District councillor for Sutton, Mepal, Witcham, and Wentworth (East Cambridgeshire District Council) and county councillor for Coveney, Little Downham, Mepal, Pymoor, Sutton, Wardy Hill, Way Head, Witcham, and Witchford (Cambridgeshire County Council)
The following planning applications in the Sutton division have been published by East Cambridgeshire District Council.
20/01331/FUL Coveney Old School House 10 Main Street Coveney Proposed conservatory incorporating study area.
20/01344/FUL Little Downham Land south of 2-2A Pymoor Lane Pymoor Construction of four-bedroom two-storey detached dwelling.
20/01378/FUL Sutton Trinity Cottage 36 High Street Sutton Front entrance porch and dormer window.
Further information can be found on the district council’s planning pages. If you would like to respond formally to the council about any planning application, comments should be addressed to the district council and not to me. Comments may be made
online using the council’s public access web page (the link above);
Older people, those with disabilities or long-term health conditions, carers and those not online were hit hardest by the pandemic and subsequent service changes.
Three in ten people avoided getting help for a health problem.
Out of those that did get help, three out of four rated it highly.
One in three people told us that the pandemic had a high or significant impact on their mental health and wellbeing.
The shutdown of dental services worsened existing problems around access to high street NHS dental care.
Although some people have taken to online hospital or GP appointments, they don’t work for everyone. Many people don’t have the internet and those with sensory impairments find remote consultations hard to access.
Healthwatch Cambridgeshire has also published a number of briefings arising out of its survey
Extract from the Westminster Tournament Roll almost certainly showing John Blanke
October is Black History Month, so every day during October I will be posting up an introduction to an historical person of colour with a place in the history of the United Kingdom.
John Blanke was a black musician in London in the early 16th century.
He probably came to England as one of the African attendants of Katherine of Aragon in 1501, and is one of the earliest recorded black people in England after the Roman period.
Little is known of Blanke’s life, but he was paid 8 pence per day by King Henry VII. A surviving document from the accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber records a payment of 20 shillings to “John Blanke the Blacke Trumpet” as wages for the month of November 1507, with payments of the same amount continuing monthly through the next year. He successfully petitioned Henry VIII for a wage increase from 8d to 16d.
Dr Sydney Anglo was the first historian to propose that the “Blanke Trumpet” in these accounts was the same as the black man depicted twice in the 1511 Westminster Tournament Roll – an illuminated, 60-foot-long manuscript now held by the College of Arms. It recorded the royal procession to the tournament held in 1511 to celebrate the birth of a son, Henry, Duke of Cornwall to Catherine and Henry VIII on New Year’s Day 1511. (Henry sadly died within two months.)
John Blanke is depicted twice, as one of the six trumpeters on horseback in the royal retinue. All six of the trumpeters wear yellow and grey livery, and bear a trumpet decorated with the royal arms; Blanke wears a brown and yellow turban, while the others are bare-headed with longish hair. He appears a second time in the roll, wearing a green and gold head covering.
Black trumpeters and drummers were documented in other Renaissance cities, including Naples and Edinburgh.
Pablo Fanque, the first circus proprietor of colour in Britain
October is Black History Month, so every day during October I will be posting up an introduction to an historical person of colour with a place in the history of the United Kingdom.
Pablo Fanque was born William Darby in 1810 in Norwich. He was a British equestrian performer and circus proprietor, the first recorded circus owner of colour in Britain. His circus was popular in Victorian Britain for 30 years.
Church records suggest Pablo Fanque was born in Norwich in 1810 and was one of at least five children. When Fanque married in 1848, he said on his marriage certificate that his late father’s occupation was ‘butler’.
There has been speculation that his father was Indian-born and had been brought to Norwich and trained as a servant. Fanque was reportedly orphaned at a young age. Another account says he was born in a workhouse to a family with seven children.
Fanque’s gravestone claims that he was born in 1871, but his age was recorded in the 1841, 1851 and 1871 censuses of England as indicating he was born in 1810. A birth register at St. Andrew’s Workhouse in Norwich reports the birth of a William Darby to John Darby and Mary Stamp at the workhouse on 1 April 1810.
William Darby was apprenticed at age 11 to circus proprietor William Batty and made his first known appearance in a sawdust ring in Norwich on 26 December 1821, as ‘Young Darby’. His acts included equestrian stunts and rope walking, and he was described in one account as ‘a negro rope-dancer’. Once established as a young adult, William Darby changed his professional name to Pablo Fanque.
