I am quite sure that if any old Thetfordian were permitted to return to his native town, he would find it, by contrast with other times, astonishingly dull. No badgering of Quakers, no cock-fighting, no scold-ducking, and no more bribery and corruption at Parliamentary elections—or at least it is not done in the old approved style, when at every inn you could call for what you liked, get riotously, hilariously, and finally dead, drunk, and have the cost of the debauch chalked up to the Duke of Grafton down at Euston, whose pocket-borough Thetford was. Alas! the borough representation went, a whole generation ago, and the town is merged into a mere county division. Dull, sir! Why, damme, yes. Not even an Assize and the spectacle of a hanging in these days, and the coaches and the post-chaises that used to awaken the echoes of the streets at night are all resolved into firewood. As for Thetford ever having been a fashionable resort, the world certainly has forgotten all about it, and when you hint it was so, looks incredulous. But the Spring Walk remains as a voucher for that short-lived fashionable patronage. Most delightful of all the roads and paths in and near Thetford, the Spring Walk owes its existence to that hope of erecting the town into an East Anglian rival of Tunbridge Wells, Bath, or Cheltenham, which was a feature of local history from the early part of the eighteenth century until the first quarter of the nineteenth had almost run its course. That was a time when every locality fortunate enough to possess waters impregnated with iron or sulphur to the requisite degree of nastiness strove desperately to attain the position of a Spa. Relics of that old-time eagerness to secure a share of the fortunes of Bath and other well-established resorts of this kind are plentiful all over England, and at most places where, owing to subterranean complications, with horrible chemical results, the water is not fit to drink, you shall now find the neglected and decaying Pump Houses and Spa Rooms then hastily built, with the hope of attracting the fashionable invalids and hypochondriacs of the day. It was in most cases a hope doomed to disappointment, for invalided fashion is gregarious, and then, even more than now, loved to herd together, to discuss symptoms and exchange scandal. Even had it been of other mood, there was not, a century ago, sufficient fashion to fully furnish a tithe of those forlorn hopes; so that many Spas of even supreme nastiness which should otherwise have secured success, failed to attract visitors in sufficient numbers to make the enterprise remunerative.

The chalybeate waters of Thetford were known so early as 1714, and were slightly tinged with iron and moderately tonic. Arising from springs on the north bank of the Upper Ouse, they were in local repute long before the necessity arose for every medical man to have his pet curative resort, and might have remained obscure had it not been for one Professor Accum, who, as an early nineteenth-century boomster, began to send patients to Thetford, long before that century was out of its teens.

Thetford rose to the occasion. In 1818 the Mayor at his own expense constructed a river-side path leading to the “Spring House,” and planted it with those plane-trees which have grown into the delightful avenue that now forms his best monument. In August of that year the spring was opened to the “free and unrestricted use of the poor,” and the sick, and large numbers of all classes flocked to it. Still larger numbers were attracted in 1819, when Professor Accum published a work on the virtues of the Thetford waters. Success seemed assured. The water was even bottled and sent, carefully packed, to all parts, as a panacea for dyspepsia; but it was when these springs failed to cure ophthalmia, rheumatism and broken bones, and to work other impossibilities, that failure came and fond hopes withered and decayed. The public expected miracles, but there has been nothing of a miraculous nature in East Anglia since the marvellous times of Edmund, King, Martyr, and Saint, when credulity, faith, and the imagination of the monks went hand in hand, and produced astounding results; and so the Thetford Spa presently ceased to be. Even those dyspeptic patients who derived, or thought they derived, benefit from the bottled waters fell away when they found they had long been humbugged by a number of practical humorists, who, combining a hateful cynicism with an abominable laziness, bottled off their healing draughts from other and handier, but quite ineffective, places.

Thetford at this day shows no prominent signs of its old Spa. The “Bath,” or “Spring,” house remains, but it is now a private residence, and few know or care to enquire, the origin of that beautiful plane-tree avenue leading beside the river to the “Nuns’ Bridges.”

Thetford in these times of ours is a very sober place indeed, has given up all attempts to attract the fashionables, and relies for its prosperity upon Burrell’s engineering works, where you can buy a beautiful traction-engine any day, and upon the Pulp Mills, which turn out unbreakable domestic articles in a wholesale manner calculated to make all interested in the manufacture of china and glass wish they had chosen some other trade.

There have been Thetfordians in the past to do wonderful things and make some little stir in their day. Let us begin with the smallest of them. In 1782, “Robert Bartley, of Thetford,” then in his sixty-third year, is recorded to have walked the eighty-one miles to London in twenty-four hours, and to have walked back the following day. He died, aged sixty-six, in 1785.

There were some excellent walkers at that time, for in 1813 the Thetford Volunteers performed a remarkable feat of endurance. They marched the fifty miles to Yarmouth in one day. Fortunately, no enemy was there, else those exhausted pedestrians might have fared ill.

But this is trifling with biography. Thetford’s most famous—or at least most notorious—son is Tom Paine