Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

56 home only to find himself unwanted and formally declared insane. He spent the remaining twenty-three years of his life in Northampton’s General Lunatic Asylum (later re- named the General Lunatic Asylum for the Middle and Upper Classes in order to exclude the likes of Clare). Coin- cidentally, Buckden’s earliest known resident doctor, Henry Waller (q.v.), also died there. (In another coinci- dence, John Clare had, in his better days, received a visit from the Rev. Chauncey Hare Townshend, a clergyman, poet and mesmerist, whose cousin, Major Chauncey Curtois, lived in Buckden.) Clare’s passing acquaintance with the village is commemorated in ‘Buckden, the Bishop’s Palace’, a lithograph by the artist Rigby Graham (See plate PB2.6.2) On Saturday, 14 March 1931, Police Sergeant Sydney Staughton of Buckden found himself giving lunch and tea to a passing stranger who had very little money and wanted to get to London. Early on Sunday morning Sgt Staughton flagged down a passing motorist and asked him to give the man a lift. The driver, Mr Charles Clapham of ‘Clapham and Dwyer, the broadcast comedians’, agreed to take him as far as Golders Green, saying later that the policeman ‘assured me the gentleman was quite all right’. The gentleman turned out to be a mental patient who had jumped out of the window of the train taking him to an asylum in Salisbury. He was recaptured in London. See also Pilgrim, Ernest. Peach, Maurice was a Buckden writer and owner of the well-regarded small press, Fensedge, whose publications include Buckden: a concise survey of places of historic interest in the village (1951, 1957); The Palace of Buckden: A Concise Survey (1957); Vignettes (1959), and the magazine Twicer’s Tatters. Peacock family. Charles Thomas Peacock (1884-1974) was one of eight children born to painter and glazier Thomas Peacock and his wife Fanny [Baker]. The two oldest children, sisters Florence and Margaret, were born in Eaton Socon (as their mother had been); Charles and his five younger brothers and sisters were all born in York Yard. When his father died in 1896, aged only 39, Charles was thrown into work at the early age of 13. He went as a labourer for Hardwick farmer William Cranfield (as, later, did his younger brother William). In 1908, he married Sarah Ann Bolton and in time became the father of six children (Jack, George, Geoff, Edward, Kathleen and Louie). Home was a two-bedroom cottage on the Great North Road. Charles served in the First World War, was wounded and after discharge returned to Buckden to work for Mr J. Mailer at Park Farm. In 1926 the family moved to one of the first council houses in the village, at Monks Cottages. Charles was a keen gardener and worked at Diddington Hall, winning prizes with his redcurrants. He would also mend shoes in a shed at the bottom of the garden. During the Second World War, Charles and Sarah shared their home with two of the boys evacuated from Tollington School (q.v.), Alan Loughlin and Ken O’Dell, who still visit Buckden in passing. While the sons of the family were away on active service, Charles and daughters Kath and Louie joined the local Fire Service. Until he died aged 90, Charles lived in Church Street with his daughter Kath, filling the last of his days with a round of village shows, fetes and outings to the sea. Kath, who died in 2004, also lived all her life in Buckden. When she left the village school her first job was as chamber maid at the George Hotel. During the Second World War she worked for the Rev. Atkinson and began courting Harold Milner (son of the local grocer). They married in 1942 and initially lived with Kath’s parents. Harold worked away during the war in the power stations in Wales. In 1949 they moved into a brand-new council house, No. 1 Lincoln Close. After eight years and two children they moved to Church Street. peasers, the Biggleswade. Marcus James King (1919 -2000) lived in Biggleswade. His father died when he was only two, leaving his mother to bring up their three children. To supplement her income there was the peasing (pea-picking) season during June and July. The peasers’ day began as early as 5 a.m., with the clatter of buckets as they set off for work. Often this meant boarding a lorry for a trip to fields as far away as Buckden. Pea-picking was one of the field tasks undertaken by the London schoolboys evacuated to Buckden during the early years of the Second World War. One of them, David Rhodes, remembers being amazed at the speed with which local women picked their way up and down the long rows. Pelham, the Hon. George (1766–1827) was an aristocratic, ambitious – and in the eyes of many, frankly greedy – cleric who agreed to become Bishop of Lincoln in 1820 only after ‘[going] sulkily down to look at Bugden…to see whether he will condescend to take it’ (he had hoped for somewhere more influential, like Winchester, the country’s second richest diocese). He was a friend of the Prince Regent and something of a dandy. He attracted criticism for his habit of augmenting his income by collecting minor but lucrative church appointments and hanging on to them, but he was hardly unique in that. He avoided Buckden in death as well as in life: he was buried on his family estate in Sussex after catching a cold at a royal funeral and dying of pleurisy. Penny Lane. The Parish Council fought a long battle to obtain the slip-road on the southbound A1 between Bramp- ton Road and Silver Street. When it was completed in 1999, it was suggested to the relevant authority that it be named Penny Lane as a light-hearted (but deserved) tribute to Jim Penny, a councillor for whom road safety was a passionate concern. The response, sadly, was ‘We do not name slip- roads; it would be confusing.’ Pepys, Samuel: see George, the and Stan[c]kes, Will. Perry Road , which runs westward from the A 1 Buckden roundabout, was originally known as New Road, but has been known as Perry Road since at least as early as the 1861 census. Known, that is, to everyone except the Ministry of Transport, to whom it was still officially New Road as late as the 1950s. Pigeon Shoot Committee. This early 20thC body was responsible for arranging the shooting handicap held at Coneygarths each New Year (weather permitting). This meant ensuring that a stock of 150 or so captured wild birds had been built up for release from traps on the day. In the early 1900s the shoots were still receiving a warm write up in the local papers, although such events were already widely regarded nationally as an ‘ignoble sport’. They continued to be popular for several years more, despite attempts by MPs and the RSPCA to have them banned and the scorn of heavyweight papers such as The Times (‘What sort of ‘sportsmen’ are they that who need two barrels to bring down a bird released at 30 paces…’).