard its terms — "Wages at 2s. a day, flour at 2s. 6d. a stone" — and promised that the overseers would examine them; the crowd went in regardless, and the looting began with £50 levied on a miller's wife. A mounted messenger had already ridden to Bury St Edmunds. Kingston says the commandant there let "a small band" of the 18th Dragoon Guards go and that the Royston troop of volunteer cavalry came as well; the Littleport Society names the Royal Dragoons, arriving on 23 May. On 24 May the soldiers, the Rev. Sir Henry Bate Dudley, a prebendary of Ely, and a body of Ely gentlemen and inhabitants marched the five miles back to Littleport, where the rioters had barricaded themselves in the George and Dragon inn. In the fight to dislodge them, the Victoria County History records, one rioter, Thomas Sindall, was killed, and another rioter and one of the militia were severely wounded. Kingston adds that one of the dragoons, a Waterloo veteran, lost an arm and "lamented the fact that he should at last receive one from his own countrymen". By his count seventy-three prisoners were lodged in Ely gaol; the Littleport Society puts the arrests in Littleport and Ely at 82. A Special Assize opened at Ely on Monday 17 June 1816 before Mr Justice Abbott, Mr Justice Burrough and Edward Christian, Chief Justice of the Isle of Ely, and sat for six days. Twenty-three men and one woman were condemned to death, the figure the Littleport Society gives, and nineteen sentences were mitigated to transportation or gaol. Five were left for execution: John Dennis, aged 32, who in Kingston's words "reluctantly assumed the role of leader of the mob"; William Beamiss the elder, 42; Isaac Harley, 33; George Crow, 23; and Thomas South the younger, 22. They were hanged on 28 June 1816 outside the city. Kingston records that no one in Ely would provide the cart for less than five guineas, that the men wore "white caps tied with black ribbons", and that three hundred inhabitants on horseback carrying white wands escorted them. Their bodies were given back to their friends, and the next day they were buried together in one grave in the churchyard of St Mary's, Ely, hard by the cathedral's west front. A stone tablet went up on the church tower above them.

Littleport is a fen town about 7 km (4.4 miles) north-north-east of Ely Cathedral, bypassed by the A10, with a station on the Ely–King's Lynn line that the Victoria County History dates to 1847. The Globe, the Main Street pub where the rioters met on the evening of 22 May 1816, was demolished in 1962, according to the caption of the photograph the Littleport Society publishes of it (catalogue number LS-1634). The Society's collection is on the first floor of The Barn, off Main Street, Littleport CB6 1PH, telephone 01353 861547. Its archive page, read on 24 September 2026, gives the opening as every Tuesday afternoon from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. excluding public holidays, free and without appointment. Parking is free and immediately adjacent, the ground floor is step-free and a chair lift reaches the collection upstairs. The same page asks anyone who wants to see specific items to contact the Society beforehand, so that they can be brought out of storage. According to the Society's riots page, the original memorial stone from St Mary's, Ely, is in that collection with other material from 1816. The Society also sells Deborah Curtis Watson's Mysterious Littleport, a 44-page paperback reissued in 2015, for £3.50. St George's Church in Littleport was John Vachell's. The Victoria County History (1953) records that its earlier registers were destroyed in the riots and that the surviving ones begin in 1754 for marriages, 1756 for burials and 1783 for baptisms. In Ely, the five hanged men share one grave in the churchyard of St Mary's, by the west front of the cathedral; the stone there now replaces the tablet Charles Harper copied in 1902. Ely Museum occupies the Old Gaol, Market Street, Ely CB7 4LS. The building was the Bishop's Gaol from 1679 until 1836, and Kingston describes the condemned men being drawn "from the gaol to the fatal platform". The museum's visit page, read on 24 September 2026, gives opening hours of Tuesday to Saturday 10.30 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday noon to 5 p.m. and bank holidays 10.30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is £7 for adults, £3 for children, free for under-fives and £16.50 for a family, and a ticket gives entry for a year. For schools the museum runs a Littleport Riots workshop built around a reenactment of the hearing in the Georgian courtroom, at £8 a child for the full day plus £79.20 for hire of the Courthouse; its paranormal page invites investigation groups to book under separate terms. The Grange, where the Society's Haunted Littleport page places a grey lady on the upper floor and a troublesome ghost in the former library, was built in 1855 as St George's vicarage and is now Littleport Grange Care Home. The page itself says the grey lady has been seen only by the residents. The remaining stories are set in the open: whispering rioters in Granby Street in the description of Watson's book, and a headless horseman on Camel Road towards Apes Hall and near Ponts Hill, and a dragoon on the riverbank, on the Society's page.