Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

STIRTLOE HOUSE AND HAMLET 142 married Mary Louisa Gatty, whose family lived in the manor-house in Church Street. 1 In the same year, Colonel Linton died, aged eighty-five, and Stirtloe House duly passed to Henry Linton. As planned, John now took over the running of the estate, which employed twenty men and ten boys on 600 acres. He and Mary Louisa remained at Buckden Wood until at least 1881, or until Henry Linton returned to Oxford, where he died in 1886, but had moved into Stirtloe House by 1891. Mary Louisa’s sister Bessie Georgiana lived there with them until 1904, when a former village doctor returned and married her in Huntingdonshire’s wedding of the year. The twentieth century John and Mary Louisa had at least five daughters—Philippa Mary (b. 1878), Louise Linton (1879), 2 Hilda Joan (1880), Olive Horton (1881) and Irene Sherard (1892)—and two sons: Henry (1884) and Clement Arthur (1887). There is no record of the improvements John made to the house. Money may have become less plentiful: the records show parcels of land being sold from early in the twentieth century. John was succeeded by his elder son Captain Henry Linton MC MCVD DL, who inherited the house in 1911 at the age of twenty-seven, in between active service in the Boer War and the First World War. It is probable that his siblings continued to live in or visit the house over the years till his death in 1952. The garden was gradually improved with colourful flower beds and ornamental trees, but few building works were undertaken. Garages were built, bathrooms and kitchens modernised and central heating installed, but the evacuees boarded at Stirtloe House during the Second World War found it ‘not the most desirable of billets’. In 1941 Captain Linton was living in the main house with his three sisters, Miss Philippa, Miss Irene and Mrs Louisa (now the widow Maude-Roxby). Below stairs there was a gamekeeper/gardener, a cook/housekeeper, a parlour maid, a gardener and handyman and a fourteen year old kitchen maid, most of whom had moved on before the end of the war. Compare these five with the seven gardeners and many other staff kept when Mr Bert Sharpe started work in the garden around 1914 at twelve years of age. The kitchen and servants’ hall were below stairs, four big stone steps down to the level of the medieval house, where Captain Linton used to hang out of the window to shoot sparrows. The evacuees, three boys, hardly saw the captain, and never saw the front of the house. However Miss Philippa did lend Alec Owen some skates to use on the frozen lake in the valley, which the boys passed on their way to school, and Mrs Maude- Roxby took the boys to a concert where they sat on the front row! It must have been a very difficult time for everyone—life changing so rapidly, the disappearance of an established order for the gentry and servants, and the boys miserable away from home. 3 When Captain Linton died in 1952, still unmarried, his brother Major [Clement] Arthur Linton continued to live in the house, but, to save death duties, the heir was to be the major’s grandson, Robert Bruce, who was about six years old and living in Argentina with his mother, the daughter of Major Linton and his wife Hilda Eden. The three great-aunts spent much time at the house, but the difficulties of administering the house and estate from Argentina can be imagined. Miss Philippa suggested that the cross-wing attached to the north of the house be demolished to let more light into the kitchen, as the rooms were no longer needed for servants who now mainly came in by day from the village, and this was done in the 1950s. She and the major soldiered on, but without much help and with a leaking roof, with the spacious entrance hall of the Alexanders’ house divided for warmth, and a small new kitchen created in the butler’s pantry. It is easy to see why Robert Bruce decided to sell the house after his grandfather’s death in 1969, keeping the parkland and estate still in the Linton family. The house was in desperate need of renovation, water running down walls when it rained, such that the local doctor didn’t feel he could send in a bill, and the garden becoming more and more overgrown, with the greenhouses, walls and railings in urgent need of repair. 1 In 1878 a deed was drawn up to provide Mary Louisa with an annual income of £500 for life. This may have been suggested because part of the estate was entailed. 2 i.e., she had Linton as both her middle name and her surname. 3 Not always miserable: see Chapter 17 in which some of the Tollington boys remember their time in Buckden.