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from, Cambridge University.
    The whole entry has an air of failure and despair about it. He may have been drunk or even under the influence of drugs when he filled in the census form, or suffering a mental crisis associated with his disordered personality, but what was he doing there? Ten years before, in the census of 1861 when living in Warwick, he had confidently declared himself to be a newspaper reporter and, moreover, the head of the household. It looks as if Francis had suffered some sort of breakdown. The attempted move from provincial reporter on the
Oxford Journal
to journalist in the national press seems to have ended in disaster. Within a few weeks he was back living once again with his parents.
    At this time the Craigs were living in modest comfort in New Square, Cambridge. They had a resident, 12-year-old housemaid and one wonders how employing such a child squared with E.T.’s socialist conscience. E.T. was in an inventive phase at this stage of his life. In the Cambridge Working Classes’ Industrial Exhibition of 1873 he won the silver medal for the greatest number of new inventions on display, 27 in all, none of which he troubled to patent although several of them were later plagiarised by other people who made considerable amounts of money from them, sending E.T. into periodic frenzies of complaint and litigation.
    During this period he earned a large part of his living as a ventilation engineer, environmental health being for him a lifetime obsession and inextricably linked to the welfare of the working man and his socialist instincts. His restless urge to travel took him all over Britain lecturing on sanitation and ventilation.He became a fierce opponent of the move to install mains drainage and sewage systems, attacking Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the pioneering sanitary engineer, in print and in public speeches on every possible occasion. For E.T. human sewage was much too valuable a commodity to dump at sea and instead the ‘guano’, as he called it, should be collected and used to fertilise the land. ‘Dirt’, as he wrote in a letter to the
Oxford Journal
, ‘is simply manure in the wrong place.’ It was yet another example of E.T.’s misguided and ultimately doomed obsessions, although, as his ideas have recently been adopted by the Green movement, maybe he was just ahead of his time.
    The impression that Francis suffered a psychological breakdown in 1871 is reinforced by the fact that when he returned to live under the parental roof he did not resume work as a reporter for some considerable time. Perhaps the failed attempt at breaking in to mainstream journalism had sapped his confidence to such an extent that he could no longer face the prospect of spending days in the company of his fellow men, jostling with other reporters as they competed for the best copy in the local courts. He may initially have spent some time living quietly with his parents, perhaps receiving discreet treatment from a local doctor, for there is no record of his ever having entered any of the county lunatic asylums, either in Cambridge or Middlesex.
    Eventually – and no doubt once again through the influence of his father – he was commissioned by William Spalding, a local printer, to undertake a detailed survey of Cambridge and the surrounding countryside. It was to take Francis nearly four years and must have involved a huge amount of pacing the lanes and byways of the medieval city, measuring and surveying the streetscape. Until the end of his life he retained a passion for maps and topography and, apparently, an almost photographic memory for streets and the people who inhabited them.
    The map was a success and became the forerunner of similar city plans such as the famous A–Z gazetteer of London. Other than newspapers it is the sole document that the British Library holds that bears his name in contrast to the 17 or so that are listed for his father. ‘
Spalding’s Plan of Cambridge and its Environs Surveyed