John Clare's Helpston // Northamptonshire

A snippet from the Jeevar Archive project

I've added a new image from the archive to the socials this week and I thought it was a good opportunity to introduce my Substack readers to my side-quest. This image of John Clare's cottage was taken in July 1977. It’s from a collection of photographs my Grandfather took around East Anglia and neighbouring counting in the 1970s and 1980s. There is more about the project’s origin story at the bottom of this article, but here is the image :

John Clare’s Cottage - Taken by Peter Jeevar in July 1977

I have previously shared a picture of his monument in Helpston which was taken on the same trip. That picture was added to socials in June this year.

John Clare’s Memorial - Taken by Peter Jeevar in July 1977

Today the village of Helpston falls under the county of Cambridgeshire, but here are the Norma Explores HQ we honour the 92 historic counties of the United Kingdom and recognize that the Helpston known to Clare and his contemporaries was in the county of Northamptonshire.

If you would like to understand the changes that have taken place to the categorization of British counties, I recommend visiting the Association of British Counties website (not affiliated - just a fan!) You can also use their search engine to discover if your town or village has always been in the county it is today!

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John Clare's monument was erected by public subscription and completed in 1869.

By 1935 the monument had deteriorated considerably and the text was almost unreadable. Funds were raised for restoration. Since 1955 it has been grade II listed.

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John Clare grew up familiar with the harsh realities of life in a poor, rural village at the turn of the 19th century. He was born to a farm labourer and his wife in 1793. He attended school until the age of 12, after which a series of low paying jobs left him struggling to contribute to his family's household. With a talent for poetry, he ventured down the path to publication as a way to raise some much needed funds, keeping his family from eviction from the family home.

In 1820 he managed to have his poems published and was celebrated for having a unique connection to rural England and the countryside. The same year he got married and was briefly earning more than he had previously.

With a growing family and fluctuating successes of subsequent books, Clare found it hard to settle into any sort of true happiness. Bouts of depression became more frequent and his mental health worsened. By 1835 he had seven children and his sales of work were not sufficient to support them, despite periods of financial help from his supporters. His alcohol consumption increased and his behaviour became increasingly erratic. 

In the summer of 1837 it was recommended that he should seek medical care and he voluntarily placed himself in a private asylum near to Epping Forest in Essex.

He remained there until 1841, when he absconded and walked the 80 miles back to his home county. He was under the delusion he was going to meet his first love and 'wife', a woman named Mary. Mary was real, however her parents had forbade marriage between them, so she had never been his wife. When he got back to Helpston it was Mary's parents that had to inform him that not only had they never been married, but that she had also died in a house fire several years previously. With his delusion broken, he finally made it back to his actual home in Northborough. 

Things had not improved though and just five months later his wife had to call the doctors for help. That Christmas he was committed to Northamption General Lunatic Asylum. 

He would remain there for the rest of his life, continuing to write poetry. One of his most memorable poems comes from this time,

'I AM'

    'I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;

My friends forsake me like a memory lost:

I am the self-consumer of my woes—

They rise and vanish in oblivious host,

Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes

And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,

Into the living sea of waking dreams,

Where there is neither sense of life or joys,

But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;

Even the dearest that I loved the best

Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath never trod

A place where woman never smiled or wept

There to abide with my Creator, God,

And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,

Untroubling and untroubled where I lie

The grass below—above the vaulted sky'

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At the age of 71, on 20th May 1864, he had a stroke and passed away. He would be returned to Helpston, the village of his birth, and buried there. His poetry connects us with a time when rural life was under great stresses from industrialization, when the enclosure acts were changing centuries of rural practice and when his world as he knew it was under most threat. He wrote in Northamptonshire dialect, adding to the list of things soon to separate him from the new changing, modern world. 

The cottage where John Clare was born is today open to the public, cared for by volunteers. His monument stands near the church and his grave can be found in the churchyard. 

What Three Words locations of the places you can visit in Helptson:

Monument : ///diver.trick.basics

Cottage: ///boil.alarm.airliners

Churchyard : ///revisits.perfume.intervals

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The Jeevar Archive 

In 2020 I inherited a collection of photographs from my grandfather, Peter Jeevar. The photographs had been taken in preparation for a book that never got finished. He had already written and published two small booklets on rural heritage, namely 'Dovecotes of Cambridgshire' in 1976 and 'Curiosities of Rural Cambridgeshire' in 1977. He self illustrated these booklets and would go out around East Anglia taking reference photos to create his drawings from. He had wanted to write similar books for the other East Anglian counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. However, in the early 1980s his life went in another direction and he moved to Scotland. Thankfully he kept the collection of photographs and his original notes, and it was these I inherited when he passed away in May 2020.

I am sharing images from the archive on social media via instagram, threads, and facebook - under the account @JeevarArchive. I am also slowly researching and revisiting these places to see what the last 40 years has done to them. Some have been lost. Some repurposed. Just a few are largely unchanged. Every other month I pick one or two places from the archive to revisit in my ‘Then and Now’ feature in the Norma Explores digital magazine which our Patreon £3+ tier members can download as a member benefit.