Thomas Crabb

Thomas Crabb was christened at Littleport on 15 December 1811, the first child of Thomas Crabb's second marriage — his mother was Susanna Moon — and he was four years old the week the village rose and the dragoons came. His whole life was worked within a few miles of the font. At twenty-three he married Susanna Pagett, a Littleport labourer's daughter, and between 1835 and 1856 they had ten children — Isaac first, then Pepworth (the old family name Pepper, given one last outing), a Susannah who died in infancy, and seven more. The censuses track the family not through streets but along the waterlands: Victoria Street in 1841; by 1851 out at Burnt Fen — the black-earth level whose name the village tied to Hereward's scorched-earth legend — where for one census he appears as 'farmer, labourer', the only rung above day-labour he ever touched; then Burnt Fen Bank in 1861, Burnt Fen Bank Cottage in 1871 — with Isaac and Rachel next door — and Ten Mile Bank in 1881, an agricultural labourer at every stamp of the decade to his seventieth year. He watched his eldest go to London to dig sewers and come home; he watched him quit for Hull on the train. Thomas stayed. He was buried at Littleport on 9 May 1887, aged seventy-five.

Susan outlived him by sixteen years, and her widowhood is the hardest reading on the page. In 1891 she was alone in two rooms at The City — a huddle of yards off Littleport's main street — and the census enumerator wrote her occupation in one word: 'pauper'. The parish relief that kept her was the Poor Law's last kindness, the same system whose workhouse shadow falls twice elsewhere in this family's records. She was still alone at The Holmes in 1901, eighty-five; she died at Littleport in 1903, aged eighty-eight — the last of this family's dead to lie in the parish their name had been part of since Queen Anne's day. Within five years of her death there were Crabbs of this line in Hull only.