Page:EB1911 - Volume 07.djvu/386

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CRANBROOK—CRANE, WALTER

winter to protect them from frost, and occasionally at other seasons to destroy insect pests; but the use of spring water should be avoided. The flavour of the fruit is found to be improved by growing the plants in a soil enriched with well-rotted dung, and by supplying them with less moisture than they obtain in their natural habitats. Propagation is effected by means of cuttings, of which the wood should be wiry in texture, and the leaves of a greenish-brown colour. In America, where, in the vicinity of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, the cultivation of the cranberry commenced early in the last century, wide tracts of waste land have been utilized for that purpose—low, easily flooded, marshy ground, worth originally not more than from $10 to $20 an acre, having been made to yield annually $200 or $300 worth of the fruit per acre. The yield varies between 50 and 400 bushels an acre, but 100 bushels, or about 35 barrels, is estimated to be the average production when the plants have begun to bear well. The approximate cranberry crop of the United States from 1890 to 1899 varied from 410,000 to 1,000,000 bushels.

Cranberries should be gathered when ripe and dry, otherwise they do not keep well. The darkest-coloured berries are those which are most esteemed. The picking of the fruit begins in New Jersey in October, at the close of the blackberry and whortleberry season, and often lasts until the coming in of cold weather. From 3 to 4 bushels a day may be collected by good workers. New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Baltimore are the leading American markets for cranberries, whence they are exported to the West Indies, England and France in great quantities. England was formerly supplied by Lincolnshire and Norfolk with abundance of the common cranberry, which it now largely imports from Sweden and Russia. The fruit is much used for pies and tarts, and also for making an acid summer beverage. The cowberry, or red whortleberry, Vaccinium Vitis-Idaea, is sometimes sold for the cranberry. The Tasmanian and the Australian cranberries are the produce respectively of Astroloma humifusum and Lissanthe sapida, plants of the order Epacridaceae.

For literature of the subject see the Proceedings of the American Cranberry Growers’ Association (Trenton, N. J.). There is a good article on the American cranberry in L. H. Bailey’s Cyclopaedia of American Horticulture (1900).


CRANBROOK, GATHORNE GATHORNE-HARDY, 1st Earl of (1814–1906), British statesman, was born at Bradford on the 1st of October 1814, the son of John Hardy, and belonged to a Yorkshire family. Entering upon active political life in 1847, eleven years after his graduation at Oxford, and nine years after his call to the bar, he offered himself as a candidate for Bradford, but was unsuccessful. In 1856 he was returned for Leominster, and in 1865 defeated Mr Gladstone at Oxford. In 1866 he became president of the Poor Law Board in Lord Derby’s new administration. When in 1867 Mr Walpole resigned, from dissatisfaction with Mr Disraeli’s Reform Bill, Mr Hardy succeeded him at the home office. In 1874 he was secretary for war; and when in 1878 Lord Salisbury took the foreign office upon the resignation of Lord Derby, Viscount Cranbrook (as Mr Hardy became within a month afterwards) succeeded him at the India office. At the same time he had assumed the additional family surname of Gathorne, which had been that of his mother. In Lord Salisbury’s administrations of 1885 and 1886 Lord Cranbrook was president of the council, and upon his retirement from public life concurrently with the resignation of the cabinet in 1892 he was raised to an earldom. He died on the 30th of October 1906, being succeeded as 2nd earl by his son John Stewart Gathorne-Hardy, previously known as Lord Medway (b. 1839), who from 1868 to 1880 sat in parliament as a conservative for Rye, and from 1884 to 1892 for a division of Kent.

See Gathorne Hardy, 1st earl of Cranbrook, a memoir with extracts from his correspondence, edited by the Hon. A. E. Gathorne-Hardy (1910).


