Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

65 in August 1818. On the day she was freed, a sympathetic Stamford newspaper proprietor, John Drakard, published an eighty-page pamphlet in which she described her ordeal and pleaded for the justice that had been denied her ‘at the hands of a suspicious magistrate, an inattentive advocate, and an ignorant jury’. It is a startlingly direct and vigorous narrative, clearly not all her own work, but not the less effective for that. Its publication was noted by some national journals, and reviewed by at least one of them. The reviewer agreed that her case had been badly conducted, but reluctantly admitted that some of the evidence against her could not easily be explained away. Her troubles clearly aroused public sympathy; but whether her pamphlet had any practical outcome remains unknown; it seems unlikely. Nonetheless, as the years went by, the possibility that she was innocent became a certainty in village memory – to such an extent that in the 1930s, a respected local historian could firmly assert that Mrs Scarborough's conviction was one of the worst miscarriages of justice in English history. The ‘suspicious magistrate’, incidentally, was Dr Maltby, the Vicar of Buckden. sewerage and sewage disposal. Before the laying of sewers and the construction of a sewage works, sewage or ‘night soil’ was either discharged into cesspits or septic tanks or into buckets. The bucket was in the little house across the yard known to some as the ‘bucket and splash’. One resident claimed that his mother used to use her bicycle to get from the house to the end of the yard. Some yard! An early reference to such arrangements comes in a terrier (inventory) of Buckden vicarage taken in 1709, which refers to ‘a little necessary house covered with thatch and walled with rodds and clay’ standing at the bottom of an orchard that ran alongside Lucks Lane. Another fraught journey for those in need! Night-soil was so-called because the excrements from the buckets were collected usually at night and taken away to be spread on the fields as fertiliser. The vehicle used for the purpose was garaged in what is now the Scout Hut in Lucks Lane, along with the refuse lorry. Bad behaviour or mis-applied high spirits are not new. One resident recalls that one morning a night-soil bucket was found upside down on a street light in the High Street; no other details. Senior villagers were not amused. In January 1898, the Parish Council was asked to deal with a letter of complaint sent to (and rapidly passed on by) the District Council. The writer drew attention to the nuisance caused by drains in the village, particularly near the Wesleyan Chapel. (As the pump outside the chapel was used to wash out the night-soil cart, this probably came as no surprise.) The Parish Council decided that anything less than a complete reconstruction of the drainage system would be a waste of money, but that the problems were not so bad as to justify so radical an overhaul. It therefore instructed its District Councillors to draw the Sanitary Inspector’s attention to certain individual drains. The laying of sewers is recalled as starting in 1939 but the full scheme proper was begun in the 1950s. We should be grateful that this work was done before the huge increase in motor car numbers. Any narrow street such as Silver Street would have been passable only by nimble pedestrians for several weeks at a time. The alternative route would have been via the High Street. Something as apparently simple as drain-laying has its dangers. A workman was killed by a fall of soil in a trench in Lucks Lane. The sewage is treated at the works off Leadens Lane. Effluent was discharged into a ditch running due eastwards across the field to Diddington Brook. The destination is still the brook but the ditch has been diverted along the edge of ‘Waterworks Road’ to allow more gravel to be won and to create one field from the two before. See also night-soil collection. Shelley. Not the poet, but an unfortunate tax-collector wrongfully imprisoned in Buckden in 1636 by the bishop of Lincoln, who objected to his attempt to assess Buckden for ship-money (a deeply resented tax). A local magistrate promptly released Shelley on bail. Shelton, Henry (sometimes Harry) Robert (b. 1860) was a Bedfordshire-born cycle dealer who used The Hoo, Church Street, as his home and place of business at the beginning of the 20thC. His landlords were the Green family, who rented out the house while farming the land (Hoo Farm) that went with it. There was clearly money to be made in the cycle business: it is a substantial house. Sherwood House [MapRef 31] is a late 18thC/early 19thC Grade II listed residence standing on the corner of the High Street and York Yard (q.v.). Census returns and directories show it was often occupied by the families of professional men such as horse and cattle doctor Edward Cope (1881, 1891), whose widow, Frances, remained there until her death in 1923; Dr R. A. R. Wallace (1920s); Dr Draper, head of Tollington School (1940s) and some of his pupils; and possibly surgeon Henry Waller (1841, 1851). For a time in the late 1930s it was the Sherwood Private Hotel. It may also have operated as a refined lodging- house earlier in its history: doctors Woolley and Meaney both stayed there when undertaking locum duties. In September 1923 this ‘old-fashioned country residence’ (the local auctioneers’ standard description of virtually every sizeable pre-Victorian house in the village) was bought at auction for £610 by Mr P. N. Burrows, in whose family it remained until 1998. Shooters Hill Farm, Perry Road, was also known as Linton’s Farm (and may at one time have been owned by the Thornhill estate). It lay to the south of the road, opposite the entrance to Buckden Wood Farm. Its size during the 19thC varied between 123 and 174 acres; some of the land was in the parish of Grafham. The occupier in 1871 was a young, temporarily deaf bachelor called James Topham (1836-1912), middle son of Offord farmer Thomas Topham (whose Stirtloe farmstead was destroyed in an arson attack: see under fires and fire-fighting equipment ). By 1881, James had married and moved to a larger farm in Perry, where he remained for the rest of his life. Shooters Hill seems not always to have had a farmhouse attached, although there was nearby accommodation for at least one labourer and his family, Silver Street–Laying sewers Robert Baxter