by Johnny Glover
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Episode 67: "The Reg Dixon Diaries Part Five" (May 19th 1998 12.10pm)

Yaxley Farcett sat down at the desk in Reg Dixon's study and opened up his diary to the 31st of January from earlier that year. He flattened the pages out with his hand and read on......................

Met Annie today at the library, and she confirmed again to me what a wonderful and misunderstood lady she is. She has been doing some research into the pubs of Banham for a small booklet she is hoping to produce. At one time there were fifteen pubs dotted about the village; in the Main Street, The Lanes and down in the Fens. It was while doing some investigation on 'The Peacock's Show' in Cauliflower Drove that she discovered something quite disturbing and I am unsure what she (or I, for that matter) should do about it.

Annie told me that she uncovered far more than she expected to whilst researching a small pub that had last served a customer in 1914. Apparently, the pub served, at the time, all the farm workers that plied their trade in Cauliflower Drove, which during harvest time could be a huge number. Hummer Thompson's Grandad, Amos, owned vast acres of land down there at the time and it was mostly his labourers that used The Peacock's Show. Hummer's Dad spent a lot of time helping in the fields down at Cauliflower Drove as a youth and had fond memories of sitting with the men in the yard of the pub enjoying a beer or five after a hot day in the fields. Anyway, when Hummers Dad had died in 1980, he had left the field which the pub had been closest to, to the village. He had the noble idea that the 14 acre field should be turned into a wood, so that future generations would be able to enjoy the field in the same way that he had done as a boy, although the pub was already a distant memory. There was a ceremony performed at the time when the land deeds to 'Thompson's Wood' were handed over by a grinning Hummer to the, then, land officer for South Fenland council Cedric Morgan. This of course was in his days as a local councillor, long before he made his famous 'Think not what your county can do for you, but what you can do for your county' speech at Shire Hall in Cambridge.