Current Events & Trends | March 2024 | Nick Goring

How A Century-Old Travelogue Inspired a 21st Century Photobook

Nick Goring

One of many Second World War pill boxes built inland from the sea to defend the fens from a feared invasion

In early 2020 I found a dusty and tired looking book while helping clear out my father’s loft.

I opened it. On the first page, in faded ink, there was note from the author to his fiancé. It would lead to the uncovering a love story that reverberates 100 years later.

In 1924 Cecily Nash, aged 17, met Christopher Marlowe a 28-year-old aspiring author. They fell in love. He proposed. She accepted. The following year he published his first book, The Fen Country, and gave her a copy with the handwritten dedication "To my dearest fiancée with devoted love from The Author".

They’d met while he was touring East Anglia researching and writing the book. He’d not long graduated from Cambridge, returning to university after having served four years on the Western Front during the First World War.

The book recounts Marlowe’s bicycle tour through the fenlands of Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire and Norfolk. Bringing to life both the sights and sounds of a post war community he writes of encounters with, among many others, commercial travellers, engineering historians and local farmers. He weaves in trips to small village fairs, ancient churches and bustling seaside resorts.

His description of the town of March as having “dreadfully uncomfortable bars, wherein men sit and brood on grievances” was so evocative that the town council demanded the book’s withdraw from circulation. It led to The Daily Mail newspaper publishing March’s response to the book under the headline, Angry Town. “The council chiefly object to the inference in the book that the town is Bolshevik. As a matter of fact, of twelve members only two councillors are Labour men, though there were ten Labour candidates at the last election.”

Without conceding, the publisher agreed to leave out reference to the town in subsequent editions.

Also in the attic, alongside the book, were letters and poems written by Christopher to Cecily while they were courting. Reading them it was clear that Christopher’s love was more than infatuation. He was desperate to find the very best of the human condition after experiencing the very worst. Despite being broken by the war he slowly found solace through his fiancé’s love and time spent cycling across the interminably flat landscape of the Fens.

Nick Goring

Nick Goring's copy of The Fen Country

Nick Goring

With a farming landscape devoid of trees, birds are encouraged to nest in somewhat artificial homes

Nick Goring

Skegness pier in 2020, a once popular destination for fun seekers in the 1920s

Nick Goring

The view across Hunstanton where Marlowe lived at the time of publication of The Fen Country in 1925

I'm a documentary photographer and saw the opportunity to tell Marlowe’s story uniquely with pictures. Just before the covid pandemic hit the UK I set off, with the book as my map, to capture the landscape and sights that Marlowe had written about. Above all I wanted to depict Marlowe’s quest to find love to life while visualising the impact the war had had on him. The result is my new book, Forelsket.

But like all good stories there’s a twist.

In 1926 Cecily called off the engagement.

Shortly after, Marlowe wrote to her mother that despite having to accept Cecily’s decision he was so very grateful to have been loved by Cecily. Both would marry others in 1928 and a year later Cecily would have her only child.

That child was my mother.

In the same year, an abridged version of The Fen Country was published in the National Geographic Magazine alongside some of the earliest colour photographs of the United Kingdom.

The Fen Country has drifted into obscurity, a relic of the past, but my copy has defied time and reminds us of the role decisions in the past play in our own lives. It remains as moving in its dedication today as it was when first given to Cecily. A simple gesture from one lover to another, yet a poignant reflection of our own individual quests for 'forelsket', a Norwegian word used by the descendants of those who settled in the Fens a thousand years ago to describe euphoria.

Nick Goring’s book, Forelsket, is published by Another Place Press on April 12 and is available for pre-order. An exhibition of a selection of the photographs from the book will be exhibited at Village Books in Leeds from April 12.