June 2020

13 Buckden Roundabout June 2020 Buckden School history birthday in 1900, and local ones like the funeral of the vicar (Daniel Haigh) in 1875. A day off was also given in 1884 when the schoolmaster (George Barber) returned home to Lincoln- shire to marry a fellow teacher, National Schoolmistress Rebec- ca Westland. Official holiday periods amounted to only a few days at Christ- mas and Easter and generally five weeks in the summer. The summer holiday was not fixed in advance but was announced when the harvest was ready. If the weather was poor an extra week might be given in September to complete the field work. Here, as before, the schoolmaster was at the mercy of the school manager farmers. Another cause of lengthy closures was epidemic disease – a reason we can sympathise with considering our current coro- navirus pandemic. There were measles (‘ Arch Enemy of Elementary Schools ’ the teacher calls them in 1884) in 1890 and 1897, and whooping cough in 1900. Mumps and smallpox affected attendance badly but did not necessarily lead to the school ’ s closing altogether, as would sometimes happen in the early years of the twentieth century. The inadequacy of the school premises may well have contrib- uted to the spread of disease. In 1871, according to the Prelim- inary Statement, the boys ’ school consisted of two rooms measuring 27' by 15' and 8' by 20' and was 10' high at the walls, and accommodated 50+ boys. In the same year, the teacher described it as ‘ very close and inadequate ’. It must have been a relief to write in 1880: ‘ March 12 th Left the school on the 9 th for the purpose of build- ing being pulled down; the school is held in a large loft or gran- ary in Mr Wm Mann ’ s yard … May 24 th Opened new school. ’ The Dame Schools In addition to pleasing the various authorities, the schoolmas- ter had to please parents, especially when schooling was not compulsory and involved paying a fee. There were alternatives in the village. The wealthy families employed tutors or gover- nesses, of course, and do not enter into this account. It has been recorded that much was expected of governesses: one who taught the Gatty sisters at the Manor House in the 1860s had to be competent to teach ‘ thorough English, good French and German, music and the rudiments of Latin and Italian. ’ There were also the ‘ dame schools ’. Miss Frances Beaumont and her sister Laura opened a girls ’ seminary (boarding school) in Buckden during the 1830s, having moved to the village with their mother, Sarah, herself a schoolmistress. At some time between 1847 and 1851, the sisters moved the school to St Neots. Trade directories and censuses show that several other small private schools came and went in the nine- teenth and first decade of the twentieth century, most of them for girls and very young boys. One such boy, looking back at his 1860s childhood, remembered his schoolmistress, an innkeep- er ’ s daughter, as an ‘ acid spinster ’, but he may have been prej- udiced against teachers, having a surfeit of them in his own family: a sister who ran a similar school, another who taught music, a third who married a headmaster, and a brother who became a nationally - known mathematics teacher. The schoolmasters had little good to say of these dame schools, naturally: ‘ Re - admitted J.W. – who has been away a year to a dame ’ s school, and not improved. ’ (1873), ‘ Admitted F.H. a good 7 from Mrs Bowling ’ s Private School rather back- ward. ’ (1878). But on the other hand: ‘ A private school kept by Mrs Bowling has a good number of children. The fee is 6d a week. ’ So this school definitely provided competition. In the next instalment of the series we will explore Buckden school in the later Victoria era and see how the school premis- es and lessons were developed. - Wendy Trattner Sources www.bl.uk Buckden, A Huntingdonshire Village, Mike Storey & Robin Gib- son (Eds.), 2010 Buckden C.E. School 1871 – 1971 Centenary Year, FWR Claxton, 1971 (Continued from page 12) 150 Years of School Buckden Valley Lake The Environment Agency recently undertook a survey of the Valley Lake at the invitation of the Village Hall Trust and Offord & Buckden Angling Society with a view to the viability of cre- ating a 1.2 acre Crucian Carp and Tench Fishery and bringing some much needed funds to the VHT. A boat was launched and the lake was electro - fished resulting in 226 fish weighing a total of 18lbs which were all recorded and released safely back into the water . All the fish were Tench with the exception of one Eel . Water depths were found to be between 6" and 18" and as expected the silt levels were in excess of 2 - 3 feet! Consequently the oxygen levels were found to be very low. Tench are one of the very few fish which can survive in such poor conditions and the E.A. suggested that they were also heavily predated on by cormorants, herons and probably by otters and mink. The E.A. have recommended that a Dredging operation is undertaken to increase depth and this would im- prove water conditions for all life forms from insects, plants , fish and even birds. However due to the costs involved and the difficult access to the site, OBAS has reluctantly decided not to pursue this pro- ject at this moment. Tony Elliott, Chairman OBAS ousefishing.com