Unlike the big thinking eighteenth century dreams of living life big, brash, and noisy with its Macaronies and Loadsa Money mansion and folly builders, the Victorian age lurched into an era of imperial quaintness.


The smokestack cities of the north were revelling in muck and brass, while little England, or Blighty – a word derived from the hindu word for “European/Foreign” - thrived in the southern home counties and the dreams of sweaty colonialists stuck in some dreary jungle. Romantic poets idealised this pastoral life and wondered lonely as a cloud of hash hish or at least an extra dose of Squibb’s Fluid Extract of Cannabis. The Victorians emphasised morality, stability and the virtues of the country side, in contrast to the moral challenges of urban and industrialised areas. Essex was thus considered a bastion of traditional English values and no opium seems to have been involved, well not unless you took the regular stagecoach to London’s East End where one could get one’s stash.

In 1846, the UK took over Hong Kong and started making large amounts of MP-bribing money from Opium and taking suitably large doses of Laudanum to oil the muse, or quell the aching backs of the aged, staunch the neurosis of many an hysterical young lady, and ensuring with a dip of the dummy into a dab of Syrup of Poppies, a well behaved babe in arms. All of which does make one wonder if the Victorian fad for ghosts and ghoulies had some of its origin in extra strong doses of Dr Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne and other exotic medicines that were now being industrially produced and imported. Thus, Great Baddow, via its local pharmacist and brewery, was probably going through a mellow period when Anne Boleyn’s ancestors rose again, as if they had ever really left.
The spelling had shifted to Bullen and though the connection with the original family might be tenuous, here in Great Baddow, the Bullens now expanding the big Georgian house called The Vines at the centre of the village, happily laid claim to their Tudor past. And as they owned lots of Essex land, they probably did have some real connection. Confusingly there was a reverend A C Bullen and a reverend A W Bullen. They were a father and son team who had eyed up the position of Vicar at St Mary’s while Thomas Dehany Bernard held it before going on to become Archdeacon of Bedford. A. C. Bullen’s tenure had been before the Bramstons, in 1812 when he was a young man, then two more vicars come along while he worked on his estates and preached elsewhere. Finally, his son took over.

The list of St Mary's vicars in St Mary's Church,
from 1327 - 2021, Great Baddow
There are many vicars on the plaque that you can see in the church that I have not covered in this essay. Given the credentials of those I have covered, I would not be surprised if they all had interesting trajectories, something not usually associated with country vicars. If this essay achieves anything, I hope it reminds people that even in the most obscure villages of England, the history of the whole of the nation can be found. No individual is wholly without influence, though researching all these biographical fragments makes one realise that life is short, and that one’s eyes and patience can only take so much, so surely enough is enough! Then someone will no doubt point out that I missed one of the most important people ever to have passed through the village. The difficulty with which you can read that shiny plaque pictured here, I hope, gives you, dear reader, an inkling of the work required in turning obscure and faded moments into a coherent story. My errors I hope, are forgiven.
At first A W Bullen moved his rather large family into the Vicarage but soon discovered that it was somewhat chilly and too small, and frankly, there was that nice big Georgian House with the new ballroom and designer garden just demanding him to move back in. With the permission of the bishop, he moved into his father’s property, and began totting up a fair amount of Victorian family tragedy. His eldest son in his twenties, died of typhoid in Africa. This cannot be blamed upon Great Baddow’s air or water. Imperial deaths were perhaps even more common than local deaths.
However, in 1873, A W Bullen’s younger son died at the age of 19. This time however, it was one of those mysterious Great Baddow fevers. It is hardly surprising that we find the 1876 Essex Chronicle reporting that the Rev. Bullen was chairing a meeting demanding measures to improve the sanitary conditions of the parish. One finds mention of drainage issues in newspapers as far back as the eighteenth century. There was a constant problem with drainage ditches that were not properly maintained and so causing the Baddow Brook to flood. Further, there was now extra waste from the brewery making it even more troublesome.

