Four Lamps - 1946
During the Second World War (and possibly the First World War too), street lamps in Cambridge were turned off. A reflective strip was painted on the posts to prevent people walking into them in blackouts. This may have been the case with the lamppost in the centre of Parker's Piece too. If so, it prefigures the power cuts of the early seventies when, as the Piece was plunged into temporary darkness, it supposedly acquired the name Reality Checkpoint.
After five years of blackouts, corporation lamps were turned back on across the city in September 1944 (Cambridge Daily News, 26 September 1944).
A year later the Parker's Piece lamp succumbed to terminal, if inadvertent, damage. On 15 August 1945, during the VJ celebrations to mark the end of the War, the pillar was broken off. American servicemen have been blamed for the damage, although the report in the Cambridge Daily News ("Cambridge's Victory Night of Revelry on Parker's Piece", 16 August 1945) does not specify who was responsible.
Mother was there, father was there and so were all the children (many in their prams) . . . Service men and women, too, in their hundreds, as well as Americans . . . It was in the main a large, gay, good natured crowd, with young and old, civilian and Service men joining in the fun . . .
The evening however did not pass off without damage. One "casualty" was the lamp standard in the centre of Parker's Piece, which was broken off a few feet above the ground, whilst bits of the rope round the enclosure disappeared, to be used for skipping ropes and for tug-of-war battles.
This murky photograph, which accompanies the news report shows "the great mass" of revellers gathered by the bandstand, caught in the floodlight. It looks like the bandstand had been erected around the lamppost. If so, this must have been last photograph taken of the original pillar.
The CDN estimates that the jubilant crowd on Parker's Piece that night was anything up to 10,000 strong (the population of the city in 1951 was little more than 80,000). There was community singing and dancing, bands playing and at nine o'clock the King's Speech was broadcast. Spirits were high.
Streets across the city had their own celebrations on this night and in the days that followed. Interestingly, Roger Waters’ earliest memory is of watching a bonfire and people dancing during VJ night, although the two-year-old future Pink Floyd singer was across town at his grandmother’s house on Cherry Hinton Road.
"Let there be more light"
Roger Waters/Pink Floyd (1968)
The following year it was restored by a local metalworks firm, George Lister & Sons, of Abbey Road, Cambridge. According to the Cambridge Daily News (5 September 1946) the work was done by foreman Sam Mason, assisted by a young apprentice, Tony Challis, who was responsible for the iron scroll.
The single lamp was replaced with the four pendant lamps we see today: one of the first fluorescent lights of its kind in England. Thus in the postwar period it was thus generally referred to as the Four Lamps – and still is by some older Cambridge residents.
Is that part of the original, discarded pillar, just visible on the left of the photo?
Photo: Cambridge Daily News / Mike Petty
An impromptu game of football in the mid-sixties. Football and cricket are integral to the history of Parker's Piece. According to Council minutes records, use by 30 youths over the winter of 1964/65 had been sufficiently heavy for the Council to attempt to direct them elsewhere to save the wear on the turf around the Four Lamps.
Photo: Cambridge News
Despite the sign, cyclists have long used the footpaths that cross at the Four Lamps, 1971.
Photo: Illustrated London News