Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

THE HISTORY OF BUCKDEN 90 The new railway system contributed to Buckden’s decline, but it also, of course, served it to some extent. Two miles east of the village, in fact just outside the parish boundary, was a station on the Great Northern main line to Kings Cross called Offord and Buckden Station. A mile north of the village was Buckden Station proper on the Kettering to Cambridge branch of the Midlands Railway, which opened in 1866. This was never a busy line: for most of its existence there were three trains each weekday in each direction. Although the lack of pressure enabled the station’s gardens to flourish - Buckden several times won the Best Kept Station Competition in the 1950s - the enterprise was uneconomic. Neither of Buckden’s stations provided useful commuting services and both were closed down by 1962 (see Chapter 19 for more on these two stations). Although Buckden became a much quieter village in Victorian times, its prosperity did not decline overnight and some fine buildings were added. The almshouses in Church Street were built in a mellow version of Tudor style in 1840 with money bequeathed in 1834 by James South, who was not only a generous benefactor but a man of unusual modesty. His epitaph in the Church reads: ‘Sacred to the memory of AN OFFICER, who sincerely regarded this his native village and caused an asylum to be erected, to protect Age, and to reward Industry. Reader, ask not his name. If thou approve a deed which succours the helpless, go and emulate it.’ The present Methodist chapel is also a Victorian building. The sect had come quite early to the village; its founder John Wesley actually preached here in 1781 and 1784. A small chapel was built in 1838-9 on a site next to the Lion in Church Street but a larger building was soon needed and the present site in Church Street was purchased in 1876. The foundation stone was laid in July of that year and the chapel first used for worship in November: a credit to the age of industry! The next door Sunday School room and vestries were added in 1911. The village school – now vastly extended – was opened in 1871. The Education Act of 1870 had made provision of schooling mandatory, but in fact Buckden seems to have been well served for education even before that (see Chapter 13). That their wishes were carried out is shown by records of 1805 detailing the cost of repairs to the schoolhouse. In the 1850s Buckden boasted a school for boys, a National Society School for Girls (housed for a time in the Dining Room of the Palace), and a private ‘dame school’ also for girls. The 1870 Act brought its own problems. Schooling was not free to all; a payment of 4d. a week is mentioned although some free places were also available. Employers - mainly farmers - were reluctant to allow the children of their workers to receive education and parents were afraid to defy their employers and risk their jobs. Children were often marked ‘absent in the fields’ and, for example, on one day in April 1871 only one boy attended the first class. On another occasion thirty boys under eleven years of age were employed by the School Managers themselves at field work during school time. Not surprisingly Her Majesty’s Inspector of Schools in that year was not pleased and wrote, ‘The discipline of this school must be improved.’ A more humble building which provided a vital service for the village, and occasionally some incidental interest and amusement, was the new windmill built near the Great North Road in the southwest angle of Perry Road. (It was later converted into a cottage.) It was worked as a windmill until about 1888, and then an auxiliary steam engine was used for a few years. A man was killed in the 1850s when he tried to go out of a door across which the sails were working. In the 1880s a man asked the miller if he could watch Huntingdon Races (then held at Portholme) from the mill. He was strapped to a sail upside down and then raised to the top from where he declared he had an excellent view and could distinguish the jockeys’ colours four miles away! The watermill on the Ouse has a much longer history, being that mentioned in the Domesday survey of 1086. Through the middle ages it was leased for a rent of ten shillings to the monks of Elstow, then after the Reformation it passed into secular ownership. In the nineteenth century it was bought by the Bowyer family who completely rebuilt it in the 1850s and converted it to steam power in the 1890s. At the beginning of the twentieth century it was modernized again and the Huntingdonshire flour it supplied to London bakers was well known for its superior quality. Today it is converted to luxury apartments. During the nineteenth century also the Palace underwent the changes which turned it into ‘The Towers’. Already in the eighteenth century Bishop Pretyman-Tomline had filled in most of the moat and provided a library. In 1837 Huntingdonshire was transferred to the diocese of Ely and in April 1838 by an Order in Council the Bishop was allowed to demolish a large part of the buildings. What remained, with the grounds, were transferred to the vicar, and it was at this time that the Palace housed a school. Finally in 1870 it passed into secular ownership. The new owner, Mr James Marshall (of Marshall and Snelgrove), found that the existing buildings were beyond repair. He filled in the remaining section of the moat and built a new house in the grounds (see Chapter 3).