COLCHESTER, September 11, 1883. No Facebook, no Snapchat, no telephones.

Social media meant reading newspapers and writing letters. Lots and lots of letters. Colchester’s Victorian pillar boxes (we still use them) were emptied four times a day, all taken to the Post Office in Head Street (now a cinema) to be sorted and delivered the next day.

Sadly, few such Colchester letters survive, though maybe some lie in old boxes in attics. The one shown here turned up recently in France, written by 10-year-old William Arnold to his mother while staying with his grandfather, Henry Arnold, at 2 Lion Walk, a charming Victorian house – I remember it well – demolished to make way for the Lion Walk precinct. Henry Arnold was a prosperous provisions merchant, a prominent member of Eld Lane Baptist Church, soon to become a town councillor.

Gazette:

Why young William was not at school (he lived in Middlesex) is a puzzle, for his letter implies a week’s visit. It is a long letter, and the handwriting and language impressive for a 10 (maybe 11)-year-old. Let’s read one section, which begins at the foot of page one: “There was a fire last Saturday in Colchester. It was in St John Street and from Grandma’s front door we could see the smoke rise up quite plainly. We heard a lot of people go by calling out ‘fire’ and presently we saw a light in the fire engine house just opposite us…. Grandma was so frightened and Grandpa was round at the shop in Wyre Street. He heard the people calling out ‘fire’ and when he looked out it seemed to be in Lion Walk. But it was really in John Street some little way from Lion Walk, but before grandpa came home grandma went to the door and asked the firemen where it was….

“Directly grandpa came home I slipped my boots on and we ran off to see it. We could not get the shorter way [probably Scheregate Steps] because there was such a lot of people. When we got there, there were such a lot of people that we still could get nowhere near it. Then we went round to the Rink and we could see it very well there. It was only a few sheds – a carpenter’s shop on top and some stables beneath. It blazed up when it was well alight but it soon went down. The firemen did not take their engine because now that Jumbo is erected they can do without them. They pulled a plug up out of the ground and they put a pipe down and screwed the hose onto the pipe and then the water came from the Waterworks and went up the pipe and so into the hose. No houses caught fire. It was about nine o’clock. There was thousands of people there….”

Though not yet officially opened, the Balkerne Tower, Colchester’s giant water tower, was already just ‘Jumbo’, a nickname bestowed by the Rector of St Mary’s (now the arts centre) over which it loomed. Despite its complex build, it was a triumph for public health: pure water, out of a tap, 24 hours a day; something most Victorians did not have, hence those terrible outbreaks of disease which kept life expectancy down and infant mortality high.

But Jumbo was not just built for the health of the poor, it came from a run of bad fires. Naked flames were everywhere in Victorian Colchester, and wood was a major building material. Many buildings, like the one in William’s fire, were all wood. Gas lamps, oil lamps, candle ends, workmen’s braziers, coal fires, falling over, caught by the wind, or just forgotten, caused a string of multiple fires that cost the town millions.

Now, 16 days before Jumbo’s official opening, William Arnold had witnessed history. For the first time Jumbo had been put to the test – and triumphed.

Turn to that other social media, the Essex County Standard of September 16, and it is clear how serious this fire might have been, caused by a pot of glue left boiling.

It began in a long line of buildings, most of them wooden. There were horses in the stable downstairs hay blazing away upstairs and houses either side. Three fire brigades came: the town’s Volunteer Brigade from Lion Walk, the Garrison Brigade and the Essex & Suffolk Brigade from the Fire Office – still there today in High Street. They did not finish hosing down till midnight. Even this well-contained fire did damages of £1,000, an economic value of £1½ million now.

Consider the cost of the pre-Jumbo fire in High Street. No wonder there were ‘thousands’ watching. No wonder William and his grandfather had a job just to see it. They did this by coming along Head Street and down little St John’s Avenue where there was a skating rink, built by Ben Cant, the rose grower, on his former nursery ground.

In 1883 ‘the Rink’ had just been converted to the meeting hall of the Salvation Army, who had arrived from London. Their marches round town were often attacked by boys throwing stones, a tactic foiled by their leader, Captain Polly Perkins, who taught herself to march backwards so that she could spot those with evil intent and report them to the police.

Had William gone to the Rink that Sunday, he would have seen an attendance of ‘between 1,500 and 2,000’ and no public address system, other than shouting, to control it.

We know this because the Standard of the 16th reported the court case of a trouble maker evicted by police from the Rink on both Sunday and Monday. It also reported a government inquiry into the high cost of buying the privately owned waterworks and making it a borough utility – the very opposite of what would happen 100 years later.

So, thanks to Victorian social media, we probably know more about the week beginning October 10, 1883, than October 10, 1983.

ANDREW PHILIPS, HISTORIAN