Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

55 Other large-scale productions have been mounted at the Towers, including two productions of ‘Merrie England’, Edward German’s comic opera. The first was in May of the jubilee year 1935, and the second was held to mark the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953 (one of over 500 such productions in Britain that year). Papworth’s Corner, at the junction of George Lane and the High Street was named for Papworth’s Bakery. It had previously been known as Gale’s Corner (q.v.). parish boundaries: see Plate PB1.2. parish constables were originally conscripted annually from among the residents of the parish to apprehend rogues and vagabonds. Service was unpaid, so rarely popular: it could even reduce a small tradesman to bankruptcy. Richer parishioners usually employed someone to stand in for them. The system changed gradually through the 19thC, the general appointment of parish constables being rendered unnecessary by the introduction in 1856 (1857 in Huntingdonshire) of fully professional county constabularies. However, even after the Parish Constables Act 1872, vestries could still appoint paid constables under the chief constable of the county. Buckden availed itself of this right into the 1930s. A look at Cope, Thomas will reveal why a constable’s lot was not a happy one. parish councils as we know them today were introduced by the Local Government Act 1894. Buckden’s first such council came into being on 4 December of the same year, when about 150 electors met in the Girls School Room to scrutinise the twenty-five candidates for the thirteen places available. Voting was done by a show of hands; it was not until 1949 that councillors were elected by full secret ballots. Meetings were held quarterly, the first of them in the Girls School Room on 31 December 1894; it included the election of a Chairman (who remained in office for the next fifteen years). For more information, see Chapter 11 - ‘The Parish Council: a History of the Governance of Buckden Village’. parish workhouse [MapRef 43]. This was erected in 1766 by the churchwardens and overseers with the help of a gift of £80 from George Cornelius Swan[n] (c. 1716– 1788). According to the Gilbert Report of 1777, it was designed for sixteen inmates. The Buckden Inclosure Map shows it sited on the south side of Mill Road, just to the east of Hunts End, describing it as ‘0a.1r.7p. Tenements and orchard.’ Next door was a cottage and small garden which the workhouse overseers rented from Burberry’s Charity. As the property could only be occupied by ‘some honest man to be hoggard [i.e. a gardener or farmworker who usually, but not necessarily, looked after pigs]’, it was presumably used to provide the inmates with fresh produce and meat. It is important not to think of this workhouse as one of the oppressive institutions so vividly described by Charles Dickens. Those were a result of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. The Act was intended to modernise a failing system of poor relief that had developed piecemeal from Tudor times. Unfortunately the legislation was drafted in haste under pressure from the public and rushed through parliament without a proper debate. The outcome was a system widely criticised as ‘legalised cruelty in the treatment of the poor’. Particularly offensive to feminists was the ‘Bastardy Clause’ which freed fathers from any legal responsibility for their illegitimate children. This forced mothers unable to support themselves and their offspring to enter the workhouse. Thus from 1836 the paupers of Buckden were no longer to be looked after in their own village by their own neighbours. They should have been sent away to a new Union Workhouse in St Neots (a Union was a group of parishes – in this case, St Neots and 30 outlying villages – that contributed to the running costs of a central workhouse, and were entitled to send it their poor). However, problems with finding a suitable site meant that the old parish workhouses in St Neots, Eaton Socon and Eynesbury had to stand in for the Union house. The latter was finally built in Eaton Socon in 1841/2 at a cost of £8,145 for 338 inmates. In 1849, John Hale, a Buckden labourer, was one of four inmates convicted of absconding from the Union with workhouse clothes. In 1851, twelve inmates were Buckden-born; in 1861, only one; in 1871, two; in 1881, seven; in 1891, nine, and in 1901, six. Park Farm, Great North Road [MapRef 18] , was previously known as Rectory Farm . The present house and farmstead were built by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners in 1857, and were described six years later by a contributor to The British Farmer’s Magazine as standing ‘bare and bleak upon a hill’. The magazine’s correspondent did not mean this to be critical: he approved of the fact that the surrounding fields had been cleared of trees and scrub in order to allow better use to be made of modern farm machinery. For more of the history of this important agricultural holding, see Chapter 9 Park, Jim Crowther (1896-1988) farmed Low Farm, Mill Road for many years, starting in the 1930s. He was born (and is now buried) in Grove, Nottinghamshire. A bachelor, his recreations were hunting and cricket: he played for Buckden and was also treasurer of the Cranfield Challenge Cup League. Parris, Thomas. From the late 1890s to the end of Octo- ber 1923, Buckden would receive a regular Friday visit from Mr Parris, hair cutter of St Neots. On his retirement he was succeeded by Cecil Sims, who combined hairdress- ing with running the Spread Eagle Inn. patients, mental, passing through Buckden. In July 1841 the unhappy poet John Clare left Dr Allen’s private asylum in Essex, and set out to walk to his native village of Helpston near Peterborough. He passed through Buckden on the fourth day of his journey, having eaten little but chewing tobacco and grass. He succeeded in reaching Park Farm–the Foreman’s House 1995 Joy Freeman