Grantham; a Town of ‘Firsts’ By Richard Coppin

Name any town in England and you’d be more than likely to discover something or someone of importance associated with it. When it comes to Grantham however there are not only quite a few of them but they also carry with them the distinction of often being the ‘first’ of their type.

Tell you what; let’s go on a whistle-stop tour around the town and unearth a few of them, shall we?

It was the railway which made a huge difference to Grantham back in the nineteenth century, bringing employment and potential down the track. On July 3rd 1938, just south of the town on the East Coast Main Line in fact, the sleek, dark blue locomotive named Mallard, thundered into the history books to set forever the world speed record for steam-powered railway engines. Mechanically, everything was being pushed far beyond the limits of what a steam train could do. Blasting through the Stoke tunnel she achieved a staggering 126 mph; a first and final record for such a machine that stands to this day. With speeds such as this, London was just over an hour away; permanently changing the old ways. It put an end to the horse-drawn mail coach service that hitherto had plied its trade along the Old Great North Road that once sliced through the congested centre of Georgian Grantham.

Go further back than that; to the seventeenth century and we might just bump into the genius child;

Master Isaac Newton (Due to be knighted in 1705). His education was conducted by the Kings School in Grantham. The school room building where, amongst other subjects, he was taught Latin sits close to St. Wulfram’s church, of which more later, and is now the library; an ancient part of what is now a modern grammar school.

A preserved scratched engraving of I. Newton can still be seen in a window sill today if you look hard enough, evidence that even as a child, this giant of science knew the boredom of simply being a schoolboy at times. A blue plaque erected by The Grantham Civic Society on the High Street close to the George Shopping Centre shows where he once lodged in town during those early scholastic years, long before that famous apple initiated the most scientific understanding of motion and gravity the world had ever seen and ushered in the first truly scientific understanding of motion and gravity.

Quite apt now that we venture into the George Shopping Centre, its red brick frontage giving us an idea of how imposing it would have been when it was an elegant hotel; The George. Here you could dine in an elegant restaurant; followed by having a dance in the ballroom. There was obviously a bar, along with a taproom and a great many bedrooms. If we could only but time travel and find ourselves in one of those chambers around the year 1838 we could spy on none other than Charles Dickens himself scribbling away and creating from his imagination a chapter or two of Nicholas Nickleby as he paused to rest during his journey along the North Road, ostensibly to venture further to Yorkshire to research one of the schools there that would feature in this very novel; a place he named ‘DotheboysHall’. The main archway which still allows access to the front of ‘The George’ would have once sounded to the clatter of the stagecoach turning in to change horses in the days before steam changed everything.

Stepping diagonally across the High Street we find an historic sixteenth century half-timbered building where Catlin’s restaurant existed for many a long year. It is reputed that here, in the days when it was a bakery, gingerbread was accidentally invented by William Eggleston; creating another first for Grantham. The local football team; Grantham Gingerbreads, owes its nickname to this great discovery. This sweet biscuit now finds its way all over the world thanks to the tireless entrepreneurial skills of Alastair Hawken, owner of Hawken’s Gingerbread.

Well, we’re walking south now, past St. Peter’s Hill, where the statue of Sir Isaac Newton stands; made from a captured Russian cannon, and continue onwards into the B&Q car park on London Road. The ghosts of Grantham’s industrial past tell us of acres of busy factories and huge workshops owned by the Ruston Hornsby Company. The output on this site was phenomenal; steam engines for all kinds of uses. Working there was a brilliant engineer called Herbert Ackroyd Stuart who,quite by accident discovered that split paraffin oil caught fire when it came into contact with a paraffin lamp. He was curious to see if he could make this explosion occur ‘inside’ an engine’s cylinder as opposed to the conventional burning of fuel beneath a boiler to make enough steam to move the piston. His idea worked and became a commercial success, making the Hornsby-Ackroyd oil engine the very first internal combustion machine in the world. See, I told you Grantham was a town of firsts.

Well, it doesn’t stop there. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century experiments were made in these factories to help their heavy steam tractors claw their way over the boggy clay of Lincolnshire’s arable land. The radical solution was found by developing a special conveyor belt-like track. Once perfected, this inspired the invention of the traction system used in what then were called Army Landships. Since they resembled large drinking-water tanks, the army decided, in the name of security, to keep up the pretence. Well the name stuck and so you could say that the first tank was almost invented in Grantham.

Staying with the military theme, we’ll leave B&Q to its historical ghosts and head off to St. Vincent’s Road. At the end of this leafy lane stands St. Vincent’s Hall, a decidedly Victorian building with an austere conical turret built for and by Richard Hornsby. The place was once home to the council’s planning department but in May 1943 it was the headquarters of Bomber Command, Five Group. Deep in this building’s cellar, news first came through to Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, head of BomberCommand and the chief engineer at Vickers; Barnes Wallis, that the special 617 squadron had succeeded in destroying two of the major dams of the German Ruhr; the Möhne and the Eder, using Wallis’s ‘bouncing’ bombs, the first ever bouncing bombs in the world. The actor, who played the dashing Wing Commander Guy Gibson, the squadron’s leader, in the 1955 film, The Dambusters, was Richard Todd. As a Hollywood actor of some thirteen movies he used to live not too far fromGrantham and was often be seen in town doing his shopping. Few people ever bothered him, and yet we all used to feel that he was one of us even agreeing to open one of the St. George’s Day events which the Grantham Events Group organised. He died on 3rd December 2009.

