MARSH FEN AND TOWN......ANDCLASS PART4. - LABELLING OF LOCATION ITS HISTORY AND MODERN DAY EFFECT
- farmersfriendlincs
- 7 days ago
- 24 min read
On the Eastern side of Spalding where the road to Holbeach, Holbeach Road, meets the River Welland is the Pigeon Inn. Whilst no longer carrying that name, it lives on in what is known as Pigeon End. This part of the town grew rapidly in the nineteenth century providing homes for agricultural labourers that worked on the farms on the nearby marshes (Wragg Marsh) and Fens towards Moulton. It was also occupied by sailors that worked on boats and barges visiting the port of Spalding or moored out in Boston Deeps. As such it was a working class area with the earliest references to Pigeon End that I have found are in the 1830's a term for the area that has survived to this day.
The Pigeon is a very old pub and the toll-bar for the 19 mile road to Wisbech that terminated a Tydd Gote was administered from these premises. This road was set up by a Turnpike Act obtained in 1764. A core of about a dozen labourers houses and cottages developed and from this grew Pigeon End.
In the twentieth century agriculture was supplemented with food processing, packing and distribution that developed close to Pigeon End with first the sugar beet factory and then Smedleys canning, Geest fruit, and George Adams meat. These businesses expanded and diversified and were joined by many other firms within easy travelling distance of Pigeon End.
Throughout its history Pigeon End grew and became a working class area that people proudly identified with calling themselves Pigeon Enders, a term I have found used from 1867 to present times. Most of the people living that part of town worked in one of the factories, or have worked there in the past.
Affordable housing of one form or another developed to house people at Pigeon End with some of the town's firs Council houses built between the Wars. After WW2 housing was so short that temporary homes from railway carriage, buses and mobile homes developed at a site in Fulney Lane, some of which remain as a legacy from this era. 1947 saw massive expansion of the area with St Paul's estate being built comprising council houses and shops. In the 70's further flats and bungalows were developed in the Pigeon End area as the land backing on to Spalding's flood relief channel was developed into housing expanding further in the 1980's housing boom as more privately owned homes were built. Occupation in this part of town was still dominated by food industry workers. It still was predominantly working class.
The nature of working class is that you tend to be close to the bottom of the pecking order of society, but the post War generation did benefit from increased social mobility, at least for a period. The 1980's saw refurbishment and improvement of council housing stock. It is perhaps not surprising to those that know the area that Royce Road, at the heart of Pigeon End were some of the last council houses in my he town to benefit from indoor toilets and this was only after much badgering by a certain district nurse who was something of a force to be reckoned with. The late 80's saw increased home ownership and some greater mixing of classes in Pigeon End, but the original Pigeon End identity still held strong, passed down through generations. In 1994 I bought my house in the Thames Road estate, an opportunistic purchase buying a three bedroom detached house with a garage for £32,000 that had once fetched £80,000. It was a repossession, one of several down votes he street, a casualty of the 80's housing boom. When I moved into the street most of the people living there were locals that worked in either Geest or George Adams. Most of the people in that area were either working class, or had working class origins and enjoyed a degree of social mobility often enabled by the food and farming industry so important to the Fenland area of South Lincolnshire and its neighbouring counties. In 1994 it was still an area where people knew each other and families going back many generations. It had a Church manned with a vicar, a primary school was, St Paul's Primary School, four nearby corner shops or convenience stores, a chip shop, a launderette and The Pigeon was still a pub. Three other pubs were in easy walking distance. It was also close to the local Secondary School, the Gleed School, where most children from the area went as very few would get to the Grammar or High Schools from that part of town (my daughter was one of the first in many years to go to the High School from St Paul's primary school). This part of town also enjoyed easy access out of town by car with plenty of work on farms, and in the range of food packing and processing factories within 40 minutes’ drive through to the Norfolk border.
So what of the label "Pigeon End" and its effects?
