Strangers in a small village

During a trawl through the British Newspaper Archive on Find My Past the other day I came across this wonderful little cutting from the Luton Times and Advertiser. I was searching for anything to do with Tempsford, the small village in Bedfordshire where my paternal grandmother hailed from. This article, dated 6 April 1894, recalls the occasion that two strangers were spotted in the village and the misconception that these two gents, being outsiders, were up to no good.

Luton Times and Advertiser, 6 Aprl 1894

It's probably a good thing that these two young men weren't apprehended. The idea that their assailants intended to 'break every bone' in their bodies is rather disconcerting.

Tempsford has always been a small village. In the 1891 census the population was recorded as 492 people. By 2011 the number of residents had increased by just 100. Even though the village is cut in half by the Great North Road (now known as the A1), its size meant that all the inhabitants in the village would have known everyone else. They would have farmed the same fields, lived side by side in their small cottages and married into each other's families. I've discovered in my family history that during the 19th century, my ancestors from Tempsford, the Cullips, were connected to virtually all of the main families of the village by marriage alone.

So two strangers in the village stood out like a sore thumb, as they would have done in a thousand other villages of this type throughout the British Isles. It's a shame it was not reported who they were visiting, where they were from (a large town or city perhaps where strangers could easily disappear into a crowd) or why they did not respond to the many curious enquiries made toward them regarding their intentions on that Good Friday eve. Still, if they had put the people of Tempsford out of their misery and revealed they were visiting friends, it's likely that this article would not have been written. Many years on, the curious reader would have been deprived of a fast paced and exciting account, which, although somewhat a let down at the end, provided a snapshot into the mindset of a small Bedfordshire village at the end of the Victorian era.