Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

3 began a long journey – a journey of many happy times singing to people who love to listen. Along the way, the choir has raised many thousands of pounds for local and national charities. The choir had twenty-five members in 1986; by 2008 it was some forty voices strong, made up of sopranos, altos, tenors and basses. Its musical director is now Grenville Gutteridge, and its activities include performances of popular choral works in local churches, particularly at Christmas and Easter. Membership of the National Association of Choirs, and in particular of Group 20 Anglia, has given the choir a wider view and the stimulus and encouragement to improve performance and extend its repertoire. arson: see under fires and fire-fighting equipment . ash, the Bugden. The 17thC saw a bizarre flurry of interest in finding ways of creating life without going through the natural processes of procreation. For some reason this included ‘creating’ new ash-trees out of dead ones. A Dr Lister was shown one such tree near Buckden. Despite being without bark and clearly dead from the roots upwards, it had a ‘fine young shoot, very vigorous and flourishing’ growing out of the very top. He rushed home to write a paper for the Royal Society on his miraculous discovery. Fortunately for his reputation, he was still writing it when word came that ‘some inquisitive Body or other’ had climbed the tree and discovered that the shoot was not the dead ash reborn: it had grown from a seed dropped from one or other end of a bird and had taken root in the decaying top of the dead tree. See also elm , plane and sycamore. B Baby Show. No longer held, alas: it was once a keenly fought event at the Horticultural Society's annual show, revealing, said the St. Neots Advertiser in 1923, ‘what fine babies Buckden can produce’. Other favourite competitions of old Huntingdonshire, such as Best Homemade Calico Knickers and Most Queen Wasps Killed By An Allotment Holder, are perhaps best left unrevived. Bakers Lane [MapRef 45] now lies under School Lane, but was once the industrial heart of Buckden, housing an agricultural machinery manufactory, complete with its own forges. It was also an area of considerable poverty, overcrowded and often unhealthy: in June 1905, a diphtheria outbreak led St Neots Rural District Council to test a well in the yard of Miss Sarah Thomson (of the inventive Thomson family (q.v.)). Finding it highly polluted with organic matter, they successfully applied for a court order to have it closed for three months. balloon dance: see following entry. Balls. To the nobility and gentry of Huntingdonshire, as of all counties, balls were the highlights of their social year. At the top were those held at the great houses such as Hinchingbrooke House and Kimbolton Castle, to which few people in Buckden could expect to be invited. In February 1868, for example, the Prince of Wales spent a week at the Castle, and was entertained by two dances: one for ‘a number of the aristocracy of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire’ and the other the annual Regimental Ball of the Duke of Manchester’s Light Horse Volunteers and friends. At balls in the houses of local squires, such as Stirtloe House, Little Paxton Hall, and Gaynes Hall, one might meet a wider range of guests: not only landowners but also the families of lawyers, military men and the clergy (but probably not curates). At the level of both the great house and the local manor, these entertainments were also likely to reflect shared political interests, especially during elections or times of constitutional crisis such as parliamentary reform. These dances were private occasions; in addition there were public or semi-public balls, held in such locations as the assembly and public rooms in Huntingdon and St Neots, or hotel ballrooms (such as the Manchester Room at the George in Huntingdon). The County Subscription Ball held for New Year 1909 took over most of the rooms in Huntingdon Town Hall, and some of Buckden’s great and good were among those who danced to the music of the White Viennese Band until 4.00 a.m. Foreign bands were hugely popular at the time, and the White Viennese was probably the most popular. In truth, the only foreign thing about most of the players was the accent they adopted to disguise their mainly Yorkshire origins! (For seven years one of their trombonists was Gustav Holst, composer of The Planets .) Fancy dress events were popular and there were also what today might be called niche balls: entertainments for a specific group. Local examples, which some from Buckden may well have attended, include the Bachelors’ Ball; the Spinsters’ Ball (held at the Fountain, Huntingdon), and the Governess and Servants’ Ball. There were, of course, numerous dances outside these events, but they were normally referred to as dances, not balls. For many years, dancing was certainly one of the favourite pastimes of Buckden’s residents: indoors, outdoors, often in the street. One resident still remembers when the Buckden Band used to play regularly outside the Lion: ‘The women danced, the men and boys all gathered together across the street outside Alf Papworth’s bakery.’ Buckden being Buckden, these occasions sometimes became riotous; but not, surely, on those evenings when the Women's Institute ‘indulged’ (their description) in dancing in the Rifle Range: not even when the indulgence was a balloon dance (in those days a lively comic competition, with couples being eliminated if they dropped the balloon held between their knees or foreheads; it did not, as sometimes happens today, involve nudity punctuated by loud bangs). See also Brass Band; entertainment in Buckden, and Smith, Francis James. Barson, James (b. 1872). On 11 January 1909 the gardeners and smallholders of Buckden crammed into the village schoolroom to hear the first of a series of eagerly- anticipated lectures by Mr James Barson, the much respected head gardener of Hinchingbrooke House and winner of many horticultural awards (thirteen firsts and seven seconds at the 1905 Ramsey Horticultural Show alone). Unfortunately, the series was doomed to remain incomplete. On 8 February, Mr Barson returned home from London on the 5.16 p.m. train to find that his cottage had been raided by the police. To the astonishment of the county he was arrested on charges of forging and uttering