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The Hard Life of a 'Faker'

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17/01/1897

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Two Salvation Army Officers, armed with the requisite brooms and suitably rigged, ragged and disguised, practised the art of 'faking' - the name given to crossing sweeping by professionals. Relating their experiences - extended over a considerable time and a wide area - the amateur sweepers arrived at the conclusion that unless one had a really good crossing, and that, too, on a very muddy day, pence were few. If the road was fairly clean the average man in the street was apt to treat the mournful 'faker' - although he simulated the most racking cough - with scorn by crossing beside, not on, the cleanly swept path. At the same time the investigating Salvationists brought the knowledge that there are crossing sweepers who manage to make a decent living, but by also working up a connection in window cleaning, running errands, and doing odd jobs in genteel neighbourhoods. However, the poor fellow who spends his last copper in the purchase of a penny second hand broom, and sallies in search of a crossing to sweep, may well deem himself fortunate if at the end of the day he has gained enough to secure a shelter for the night and food for the morrow. (Peterborough Advertiser)

Taken from The Peterborough Book of Days by Brian Jones, The History Press, 2014.

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Cromwell Comes to Stay

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1643

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The Cathedral was ravaged during the English Civil War when Peterborough, a town with Royalist sympathies, was taken by Colonel Oliver Cromwell. Nearly all the stained glass windows were destroyed and the altar and reredos, cloisters and Lady Chapel were demolished. Much of the Cathedral’s library was destroyed by Cromwell’s troops, by being burnt in the cloisters. The Royalist newsbook ‘Mercurius Aulicus’ describes it thus: ‘It was advertised this day from Peterburgh, that Colonell Cromwell had bestowed a visit on that little City, and put them to the charge of his entertainment, plundering a great part thereof to discharge the reckoning, and further that in pursuance of the thorow Reformation, he did most miserably deface the Cathedrall Church, breake downe the Organs, and destroy the glasse windowes, committing many other outrages on the house of God which were not acted by the Gothes in the sack of Rome, and are most commonly forborn by the Turks when they possesse themselves by force of a Christian city.’  Cromwell spent a month in Peterborough, lodging in the Vineyard at the back of the Cathedral Precincts, allegedly with concussion from having hit his head whilst galloping under a low gateway. Recent archaeological evidence has been found of Cromwell’s troops being camped in the Cathedral grounds.

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Oliver Cromwell , Civil War , Mercurius Aulicus , Royalists

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