Town not gown

Sometimes, when I say I was born and brought up in Cambridge people accuse me (yes accuse is not too strong a word!) accuse me of being posh. They associate Cambridge with the prestigious university which has been there for about eight hundred years, not the town which has been there for two thousand if not longer.

My Cambridge is what has grown from a little cluster of houses around the crossing place over the River Granta, or the Cam; my Cambridge comes from the British people who were drawn to the Roman settlement there with its castle on one of the place’s seven hills; my Cambridge is the Anglo-Saxon settlement on the edge of the Fens; I expect many of the people living there fled the Normans as they brutally worked their way through the conquered country after 1066, and I expect Cambridge people fled into the fenlands and may well have ended up on the isle of Ely with Hereward the Wake.

As the University was established it used the local people as servants, and it became more dominant exercised more and more control over the town. My family was agricultural labourers who came out of east Anglia when the railways offered them a different sort of employment in the middle of the nineteenth century. My great-granddad became an Alderman and had a pub, and his son, my grandfather also held the license of a pub. My father and his brother and sister worked in the pub as young people, but they also worked hard at school and managed to get to a grammar school. My dad was called up before the war stated and demobbed in 1946; those seven years serving his country robbed him of any chance of going to university as his brother had done through scholarship, but he began to work in a science laboratory.

We’re not posh at all; we’re not rich or famous or think ourselves better than other people. We’re town folk, not University!