Arbury Update: The Manor School Caretaker's House, The Bomb, Arbury Court Library, Arbury Carnival...

Manor Girls' School foreign holiday, 1960: the first Manor girls to go on a joint foreign holiday with Manor boys: G. Anderson, J. Barnes, C. Blackwell, H. Brown, S. Budd, L. Carter, A. Clarke, L. Doggett, C. Doughty, P. Drake, S. Hardy, E. Harradine, B. Kaspar, D. Miller, J. Parker, L. Phillips, J. Reeves, J. Spencer, J. Symonds, with headmistress Mrs Firman. Note the Manor Schools' caretaker's house can be seen in the background, and the trees of the old Manor Farm orchard.

Lots of great emails and comments - all of which will be answered personally, or on here. Thanks very much indeed to everybody for taking the trouble to get in touch.

The Arbury Blog has proved far more popular than we ever envisaged, and we are delighted. Thank you all to our visitors. 

We've aimed to present a history of the historic Arbury district from the prehistoric, pre-Chesterton days of Arbury Camp, to the 21st Century, including Arbury Camp; the Roman developments and other finds on the land adjacent; the old Arbury Meadows, Furlongs, etc; the Manor, Arbury Camp, Hall and King's Hedges farms; the early estate with community initiatives like the Arbury is where we live! book; the Arbury Carnival; the Arbury Adventure Playground on the Nuns Way Playing Field and the Arbury Town Park and Arbury Community Centre in Campkin Road; and the schools - Arbury, St Laurence's, the Grove, King's Hedges and the Manor/North Community Academy. We've come into the 21st Century with our history of the Cambridge Gurdwara, Cambridgeshire's very first Sikh temple, in Arbury Court, and more.

We still have much material to share and ground to cover. Thanks again to all our commenters and visitors!

Special thanks to Ms Rebecca Downham, step-daughter of Mr Brian Downham of the Manor Farm, who contacted us last year. Ms Downham has provided us with scans of several vintage photographs of the sites of Campkin Road, Arbury Town Park, and numbers one and two Manor Farm Cottages, which stood at what is now the junction of the Arbury and Campkin Roads - traffic now passes over the site! 

It was at No 2 Manor Farm Cottages that Brian lived. His father, William Downham, farmed a large number of acres at Manor Farm, and Downham's Lane is named after him.

Brian was a great contributor to the Arbury Archive in the 1980s, and Andy remembers him fondly.

We'll be sharing the photographs and more about the Downham family in a future article.

Second on our list for this post, we'll take a look at the caretaker's house at the Manor School. We've had two lovely comments from somebody who actually lived there in the 1960s, and tells us it was called 'Manor House' back then. Andy recalls that in his school years and first research as an Arbury Archivist in the 1980s, it was then called 'Manor Cottage'. It was a purpose-built caretaker's house for the school, and part of the school development. We are very grateful to the person who lived there as a child for contacting us, and also for verifying the opening year of the Arbury Court Library as 1966. This contact watched the library being built from their bedroom window, and attended the opening in 1966 with their mother!

Thank you so much for writing!

Another email asks about a bomb which fell on the future site of the Manor School during the Second World War. Yes, the bomb fell in the Manor Farm's old Park Meadow, which had been split into smallholdings, with a large part of it retaining the 'Park' name. The bomb fell near - and damaged - the cowshed at the back of No 3, Manor Farm Cottages. A cow was killed.

The farm cottage, built in 1924 on part of the Manor Farm orchard plot, was undamaged, and the damaged end of the cowshed was rebuilt. The cowshed was still standing when Andy and Debbie went round the Manor/North Cambridge Academy site in 2022! We'll have all the details, dates, etc, regarding the bomb in the next part of Mrs Hinchcliffe's recollections from the archive. She remembered the incident, and also incendiaries falling across the Arbury fields during the war.

