Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

6 For a short time after the war, the occupiers were the Elliott-Binns family. The Rev. Dr Leonard Elliott Elliott- Binns (1885-1963) – who until 1936 had been plain the Rev. Dr Leonard Elliott Binns – was a respected ecclesiastical lecturer, historian and author. In 1946, he wrote to The Times from Beech Lawn to suggest that tobacco should be included in the sweet ration: but for adults only! For the information of young readers, say those under fifty-five, sweets were rationed from July 1942 until February 1953 (except for four blissful months in 1949). Another occupant of interest in the late 1940s/early 1950s was Edward Cranfield Rose, co-inventor and patentee of an apparatus for heating tarred and bituminous road surfaces. In the early days of the Huntingdonshire Constabulary, Beech Lawn was a police conference point, a place where the local constable could be contacted by his seniors at a fixed time (and woe betide him if he wasn’t there). Beehive, 20 Lucks Lane [MapRef 38]. The Beehive, a thatched cottage in Old Lucks Lane, was formerly a brewery. In 1841 it was occupied by an elderly couple, Jane and William Cambers - the cottage does not appear in the census by name, but the Cambers are the only brewers shown in Lucks Lane. They were not Buckden people and when they fell into poverty, they left (or were sent) to live on parish relief in William’s village of birth in Bedfordshire. The 1851 census again does not list the Beehive by name, nor is anyone in the lane described as a brewer. It may therefore have been one of the two houses recorded as uninhabited. Later, members of the Lymage family were its tenants: Richard Lymage was in occupation when the Beehive was included in the dispersal sale of the late Robert Whitehead’s Buckden estate in April 1864. In 1899, it was one of three Buckden premises among a hundred Huntingdonshire properties listed as being part of the Jenkins and Jones (Falcon Brewery) estate. The other Buckden properties were the George (q.v.), and the White Horse (q.v.). Belgian refugees. One of the earliest events of the First World War to impinge on Buckden was the arrival in September 1914 of refugees from Belgium. They were lodged with widow Rebecca Hubbard in Taylors Lane. They were part of the biggest refugee movement Britain had ever seen, totalling over a quarter of a million people. bells, the silence of the. Not as bloodcurdling as The Silence of the Lambs but bizarre enough in its own way, this story of Buckden's prolonged campanological hiatus is revealed in Chapter 5 . bier, parish. This was a four-wheeled hand-cart which a bereaved family could hire for three shillings to carry the coffin to church. It was used by all classes of society: as, for example, in the imposing funeral of Alexander Copping (q.v.). An inventory of 1709 includes the parish bier as one of the items of furniture kept at (or possibly in) the church itself. In later years, however, its successor was kept in an old barn at Hunts End; a resident can remember as a boy peering in fearful fascination at it through a crack in the door. This bier was made by Dottridge Brothers, of Hoxton and Shoreditch, London N.1. They founded their company in 1835 and were renowned for the quality of their coachbuilding, moving easily from Victorian horse-drawn funeral cars to hearses converted from classic 20thC cars such as the Silver Wraith. In 1985 the firm moved to Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire, and later to Sutton Coldfield, but by 2009 it was no longer trading. The Buckden bier was thoroughly restored in the late 1970s by a small group of villagers including Brian Smith, then Chairman of the Parish Council, and Leslie Button, secretary of the Local History Society, and it is now in St Neots Museum. Bishop, John (c. 1789 – c. 11.20 a.m. on Saturday, 4 April 1829). ‘The facts [of the case],’ reported The Times laconically, ‘were wholly uninteresting; and the prisoner was found Guilty.’ The prisoner was John Bishop, a failed shepherd, and the uninteresting facts were that he had stolen sheep belonging to Mr Thomas Lindsell, gent., of Hemingford Grey. Unfortunately for Bishop it was not his first offence; as a result he became the first and last person to be hanged outside the new county gaol in Huntingdon; the last person, indeed, to be judicially hanged anywhere in Huntingdonshire for a crime other than murder. In passing sentence, the judge held out to him ‘no hopes of mercy this side of the grave, in consequence of the magnitude of the theft ’ (twenty sheep). Two men with ties to Buckden were associated with John Bishop’s last days. The case against him was laid out by Buckden-born lawyer E. H. Maltby (q.v.), while his The Beehive The Bier L.R.Button