Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

70 cousin Mrs Harry Worley. Mr Harry Worley was unable to attend, being in the County Hospital; the night before Miss Stoneham’s death he had been found in the road near Buckden Station having fallen from – or been knocked off – his bicycle while returning from Home Guard duties. Also absent was Mrs Duberly herself, too frail to travel at the age of 95. But the wreaths and flowers included ‘lovely floral tributes’ from her and Arthur and Brenda. Arthur and Brenda were her Pekinese. Suffolk, dukes of, two buried in same tomb. A table- tomb near the east end of St Mary’s Church is said to cover the bodies of Henry Brandon, (1535––-14 July 1551) and his younger brother Charles (1537/8–14 July 1551), respectively the second and third Dukes of Suffolk. They died within an hour of one another, victims of the fifth and (to date) last major outbreak of the ‘English sweate’, a frighteningly rapid and lethal malady whose causes are still unknown and much debated. The brothers were students at Cambridge when the disease struck the city in the summer of 1551. By the time their mother sent them to Buckden for safety, they had already been infected. The absence of contemporary burial records means we have no idea whether this resulted in other deaths in Buckden (rural communities are thought to have been particularly susceptible). Sunnyside, 14 High Street: see Valency House. Sutter, Robert Ross MD Aberd MC CM MRCS LRCP was a Warboys doctor who provided locum services to Buckden after Dr Williams died. He was succeeded by a characterful Australian, R. A. R. Wallace. Swan End is one of three streets off Vineyard Way named after birds, though it serendipitously commemorates both the Swan, a beer-house believed to have once stood nearby, and Buckden benefactor George Cornelius Swan, who paid for the erection of a workhouse not far away on Mill Road. Sycamore House, 16 High Street, is a Grade II listed townhouse dating from the late 18thC. The name does not appear in any of the county directories that are readily accessible for Buckden, making it difficult to identify past residents. We do, however, know firstly that it was the surgery and family home of Dr Morris from 1964 to 1969; and secondly that the painter Theresa Sylvester Stannard stayed there in about 1916, and perhaps on other occasions as well: she and her father, the artist Henry John Sylvester Stannard (q.v.) made several painting trips to Buckden in the second decade of the 20thC. sycamores, odd, in Buckden. In 1925, two sycamores were found to be flourishing in the roof an old brick kiln. They were in no way connected to the earth as their roots were visible hanging in the air on the underside of the roof. See also ash, elm and plane. T Taylors Lane once joined the High Street to the fields and woods to the west of the village; the re-routing of the A1 in 1962 cut it in half. Both halves still share the same name, as though the highways authority could not resist the chance to confuse and infuriate strangers to Buckden. The lane may have been named for the Taylor family, who occupied what is now No. 93 High Street. Taylors appear in the parish registers, in various spellings, from the middle of the seventeenth century. They included blacksmiths, plumbers, castrators and glaziers. At its sale in 1892, No. 93 was described as a substantial brick and tiled four-bedroomed dwelling-house, with an enclosed paved yard, dairy, cellar, pump, WC, bidet, barn and other conveniences. It is also possible that the lane received its name in the middle ages, long before there was a blacksmith – or a house – at No. 93: this may have been the route that took the bishops of Lincoln’s ‘tailleurs’ or woodcutters to and from their work among the trees and coppices of the Great Park. telephone kiosk, High Street. Buckden’s smallest listed building (Grade II) is a Type K6 cast iron kiosk made to the classic design that architect Giles Gilbert Scott produced for George V’s silver jubilee in 1935. Vandalism and mobile phones threaten to reduce it to the status of an ancient monument in spite of BT giving it a new but possi- bly temporary lease of life as a card-only kiosk. telephone service. Buckden has had a telephone exchange for many years. The first – a manual exchange – was in Aragon House on the corner of St Hugh’s Road and High Street. As was usually the case it was rumoured that the operators knew as much about the subscribers’ business as anyone and could save the cost of a phone call by telling a caller that the intended recipient had gone out. There were more than 40 lines available in 1931. The second exchange was in a purpose-built structure in Lucks Lane almost opposite the Scout Hut. It has been converted into a dwelling. The third and present utilitarian building is in George Lane. The name of one of the first ‘telephone clerks’, perhaps the first, appears in the 1901 census. She was Hilda Jessie Shearn, the 18 year old daughter of a Wesleyan minister, and seems to have ‘lived in’ with her employers, the Langley sisters. In the Kelly’s Directory for 1910, the George Hotel is shown as having a National Telephone Company call office. (A call office was usually a wooden kiosk in which you could operate the telephone yourself or, if you were particularly timid or refined, have an attendant make the connection for you). Photographs of the time show the south-east corner of the building dominated by a large telegraph pole. The National Telephone Company (NTC) had been founded in 1881; it was far from being national and was not noted for its efficiency. From 1892 onwards it became government policy to take over and extend the NTC’s trunk network. The full transfer of the company’s plant, property, assets and staff finally took place on 1 January 1912. See also under police. tennis in Buckden. Tennis as we know it today began in England in the second half of the 19thC (the first tennis club was started in Leamington in 1872). Originally an amusement for army officers, it eventually spread through all classes of society and around the world. Houses in Buckden where lawn tennis is known to have been played by or around the end of the 19thC include Ellerslie in Perry Road – a sale notice of 1898 reveals that it had two courts – and Jessamine House in the High Street. The latter’s grass court still has an unusual pavilion thought to be late Victorian or early Edwardian, with two changing rooms. There were also courts at, among others, The Gables, Oak