5 Famous Historic Figures With Norfolk Connections

When you buy a holiday home at one of our East Anglia holiday parks – like Waveney River Centre or Broadlands Park and Marina – you’ll be walking in the footsteps of some of history’s most remarkable figures. Norfolk’s landscape has shaped, inspired, and sheltered world-famous men and women, and you can still trace their stories today.

Here are just a few of the legends with Norfolk roots:

1. Admiral Lord Nelson

Naval mastermind Admiral Horatio Nelson, renowned for being the hero of great sea battles at The Nile, Cape St Vincent and, most famously Trafalgar, was born in Burnham Thorpe in 1758, on the North Norfolk coast.

Nelson learned to sail on the Norfolk Broads, and studied as a pupil at the Norwich School next to the Cathedral.

The village’s main pub, originally built in 1637 and known as The Plough until 1798, was renamed The Lord Nelson in honour of his victory at the Battle of the Nile. The pub is a true step back in time: no bar, real ales served directly from a tap room, stone floors underfoot, wooden settles (including one where Nelson himself once sat), and walls decorated with Nelson memorabilia – all carefully preserved to capture the atmosphere of his day.

You can also take a trip to the local church, where you’ll discover the tribute to Nelson, which is the same church where his father, Edmund Nelson, was the rector.

2. Albert Einstein

Cromer was the location where the world’s most famous scientist was taken into hiding in the 1930’s.

The physicist and mathematician Albert Einstein stayed in Roughton in Norfolk during the 1933, following his departure from Germany when Hitler came to power with the Nazi party. Einstein was Jewish, an intellectual and strongly opposed war and the Nazi regime, so he knew it was time to leave when Hitler took office. Einstein was a guest of Conservative MP, Oliver Locker-Lampson for three weeks, in a seaside hut on the heaths near to the MP’s summer home in Cromer.

While Albert was residing here, he would still get to work on his scientific theories. He had access to musical instruments, security, and a butler. He was visited at his hut at Roughton Heath by artist Jacob Epstein who sculpted a well-known bust of the scientist.

Weeks later, Einstein vacated Norfolk and set sail for America, where he saught asylum and remained for the rest of his life.

3. Pocahontas

Pocahontas, best known for her immortalisation in the Walt Disney animated movie, was a resident of Heacham in Norfolk.

Two years after being taken prisoner and married to plantation owner John Rolfe at the age of 16, Pocahontas resided in Heacham with Rolfe and their infant son Thomas. Visit the church of St. Mary at Heacham and you will find a memorial to Pocahontas, carved by a pupil of the French sculptor, François Auguste René Rodin.

Pocahontas is depicted on Heacham’s village sign. The sign and the memorial both feature her dressed in a stylish Jacobean trilby hat along with a great neck ruff.

4. Elizabeth Fry

Elizabeth Fry is known as a social reformer and was born in Norwich. Known most prevalently for her work in transforming conditions for women prisoners, she was memorialised with a portrait on the Bank of England £5 note in 2002.

Fry was born in 1780, in Gurney Court, off Magdalen Street in Norwich where a plaque commemorates her. A daughter of an influential Quaker family, Elizabeth went on to marry into the Fry family (of Fry’s chocolate). Later on in life she resided at Earlham Hall, which is now a part of the University of East Anglia.

5. Edith Cavell

Known as a “Nurse, Patriot and Martyr,” Edith Cavell was born in Swardeston, South Norfolk. During the First World War she courageously helped hundreds of Allied soldiers escape German-occupied Belgium.

For her bravery, she was executed by a German firing squad in 1915. Today, she is commemorated with a striking statue outside Norwich Cathedral, where she is also buried.