The Old Vicarage in the Cambridgeshire village of Grantchester is a house associated with the poet Rupert Brooke, who lived nearby and in 1912 referenced it in an eponymous poem – "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester".[1] The house is next door to The Orchard tea garden, also part of the poem. A portrait statue of Brooke by Paul Day stands in the front garden.[2]
The Old Vicarage was built in around 1685 on the site of an earlier building, a minute's walk from the Church of St Andrew and St Mary. It passed from church ownership into private hands in 1820, and was bought in 1850 by Samuel Page Widnall (1825–1894),[3] who extended it and established a printing business, the Widnall Press.[4]
In 1910 it was owned by Henry and Florence Neeve from whom Rupert Brooke rented a room and, later, a large part of the house. Brooke's mother bought the house in 1916 and gave it to his friend, the economist Dudley Ward.[3] In December 1979, it was bought by the scientist Mary Archer, who had recently been appointed to a position at Cambridge University, and her husband Jeffrey Archer, then a politician and subsequently a novelist.[5] The house has been listed Grade II on the National Heritage List for England since August 1962.[6]
The Guardian crossword setter John Galbraith Graham (Araucaria) set a clue often described as epitomising his clue-making: Poetical scene with surprisingly chaste Lord Archer vegetating (3, 3, 8, 12), the last four words forming the anagram THE OLD VICARAGE GRANTCHESTER.[7]
References
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