Nowadays the Baddow Brook is a small stream that runs down into a drain as seen here, and disappears under Vicarage Lane. Back at the start of the 19th Century it had run downhill behind the White Horse Inn, picking up the contents of various chamber pots as it went, and followed in a ditch beside the High Street down to what is now the Chelmer River. By 1876 Mr Joseph Bazalgette had resolved London’s sewage problem so Great Baddow’s should have been easy to fix. Except Mr Tabor, of Tabor Hill fame, objected to the proposed sewage plant being near his property.
As late as 1882 Rev. Bullen was still plugging away trying to hurry the process on. He reported that the village had twenty funerals: five were for children under five, five were over five but under twenty, seven were over twenty but under 60, one was 85 and one 91... So the odds against getting to a ripe old age in Great Baddow were still pretty high.
Besides sewers, the reverend was interested in inviting people to speak about the promotion of Christianity to the Jews, the evils of gambling, especially during the Chelmsford Summer Meet, and the beneficial nature of temperance - which given how the Crabbes were one of St Mary’s main benefactors, probably did not sit well with the Crabbe men. As for the Crabbe women, it seems to have had a profound effect for in the twentieth century they turned T-Total and sold the Brewery making 140 men and 40 women redundant.
Life in Great Baddow was not all death and drainage, if the local newspapers are anything to go by, it was one of Gymnastic displays by the Church Lads Club, The Baddow Flower Show at Baddow Lodge, Choir meetings, Harvest festivals, auctions at the White Horse Inn, Church trips to Clacton, Bicycle sales, waxwork exhibitions, and Prize Mangel Wurzel competitions. The village, despite the railways turning the Chelmsford area into an industrial hub and the Brewery being the biggest employer, was a haven of rural gentility served by parlour maids, cooks and estate managers.
There is something quite other worldly about this society. Out in the wider world Britain was hunting down slavers and bringing Christian enlightenment to the natives, while at the same time ruthlessly making grabs for raw materials to feed its industrial base. And many a Brit was being slaughtered by Afgans, Mad Madhis, Russians and Zulus, while pushing Opium on the Chinese. In short, they were a tough and pragmatic lot out in the colonies, some beneficial to the locals, some outright gangsters combined with a few rather zealous gun-crazy Christians like General Gordon on some kind of personal crusade.

The Parish Hall, Great Baddow

In the 1880’s onwards the Empire story was transformed into the Great Baddow Glee Club’s entertaining skits, songs and recitations. Their performances, like today’s Amateur Dramatics took place at the Parish Hall as seen above.
One favourite was Mr Marshal singing Old Timber Toes, a song about losing a leg fighting the Russians, which apparently was a price worth paying, “For what did I want two legs for, I'm just as well wi'one. For Jack at sea, an Jack a'shore, is not the boy to run… for A Fightin we must go! A fightin’ we must go!”

Blighty was a shining example of civilisation and in 1887 a fountain was erected in the village centre to celebrate the 50th jubilee of Queen Victoria. It even had a gas light on it. Progress indeed! But of course, progress could go backwards, as far as piano tuners were concerned. It seems that Mrs Bullen and her daughters often bashed the piano to accompany the entertainment without complaint. However, when Mrs Foster was relegated to the piano, despite the no doubt brilliant vocal stylings of the evening surrounding “The Midship Mite” - another stirring song of a wounded child sailor in the Crimean War telling others to save themselves for he was “a gonner” - Mrs Foster refused to play another note for the piano was so out of tune. Mr E Fitch, so the news report has it, volunteered to try his song, “The Wild Beast Show,” but perhaps thankfully the keys of the piano just would not function. So, Mr Turnage proposed a vote of thanks to the misses Bullen for providing the tea. This was heartily carried and the proceedings came to a close with the singing of the National Anthem.

One gets a hint from this reportage that a newer generation were beginning to feel that the previous one was a tad ridiculous.
It was now that the members of Galleywood’s contingent on the Parish Council, probably not invited to the entertainments, thought they were short changed and wanted their own parish. They in no uncertain terms were told by Mr Crabbe that they might not have received as much cash as Great Baddow, but they were given many things in kind to make up for the shortfall. The Galleywood contingent were not that impressed and a committee was appointed to look into this situation. They looked into it very thoroughly, and a mere one hundred years later they got their wish. In 1987 they ceased being part of the Great Baddow parish.

Another controversy gripped the village concerned the adoption of Hymns Ancient and Modern by St Marys. This revolutionary change in the religious service nearly lost half the church congregation to the Wesleyans. It was seen as a suspiciously “Popish” plot. The Civil War of the 17th century was still raging in the minds of some of the parishioners. What they thought of the campaign for Irish Home Rule then raging, along with threats of military mutinies and Orange Men marching through various English cities, is not noted. Though these events, I am sure, would have also stirred up otherwise benign meetings with tea and biscuits. We often forget that even in the picture postcard rural village, stirred the same old politics of tribal identities that appear to have plagued England, if not the entire world, forever.
At a very oversubscribed parish council meeting then, Mr Crabbe called the hymn book an unjustifiable and unrighteous attempt to do violence to his conscience. Mr Whit, a local gardener, proposed that Mr Kemble’s Psalms and Hymns, a Wesleyan hymn book, should be used instead or he would no longer be a member of the Church of England. This was greeted by much applause either to encourage him to leave or in agreement.
The Reverend Bullen managed to calm things down by promising not to use any suspect hymns and all agreed that he was an honourable man who would protect their spiritual needs. But the Crabbes were watching him. They knew this was a slippery sliding slope that could lead to the collapse of the Empire.

The British Empire was a very peculiar sort of affair. It united the country but instead of it being celebrated as a triumph it was seen as a burden one paid for moral rectitude. The bullet riddled Tattered Flag of decorum, decency, and bravery, coupled with no Popery, thus become the symbol of the Empire, saluted around badly tuned pianos world-wide. The sense that we were a bunch of amateur duffers out of their depth and still conquerors of the world, made us all the more fearful of what a frightful mess all those lesser mortals in our charge would make of it. In 1883 in the book The Expansion of England, John Seeley said: “We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.” Hurrah!