Mamble and Crowl, Worcs

Finally got to Mamble, which was a bit of a disappointment, to say the least. A little place with its most open area on a downward piece of the hill, a pub and a church and almost nothing else. Plainly we’ll have to rewrite the song:
Now we’ve been to Mamble
That lies above the Teme,
And there’s no one much in Mamble,
At least as we have seen.
No doubt they breed and brew there,
Still lazy as the claim,
But I doubt that any song there
Sets the local pub aflame.
However, we also went to the other Crowle, in Worcestshire. This has a totally different atmosphere to the Crowle up north, which seemed run down and devitalised. Crowle, Worcs, is probably a dormitory suburb, but the houses are both old thatched roof style and modern, the church has a sense of quiet about it, and there’s a modern parish hall at one end of the village. No sign of any Crowls in the church graveyard, so maybe we’re a hardy lot!
This morning, however, we went to church at the local place just down the road, in the village of Wolverley. This was a fairly High Anglican place, seemingly occupied by widows (only a couple of blokes that I could see) and not very many of them. There was a choir, however, all in heavenly-blue robes, and there were a couple of guys in amongst them too, so that supplemented the numbers on both sides.
The minister was a woman, but she isn’t the vicar, apparently. He was away doing a service elsewhere. She spoke well in her short sermon, and made a good point about reaching out to others in her comments on John’s Gospel.
At the end we took a brief look around the place, and there was a list of former vicars, going way back to the 13th century. One John Crowle stood out among them. He was vicar around 1545, and had an alias: Yewes. Not sure what that had to do with anything!
Of course he may have no connection with my part of the family, but it’s good to see someone in the wider clan doing a good job all that time ago.
Anyway, both the Wolverley church and the Crowle church are named after St John the Baptist. The Wolverley one, which is in the picture, is built on a hill. This is probably a good thing, apart from its biblical significance, because in June this year, Wolverley's lower reaches were flooded twice. We saw a man digging out the stream that runs past his house, and replacing the rocks that had been shifted from his garden wall. He's planning on building a much higher wall around that side of the house, even though the stream is at present more than a metre below the foundations.

Broads, Cripps, Roys

Don’t think I’ve mentioned that we went to Wroxham - by accident. We were intending to go to Riverside in Norwich, and put in Riverside Shopping Centre on our GPS only to discover that Malvina (as we’ve named her - after a famous NZ opera singer) thought we meant the RSC in Wroxham. That was okay, as Wroxham is on ‘The Broads’ as the many waterways around Norfolk are called, and Celia wanted to go back and check them out. She’d sailed on them as a schoolgirl. They are lovely: houses built right down to the water’s edge, and boats galore. We debated hiring a boat for a week and exploring them, but that’s still up in the air at this stage, as it’s quite costly.
Anyway, the other interesting thing about Wroxham is that in the distant past a small corner shop named Roy’s once existed. Roy must have made a great deal of money as his name is now on a dozen shops, all within spitting distance of each other. The Riverside Shopping Centre is part of it, and there’s a DIY, a garden centre, a food hall, and you name it. All of them have “Roy’s” plastered over them. Obviously Roy was pretty canny with his money - and his buying up of properties. Anyway it gives Wroxham a very prosperous feel.
Roade has had a similar thing. Sir Humphrey Cripps began his working life as a very much underpaid factory worker. Over the course of his career he was able to buy out the Pianoforte Supplies business, which was at the time a very large company in Roade, and later took to making metal car parts when the piano scene quietened down. He owned an island in the Caribbean; he bought up Waterford Crystal in Ireland, and he owned companies in Canada and elsewhere. All in all he was a very wealthy man, He was also a very generous man. He built an entire secondary school; funded umpteen things at universities, old churches and the like (including doing a good deal of restoration work at the Roade Anglican Church: St Mary Virgin). There’s an old people’s home with his name on it up the road from where we’re staying, and no doubt there are dozens of other things that he paid for. The great blessing of a truly wealthy man is that he can give most of his wealth away.

The photo was taken at Horning, along the road from Wroxham - we forgot to get our camera out in the latter town.