Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

77 wells running through the gardens of houses lining the west side of the High Street. Hand pumps over wells can be seen in one or two places from the road even now but they are not in use. However, Oak Lawn in Mill Street still has a working well. Not surprisingly, the Board’s report noted that gravel formed a third of the parish’s 2,500 acres, the remainder being good quality clay. Its author also thought that the lie of the land suggested there was probably coal to be mined in several areas round Huntingdon. Buckden was presumably not among them, or the Church would have enthusiastically exploited such a source of revenue, as it did in other areas of the country such as Durham. It is hard to avoid a shudder at the thought of Buckden as a landscape of slagheaps, abandoned pitheads and subsided tunnels. One hears the traditional comments that the mains water does not taste as good as the well water. Perhaps it doesn’t, but it is generally more reliable: towards the end of the 19thC, many wells were drying up and householders, unwilling to approach their landlords, were urging the recently-formed Parish Council to do something about the failing supply. Nor was having to fetch water in a bucket good for the health: see the entry for Henry Frost . A Francis Frith photograph taken in Church Street shows a tank on a horse-drawn cart being filled from the public pump outside the Methodist church. The tank was used to distribute water to those without a well. In the 1920s, Buckden resident Mr J. M. Brown was respected throughout the county as a successful water- diviner. His work in Buckden included testing prospective housing sites for builders such as Hardwick & Burrows, and G. Page & Son. Another source of water was from roofs. One major one was the church roof. The rainwater is said to have been led to the vicarage across the road where there was the daily chore for someone to pump water to a tank in the roof. Since the water was well fouled with pigeon droppings one hopes that it was filtered and boiled before use! (Perhaps it wasn’t: a resident who grew up in Lucks Lane remembers the then vicar regularly sending over for buckets of water from her family’s well ‘as it tastes so much better than our supply!’.) Another resident remembers Buckden’s water being put to good, if unconventional, use during the Second World War by one of the village innkeepers – see under Spread Eagle. The wartime hospital and camp for displaced persons in Diddington drew its water from wells there; when the hospital storage tank was full, this supply was pumped to the reservoir above Buckden on the Perry Road. This source was augmented in 1952/3 and 1954. The scheme for the provision of piped water to Buckden and ten other villages began in 1946 and continued until the early fifties. The reservoir for the scheme was at Great Paxton. That water undertaking was instituted by the St Neots Rural District Council. On 1 April 1963, it was taken over by the Nene and Ouse Water Board, which reinforced the Buckden supply in 1965 by a 12-inch main from Brampton. The village supply is now (2009) the responsibility of Anglian Water Services Limited, an appointed water undertaker owned by AWG plc, which in 2006 was bought for £2.25 billion by Osprey Acquisitions Limited, a Huntingdon-based company set up for that purpose by a consortium whose members include the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, several Australian superannuation funds, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and an international venture capital and private equity business. Welcome to the global village pump! Weighbridge Cottage was, according to the 1881 census, located at the northern end of Buckden. It was occupied by a shepherd and his young family. Since operating a weighbridge seems an occupation not easily compatible with being a shepherd, it may be that it was no longer in use or was supervised by his wife – the machinery had been looked after by two women forty years before, a lath-render’s widow and her young daughter, both called Mary Newman (Mrs Newman died in 1842; Miss Newman married William Picking, a thatcher, in 1848 and died in 1915). Weir Close is a small development of local authority housing off Lucks Lane. As nearby streets include Spring field Close and The Osiers , it is not surprising to find that older residents remember the area as a water- meadow. Wesley, Rev. John (1703–1791) visited Buckden on at least three occasions, and was probably the shortest and cleanest of the founders of Methodism: barely 5' 3'' high and a meticulous recorder of how many items of clothing he sent out to the laundry each day. His energy bordered on the superhuman. A typical week in his diary for 1781 shows him preaching in Kent on Wednesday and Thursday, and Sussex on Friday; back in London on Saturday; preaching there on Sunday evening before taking the overnight coach north; preaching in St Neots on Monday evening, Buckden on Tuesday morning and Huntingdon Tuesday evening; and on Wednesday arriving in Bedford. This itinerary is the more astounding for being undertaken in December by a man of seventy-eight. But he was rarely worried by winter weather: in February 1747 he stopped off in Buckden for ‘a short bait’ (refreshment break) on his way north to Grantham. The journey had not been easy – the roads were invisible under snow, and the wind rose to gale force – but he insisted on continuing, undeterred by a storm of hail and rain that ‘froze as it fell, even on our eyebrows’. Despite arriving exhausted in Stilton, he battled on to his destination through snow- drifts almost deep enough to swallow his horse. Wesleyan Methodist Church, Church Street [MapRef 8]. A Methodist Class was formed as part of the Bedfordshire Circuit in 1781, but without established premises. Its fortunes at first ebbed and flowed. According to Samuel Lewis‘s Topographical Dictionary of England , there was a place of worship for Wesleyan Methodists by 1831. By 1838, however, a leader had emerged: a Silver Street trunk-maker (and later carrier), called Henry Creamer (c. 1802-72). There were soon sufficient members and funds to justify starting work on a 100-seater chapel. The £100 debt that the work incurred was paid off by 1842 (pew-rents helpfully raised over £7 a year). The building, sometimes known as the [Old] Gospel Hall [MapRef 14] , was in Church Street, and now forms the east end of the Lion Inn. The present chapel in Church Street was opened in July 1876 by Charles Roberts BSc of Peterborough. In June 1878 it was registered for the solemnisation of marriages, and in 1915 was the scene of an event that caused considerable local interest. This was the wedding of schoolmistress Evelyn Marjorie Phillips and Teiji Orihashi, a native of Japan. Mr Orihashi had come to