CRANBROOK, a market-town in the southern parliamentary division of Kent, England, 45 m. S.E. of London on a branch of the South-Eastern & Chatham railway from Paddock Wood. Pop. (1901) 3949. It lies on the Crane brook, a feeder of the river Beult, in a pleasant district, hilly and well wooded. It has a fine church (mainly Perpendicular) dedicated to St Dunstan, which is remarkable for a baptistery, built in the early part of the 18th century, and some ancient stained glass. As the centre of the agricultural district of the Kentish Weald, it carries on an extensive trade in malt, hops and general goods; but its present condition is in striking contrast to the activity it displayed from the 14th to the 17th century, when it was one of the principal seats of the broadcloth manufacture. Remains of some of the old factories still exist. The town has a grammar school of Elizabethan foundation, which now ranks as one of the smaller public schools. In the neighbourhood are the ruins of the old mansion house of Sissinghurst, or Saxenhurst, built in the time of Edward VI.


CRANDALL, PRUDENCE (1803–1889), American school-teacher, was born, of Quaker parentage, at Hopkinton, Rhode Island, on the 3rd of September 1803. She was educated in the Friends’ school at Providence, R. I., taught school at Plainfield, Conn., and in 1831 established a private academy for girls at Canterbury, Windham county, Connecticut. By admitting a negro girl she lost her white patrons, and in March 1833, on the advice of William Lloyd Garrison and Samuel J. May (1797–1871), she opened a school for “young ladies and little misses of colour.” For this she was bitterly denounced, not only in Canterbury but throughout Connecticut, and was persecuted, boycotted and socially ostracized; measures were taken in the Canterbury town-meeting to break up the school, and finally in May 1833 the state legislature passed the notorious Connecticut “Black Law,” prohibiting the establishment of schools for non-resident negroes in any city or township of Connecticut, without the consent of the local authorities. Miss Crandall, refusing to submit, was arrested, tried and convicted in the lower courts, whose verdict, however, was reversed on a technicality by the court of appeals in July 1834. Thereupon the local opposition to her redoubled, and she was finally in September 1834 forced to close her school. Soon afterward she married the Rev. Calvin Philleo. She died at Elk Falls, Kansas, on the 28th of January 1889. The Connecticut Black Law was repealed in 1838. Miss Crandall’s attempt to educate negro girls at Canterbury attracted the attention of the whole country; and the episode is of considerable significance as showing the attitude of a New England community toward the negro at that time.

See J. C. Kimball’s Connecticut Canterbury Tale (Hartford, Conn., 1889), and Samuel J. May’s Recollections of Our Anti-Slavery Conflict (Boston, 1869).


CRANE, STEPHEN (1870–1900), American writer, was born at Newark, New Jersey, on the 1st of November 1870, and was educated at Lafayette College and Syracuse University. His first story, Maggie, a Girl of the Streets, was published in 1891, but his greatest success was made with The Red Badge of Courage (1896), a brilliant and highly realistic, though of course imaginary, description of the experiences of a private in the Civil War. He was also the author of various other stories, and acted as a war correspondent in the Greco-Turkish War (1897) and the Spanish American War (1898). His health became seriously affected in Cuba, and on his return he settled down in England. He died at Badenweiler, Germany, on the 5th of June 1900.


CRANE, WALTER (1845–  ), English artist, second son of Thomas Crane, portrait painter and miniaturist, was born in Liverpool on the 15th of August 1845. The family soon removed to Torquay, where the boy gained his early artistic impressions, and, when he was twelve years old, to London. He early came under the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites, and was a diligent student of Ruskin. A set of coloured page designs to illustrate Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott” gained the approval of William James Linton, the wood-engraver, to whom Walter Crane was apprenticed for three years (1859–1862). As a wood-engraver he had abundant opportunity for the minute study of the contemporary artists whose work passed through his hands, of Rossetti, Millais, Tenniel and F. Sandys, and of the masters of the Italian Renaissance, but he was more influenced by the Elgin marbles in the British Museum. A further and important element in the development of his talent, was the study of