History Book

Swavesey and District History Society – Reports for Nov/Dec 2023

Swavesey & District History Society

November 2023 meeting.  45 attended a talk on The History of Marshall of Cambridge by Group Captain Terry Holloway from Fakenham.  The Marshall group was established in 1909 by David Marshall.  Its original base was in Brunswick Gardens where he started a simple chauffeur service to the wealthy.  It quickly grew and employed mechanics for vehicle repair, enabling the business to relocate to larger premises in Kings Street in 1910 and again to Jesus Lane in 1912 where it expanded into selling motor vehicles.  In 1912 a British Army airship made an emergency landing in Jesus Green and the Marshall mechanics repaired its engine.  During WWI Marshall’s premises were engaged in the servicing and repair of vehicles required for the British war effort.

David’s son Arthur joined his dad in 1926 and became the driving force.  Arthur was a brilliant athlete and a member of the Paris 1924 (Chariots of Fire) Olympic team.  He wanted to fly for fun and learned to fly in 1927.  The engineering and chauffeur businesses continued to do well so Arthur bought himself an aircraft in 1928.  In 1929 Sir Alan Cobham, pioneer of long distance flight and aircraft technology, persuaded Arthur to turn the field behind his house in Fen Ditton into an airfield and the first Cambridge airfield opened on 9 June 1929.  This was replaced in 1938 on 800 acres (324 ha) of newly purchased agricultural land at nearby Taversham by the bigger Cambridge airfield of today, owned and run by Marshall Aerospace.  The opening day was the first public showing of a Spitfire from nearby Duxford.  A major flying training school was quickly set up by Marshall and by the end of WWII over 20,000 aircrew including pilots, navigators and instructors had been trained.  The company also carried out aircraft maintenance and repaired over 5,000 aircraft of many types during WWII.

The first commercial aircraft flight was on 1 January 1946 since when the Marshall companies have grown exponentially in aerospace and in special vehicle engineering with the Post Office and the prison service as customers plus ordnance destruction systems, mobile operating theatres and many more.

Michael Marshall became CEO in 1989 and by 2012, the Group was reporting an annual turnover of more than £1 billion and was employing nearly 4,500 staff.  Today Marshall Motor Group is also one of the UK’s largest car dealer networks with 142 sites selling 23 of the world’s most popular cars.

In November 2022, Marshall Aerospace announced that it expects to have left Cambridge Airport “by 2027”, relocating to Cranfield airport near Milton Keynes.  The Group plans to redevelop the airport site for around 12,000 houses and 5 million sq. ft (0.46 million m2) of business premises.  The Chauffeur-drive business continues today.

December 2023 meeting.  On a cold and wet evening 23 members turned out for the AGM.  After the formal AGM proceedings three Swavesey residents, gave short presentations.

Penny King of Boxworth End spoke of her second cousin, Myrtle Bond, who lived for most of her life in the Poole area of Dorset.  Born in 1912, she worked as a talented paintress at Poole Pottery from 1927 to 1942, only leaving because the market for Art Deco pottery dwindled in WWII.  The beautiful decorations were individually hand-painted and each paintress was encouraged to slightly vary the agreed patterns to make every piece unique.  Paintresses had their own mark, Myrtle’s being a double headed arrow, and her pieces still turn up very occasionally today.  After the war she joined the police service in Bournemouth.  Penny attended her funeral in 2009 where one speaker reported that Myrtle was a British spy during the war.  It is not known if this is true but from the 1960s Myrtle would introduce herself as “The name’s Bond.  Myrtle Bond”.

Carole Pook of Market Street reported shocking aspects of a case where her husband John’s relatives on both sides, the Burgesses and the Westcotts, appeared as witnesses in a case in 1929 near Barnstaple in Devon.  It all started when a witness heard an agricultural worker questioning a colleague about the fact that the union of agricultural workers would pay a sum of money if a member’s wife died.  A few days later the man went into Catherine Burgess’s shop asking for arsenic or mercury.  Catherine had none but suggested Mr Wescott might help.  In court Wescott said he had supplied arsenic, wrapped in paper, to the prisoner.  The man also bought clotted cream which his wife consumed.  She died and her stomach was found to contain arsenic.  Mysteriously, three hens and a pig in the adjacent yard also died.  It seemed unclear as to whether or not the man was found guilty but he definitely asked for funds from the union to help to pay for the funeral.

Penny’s husband, Pete Halasovski, spoke about the development of rural communities in the Ukraine.  This was a broad description of the changes that swept through the Russian empire since the freeing of the serfs in the 1860s to the early C20th when Pete’s grandparents emigrated from Ukraine to America.  Due to the size of the subject, it was a whistlestop tour.  He touched on the size of the leap that was made (from wooden ploughs to steam engines in a couple of generations) and outlined how people in rural communities coped with the progress.  He ended by talking about how his own grandfather left on an assisted passage scheme organised by his local church, with the intention of returning with enough money to start a dairy herd.  The Russian revolution prevented this, separating the family.  Contact has recently been re-established and the talk finished with pictures of Pete and Penny visiting his family in Ukraine.

After presentations from the three speakers a light buffet of food and drink was kindly provided by the Committee Members.