Now Bibles Return to the Village

 

Gravestone of Burwell fire victims

 

Ornamental gravestone of Burwell fire victims

In the August magazine edition, I reported that an oil painting by Harston artist Mary Greene had returned to the village and was hanging in the Village Hall.

I can now report that two 18^th century bibles belonging to the Taylor and Rowley families who lived in Harston Manor around 1800 to 1950 have been offered to the village by a descendant of these families. These give details of members of these families but there are also details of a family which is linked to a great tragedy in another village.

In a bible of 1706 there are details of several members of a Brown family from 1682 to 1769. I have researched the family and discovered that they were from Burwell and two of the family were victims of what has become known as the Burwell Barn Fire.

Ann Palmer Brown (b 18 Jul 1712) and her brother William (b 2 Jul 1714) went to a puppet show in a barn in Burwell on 8 Sept 1727. Puppet shows were a rare event, particularly in small Cambridgeshire villages and this one only occurred because the puppeteer family were on their way to the annual fair at Stourbridge Meadow and needed money to make the rest of the journey. Crowds flocked to see the show and to prevent over-crowding the barn doors were nailed shut! In a barn partly filled with hay, the inevitable happened – fire broke out, people panicked, the doors couldn’t be opened.

Burwell parish records report that “most of those that did escape, which was but very few, were forced to crawl over the bodies of those that lay in a heap by the door.” An eyewitness report published in 1750 states that “there were so many bodies mangled as to be unknown, so that no less than three cartloads of fryed carnage and burnt bones, were put into two great pits.”

These pits are in the Burwell churchyard marked by this poignant memorial stone with flames burning a heart. 78 people died of which 51 were children including the 2 Browns.

A mystery remains as to why a bible with Brown family details ended up with the lords of Harston Manor