Cranbrook's Namesake

THIS IS ABOUT CRANBROOK IN ENGLAND.- Interesting Article On Our Cranbrook’s Namesake. – Ancient Wool Town. – History of Old Country Place Goes Back Over Four Hundred Years, and Once Was Prosperous.

            Through the thoughtfulness and courtesy of A.R. Barrow, a resident of Kitchener, the Courier is able to pass on to its readers a little history on Cranbrook, in England, the place for which Cranbrook, British Columbia, was named.  The late Col. James Baker, founder of our Cranbrook, came from the Cranbrook in the Old Country, situated about forty miles from London, and named the new townsite here after the place in his homeland with which several generations of the Baker family had been associated.  The following is taken from the London Observer:

            Cranbrook must take its place with those other ancient towns in England whose greatness left them so long ago that not the smallest remembrance of past achievement or prosperous days lingers on to spoil the full flavour of their picturesque and highly sentimentalized old age.  Theirs is not the sharp tragedy of so many of our fine country towns which less than a hundred years ago were proud and independent capitals in their own territories and which now have become little more than so many points on the map for the opening of the ubiquitous “multiple store.”

            Cranbrook’s tragedy, like Lavenham’s, in Suffolk and Worstead’s in Norfolk, happened so much longer ago that there is nothing to harrow us about it today.  In Edward III’s reign there was no place in all prosperous Kent more commercially important than Cranbrook, the capital of the Weald and the center of the wool trade, and those happy days were to last until long after Queen Elizabeth came to endow the Grammar School there, and they laid down a carpet, made of Cranbrook wool, right through the town for her to walk on.

            In 1510 one of the Cloth Halls of the Kentish guilds of weavers was Goddard’s Green, and this fine house, with its clustered chimneys, black and white half-timbering, and tiled gables, is now to be sold by Messrs. Knight, Frank & Rutley, in conjunction with Messrs. Winch and Sons.