Prior to 1850 it is very hard to assess the label Pigeon End except in the writings of local clergy. It was deemed a less moral part of the town with sailors and labourers drinking, over-crowded housing, youths squatting on lighters moored on the Welland and gang workers lodging like sardines in a tin in over-crowded, mixed sex immoral circumstances.
As the port declined and the railway began to dominate the mix of people in Pigeon End were mostly agricultural labourers, but also seamen. It was often the case that seamen also worked on farms switching between jobs as opportunity arose. The nature of the area was that it was dominated by migrants from other parts of Britain, often coastal towns to the South of The Wash, but also the Midlands. Similar to Pigeon End, on the landward side towards Cowbit Wash a similar suburb of labouring people g]had developed. This was called Little London, but unlike Pigeon End, tended to be more local people and was deemed of better character as more of them attended Church either at Cowbit or Spalding Parish Churches. Pigeon Ender’s did not have the same propensity to attend church. Pigeon End was a “moral desert”, or at least described as such, but the Church of England tended to serve those with money. The more working-class friendly Primitive Methodists created a small chapel and school at Pigeon End called “The Foundry School” because it was erected on the site of an old foundry. This provided a Sunday School and religious meeting room. The labelling and attitude towards Pigeon Enders is seen in this Free Press article of May 1873:
“MORAL IMPROVEMENT IN PIGEON END - From some cause – inexplicable in all respects perhaps – there has evidently been a great moral revolution in this locality during the last five or six years. We remember a few years since, it was highly dangerous, especially on Sundays, to walk in this direction. A stone would be pelted at one’s head and dirt thrown on ladies dresses, or some other mischievous prank would be stealthily practised on the unwary pedestrian. Then there was marble playing, pitch and toss, and a host of other Sabbath games as if it were a heathen instead of a Christian town.”
In later articles you see Pigeon End repeatedly described as a “moral desert” prior to the erection of the Foundry School. Thus we see an othering of working class. Indeed, with Church of England dominance of religion, welfare and magistrates they could rightly feel judged and it was the non-conformist religions, in this case Methodists, that became accepted as part of the community.
This was a community from which arose Holland with Boston’s only ever Labour Member of Parliament, William Stapleton Royce .from 1918 to 1924. It is typical of the labelling that you see a Liberal candidate dismissing him as, “a gentleman understood to hail from the salubrious district of Pigeon End” in 1910.
The Foundry School formed a library, schooling on a Sunday, religious services, and instructional lectures for the labouring classes – all with very little support from the local well to do. Class and religion were inter-twined and it’s no accident that throughout the Fens the labouring classes were drawn to the non-conformist churches where the ministers tended to live amongst them and not aloof in large vicarages sitting on the bench dispelling judgements. Many of these pioneer non-conformist leaders heralded from Manchester or the Midlands from self-made backgrounds in industry.
The notorious Canon Moore of Spalding Parish Church was not happy that non-conformists had a foothold in influencing and guiding the working class of Pigeon End and persuaded Charlotte Charinton to fund the building of a fine church, vicarage and school room at Pigeon End – Fulney Church designed by Gilbert Scott.
Living at the edge of Spalding in Fulney Hall were the Everard family that farmed on Spalding Marsh. They give the impression of being benefactors, but Mr Everard was clearly a ruthless man and invoked criticism from his peers when he evicted a dying employee from a tied cottage on his farm and had him transported to Spalding Workhouse. In contrast we see Mrs Everard being generous towards Pigeon Enders. Mrs Evereard was a key donor towards the formation of the Working Men’s Institute in Holbeach Road, not far from the Pigeon. The purpose of these institutions were to enable self-improvement by labouring men through self-education by providing books and lectures. However, I feel there is an imperious approach to this as she clearly viewed Pigeon End labourers as in much need of improvement often in a judgemental fashion. There was also a commercial motive as the business and machinery of the late nineteenth century required employees with greater literacy and numerical skills. Mrs Everard’s generosity cannot be judged easily, but all her works were very public and invoked praise from her social equals. There is a thin line between a social consciousness and piety.
