The Manea Colony Social discontent and change often follow after periods of major warfare. In the UK the 1945 election of Clement Atlee's Labour Government at the end of WWII is a prime example. Another great European struggle the apoleonic Wars (1803-1815) led to a considerable period of turbulence in Britain. The economy had suffered from years of war, thousands of ex-soldiers flooded he labour market causing wages to fall below subsidence levels. Rioting became common place, including the infamous 1816 Littleport riots. The expanding Industrial Revolution and introduction of machinery threatened workers, the 1834 amendment to the Poor Laws broke up families by segregating workhouses. Against this troubled background socialism flourished, demanding universal suffrage for men. Robert Owen painted a vision of a communitarian' soci ty promoting an Utopian socialist economic vision of a new moral world, and across the Country "Chartist" communities were set up. In 1838 a local farmer and Methodist Minister, William Hodson, resolved to create a socialist colony by building a small township on the west bank of the Old Bedford River on 200 acres of land at Manea Fen, now known as the Manea Fifties. The community started, making its own bricks to build a Church, houses, workshops, a community building, a school, a large pavilion and a windmill. They produced a newspaper, the "working be '. Sadly the dream didn' las . Disputes broke out within the community, and in 1841 William Hodson withdrew his financial support, and within a couple of years the colonists had all gone. People carried on living in the houses, digging clay and making bricks but occupation gradually dwindled. The 1851 census recorded 74 people living there, the 1881 census 27, and the last record to be found is of a baptism in 1906. The abandoned brick pits flooded and were shown as swamps on the 1890 Ordnance Survey map. 1
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Dorothy L Sayers
Fenland'• Beat Selling Author•••
Dorothy L Say rs (1893 - 957), one of th 'Queens of English Detective Fiction', grew up in first in Bluntisham, and later in Christchurch where her father was rector. The family seat of her aristocratic fictional detective, Lord Peter Wimsey's was Denver. Wimsey helped defend his brother, th 16th Duke of Denv r, ,,vh n he b cam th chief murder suspect in Sayers' novel 'Clouds of Dorot.h, L Sa) rs at the Witnesses' in ¥lhich he was tried by his p ers, b for th h i ht of hcl' care r. full House of Lords. Her choice of the name 'Denver' for the fictional Dukedom reveals her Fenland roots. Her 1934 mystery the aw·ard winning 'The Nine Tailors' is set in the fictional fenland villag of Fenchurch St. Paul. The nd of the book includes a vivid description of a massive flood, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Sayers mus herself have witnessed similar flooding while growing up in the£ ns. I is rumoured that several characters in the book share names with graves in Bluntisham churchyard. 0
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