Great St Mary’s
Trail script by Historyworks, read by Michael Rosen.
You can either listen to the audios and/or read the scripts below.
To find the teacher resources including powerpoints and laminates click here.
There have been bells at Great St Mary’s from at least 1303 and they rang to call everyone to Church services; to open the town Corn market; to toll for births, marriages and deaths; and to announce the start of University meetings and lectures. They rang out for great events like royal coronations and victories in battles; but also tolled every evening to remind local people to cover over the fires in their hearths for the night and this continued until the outbreak of the Second World War. And because the tower was not completed until 1608, the bells were hung on temporary frames, located both inside and outside the church door, and in the church yard by the market, where the ringers stood using long ropes.
The belfry was completed in 1596 with four bells. However, now there are thirteen new bells, all cast in 2009 as part of the 800th anniversary of Cambridge University. You can find the belfry when you walk up the stairs of the tower, and you will be able to see all these bells in the bellchamber. There has been a clock on Great St Mary’s above the door since 1577, when there were very few public clocks. What is even more distinctive about Great St Mary’s is the noise made by the chimes. The tune of the chimes is known as the ‘Cambridge Quarters’ and has become very famous because it was copied for the ‘Westminster Chimes’ of Big Ben at the Houses of Parliament. Not everyone knows that our Cambridge chimes were the first bongs!
The Cambridge Marketplace is what it is today as a result of the Great Fire. This took place on the night of Saturday 15th September 1849, when a blaze broke out at half past midnight at a clothier’s shop full of textiles. In those times, there were wooden houses and workshops erected like a shanty town in the middle of what is now the Market Square, and spreading down Petty Curry and Peas Hill.
Even Great St Mary’s had shops with upstairs dwellings leaning on the east wall, which meant if you looked up in church you could see into neighbours’ bedrooms! It was therefore easy for a fire to spread because of the clusters of wooden structures.
Water from Hobson’s Fountain should have been used to quickly put out the fire, but the key to the conduit had been mislaid in the panic so the townspeople had to put the fire out with buckets, forming a long chain from the river. Newspaper reports describe when the chemist shop caught fire, that the chemicals turned the flames every colour of the rainbow like a firework display! Thankfully no one died when many structures in and around the market were burnt to the ground. The extra space gave the marketplace its modern shape.
Created with flickr slideshow.
