Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

64 officer with the P&O shipping line, fought as an infantry officer in the First World War trenches, and ended up in the Balloon Section of the RAF, serving both in the front line and in England, where he was responsible for the balloon defences over London. In 1912 he married Louise, one of the Lintons of Stirtloe House. Henry M Roxby , an art teacher who became a poultry farmer. Rev. Wilfred Maude-Roxby , grandfather of the actor Roddy Maude-Roxby. Royal Observer Corps Monitoring Post. Those who have had business at the gravel pits north-east of the vil- lage will have seen two concrete structures beside the track partly obscured by scrub. One consists of a box on stilts with the remains of a ladder leading to its doorway. The other is a manhole over a 5m. deep shaft. The first is an ‘Orlit B’, being a pre-cast concrete hut used for aircraft observation by the ROC in their original role until 1965. The underground shelter was built sometime after 1956. There were 1,563 of these in Great Britain and North- ern Ireland in use until 1968 when the number manned was cut by half. Another reduction in numbers was made in the 1980s. Each post was equipped with instruments of various degrees of sophistication to record nuclear bomb explosions, the intention being to provide some informa- tion on the location and power of each detonation and the consequent radioactive fall-out. In the early 2000s the parish council, in association with Dr Mike Osborne of The Defence of Britain Project, sought unsuccessfully to have the post accepted as a Listed Building. Russell, Lord John (1792–1878) was Britain’s shortest and cleanest prime minister - less than 5' 5'' high and one of the first Englishmen to have a bath every day. His elder brother, and possibly Russell himself, spent time in Buckden being coached for university by the vicar, Edward Maltby. As a result, Maltby became Russell’s friend and political ally, helping him with his election as a Huntingdon MP in 1820 and later supporting his party (the Whigs) from the bishops’ bench in the House of Lords. In 1847, Russell offered to make him Archbishop of York; Maltby, old and weary, turned him down. Not Russell’s cleanliness, not his use of Tyzack’s Rhodora Shaving Paste nor the fact that he was the only one of her ministers she could (almost) look straight in the eye, cut any ice with Queen Victoria; she called him ‘a dreadful old man’. Buckden was also familiar to Lord John’s grandson, the second earl Russell, though for rather different reasons – see under police trap . S Scarborough, Mrs Jane ( fl. late 18thC/early 19thC) The years 1816 to 1818 were, to say the least, not kind to Mrs Scarborough, much-respected hostess of the George Inn. Her woes – her family’s woes, as it turned out – began in November 1816 when she was accused by the Post Office of having a year earlier stolen a letter containing twenty pounds in order to help pay off her son’s debts. In the eight months before she came up for trial, creditors put a lien on both the George and the Bell at Stilton, which was managed by her son from her first marriage. The two inns were links in one of the long-distance stagecoach lines. Other innkeepers in the line immediately decided to bypass the Scarboroughs’ premises, thus hugely reducing their value. In the spring of 1817, both she and her son had to attend bankruptcy hearings; the inns and other family properties had to be sold at a substantial loss and the Scarboroughs found themselves without home, business or reputation. Matters were made worse when legal bungling meant that her case was not tried at the Spring Assize, when she had all her witnesses in place, but was postponed to the 28 July, by when it proved impossible for her to present a convincing defence. The case had attracted widespread interest, and on 4 August the national newspapers reported that she had been found guilty and SENTENCED TO DEATH. The next day, however, the papers admitted that their informant had got it wrong: she had in fact been sentenced to only twelve months’ imprisonment in the county gaol. The mistake was understandable: if she had been an employee of the Post Office she could indeed have been hanged. She had constantly maintained her innocence of the charge. Visiting her in gaol, her lawyer, whose inadequate trial preparation was in large part responsible for her being found guilty, sought to console her by remarking that her case was not the hardest in the world, for he knew of two other innocent people in the gaol who were at that moment ‘suffering the punishment due only to the guilty’! She was not consoled. Although she was given as comfortable a stay as the gaol could offer, her unhappy year stretched on until her release An ROC Orlit B observation post