Littleport

Littleport is a fen-edge town four miles north of Ely, and its hauntings are the kind a public hanging leaves behind. In May 1816, with the Napoleonic wars over, grain prices high and the harvest ruined by the summerless year that followed Tambora's eruption, labourers and discharged soldiers met at the Globe Inn on Main Street, mounted two punt guns on a waggon and marched on Ely. The rising lasted three days. A special commission condemned twenty-four people, 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!" — not, as is often repeated, in unmarked ground. The town's own history society records the ghost lore that grew from it: a dragoon said to walk the riverbank, and whispering rioters' voices in Granby Street. For the anniversary crowd and the ragged figure at the church, we could find no source at all, and we say so.

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 June and discharged soldiers were coming home to no work; the Corn Law of 1815 had pushed grain prices up; and the eruption of Tambora had produced the summerless year that ruined the harvest. 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. Ely's magistrates conceded a wage rise and poor relief, then the looting began anyway. On 24 May a militia of Ely citizens led by Sir Henry Bate Dudley, backed by the 1st Royal Dragoons, charged down the Mill Street incline into Main Street. The rioters made their stand in the George and Dragon. Thomas South shot trooper Wallace through the forearm; Thomas Sindall, the only man known to have been at both the Downham Market and Littleport disturbances, tried to take a musket from trooper William Porter, ran, and was shot through the back of the head. He was the single fatality. One Waterloo veteran of the dragoons lost an arm and, Kingston reports, "lamented the fact that he should at last receive one from his own countrymen". The Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth, did not leave the trials to Edward Christian, Chief Justice of the Isle of Ely and brother of the Bounty mutineer, but appointed a Special Commission under Justices Abbott and Burrough. The assizes opened at Ely in the week of 17 June 1816. Twenty-three men and one woman were condemned; nineteen sentences were mitigated to transportation or gaol. Five were left for execution: John Dennis, aged 32 and a reluctant leader; 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 working fen town on the A10 about four miles north of Ely, with its own station on the Ely–King's Lynn line. There is no attraction to buy a ticket for: the riot's landmarks are ordinary streets, and the Globe on Main Street was demolished in 1962, leaving Globe Lane behind. The one place built for this story is The Littleport Society's archive, on the first floor of The Barn, off Main Street, Littleport CB6 1PH (01353 861547). It is open every Tuesday from 1pm to 4pm except public holidays, free, with no appointment needed and free parking adjacent. The ground floor is step-free and a chair lift reaches the collection above. The Society holds the original memorial stone from St Mary's along with other material from 1816; if you want specific items brought out, contact them beforehand rather than turning up cold. The Society also publishes the local titles on the riots and on Littleport's ghost lore. St George's Church, Littleport, is John Vachell's church; some of its registers were destroyed in the riots and the surviving ones begin in 1754, 1756 and 1783. In Ely, the grave and the tablet are at St Mary's Church, beside the cathedral's west front — a working parish church, free to enter, with no admission arrangements for this. Ely Museum occupies the Old Gaol at Market Street, Ely CB7 4LS, the building where the prisoners of 1816 were actually held: open Tuesday to Saturday 10.30am–5pm and Sunday noon–5pm, closed Mondays outside bank holidays, adult £7, child £3, under-5s free, family £16.50, and the ticket is valid for a year. The museum runs a schools workshop that reenacts the Littleport trial in the Georgian courtroom, and it takes bookings from paranormal investigation groups by arrangement. Two places to leave alone. The Grange, where the Society records a grey lady and a troublesome ghost in the old library, is now a private care home with residents in it. Granby Street, Camel Road and Ponts Hill are ordinary residential streets. Look from the pavement and go no further.