However, as we reach the 1880’s we see great deprivation at Pigeon End as a combination of the agricultural depression and severe winters takes bite. Mrs Everard came to the fore providing a soup kitchen at the Working Men’s Institute for families to be fed. She also ensured coal and groceries were delivered at her expense to over 20 families in need. In contrast you see people in the central area of Spalding regarding the difficulties of Pigeon
January 1891, as ice restricted work for a prolonged period, saw Pigeon End described as “dark spots” in Spalding with “impoverished homes, half-starved children, fire grates and cupboards nearly empty, the breadwinner compulsorily idle.” It is clear that middle class objectors to the poverty at Pigeon End compared them with working class at Little London. This was effectively comparing apples with pears. Little London benefitted from greater side-line income from the resources and abilities of fen cottagers who had larger gardens, plus wildfowl, fish, reed-cutting and additional fen work. Also, they were paid better. Yet better off town folk argued that as both Little Londoners and Pigeon Enders were labouring classes the ability of those in Little London to have reserves of potatoes, corn and bacon was because they had greater “forethought, thrift, greater toil on their allotments and provided for themselves for a rainy day.” Pigeon Enders had less land and allotments available to them in proportion to the population plus wages at Pigeon End were lower than those paid by farmers the far side of Spalding. At Pigeon End, “homes where large families and low wages are the rule even in the best season of the year.”
The Free Press championed the destitute of Pigeon End at the point of starvation and was severely criticised by many townsfolk for doing so. The Free Press had made people uncomfortable by highlighting how Pigeon Enders were being treated as a class lower than all others in the town and that poverty was a result of their lack of morality. These were a people close to starving. The Free Press hit back at its critics on 13th January 1891:
“Why wait until houses are impoverished and children are starving before adopting measures of alleviation and relief? ‘Prevention is better than cure’, and we believe in grappling with the situation in good time and preventing suffering, rather than driving the parents of suffering families to desperation and then tardily offering sympathy and aid which simple humanity should have prompted long before. We have been accused of exaggerating the evil, and of casting the undeserving stigma upon the residents of Commercial Road and Pigeon End. What a pity is that people do not trouble themselves to ascertain the truth, and seek to understand the situation, before speaking and writing in a spirit in a spirit, which, however little this effect is intended, must prevent the assistance which is so much needed. ‘Exaggeration’ indeed! If there was a defect in our last week’s sketch , it was that the actual distress was minimised rather than exaggerated and all we predicted is most certainly taking place. Families lying in bed until mid-day for warmth, because they have no coal with which to make a fire, or huddle together in sacks on the hearth stone; children crying for bread and parents turning from them in despair because they had no food to offer; honest, industrious working men penniless and almost fireless and foodless, and yet willing to perform honest work if it were accessible; sensitive, retiring, cultured and delicate women and children, reared amidst affluence, reduced to poverty and silently suffering the extremest distress rather than expose their needs – can our record of the condition of affairs be justly described as exaggerated whilst this state of affairs exists? We know what we are speaking about . We have not depended upon idle gossip, as have some of our critics, for our information; but have spent many an hour in moving about amongst these people and in searching them out for ourselves; and we declare most emphatically that, although we have not found actual starvation anywhere, and even the suffering has been less general than might have been expected, still there are some families in Spalding which during the past week endured the most excruciating poverty, and but for the providential interposition of charity, the verge of actual starvation must ‘ere have been reached.”
For context I have found daytime temperatures recorded in January 1891 in South Lincolnshire recorded by a farmer as peaking at 10 Fahrenheit (minus 12 Celsius) in the worst of the weather. The Free Press denied making any moral comparison between people of Pigeon End and Little London but pointed out, “the public are quite competent to form their own opinions on that matter without our aid.” The local paper effectively pricked the conscious of a town that had a low regard for people simply because they lived in Pigeon End.