Fanque made a highly successful London debut in 1847. In the 30 years that Fanque operated his own circus he toured England, Scotland, and Ireland, but performed mostly in the Midlands and the North of England. His children also joined his circus.
In the 1960s John Lennon composed The Beatles’ Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!, borrowed from an 1843 playbill for Pablo Fanque’s Circus Royal. Lennon had bought the poster from an antique shop, and the title is taken from it. The Mr. Kite referenced in the poster was William Kite, who is believed to have performed in Fanque’s circus from 1843 to 1845.
Fanque married Susannah Marlaw, the daughter of a Birmingham buttonmaker. They had two sons, one of whom was named Lionel. In 1848 Susannah died in Leeds at an accident in the building where the circus was performing. Their son was performing a tightrope act when the gallery collapsed, but Susannah was the only fatality.
In June 1848, Fanque married Elizabeth Corker, a circus rider and daughter of George Corker of Bradford. Fanque and his second wife had two more sons, and again both joined the circus. A daughter died aged 1 year and 4 months and is buried in the same plot as Susannah and William, as recorded on the gravestone.
The 1861 census records Fanque as living with a woman named Sarah, 25, who is described as his wife. In 1871, just before he died, census records show him living again with his wife Elizabeth and his two sons, in Stockport.
Pablo Fanque died of bronchitis at the Britannia Inn in Stockport in 1871. Fanque is buried in Woodhouse Lane Cemetery, Leeds, next to his first wife Susannah Darby.
October is Black History Month, so every day during October I will be posting up an introduction to an historical person of colour with a place in the history of the United Kingdom.
Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) Gandhi (1869 – 1948) was of course born in India, and died in India, but studied in London so is included in my month’s roll-call due to his connection with Britain. My blog, my rules.
A lawyer who led the successful campaign for India’s independence from British rule, Gandhi inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. The title Mahātmā is Sanskrit for ‘great-souled’ or ‘venerable’, and was first applied to him in 1914 in South Africa.
Born and raised in a Hindu family in Gujarat, Gandhi trained in law at the Inner Temple in London, and was called to the bar at age 22 in 1891. Unsuccessful in his attempts to set up a law practice in India, he moved to South Africa in 1893 to represent an Indian merchant in a lawsuit – and stayed for 21 years. He raised a family there, and first employed nonviolent resistance in a campaign for civil rights. (The composer Philip Glass wrote an opera about this period in Gandhi’s life, called Satyagraha, which I saw in London a couple of years ago.)
In 1915, aged 45, Gandhi returned to India, where he organised peasants, farmers, and urban labourers to protest against excessive land-tax and discrimination. Gandhi became leader of the Indian National Congress in 1921, and led nationwide campaigns on poverty, women’s rights, religious and ethnic amity, ending ‘untouchability’, and achieving Swaraj or self-rule.
The same year Gandhi started to wear the Indian loincloth or short dhoti and shawl as a mark of identification with India’s rural poor. He lived modestly in a self-sufficient residential community, ate simple vegetarian food, and undertook long fasts as a means of self-purification and political protest. He led the 400 km (250 mi) Dandi Salt March in 1930 in protest against British salt taxes, and called for the British to ‘Quit India’ in 1942. He was imprisoned for many years, on many occasions, in both South Africa and India.
Gandhi had a vision of an independent and pluralistic India, but in 1947, Britain granted independence but partitioned its Indian empire into two dominions, a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan. Displaced people made their way to their new lands amid outbreaks of religious violence – one of the worst mass migrations in history, with over a million deaths. Gandhi visited the affected areas, attempting to provide solace and undertaking several fasts to the point of death to stop the violence.
In 1948 Gandhi was assassinated by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist.
Gandhi’s birthday, 2 October, is commemorated in India as a national holiday, and worldwide as the International Day of Nonviolence. Gandhi is commonly considered the Father of the Nation in India.
More about Mahatma Gandhi at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi
An over-lengthy and fractious meeting of the County Council’s General Purposes Committee this morning, as the development of the Council’s budget for next year begins.
The prospects are not good. Even if the battle against COVID goes well, the Council will need to find savings of £40M in the financial year starting next April. If COVID goes bad – and the evidence so far suggests cases are continuing to rise – then the savings needed could be over £82M.
