The Newmarket, Bury, Thetford and Cromer Road: Sport and history on an East Anglian turnpikeHarper, Charles G. (Charles George)
History
The Newmarket, Bury, Thetford and Cromer Road: Sport and history on an East Anglian turnpike
Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
England -- Description and travel; England -- Social life and customs
The story of his financial expedients is a long one, but it ended in
July, 1864, with final and irrevocable bankruptcy. He had completely
dissipated the residue of his extensive property, and was dependent upon
an allowance made by his uncle, whose efforts to save him from himself
had met with such misrepresentation. To keep him employed and out of
mischief, he was induced to accept a situation at £1 a week, to drive
the “Express,” Norwich and Cromer coach; and when that enterprise
failed—chiefly, we may suppose, because _he_ drove it, and because of an
absurd prejudice the passengers cherished against acquiring broken
necks—it was kept on the road solely for the same purpose; until,
indeed, he fell in love for the hundredth time. On this occasion it was
a Norwich barmaid who had caught his fancy. She thought coaching “low,”
and he gave it up, to please her.
The poor fool was drawing to his end. A few weeks longer of a miserable
existence at the “Norfolk Hotel,” where he had one solitary room, and it
was all over. He died there, after a few hours’ illness, February 2nd,
1866. A clot of blood on the lung cut his career short, in his
twenty-sixth year. His body was removed to Cromer, and thence to the
family vault at Felbrigg, where it lies among the real Windhams and the
sham. Tom Saul, an old coachman, together with a few cronies of the
Norfolk Tap, were the mourners.
Felbrigg had already passed out of the family, and had been purchased by
a man whose career was itself a romance.
John Kitton, who bought the estate and the Hall as they stood, including
the furniture, library, and the entire appointments of the house, had
been a grocer in a small way of business—one may almost say he had owned
a small chandler’s shop—in Norwich. His rise dated from a small
speculation in wheat shipped from Russia on the eve of the Crimean War.
By the time it had reached these shores the price of grain had become
enormously enhanced, and he netted a very handsome profit. His next
venture, of sending out a heavy shipment of oil-cake to the Crimea, was
equally successful, and laid a solid basis for the great fortune this
clever man of business rapidly acquired. The sum he is stated to have
given, in one cheque, for Felbrigg, “lock, stock, and barrel,” when the
estate was sold under “Mad Windham’s” bankruptcy, was £137,000. He then
changed his name to Ketton, and set up as a country squire. He died,
aged sixty-one, in 1872.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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