1941: On this day, 814 20-year-old city girls responded to their call-up papers - although some forgot their registration card! Many of the girls had come with their mothers, while others had their boyfriends for company. Some are described as arriving 'with an army escort on either side'. Quite a few perambulators are also recorded as being parked outside the building. (Gray, David, Peterborough at War 1939-1945, David Gray, 2011)
Taken from The Peterborough Book of Days by Brian Jones, The History Press, 2014.
Farming arrived in the Peterborough area around 4000 BC. The first farmers were a mix of in-comers from Europe and local people who had acquired the new skills of agriculture and animal husbandry.
They grew wheat, barley and oats and kept cattle, sheep and pigs. Their farms – and several are known - were mostly confined to the east of Peterborough, around Fengate, Whittlesey and Eye. They consisted of small oval houses, within garden-like plots where crops were grown. Animals were kept in larger open areas away from the crops. Pigs would have roamed the woodlands around the farms. They buried their dead beneath mounds, known as barrows, or in open graves.
The first farmers introduced pottery-making to Britain and also produced fine flint tools with long, knife-like blades. By 3000 BC they had felled most of the trees that grew in the area and the landscape was dominated by large, open pastures.
A highwayman stopped a farmer on Lincoln Road near Dogsthorpe and threatened to murder him if he didn’t pay up. Another traveller happened to be passing on horseback and together with the farmer gave the highwayman ‘a thorough thumping’. The farmer beat him with his own bludgeon and the traveller whipped the clothes off the highway man's back before letting him go, so badly beaten they hoped it would mend his ways.
Farming arrived in the Peterborough area around 4000 BC. The first farme…
A highwayman stopped a farmer on Lincoln Road near Dogsthorpe and threat…