The old Manor Farm stables/cowshed, 2022. This stood at the back of No 3, Manor Farm Cottages. The photo was taken on the Manor Community College site, with the shed just beyond the school's boundary fence. The stables - later  a cowshed - was built for the Cardinal family, the original occupiers of No 3, Manor Farm cottages, which was built by Cambridgeshire County Council in 1924. The cottage is still standing today. Another branch of the Cardinal family lived on King's Hedges Road, and Mr Gordon Cardinal contributed his memories of the rural district, 'The Arbury', to the Arbury Archive in 1983.

If you would like to read 'The Arbury', the 1930s, '40s and '50s memories of Mr Gordon Cardinal, written for the Arbury Archive in 1983 - please click here.

Next, an enquiry about the old Manor Farmhouse (often dubbed the 'manor house' locally, particularly after the farm's fragmentation into smallholdings, when it ceased to be the home of the tenant farmers), which stood on Campkin Road, opposite what is now Arbury Town Park. Do we have plans or details of this house, which was built in the years following the 1840 Chesterton Enclosures? Yes, we have a plan drawn up in 1984 for the Arbury Archivists by Dr John Bennett, who lived at the house and whose parents were the last tenants. We will upload it soon (the Arbury Archive is housed on paper in about two dozen large folders and it takes some sorting through!).

We also have details of the accommodation from the farm sale details of July 1909 and the following newspaper insert from October 1909, with the County Council letting the house. The council demolished some of the buildings at Manor Farm, sold off some of the land - a lot of it fronting the Ely (Milton) and Arbury Roads - for building - and let the farmhouse, at first to the Medlow family. Andy interviewed Mr Kenneth Parsons, a relative of the Medlow family in 1984, and we'll have more details soon.

'Cambridge Independent Press', October 1909 - house to let - the 'Manor-Farm House', with four reception rooms, two kitchens, 'commodious offices', seven bedrooms, a dressing room and a bathroom! The old Manor Farmhouse, home of the tenant farmers, was far more luxurious than the homes of the employees at Manor Farm, although there was no gas or electricity at the farm at that point.

County land agent Colonel Charles Bennett and his son John in the garden of the old Manor Farmhouse. The front faced what is now Campkin Road, with a view across the Manor Farm Drive to what is now the Arbury Town Park and Arbury Community Centre. The back faced the old Manor Farm's Park Meadow (the Manor Community College/North Cambridge Academy site).

The house became something of an adventure playground for youngsters from Arbury, Chesterton and further afield after its final tenants, County Land Agent Colonel Charles Bennett and his wife Frances, moved out in the 1950s. Children built bonfires in the overgrown garden, sometimes taking up floorboards in the old house to do so, broke windows and generally had a marvellous time!

Andy calls this 'the first Arbury Adventure Playground', as the later (official) one established on the Nuns Way playing field in 1973 gave children another opportunity to have fun and be adventurous, but this time supervised!

Andy's great-grandmother, Mrs Lydia Brett (1888 to 1976), worked and lived at the Manor farmhouse as a general servant and cook in the early 20th Century, and was living in Brackley Close in South Arbury at the time children and teens from South Arbury, Chesterton, and further afield were enjoying adventurous playtimes there. She said it was a terrible way for such a lovely old house to end up, and disapproved strongly of the ending of National Service in the late 1950s!

More about that here.

And a final word - a reminder that the 2026 Arbury Carnival is on the way, and the theme has been decided - music legends. Will you be Elvis Presley? Tina Turner? A Beatle? Mariah Carey? Alannah Currie (Thompson Twins - very 80s hair!)? Billy Ocean? Adam Ant? Some other 50s/60s/70s/80s/90s icon - or somebody more modern? This year marks forty-nine years since the first Arbury Carnival took place at the Arbury Town Park in Campkin Road. Almost half a century! The Carnival was born of community spirit, and it's community spirit which powers it today.

Many thanks to the team working so hard to bring it alive for us all to enjoy.

Here's to many more years!