It is unlikely, to put it mildly, that the Government will come charging over the hill with £82M in its pocket. And unless there is more cash coming Cambridgeshire’s way, the options available to the Council will mainly be ‘efficiency savings’, cuts to services, increased fees and charges, lucrative commercial investments*, and council tax.
(*Not working out so well at the moment – the money they put into buying student accommodation in Cambridge and leisure facilities in Wisbech isn’t making great returns in a pandemic.)
Already lines are being drawn ready for the political arguments that will last through to February’s budget meeting and beyond. The predictions we’ve been given so far assume that Conservative councillors running the Council will go for an increase of two per cent in council tax for adult social care (a service facing huge increases in need), but zero council tax increase for general services.
We don’t yet know what maximum council tax increase the Government will allow this coming year. In the past few years councils have been allowed to set rises of around two or three per cent without having to conduct a ruinously expensive referendum – and the Government generally assumes councils will do that. Assuming the maximum this coming year is of a similar level, it might be considered sensible to start building that figure into the calculations. (If the Council were to try to bridge the whole of a £40M funding gap by way of council tax increases, the rise would have to be about 15 per cent, and nobody – absolutely nobody – is suggesting that.)
Conservative councillors are talking about council tax rises being their last resort after every other option. Liberal Democrats are saying that while nobody relishes higher council taxes, cutting services and increasing charges will affect the most vulnerable population worst, and assuming an increase in council tax of a couple of per cent at this stage would help bridge that gap (albeit only partly in the scheme of the financial problems unfolding).
The Council is now approaching Government to ask for more financial support. That’s all well and good, but the Government will want to see the Council doing all it can to bridge its own gap – and appearing to resolutely stand against raising council tax at all probably won’t persuade the Government of the urgency of the Council’s case.
It’s also fair to say that the Conservative Council has been asking the Conservative Government for ‘fair funding’ for many years with little to show for it, and there’s no reason to assume they will have any better luck this year when COVID has already trashed most of the economy, and a no-deal Brexit in a couple of months’ time will trash the rest.
We could of course all be surprised, but seeing what the Government has just done to Greater Manchester doesn’t suggest that will be likely.
October is Black History Month, so every day during October I will be posting up an introduction to an historical person of colour with a place in the history of the United Kingdom.
Wilfred Wood was Bishop of Croydon from 1985 to 2003, the first black bishop in the Church of England.
Born in Barbados, Wood trained for the ministry there and was ordained a deacon on the island, then in England as a priest in St Paul’s Cathedral, having served as a curate at St Stephen’s Church, Shepherd’s Bush. He spoke out on racial justice, and was elected president of the Institute of Race Relations in 1971.
In 1974 he joined the Diocese of Southwark as Vicar of St Laurence, Catford. In 1977 he was appointed Rural Dean of East Lewisham and Honorary Canon of Southwark Cathedral, then Archdeacon of Southwark from 1982 until his consecration as area Bishop of Croydon in 1985.
Wood was a champion for racial justice, launching several initiatives, serving on committees, and playing a significant part in founding the UK’s Martin Luther King Fund and Foundation.
In 1992 together with the Bishop of Liverpool he co-sponsored a new set of race equality principles for employers, known as the Wood-Sheppard Principles. He was Moderator of the Southwark Diocesan Race Relations Commission, the first of its kind in the Church of England, and also served as Moderator of the World Council of Churches’s Programme to Combat Racism.
In his last years as Bishop of Croydon, Wood protested at the honours given to Enoch Powell upon his death, stating that “Enoch Powell gave a certificate of respectability to white racist views which otherwise decent people were ashamed to acknowledge. In 2000 he argued against the then British government’s and opposition’s negative attitudes to asylum seekers.
Wood was a board member for the local Mayday Hospital for more than ten years, and in 2002 was made an Honorary Freeman of the London Borough of Croydon. He was President of the Royal Philanthropic Society, dedicated to the welfare of young people at risk. He served on the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure which recommended the establishment of the Crown Prosecution Service, and on the board of the Housing Corporation where he supported local housing associations and promoted black housing associations. A number of housing developments have been named after him.
Wood holds honorary doctorates from the Open University, the University of the West Indies and the General Theological Seminary, New York. In the year 2000 he was appointed a Knight of St Andrew, the highest class within the Order of Barbados “for his contribution to race relations in the United Kingdom and general contribution to the welfare of Barbadians living here”.
