Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

THE HISTORY OF BUCKDEN 91 And what of the people who lived in Victorian Buckden? What led the Hunts’ Post of 1897 to make the following statement: ‘The village of Buckden has enjoyed for the best part of a century the reputation of containing the most quarrelsome, cantankerous and cliquey set of people in Huntingdonshire’? Twentieth-century Buckden The turn of the century saw the death of Queen Victoria and the accession of Edward VII. Buckden marked the coronation by creating the green at Hunts End. This had formerly been the site of a pond and of the village stocks and pound. The trees planted at that time – lime, chestnut and plane – grew to splendid maturity, although the chestnut was replaced (by an oak) early in the present century after being damaged in a gale. In the same decade, extensive repairs to the church were carried out. The village remained a quiet place, though a certain degree of prosperity was brought back with the growing popularity of the bicycle. The first time-trial from London to York had passed along the High Street in 1872. The hardy cyclist on his solid-wheeled machine completed the journey in 42 hours and 10 minutes with an overnight stop at Stamford. Now for a brief period there were crowds of cyclists taking part in the North Road Club’s road- racing events 1 . The First World War destroyed the tranquil scene. The ‘lost generation’ of young men who died in the conflict has become a cliché, and like every English village Buckden has its memorial. There are thirty-three names on it. It might seem invidious to single out one, but the letters V.C. after Captain John Leslie Green’s name invite investigation. Green, who was born in Buckden High Street, was twenty-five when war broke out in August 1914. He had not quite finished his medical training at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, but he was commissioned straight away in the Royal Army Medical Corps and was soon posted as Regimental Medical Officer with the 1/5 Sherwood Foresters. He was serving with this battalion on 1st January 1916 when he married a fellow doctor, Edith Mary Nesbitt Moss. He was killed exactly six months later, one of the 19,240 young men of the British Army who lost their lives during the first day’s fighting of the Battle of the Somme, 1st July 1916. For an account of his death I can do no better than to quote from the letter sent to his widow by the General Officer Commanding 139 Brigade: I must express my intense admiration for the manner in which he met his death. He was advancing in the rear of his battalion in their assault on the German trenches. On reaching the German wire he found an officer lying seriously wounded. He moved him, under fire, into a shell hole and there dressed the wound under continuous fire and bombing from the German trenches. He then carried him back towards our lines, still under fire, though wounded himself, a matter of about 200 yards. Just before reaching our advanced trench his brother officer was hit again. Your husband started to dress his wound when he was himself shot through the head. The General went on to express his sympathy and his opinion that the deed merited the Victoria Cross. It was awarded in October of the same year, Britain’s supreme award for gallantry. Buckden therefore suffered its share of personal loss. The use of The Towers as a military hospital brought the realities of warfare close to home as well. On a lighter note: we can be sure the school children made the most of an afternoon off in 1914 to pick blackberries for jam for the soldiers. Soon after the war, The Towers changed hands again. It was bought by Dr Robert Holmes Edleston who (again) found the old buildings ruined and neglected. He too had great plans for their restoration. In the event he carried out some excavations, renovated the gate house and rebuilt a small part of the north wing. His scheme for rebuilding the bishop’s old chapel only got as far as the crypt, now the sacristy of the chapel. Edleston was devoted to the memory of Napoleon III: he wrote his biography and hoped to make a museum. This explains the mystifying inscription to the Emperor on the north wing of the Gate House; he had no other connection with the village. Further developments in transport affected Buckden in the 1920s when motor buses began to run regular schedules. In 1921 Hinsby of St Neots was operating a service between Huntingdon and St. Neots on Thursdays and Saturdays, a year later it was four days a week, by September 1926 there was a daily service. At this time there were five buses each weekday and three on Sundays and daily commuting became a possibility. (The single fare was 6d. from Buckden to Huntingdon or St Neots.) Largely as a result of wartime demands the bus service has improved since the twenties, in contrast to many East Anglian villages’ experience, though it is also vastly more expensive, of course. There are other signs of Buckden’s growing participation in the wider county scene at this time. For example, in 1927 application was made by a Miss Looker to the Huntingdon County Nursing Association for assistance in finding a suitable district nurse: ‘She understood the County Association had a bicycle and 1 For more on the impact of cycling on Buckden see the entries on cycling and cycling clubs and cyclists in the A to Z Section