THE MAN WHO LIVED AT THE PALACE

Ishbel Beatty tells the history of flamboyant Dr John Perkins

JOHN PERKINS LIES in EAST HATLEY CHURCHYARD, near enough to Buff Wood, as he asked, to hear the Cambridgeshire hounds working through it. But he was more than a keen huntsman, a bushy-bearded figure of ready wit and congenial presence. He was a Tutor at Downing College for 26 years, Bursar for 28, and he managed the estates belonging to the College around East Hatley up to 1901.

As landlord's representative, he was popular with the tenants, whose rents he collected at the Downing Arms. The College had built a house in the village in the 1860's for the use of Fellows and others, and installed a gamekeeper, Joseph Ingrey and his wife Rebecca. It was called the Palace, perhaps as a joke because of its contrast with the small cottages of the farm labourers which made up the village. The Bursar often stayed there, and when his period of office as Tutor came to an end in 1888, he farmed at nearby Pincote's, in partnership with Joseph Ingrey.

In 1901, aged 65, Dr. Perkins became oppressed with melancholia, and in spite of the care of his brother Henry, a London barrister who came to stay with him for some weeks. He shot himself outside the door of the house on a day in early May. Evidence was given at the inquest that he feared approaching blindness and worried without cause about the affairs of the dairy farm.

A popular lecturer and tutor in the classics, Perkins had been a friend of W G Grace, the cricketer, was invited to shoot with the Duke of Cambridge at Six Mile Bottom, and gave a much-appreciated annual address to the Great Gransden Agricultural Society. He stocked the village ponds with fish, and for 25 years he was Secretary of the Cambridgeshire Hunt. He once declared that he believed his best memorial to be the great increase in the number of Downing undergraduates whilst he was Tutor, and the fact that while he was Bursar no fox was shot on the College estates.

His portrait, which hangs in Downing College, shows an auburn-haired and bearded man in his favoured hunting kit, with the trees of Buff Wood in the background. Stories which circulated in the village for years after his death have not survived, but would have told much about his sometimes flamboyant behaviour.

John (or Jack) Perkins was the youngest son of the four children of the Vicar of Sawston. His eldest sister, Martha, unmarried like him, also lived in East Hatley for some years, and is buried next to him. When brambles were cleared from their graves after some years of neglect, the wild yellow daffodils that had been planted in their memory began to bloom again.

Back to Gamlingay map