Wood retired as Bishop of Croydon in 2002, whereupon he returned with his wife to their native Barbados. He has been blind since 2004.
More about Wilfred Wood at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfred_Wood_(bishop)
October is Black History Month, so every day during October I will be posting up an introduction to an historical person of colour with a place in the history of the United Kingdom.
Learie Nicholas Constantine, Baron Constantine, MBE was a West Indian cricketer, lawyer and politician who served as Trinidad’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom and became the UK’s first black peer. He played 18 Test matches before the Second World War and took the West Indies’ first wicket in Test cricket. An advocate against racial discrimination, in later life he was influential in the passing of the 1965 Race Relations Act in Britain. He was knighted in 1962 and made a life peer in 1969.
Born in Trinidad to the grandson of slaves, Constantine established an early reputation as a promising cricketer, but decided to pursue a career as a professional cricketer in England due to the lack of opportunities in his home country. His father wanted him to establish himself in a career, so he had become a clerk in a legal firm but faced many social restrictions as a black man. On arrival in the UK he played for Nelson in Lancashire, while remaining a member of the West Indies Test team, and was chosen as one of the Wisden Cricketers of the Year in 1939.
In 1927 Constantine had married his wife Norma Cox; they had a daughter, Gloria, in 1928.
During the Second World War, Constantine worked as a Welfare Officer responsible for West Indians employed in English factories, and was awarded his MBE in 1947 for his wartime work. In 1943, after a London hotel refused to accommodate him and his family because of their colour, Constantine successfully sued the hotel company (Constantine v Imperial London Hotels) – a milestone in British racial equality.
Constantine qualified as a barrister in 1954, while also establishing himself as a journalist and broadcaster. He returned to Trinidad in 1954, became a founding member of the People’s National Movement, subsequently becoming a minister in the Trinidad government. From 1961 to 1964, he served as Trinidad’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, was knighted in 1962, and became involved in issues relating to racial discrimination. He served on the Race Relations Board, the Sports Council, and the Board of Governors of the BBC, and was awarded a life peerage in 1969, becoming the first black man to sit in the House of Lords.
Constantine died of a heart attack in 1971, aged 69, and was buried in Trinidad. Norma died two months later.
More about Learie Constantine at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learie_Constantine
October is Black History Month, so every day during October I will be posting up an introduction to an historical person of colour with a place in the history of the United Kingdom.
John Edmonstone was born into slavery, probably in Demerara, British Guiana, in the late eighteenth century, but later gained his freedom. He learned taxidermy from Charles Waterton, who used to visit Charles Edmonstone at his plantation in Demerara. Waterton took John under his wing and taught him taxidermy or in his own words, ‘the proper way to stuff birds.’ The two would travel together on expeditions into the rainforest and John would learn the skills he would go on to teach Darwin.
After he was freed in 1817, Edmonstone came to Glasgow with his former master, Charles Edmonstone. From there he moved to Edinburgh, where he earned a living stuffing birds at the Natural Museum and taught taxidermy to students at the University of Edinburgh.
In 1825, Darwin came to Edinburgh to study medicine. Having changed his mind about making his future as a doctor or surgeon, Darwin took lessons from Edmonstone on bird taxidermy.
It has been suggested this this is how Darwin’s interest in naturalism began, and that it inspired him to explore the tropics. Within five years, Darwin was on the HMS Beagle as the ship’s naturalist for its famous voyage in 1831 to South America, Australia, and New Zealand.
More about John Edmonstone at https://www.history.co.uk/shows/not-what-you-thought-you-knew/articles/john-edmonstone-%25E2%2580%2593-the-man-who-taught-darwin
The following planning applications in the Sutton division have been published by East Cambridgeshire District Council.
20/01211/CLE Little Downham Alfie Acres 1B Second Drove Little Downham Certificate of Lawfulness for existing use as a residential dwelling.
20/01299/FUL Witchford 87 Main Street Witchford CB6 2HQ Single storey rear extension.
20/01193/FUL Witcham Hillcrest Mepal Road Witcham Two dwellings (phased development Plot 1 & 2).
20/01204/FUL Witcham Oneway Headleys Lane Witcham First floor extension and garage conversion.
Further information can be found on the district council’s planning pages. If you would like to respond formally to the council about any planning application, comments should be addressed to the district council and not to me. Comments may be made
online using the council’s public access web page (the link above);
