1868
The Orchard is planted. We still have a copy of the original planting plan.
Our History
May 1897
Mrs Stevenson, who lived in Orchard House and usually served tea and cakes in her front room or if it was a nice day in the garden of her home, was asked by a group of Cambridge students if she would serve them beneath the blossoming fruit trees of The Orchard. The students enjoyed their rural tea unaware that they had started a great Cambridge tradition, for soon The Orchard became a popular ‘up-river resort’ well-known to Varsity men. The Stevensons’ advertising card proudly announced that The Orchard was not connected to any public house.
1909
Rupert Brooke rents an upstairs bedroom and a downstairs sitting room in Orchard House from Mr and Mrs Stevenson. He has free use of the garden, and all his meals are provided for the sum of thirty shillings (£1.50) a week.
1910 to 1912
Rupert Brooke moves to The Old Vicarage, where he rents three rooms on the ground and first floor for the same price of thirty shillings from Mr and Mrs Henry Neeve.
Rupert Brooke was the centre of a remarkable group of friends who provided a constant stream of visitors to The Orchard, including Virginia Woolf (novelist), Bertrand Russell (philosopher), Ludwig Wittgenstein (philosopher), E.M. Forster (novelist), John Maynard Keynes (economist), and Augustus John (artist). So bohemian was their lifestyle that Virginia Woolf would later dub Brooke, and his back-to-nature friends, as “the Neo-Pagans.” When in London, some of this group were part of the highly influential Bloomsbury Set.
May 1912
Sitting at a table in the Café des Westens, Berlin, Brooke drafts one of his best-known poems: The Old Vicarage, Grantchester, with its famous final line, immortalising afternoon tea in The Orchard:
Stands the church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?
This last line refers to the bee-keeping hobby of Henry Neeve whose honey used to be served in The Orchard.
1914
After his return from the fall of Antwerp, and in the last months of 1914, Brooke wrote his most famous poem, The Soldier, with the immortal lines:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.
On his way to war, Brooke received a telegram telling him that the Dean had read excerpts from ‘The Soldier’ from the pulpit of St. Paul’s Cathedral on Easter Sunday.
1915
Brooke sailed as part of the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force to support the landings at Gallipoli and the campaign to capture Constantinople (Istanbul). On the way to battle, Brooke was bitten by a mosquito, and on 23rd April, he died from blood poisoning. He was buried by his comrades-in-arms in an olive grove on the island of Skyros.
1921
Xu Zhimo is introduced to King’s College, Cambridge and the Orchard Tea Garden by Goldsworthy (Goldie) Lowes Dickinson, a British political scientist and philosopher. In 1928, Xu Zhimo writes his poem Leaving Cambridge for the Last Time. It was to become his most famous work, as it is learnt by heart by almost all Chinese students.
1987
The Trustees of the Pemberton Settled Estate are granted planning permission for two houses to be built on The Orchard. Immediately, one hundred years of history and tradition were in danger of being lost.
1992
Robin Callan buys The Orchard and reopens the Tea Room for the summer season. At the time of its reopening, he wrote, “I do not seek to make a profit. I only seek not to make a loss.”