The 1900 Housing and Town Planning Act was one of several Acts of Parliament that put a responsibility on local authorities to build housing. Poor housing dominated Pigeon End and it is clear that some councillors avoided inspecting the housing in that area because they knew what they would find; squalid housing, overcrowded and not fit for habitation. There was a clear indication that proposed rents of any future housing in the 1910’s could be a strain on the working man with a family as it amounted to 25% of his income, with food, coal, schooling of children to pay for on top. There was a clear argument between those that were aware of the lot of the working man and those that lived in a bubble of self-righteousness. Perhaps little has changed?
Dr. Munro, Spalding’s Town Medical Officer was a force of nature – I never knew him, but I can imagine as his daughter was the secretary at Spalding Grammar School and she was a fierce, but fair lady that no-one crossed, teachers and boys alike! An inquiry into housing was announced with notices placed on church and chapel doors, but Dr. Munro pointed out that only a quarter of the working classes attended churches or chapels. Housing was in such short supply that even the poorest, smallest cottage in a dilapidated state had people lining up to rent it. Indeed, if a family had a tied house there were several incidents of whole families having to go to the workhouse when evicted by the man’s former employer. Typically housing in Pigeon End would be one bedroom with a second shed-like lean to bedroom tacked onto the cottage. There was usually no running water, no bathroom and a shared privy. Family sizes were typically husband and wife with 4-6 children, some of whom were adults. It was felt that the social benefits of education were being wasted on Pigeon Enders if they lived in such housing. The growth of the labour-intensive bulb and flower industry combined with increased conversion of pasture to arable were cited as reasons for so many families arriving to work in the area to require housing. It was therefore considered prudent that Pigeon End should site the first Council houses as that was where there was the most need. But, the site chosen in Queens Road meant that allotment holders in the very area most needing them to supplement their meagre incomes and food were to lose up to a fifth of their area. However, this still went ahead as this was where housing was most needed.
The denigrating of Pigeon Enders in the discussions about Pigeon End as the site chosen for council housing make you cringe. One councillor suggested that housing in the area was overcrowded because there were too many young women in the area. Some suggested the housing at present was in keeping with the occupants.
Dr. Munro was having none of this pointing out that 90% of housing in the town was two bedroom. In Pigeon End a great many houses were unfit for habitation and were over-crowded with more than one family. He regarded much of the area as worse than the slums of large towns.
In the discussions on building the first council houses you see plans to fit more houses into the area if access involved crossing each other’s back yards, “That six women may have to cross each other’s yards they surely will not mind as they are working class.” This is in contrast to Bevan’s later 1949 view of council house estates “drawn from all sections of the community.”
As Pigeon End was expanded with council houses in the 1930’s we see Dr. Munro again having to champion the welfare of Pigeon Enders to improve drains and sewage in the area that saw household waste going into open drains.
What I perceive up to 1939 was a distinct class of people that were not aware of the difficulties and challenges of others, and/or were simply prepared to judge and dismiss them. This is seen in the language used, “another Pigeon End reprobate”; “the Pigeon End fighting man”; “a coarse Pigeon Ender”; or “another immoral woman from Pigeon End.”
The first half of the twentieth century saw controversial changes in electoral wards, together with increased suffrage to both men and women meant people living in greater density poorer accommodation had a voice at the polling booth. You see this feared as there is much debate on how electoral wards in the town should be changed and a reluctance for people say, in Church Street, to have to walk down to Pigeon End to vote. Positioning of polling booths was a potential tool to reduce working class votes. This possibly enabled the Labour MP W.S. Royce to gain his seat in 1918 for Holland and Boston constituency that throughout my lifetime (born 1967) has been a Tory stronghold.
