Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

47 But Maltby was no time-server. In 1836, he became Bishop of Durham and played an important part in the establishment of that city’s university. As was customary at the time, he did not forget his family or friends: among the canons of his new cathedral were his youngest son; his nephew, and Professor John Edwards, the son of his predecessor as vicar Vicar of Buckden. In the mid-1850s, failing eyesight finally made it impossible for Maltby to continue his duties and at the age of eighty-five he offered to retire. However, no bishop had been permitted to retire for over three hundred years, and his request for a pension of £4,500 a year aroused widespread outrage, coming as it did at a time when the public had become aware that many of the lesser Anglican clergy were living on the edge of poverty (Maltby had already been fiercely criticised for drawing an income from Durham far above that which he was supposed to have, and for diverting – legally, but not exactly ethically – several thousand pounds in revenue from an ecclesiastical post to his son, Edward Harvey). In the end, the government reluctantly passed legislation that released Maltby and an elderly colleague into retirement – and granted Maltby his pension. He died in London in his ninetieth year and is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery. Margaret Mary outlived her husband by nearly ten years. Like his first wife and his eldest son, she is commemorated in Buckden church. Edward Harvey Maltby (1798-1867) was a Buckden man who made frequent appearances at the Huntingdonshire Assizes but not, as some of his fellow-villagers did, in the dock: he was a barrister. He was educated at Cambridge (where, like his father, he wrote prize-winning Greek and Latin epigrams), and was called to the bar in 1824, taking chambers in Paper Buildings, Inner Temple. He specialized in criminal law, practising on the Norfolk Circuit, where he usually appeared for the Crown. Huntingdon was in this circuit; among the cases in which he acted there, and which attracted national attention, were the 1827 prosecution of Joshua Slade for the murder of the octogenarian vicar Vicar of Little Stukeley, and the March 1831 trials held in the wake of the previous winter’s agricultural riots (see under Alderson and machine- breaking ). By 1840, however, he had become a London magistrate, presiding over Marlborough Street and several other courts. Newspaper reports reveal an unexpectedly likeable man, unimpressed by rank or status, ready to deflate the self-important, often sympathetic to the poorest defendants (whom he sometimes helped out of his own pocket) and given to telling disputants to go away and settle their quarrels out of court. He retired from the bench in 1847, suffering from a severe nervous indisposition caused by a ‘too anxious attention to his duties’. He had something of an annus horribilis in 1832. In January he lent £800 to a shopkeeper who later went bankrupt; in June he failed in his bid to be chosen as a parliamentary candidate for Huntingdon; and in July his chambers were broken into and ‘every portable and valuable article’ stolen except his books. The thieves were soon caught and despite their lawyer’s attempt to get them off on a technicality were sentenced to seven years’ transportation. The judge seemed depressed that he no longer had the death penalty at his disposal; Maltby was depressed by not having recovered more than one- twentieth of his property. In December, having after all been adopted as a parliamentary candidate, he came bottom of the poll. Maltby was well-off. A resident of the Albany, Piccadilly, London’s most exclusive bachelor address (later dismissed by Charles Dickens’s son as ‘a collection of queer houses, let as chambers’), he was something of a dandy, given to velvet-collared coats and green silk handkerchiefs. He never married. George Rivers Maltby (1795-1820), was born in Buckden, the eldest son of Edward and Mary Maltby. Unlike his brother Edward Harvey, he did not go to university but joined the army. In the summer of 1820, following his promotion to Captain in the Sixteenth Regiment of Foot, he was posted to Ceylon. Almost immediately on arrival, he was killed when his horse bolted and he was struck on the head by a tree branch; he is commemorated in St Mary’s church. Manor House, Church Street [MapRef 11]. The sig- nificance of the manor house is discussed in Chapter 3: Buckden’s Buildings . Among its more interesting occupants over the years have been: Major-General George Cleland Rowcroft (1831-1922), who was a member of a distinguished military family. Born in Delhi, he spent his career in India; this included service during the Indian Mutiny and on the North West Frontier. In 1889 he came to England, having been placed on the army’s Unemployed Supernumerary List.* He moved to Buckden sometime between 1898 and 1901 and left at Michaelmas 1919, when the manor was sold. * A depressing title if ever there was one. By the time he settled in Buckden, he listed his recreations rather wistfully as ‘ formerly, shooting, polo, etc.’ In its obituary, The Times pointed out that his death had severed one of the last remaining links with the famous – or infamous – East India Company, for which he had briefly worked as a very young man. Surgeon-Commander Arthur Sydney Gordon Bell RN MRCS LRCP (born 1869 into a naval family) probably succeeded General Rowcroft; he was certainly living in the Manor House by 1924, the year in which he celebrated his silver wedding anniversary. Remembered by at least one resident as ‘a nice man, a gentleman’, he had a strong sense of public duty, serving as a parish councillor, president of the horticultural society (1935), Deputy Lieutenant of Huntingdonshire (1936), and Hon. Sec. of the Association of Air Raid Precaution Officers (from 1938). Major Teddy Chubb MC (1917-2007) was educated at Oundle, and began his working life with Vickers, Barrow. In 1936 he joined the army, and was commissioned in the Royal Artillery 1940, winning the Military Cross in Italy. He was promoted Major in 1952, moved to Buckden in the mid-1960s and retired in 1971. A keen gardener, he became President of the Buckden Gardeners’ Association, but was