Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

5 the children were sent to live with relatives; Fanny and Laura stayed with their mother. Early in the 1830s the three women moved the school from Huntingdon to Buckden, leasing Oak Lawn (q.v.) from the Reynolds family. Fanny was now in charge, assisted by Laura. Twenty pupils were present on the night of the 1841 census (day-pupils, if any, would have been recorded in their own homes). They ranged in age from fourteen down to four; three of them were boys (all with older sisters to look after/suppress them). They were typically frommoderately well-to-do farming or business families. Although most of them had been born outside the county, some came from as near as Kimbolton or Offord. To be boarded this close to one’s home was not unprecedented: Jane Bowyer Cope of Buckden boarded at the Misses Foxes’ school in Huntingdon, and horse trainer’s daughter Clara May Hawkes of Brampton boarded in Buckden at the Ladies’ School run by Mrs Bowling (q.v.). Sarah Beaumont died in 1842, and is buried in St Mary’s churchyard (though not where her headstone now indicates). The inscription on her grave is from the Book of Job and confirms that life had not always been kind to her: ‘There the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary be at rest.’ At the end of the 1840s, something, probably the sale of Oak Lawn, prompted the sisters to move the school to The Limes in St Neots, where they ran it until their retirement in about 1870. They later moved to Folkestone, where Fanny died in 1891, aged 84, and Laura in 1893, aged 83. Two of their siblings were also teachers: Caroline was a schoolmistress in Alconbury Weston until, in her forties, she married and became a shopkeeper in Huntingdon. Their brother William, after a false start as a printer's compositor (during which he lodged with a wheelwright in Buckden), taught at a boys' school in Huntingdon New Town. See also balls; Bowling, Mrs Sarah; Cartwright, George; and Langley family. Beckwith, Audrey , author, lived in Buckden from 1974 to 2009. She knew during her teenage years that she wanted to write, but she led a very active life and could not concentrate on her writing till later. In her twenties she worked for the BBC East and Central European News Department in Bush House in London. Later, she was in the Drama Department. After her marriage, Audrey and her pharmacist husband, Roy, moved to Derbyshire. Here she wrote her first novel, which was set in Italy. Her first accepted novel, however, was mainly set in Jamaica, and published in America. She had chosen the title Martha’s Cottage , but the publishers thought it would sell better as Midnight Heiress - with the cover line SHE HAD INHERITED A LEGACY OF TERROR. Audrey wrote from inspiration, sometimes finding one line enough to set her going. This would develop into a plot, and then the characters would take on a life of their own. But she was always in charge, and was ruthless with them if the need arose. She used two pseudonyms. As Dawn Stacey she wrote historical novels, of which the first was Man of Principle and concerned the English Civil War. As Kate Frederick, she wrote gothic novels, such as Midnight Heiress. Gothic romances were out of fashion by the beginning of the 21stC, but she had several ready, she would say, for when the fashion changed. Several of her books were on the best seller list; some were issued as audio books, in large print and in translation. Audrey was an accomplished and intelligent actress, and happily her and Roy’s arrival in Buckden coincided with the revival of Buckden Theatre Club, of which they both became active members. Audrey died in May 2009; Roy had predeceased her in 2008, at the age of 91. Janet Ingamells Beech Lawn , Silver Street [MapRef 49], was described in 1898 by St Neots auctioneers Dilley and Son as ‘a charming, old-fashioned Bijou Residence, secluded in its own grounds, with Ornamental & Kitchen Gardens (well planted with Shrubs and Fruit Trees), Orchard and Paddock of Rich Old Pasture Land, Stabling, Coach House, Harness Place, Cow House, and other convenient Outbuildings, Gardener’s Cottage, Laundry & small Yard.’ More prosaically, it is a Grade II listed residence erected in the mid 18thC and altered several times since. Census returns, directories and title deeds give us a glimpse of some of those who occupied it (some for quite brief periods). They include the Warsops or Worsops): Mary and her seventy-nine year old husband John, a retired farmer from Alconbury. They moved in during 1862. Mr Worsop died towards the end of 1866; and in October 1868 his widow sold up and returned to Alconbury. The new owner was a retired London merchant, Charles Frederick Mann. He and his wife Caroline employed two resident house servants, and a gardener and his wife (both of whom came, like Mrs Mann, from Yorkshire). Mr Mann died in 1875. By 1877 the occupier was the adjutant of the Hunts Militia, the recently-married Captain Hillyard H. A. Cameron of the Royal Marines (later a Colonel in the Bedfordshire Regiment). He was the son of a controversial Canadian Attorney General, fathered four children in rapid succession, preferred good plain cooking and was posted to Hampshire in 1881. Beech Lawn’s gardener, James Dawks, and his daughter Susan then acted as caretakers for a time while the house was untenanted (they normally lived with the rest of their family). The next named occupier was Felix Cottrill, who was living in Buckden by 1885 and was still there in 1890. We have no other direct information about him; a person of that name graduated from Cambridge in 1886, studied medicine and ended up a director of T. & M. Hesketh & Sons, his brother-in-law’s Lancashire cotton manufactory. Whoever he was, he was gone by 1891, when the George Augustus Cumming Elliotts were in residence, a Scots- Irish couple with a groom/gardener, cook, German butler and no visible means of support. It seems likely their occupancy was brief, as in May 1892 this ‘charming country residence’ was again being advertised to let, with immediate possession. By the time it was put up for auction in 1898, Beech Lawn was in the ownership (but not necessarily occupation) of E. Henry Cragg, Esq., who also sold (for £200) the nearby ‘brick and slated dwelling house’ occupied by the widow of Henry Hyde (q.v.). Beech Lawn was bought by Dr F. E. Williams (q.v.) as a home and surgery. After his death in 1923, it remained the home of his widow Laura (his successor, Dr Robert Wallace (q.v.), had to live elsewhere but continued to use the surgery). Mrs Williams was still there in 1936, but from 1937 to 1942 or 1943, the occupier was the celebrated Captain H. G. Amers (q.v).