THE visit to Essex University by the current Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow (MP for Buckingham) – who graduated from the university in 1985 and thus knows Colchester well – is an excuse for me to mention when the town’s MP was Speaker.

On April 25 1660 Sir Harbottle Grimston was elected Speaker, but only for a few months.

He was MP for Colchester from 1640 to 1654 and again from 1660 to 1683. There is a portrait of him in the town hall in the Mayoral Suite.

Twelve years previously, at the time of the Siege of Colchester in 1648 during the English Civil War, his house was burnt down.

This was on the main road out of Colchester towards London, on a site between today’s Maldon Road roundabout and Essex County Hospital. Its location meant it was in line of fire from both defending Royalists and attacking Parliamentarians.

In the Moot Hall is the portrait of another Speaker, that of Charles Abbot who later became 1st Baron Colchester. He was Speaker from 1802 to 1817. He was MP for Helston, Cornwall, but later took the title Baron Colchester because of his family’s association with the town.

His father, the Rev John Abbot, was Rector of All Saints’ Church on the corner of High Street and Queen Street. This hereditary title ended when the 3rd Baron died in 1919.

A Speaker with a name familiar to contemporary Colchester is Thomas, Lord Audley, after whom the secondary school at Monkwick is named. He was MP for Essex from 1523 and became Speaker from 1529 to 1533. His statue is one of six on the outside of the town hall.

Here are some more snippets of Colchester history:

  • Reading an article about the Army in Colchester, I realised last year there were two significant anniversaries from the 19th century. In 1816 , the wooden barracks put up in 1794 as Britain engaged in battles against France, were demolished after the final defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo the previous year.

These were located at where today we have Barrack Street, Artillery Street and Cannon Street to the east of Wimpole Road.

At its peak it housed 7,000 soldiers, 200 officers and 450 horses. There was a hospital for 414 patients.

In 1856, the Army returned to Colchester with a hutted camp built between Mersea Road and what we call Military Road. All that remains is the wooden camp church, later known as the Garrison Church, which is now the Russian Orthodox Church. Towards the end of the 19th century the hutted camp was replaced with permanent brick barracks Meeanee and Hyderabad. In recent years the sites have been re-developed with new houses.

  •  Colchester’s 1844 Victorian Town Hall was demolished in 1898 and the current town hall was opened in 1902. A map of the town centre published in 1900 states municipal offices on the south side of High Street, third property in from Head Street, which I am assuming is where the council operated from during the years Colchester did not have a town hall.
  •  The original name of the Red Lion hotel in the High Street was the White Lion. It had been built as a town house for the Howard family, wealthy landowners from Stoke-by-Nayland, a descendent of which was Catherine Howard, one of the six wives of Henry VIII.
  • The Eastern Counties Railway from London reached Colchester in 1843. The first trains, for cattle, ran on 8th March; those for passengers on 29th March.
  • The first recorded note of black people in Colchester was when there was a spectacular military parade at Lexden Heath on 2nd May 1775 which included “two negro trumpeters with turbans and scimitars...”

SIR BOB RUSSELL