The Second World War touched every household in the town and the country as a whole and brought a greater understanding between people from different social backgrounds in my opinion. This I believe is telling in that I see people of my grandfather’s generation tended to refer to Pigeon Enders with greater respect. Indeed, when I started wildfowling, with the roots of Spalding Wildfowlers being at The Barge beerhouse in Holbeach Road, I got to know more of the old Pigeon Enders. People that lived in Pigeon End in the 1930’s proudly carried the title “I’m a Pigeon Ender” as a title of being from that community. Indeed, I have seen people younger than me, with families several generations deep in the area happily still use the title, although it is dying out. Everyone should be proud of their origins regardless of wealth, class or background as it forms part of your identity. To this day, in Spalding, there are certain surnames I would identify as being Pigeon End. But Pigeon End did retain a label of low status that changed between generations to actually loose the respect it deserves.
Post WW2 saw a massive expansion of housing, primarily council housing, with some increased private building in the 1950’s restricted by the supply of materials that did not ease until the 1970’s. It is important to note Erin Bevan’s image of council house estates that he hoped to achieve:
“These new estates should not just be for the poor. It is entirely undesirable that on modern housing estates only one type of citizen should live. If we are to enable citizens to lead a full life, if they are to be aware of the problems of neighbours, then they should be drawn from all sections of the community. We should try to introduce what was always the lovely feature of English and Welsh villages, where the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street.”
So we saw new council house estates develop at Pigeon End complete with shops and post office, and a primary school. The new St Pauls Estate expanded Pigeon End and with it diluted its identity as the area increasingly became referred to as St Pauls. The interesting thing is that the original Pigeon Enders were left behind in inferior housing, ironically in Royce Road, the road named after the only Labour MP the town ever had.
Queens Road, Royce Road and Banks Avenue were at the heart of Pigeon End in the 1970’s comprising some of the earliest council housing in the town that was also the least modern and the poorest maintained by the local authority. Going down there for me as a child was to see another world, such as the house with the broken window where every meal appeared to have been out of a tin that was instantly discarded unwashed through a hole in the window forming a pyramid of empty cans. In the 1970’s if Dad had a call in Royce Road or Banks Avenue he would try and have either myself or my sister sit in his van as kids to keep an eye on it. Down the road would be several cars on bricks with the shell of another car that had been dismantled and a further one burned out. It looked rough through my childhood eyes. Often a woman would come out of one of the houses and ask if I had a coin for the electric meter, I had none, and Dad warned me this might happen. Was the area blighted because of its people or because of its label? I believe the latter. It is telling that Royce Road were the last council houses in Spalding to benefit from indoor toilets thanks to a campaign by resident Mrs Baxter and support from the district nurse.
People were judged by a combination of family name and the road they came from. The title Pigeon End had its core at Royce Road, Queens Road and Banks Avenue with some families that had successfully lived in Pigeon End for three generations or more. It has to be understood that in my 70’s childhood Spalding was still a very parochial town. Looking back I saw the labelling of kids even at primary school. I remember one teacher telling a lad, “You’re as bad as your father when I was teaching him.” And “You’ll come to ‘owt like your brother.” Such behaviour was appalling, but it was the nature of how children were labelled by family or place very early. Most of the time I was on the right side of this discrimination.
The expansion of food factories especially Geest, Smedleys and George Adams in the 1970’s and 80’s saw increased pressure on housing. Availability of work at this end of Spalding (St Pauls) has always been a factor in its residential enlargement. A further estate was created off Queens Road called the Thames Road Estate with a mixture of social housing and subsequent private housing on the site. Most workers in that part of town were within walking or cycling distance of their place of work.
You see people from different backgrounds and ages refer to Pigeon Enders in different ways or tones. He or she, “was a good old Pigeon Ender” is a compliment you are more likely to see within that community or by older people that respected Pigeon End or originated from their or similar working class backgrounds. A sneering view of a Pigeon Ender was more likely to come from people with lessor knowledge of the area and its people, snobs, or middle class locals trying to elevate their status by appearing to be something they are not. Nowadays, especially with The Pigeon no longer being a pub the area is not generally labelled Pigeon End, but rather St Pauls.
