With an
Old English name of
Litelport, the village was worth 17,000
eels a year to the
Abbots of Ely in 1086. The legendary founder of Littleport was
King Canute. A fisherman gave the king shelter one night, after drunken monks had denied him hospitality. After punishing the monks, he made his host the mayor of a newly founded village. The Littleport Riots of 1816 broke out after war veterans from the
Battle of Waterloo returned home, only to find they could get no work and grain prices had gone up. They took to the streets and smashed shops and buildings until troops were brought in. St George's church registers were destroyed in the riots. The remaining registers start from 1754 (marriages), 1756 (burials), and 1783 (baptisms). Some original documents to do with the riots are held in
Cambridgeshire Archives and Local Studies at the County Record Office, Cambridge. In 1944,
the Boat Race was held on the River Great Ouse between Littleport and
Queen Adelaide, Cambridgeshire.
The Boat Race 2021 was also held here because of the COVID-19 pandemic and safety issues with Hammersmith Bridge on the Thames. In 2003, a
Harley-Davidson statue was unveiled in Littleport to mark the centenary of the motorcycle company. William Harley, father of the company's co-founder
William Sylvester Harley, was born in Victoria Street, Littleport, in 1835 and emigrated to the United States in 1859.
World War II On 16 December 1944, British double agent
Eddie Chapman was flown on a mission to Britain by the Germans in a fast and manoeuvrable small fighter plane, that took off from a forward Luftwaffe fighter station on the Dutch coast. The purpose of the mission was to monitor the accuracy of
V-1 flying bombs and
V-2 rockets falling on London and then to report back their effect on the morale of the population in order to improve the performance and devastation of the attacks. After following the bombs to London, Chapman's fighter rerouted to East Anglia to enable him to bail out over flat ground. The fighter had been converted for parachuting by cutting a small trap door in the floor. The low-flying fighter was picked up by a British night-fighter and attacked over the dropping zone. Chapman scrambled head first through the trap door, with his parachute initially getting stuck. Whilst floating down to the ground he witnessed the British night-fighter re-engage the German fighter, which burst into flames and exploded in a fireball as it hit the ground killing the remaining crew. Chapman landed near Apes Hall, Littleport, in the middle of the night. He woke the farm foreman George Convine by banging on the hall door. To avoid difficult questions, Corvine was told by Chapman that he was a crashed British airman and that he needed him to call the police. ==Governance==