46 THE FRUIT INDUSTRY 



the expedition which the nature of it demands, each 

 company requires to have at Wisbech, during the busy 

 season, a total staff (including clerks, draymen, etc.) of 

 something like 100 men. The growers naturally do not 

 deliver their consignments until the latest possible 

 minute, in order that the fruit shall be sent off as fresh 

 as may be ; and it is no unusual sight, especially in the 

 strawberry season, for the railway-yards to be blocked 

 up by 100 or more vehicles at a time, these being of 

 every imaginable variety, from a heavy dray to a sugar- 

 box on wheels, and all wanting to deliver fruit at the 

 same moment. 



' You should see us then,' said to me a Wisbech 

 railway-man who had shared in the fray and still 

 lived ; ' you w r ould wonder how we get through it.' 



But in the course of the next year or so there will be 

 still more for them to get through. The area under fruit 

 cultivation around Wisbech is constantly increasing. In 

 one locality an additional area of 25 acres was being pre- 

 pared in the autumn of 1905 for strawberry cultivation, 

 and smaller pieces of land were being taken up in all 

 directions wherever available. Wisbech, however, 

 represents only part of what is known as the ' Cam- 

 bridgeshire fruit-growing district.' Included therein, 

 on the south, is an area extending from near to Cam- 

 bridge through Histon (population 1,000), Oakington 

 (465), Long Stanton (340), and Swaversey (890), in the 

 direction of St. Ives, and thence through Haddenham 

 (1,686) and other places to Ely. The production of 

 fruit by the group of small villages within the triangle 

 thus formed taking Cambridge and Ely as the base 

 and St. Ives (Hunts) as the apex is not only extremely 

 substantial, but still constantly increasing ; so that in 

 the ' Cambridgeshire district,' as a whole, the fruit 

 traffic by goods trains on the Great Eastern Railway 