So how was Pigeon End/St Pauls treated? Increasingly it has been let down in various ways or seen as a social dumping ground. Considering St Paul’s church was gifted to improve that part of the town the Church of England is not gilded in glory over how it has run down and deserted the area. In the early 2000’s St Pauls Church had a vibrant congregation and a highly active vicar that supported and was part of the community. The Church of England let down the area. It ran down the church over a period of years and failed to invest in and support its own people. The grand church and vicarage designed by Gilbert Scott and gifted to the Church of England was an inconvenient cost. Without investing in people and leadership the church went further and sold off the vicarage. The last three full-time vicars all reached out of the church to the community and worked hard – any legacy they created was undermined and destroyed by appalling lack of leadership and imagination by the Diocese of Lincoln. The church deserted its community and made insufficient effort to restore its function and status.
Social services often had a bias. About twenty years ago I spoke to a retired social worker about a certain family in the 1970’s that were abuse victims as was common knowledge at the time, but never reached the courts. The response staggered me, “ Andrew, everyone knew but nothing could be proved so best leave alone. Afterall it was Pigeon End.” A local councillor in the 1990’s admitted to me that they tried to dump all the “problem cases” down Pigeon End to keep all the “shit” in one place. To consider the area as a dumping ground is unfair, unjust and degrading. St Pauls has the highest density of social housing in the town, added to this are considerable number of private rents with high usage of housing benefit. Certainly when I worked at Long Sutton and Holbeach I saw people that had problems or issues in those areas moved into social housing in St Pauls. But, it could be argued that this was practical as it freed them from the disadvantage of not having a car, with nearby work and facilities. This was not necessarily a negative to the area provided people received appropriate support and services , which was increasingly short-coming as the town population (in reality if not on paper) expanded at a ridiculously high rate with migrations into the town and increased houses of multiple occupancy.
Measures by the local authority to produce housing often through agencies or housing associations no mean it is very easy to sell private houses in that area to those people. In 2023 I saw a two bedroom house sold that, according to the workmen employed on it, was bought by the council who then spent a considerable amount of money on it not only getting it up to a good standard but also converting it to a one bedroom house. But why one bedroom? The reason is that the largest group of people requiring homes want only one bedroom because if they had a second unused room it would reduce their housing benefit. I understand at the time that the reduction was 14% for one empty room and 25% for two empty rooms. Now to fulfil its housing obligations, especially for a disabled person that cannot work it is reasonable for the local authority to obtain such a dwelling, but by reverting a two bedroom house to a one bedroom it is akin to stepping back to the nineteenth century. But the problem is that the tenant had a mental disability causing paranoia preventing him from going out and going to work. He had been placed in an area that it was very easy to obtain drugs and from the smell he clearly used cannabis. His paranoia did not prevent him going out at night to an unlit street to obtain drugs, although he did jump out of his skin as I passed the dealers car. This housing decision would not have been made in one of the newer estates of the town.
The town bus service used to run through the Thames Road estate of St Pauls and provide an essential lifeline to the high number of elderly and disabled living in the council bungalows on that estate. It was withdrawn because of delays allegedly caused by parked cars. It was a cut back of service that hit vulnerable people as they had to walk out of the estate to catch buses, one near neighbour with COPD was effectively denied public transport. In contrast other parts of town did not see a cut through the more middle class areas.
Even cycle routes that were created through the area were done on the cheap with third rate markings and no clear safe route to the nearby Springfields shopping centre making the safest means of transport, even though its a few hundred metres away, by car!
Working class areas form mostly due to availability of work. The clue is in the word! Pigeon End and the St Pauls area developed over decades due to the port, agricultural work, and then the food industry. Unlike most areas of the country and other industries the food industry has not seen a process of deindustrialization. However, both it and the agricultural industry have seen expansions and contractions caused by economic and business change, or even the weather as I described in 1891. There used to be greater seasonality of work with the sugar beet and canning factories having periods of great work availability in their “campaigns” followed by either low work or shut downs in the case of sugar beet. These great seasonal fluctuations meant people could make good money, then have a period with either low or no earnings. People adapted their spending patterns. Bizarrely to an outsider many “campaign” workers especially in the sugar beet would at the end of each season have expensive holidays, new cars and, to my father’s benefit with his TV shop, new TV’s. The reasoning being that with too much savings they would lose out on qualifying for housing benefit, then usually called rent relief and rate relief before the next season started. It’s very easy to judge this, but double shift work was the norm in campaign seasons, so there was an element of “what am I working for?”