Westwards leads us to Springfield Road where a new housing estate has emerged. The site of these homes was once a munitions factory; British Marco. In 1942 a feature film was based on true wartime events connected with this factory. The story depicted the deeds of Melbourne Johns, the firm’s foreman who went into occupied Europe to retrieve three huge munitions machines and only just made it back. The film; A Foreman went to France, showed what ingenuity Johns possessed to achieve his mission; a full-on British stiff-upper-lip movie, what-ho!

Back in the centre of town we ought to drop in at the Guildhall Arts Centre (the old temporary town jail at one time). This building would have been familiar to a formidable woman called Edith Smith. You’d be forgiven for thinking that London or Manchester might boast the nation’s first woman police officer vested with powers of arrest, but no; it was in dear old Grantham. We’re not afraid to produce feminists here. On November 27th 1914, as World War One began, Edith went on duty in the Women Police Service. Her job was to clear Grantham’s streets of unseemly ladies of a certain professional nature. She worked until the war’s end in 1918 and in a tragic turn of events committed suicide five years later.

Ah, but if it’s a real feminist you’re after, a colossal, giant-sized feminist, I’ve got just who you’re looking for. To the north of the town at the corner of North Parade and Broad Street you’ll come across a private health and therapy centre. On the 13th October 1925, in this very building a baby girl was born in what are now upstairs treatment rooms. Her Mum and Dad; Alfred and Beatrice Roberts, owned what was then a grocery shop, and lived above it. The baby was named Margaret Hilda, little knowing that at some point in the future she would marry a Mr. Denis Thatcher and become the first woman Prime Minister in Britain. A plaque on the building’s western wall marks this as her birthplace. Her name is also on display on the Head Girls’ roll of honour at the Girl’s High School where she was a student before going on to Oxford University to study chemistry and to dabble a bit in politics. Quite recently, a statue of her was erected on St. Peter’s Hill Green.

Famous names seem to occur all over the place in Grantham. Albert Ball, the dashing fighter ace of World War One was taught at the Kings School and lived in the town during his student years. Nicholas Parsons, the T.V and radio entertainer was born at number one Castlegate in 1923. It’s now a dental practice, where presumably, there are no hesitations or repetitions. Anyone who listens to the radio show ‘Just a minute’ will no doubt appreciate that.

Yet whilst the famous come and go, the market town of Grantham just keeps on keeping on. A market is held here every Saturday on The Market Place and Narrow and Wide Westgate and anyone passing through it is taking part in a tradition that has been going on in Grantham for over a thousand years. King Richard III consented that a Wednesday market be granted on the 3rd March 1484 inGrantham, establishing a way of life that continued until 1634, when market day was altered to every Saturday. In the early days the market was held at the foot of the two hundred and eighty foot high spire of St, Wulfram’s church which even today dominates the town’s skyline as it has done continually for over eight hundred years. It was once the tallest ecclesiastical building in the land for many a long year.

The market is without doubt the oldest commercial enterprise the town has ever seen, but there are some local businesses that have nevertheless survived the ups and downs of history. Henry Escritt is a case in point, a man who began his estate agency business as far back as 1860. 1908 saw him forming a partnership with Cecil Barrell to create Escritt and Barrell. A year later the estate agency Goldings was created, successfully continuing until 2006 when it joined with the still thriving Escritt and Barrell.

As times change, however, there always needs to be an influx of new business ventures to keep a town moving forwards. The re-designing of Grantham’s traffic system has provided the likes of Asda and other supermarkets to become a part of our everyday lives. Sainsbury’s was set upon the site of the old London Road football stand after the club moved lock, stock and goalposts its present location on Trent Road. Many of the tumbledown back streets have also gone in the name of progress to give space to the Isaac Newton Shopping centre.

More recently, Next and Home Bargains have set up shop adjacent to the Relief Road named afterGrantham’s twin town, the Sankt Augustin Way. The town boasts a brand new contemporary cinema, a ten-pin bowling centre, a leisure complex, several highly dynamic gyms, a superb theatre and arts centre, numerous pubs and clubs, and an immense collection of food outlets. One of those restaurants is in the Angel and Royal hotel, the façade of which is over six hundred years old.

Grantham has easy access, whether it’s by road or railway. Yes, the railway, I seem to remember mentioning that at the beginning. We seem to have come back to where we started this stroll through Grantham. I think you’ll have to agree that as far as English towns are concerned, Grantham is the last word in firsts. Come and see us; we can’t wait to welcome you.