I decided that this Website should be created to tell the story of the Great Whyte and the construction of the Tunnels. These exist underneath the Great Whyte Ramsey in Cambridgeshire. However when they were built, Ramsey was in the old County of Huntingdonshire.

This Victorian brick-built marvel has never been documented in any detail since it was built-in 1852/4. These dates coincide with similar great engineering projects that were taking place in London. Such as the covering over of the Fleet river, which runs under Fleet St, and the London Underground tunnels all being built in brick. In fact if you look at photographs  of the Fleet Tunnel you will see similarities in construction and shape to the Ramsey Tunnels. This shows that the work was very much up to date for the time.

It is a great shame that all the hard and skilled work by the unknown Navvy workforce has been forgotten, simply because no records of who they were and where they lived in the Town were kept. All the information we have are in the minutes of the Vestry Meetings which only tell us the reasons why the Culverts (Tunnels) were built and the costs involved.

Clive Beeke 2019

This website was created by Clive Beeke (1945-2024). He was born in Huntingdon and moved to Ramsey when he married a local girl. Clive was an electrician. After contracting on large building sites for a number of years, he established his own electrical business that served the Ramsey area. He was always a keen reader, and history interested him greatly. Ramsey, with its lost Benedictine Abbey and Victorian river tunnels, supplied him with a huge amount to get excited about. And he did! He wanted to share his knowledge with others, and being keen on computers he chose to learn how to create websites. This is one of two websites he researched and built on Ramsey Abbey (2006), and the Ramsey tunnels (2019). In later life he was in great demand to give talks on both subjects to local groups, and he wrote a book on the tunnels. But the websites came first, and he was very proud of them. We are grateful for the support of Ramsey Rural Museum, which is now custodian of the websites so they can live on. The websites are a tribute to the husband and father we loved dearly.

Suzanne Beeke and Lynn Beeke

2025

Photo with kind permission of Sally Elding