As people in St Pauls increasingly bought houses, either the newer private ones in the Thames Road Estate or by exercising an option to buy their council house, but this made them more vulnerable to the personal economic shocks of redundancy and high interest rates as they risked homelessness. Furthermore, those that bought undiscounted private houses with the aspiration of being able to move again in the future were robbed of that opportunity as prices crashed and they were hit with negative equity. This coupled with variations in employment – it has to be understood that most of the people I know that have worked for Geest when they first left school have been made redundant at least four times. The increased use of casual gang labour has made the industry even more fickle in the 21st century. When I bought my home on Thames Road estate, itself a repossession subject to negative equity, there were five repossessions for sale down the street. Thatcher’s dream of home ownership for all as a means of social mobility failed many, and as we have seen today, the market has failed to produce sufficient affordable housing for future generations. When I bought my house most of the street was occupied by people born in the area working in the food industry, with Geest the dominant employer. By 2010 below half the street’s occupants originated from the UK and seven houses were multiple occupancy. Migrant working class displaced local in the work place with lower income made possible by being prepared to over-crowd. The fortunate aspect of this is that the area had a mix of people with no domination of one group. But the population of St Paul’s, along with the whole area, was squeezed with no matching investment in schools, doctors, police, social and health services. The number of children that spoke English as a second language in the local school grew. Not in itself a problem if matched with resources.
With this change in population that was often transient and changing as people earned money and returned home there was a huge increase in black markets serving the St Pauls community with smuggled food, alcohol, cigarettes and drugs. From my home I witnessed multiple drugs raids and one customs and excise raid. Vans from eastern Europe openly traded food, meat, alcohol and goods. Over time this lapsed and became a more visible black market that migrated to the many “Euro” style shops in Spalding and every Fenland town.
I saw the attitude of teachers and those volunteering in youth organisations towards children and parents in the St Paul’s area as discriminatory, judgemental and condescending. I saw children being excluded first hand, including my daughter until I used my middle class sharp elbows. Even some so-called Christians in Spalding Parish Church behaved in such a way which for me cumulated when I went into Spalding Parish Church one Saturday, the Church I was raised in to be quizzed by a person as to why I was there and where I lived to then be told I should go into St Paul’s as “that is your church.” The old discrimination against Pigeon Enders was alive and kicking in the 21st Century.
What I find most disturbing is how social services operate. I was, through a third party, privy to reviews of incidents that had “gone wrong” and my view is that the victims of these incidents were judged by their situation, class and location. Worse still, truth was not revealed and failings by various people were in my opinion effectively covered up. I do not believe this would have been possible with middle class people with louder voices.
No longer, living there, but a regular visitor, I believe post Covid has seen improvements in some areas and decline in others. Those resident migrants that have settled have integrated, but I suspect many of the disadvantages and discriminations of Pigeon End remain, perhaps in different forms. If you look at statistics the area is still deprived and disadvantaged.
I hope I have painted a picture, at least in part, of the history and labelling of a working class people and area such as Pigeon End. What should be noted though that the pattern of an area being disadvantaged over 180 years despite the town enjoying overall prolonged prosperity and growth is a failing of society and politics.
That this happens elsewhere is undoubted. In her book “Getting By” Dr. Lisa McKenzie describes a similar labelling of an area and its people in St Anns, Nottingham. In a small way I saw this happen when I have worked briefly in Nottingham in the 1990’s and saw customer’s referred to as being St Anns or Meadows and judged accordingly. That this has happened in other towns and villages in the Fens I am sure. As a “conservative” I believe in the power of the individual, but my observation and experience makes me fear I am wrong and class discrimination creates too many barriers.
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