Meeting reports 2023 and 2024

Speaker Paul Shakeshaft revealed how the complex history of this hundred-year building project can be recognised in the fabric and fittings of the Chapel. He also asked a more testing question: why was this, the most splendid of all late Medieval European university chapels, built in Cambridge, whose University at the time was regarded as, at best, of the second rank?

Our speaker, Dr Sean Lang, gave a wide ranging talk covering many aspects of British Rule in India and the lifestyle of those who went to live and work there. He spoke from experience: four generations of his family had lived in India. He illustrated the talk with some family photographs.

Speaker John Biggs, one of the group of twelve engineers from Acorn who started ARM in 1990, talked us through the development of the microchip industry and how a small Cambridge company came to be so dominant.

Speaker Ian Sanderson described how he and some other enthusiastic amateurs formed the Archaeology Rheesearch Group in 2004 (named for the river Rhee, a tributary of the Cam). They carry out investigations of sites of archaeological interest, broadly in the South Cambridgeshire area, by simple field walking, land surveying, and using geophysical techniques.

The Whipple Museum was founded in 1944 and is located on Free School Lane, Cambridge, though the impressive doorway has “Laboratory of Physical Chemistr” written above it. Alison Giles, the Learning Coordinator, brought along 10 objects selected from about 7,000 and told us all about them. They represented several of the ‘shiny things Mr Whipple liked the look of’.

Tales of village life in Stapleford and Shelford, a talk by Helen Harwood The rural poor were extremely poor and living at a time when the Poor Law of 1601, with its use of workhouses, was still in operation and there was no system for pensions or Welfare State provisions that we take for granted today. People were not paid enough and by 1855 a hundred and twenty people had set off from Shelford and Stapleford searching for a better life somewhere in the new world.

Chip Colquhoun is a storyteller who didn’t need a screen yet held us fascinated as he explained just how our very own Cambridge is entirely responsible for creating a whole country!

Gill Shapland visited to present her talk, based on the Ely ‘Quarter Sessions’. We did not have one of our volunteers writing up this talk for us. A write-up of a very similar talk by Gill Shapland can be found on the British Association for Local History Newsletter archives of winter 2020.

A talk by Professor Emerita Evelyn Lord The similarities between the Great Plague and its societal consequences and what we have recently experienced with Covid-19 were brought out by the speaker. There are two types of plague: bubonic, caused by the transfer of a bacterial infection from the fleas on rats, and pneumonic with Covid-19, caused by a sort of cold virus, being the most recent example.

A talk by Elwyn Davies and David Pearce, who are co-owners of the restored twelve-sided Wicken Windmill.

This talk was given by Mary Dicken, a vicar’s daughter, who has spent all but her student years living in Sawston. The talk focussed on the young men who came into the area and decided to set up businesses, having been attracted primarily by the natural resource of the lime rich waterway.

From a Scottish Croft to a Cambridge Shop: this was the story we were told by Duncan MacKay. Speaking without notes for over an hour, he was armed with a formidable memory for his family’s history and a series of amazing photographs. These ranged from an early daguerrotype image of his great great grandparents, Donald MacKay and Isabella Fraser, to one of the Meccano prototype of the radio telescope with which Martin Ryall won his Nobel prize.