Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

4 receipts with intent to defraud. Further charges followed, and from a succession of court cases emerged a sad story of an able and ambitious man whose promotion to heavy responsibilities while still under thirty had tempted him into living above his means, and thereby sinking into debt, drink and deceit. At the summer assizes, he was sentenced to fifteen calendar months’ hard labour; the judge said that in rejecting the harsher penalty of penal servitude, he had taken into account Barson’s guilty plea, the time he had already spent in prison and the probability that he would never again climb above the bottom rung of his profession. Barthram family members played a respected part in the commercial and church life of Buckden in the latter years of the 19thC. Joseph Barthram (1842-1921) was born in Stokesley, Yorkshire, and grew up in the household of one of his uncles. Like his father, Joseph became an assistant highways surveyor, but left while still in his twenties to work for the railways. In 1867, he married Elizabeth Hedge, a bonnet-sewer of Luton. By 1870 (perhaps earlier), he was a stationmaster. At least two of his postings were in Lincolnshire, of which the first was to the newly enlarged Horncastle station on the Horncastle & Kirkstead Junction Railway (seven and a half miles of track, three trains each way each day, extra market specials on Wednesdays and Fridays) Some time after 1876, Joseph changed careers again: the 1881 census lists him as a provision merchant in Somersham. The household comprised himself, his wife and a son, Joseph Arthur, apparently born in Horncastle in 1870. By 1885, the family had moved to Buckden to open a provisions store in Falcon Yard (q.v.), probably on the site of what is now 87 High Street. (gone today, the yard was just to the north of the Spread Eagle public house). In about 1900, Joseph retired and handed over the business to Joseph Arthur, who had worked with him in the shop for at least ten years and had, according to his descendants, qualified as a Master Grocer. But this Joseph Arthur was not Joseph’s son. He was his nephew, who had also been born in 1870, the son of John and Betsy Barthram of Hull. Curiously, the two young men never appear in the same census: furthermore, the ‘Horncastle’ Joseph Arthur seems to have no existence outside his inclusion in the Somersham household in 1881; further research suggests that he may never have existed. Within a few years, the Barthrams gave up the Buckden shop. The older generation remained in the village, but Joseph Arthur followed his uncle’s footsteps in reverse, and went to work for the railways, as a goods checker in Lincoln. Both his son, Arthur John (born Buckden 1893 and known as ‘Jack’), and his eldest daughter, Florence Celia (Buckden 1898), served in the Air Force during the last year of the First World War. Arthur was in the Royal Flying Corps, and Florence was a clerk in the WRAF. Barthrams Yard: see Falcon Yard. Barton, John (c. 1839-1868) was nearly 5' 7'' tall, middling stout and sallow-skinned, with brown hair, hazel eyes and a long face. We know this because he was one of the few Buckden residents – perhaps the only Buckden resident – to be sentenced to transportation. For his story, see under fires and fire-fighting equipment . Bateman, Oliver. In 1607, this keeper of the bishops’ park in Buckden was accused of killing a red deer on (probably) the Grafham estate of Sir Thomas ‘Swiftsure’ Lake, the king's favourite hunting companion. The justice who examined Bateman decided that the killing had been an accident, and ‘entreated favour for him, being a poor man, and very useful to the Bishop’. The plea was apparently successful, as Bateman was still alive nine years later. bath chair, the Buckden (invalids, for the use of). Purchased in 1909 with the proceeds of a concert organised by Mr Pat Howson, it could be had on application to the Vicarage. This photograph of the High Street is thought to show the chair in use. Baxter, Joseph (1797/8- 1886). ‘The oldest inhabitant in the village has just passed away,’ said a local paper in its tribute to a respected resident. Born in Offord Cluny and married in his wife’s home village of Great Paxton, he began his working life as a carpenter. By 1851 he had become a brewer and the landlord of the Lion and Lamb, but left there some time in the 1860s and thereafter defined himself by his old trade of carpenter (albeit now a retired one). He lived first out on Mill Road beyond Burton’s Lane (now Leadens Lane), and then in Silver Street. His wife Ann survived him by only a few months; their marriage had lasted nearly seventy years. Beaufort Drive is at the time of writing (2009) the most recent large housing development in the village. Bordered by Silver Street to the east and the A1 to the northwest, it stands on land previously leased from the Church Commissioners as Parish Council allotments. The name was chosen through a competition run by the developers in conjunction with Buckden School; the winner was Alex Day. It commemorates the formidable mother of Henry VII, Lady Margaret Beaufort (1443–1509), who spent the summer of 1501 at Buckden Palace. An earlier Beaufort, Cardinal Henry, had been Bishop of Lincoln from 1398 to 1404. Beaumont. Frances (Fanny) & Laura Beaumont were Houghton-born sisters who ran a girls’ boarding school in Buckden through most of the 1830s and 1840s. Having your own school was one of the few acceptable occupations then open to an unmarried or widowed middle-class woman whose family could no longer support her, either because its income had died with the death of the father/husband (the situation in which the Beaumonts found themselves) or because an excess of daughters strained even a respectable income (as was the case with the Beaumonts’ near-contemporaries, the Fox sisters, four of whom ran a girls’ school in Huntingdon). A school proprietress had a degree of independence and respect not found in such under-paid alternatives as being a governess (an employee ‘uncomfortably stranded between the dining-room and the servants’ hall’), or a companion (i.e. dogsbody) to a richer relative. (But see under Motley and Stoneham for happier examples of companionship.) Unfortunately, the lure of independence sometimes tempted people into setting up schools they were not competent to run. Fanny and Laura, however, were better- qualified than many. They were following in the footsteps of their mother, Sarah Robson. Born into a Cambridge family of musicians, artists and clergymen, she had opened a girls’ school in Huntingdon after her husband’s death had left her with a large family and little money. Some of