Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

CONEYGARTHS 146 whereby retiring adjutants nominated their own successors and in return received from them a sizeable ‘consideration’. His friend and commanding officer in the militia, the Earl of Sandwich, brusquely reminded him that the practice was now banned (he also had candidates of his own to put forward for the adjutancy). In the end, John George resigned in 1856 and lived out a presumably rather resentful retirement at Coneygarths in the company of his two unmarried daughters (his wife had died in 1845). He died in 1882, supposedly in the same bed and the same room in which he had been born ninety-four years before. During his life he had brought Buckden to the world’s notice as the home of the Man with the Golden Eagle—see under Captain Green in the A to Z Section. Now his death, too, attracted widespread notice, for he was the last known surviving participant in Nelson’s funeral, which he had attended as a boy-soldier in 1805. The farmer When John George died, his son Francis—who preferred to be known as Frank—was living in Field House, Silver Street. He had run the family’s farming interests for nearly thirty years, taking them on while still living with his father at C0neygarths. The Greens drew most of their income from land: the government’s 1873 survey of landownership showed John George had 41 acres, Frank 181 acres and his sister Margaret 52 acres. Frank’s acreage was the result of his 1856 purchase of part of Hoo Farm for £9000. By 1882, however, Frank had passed the day-to-day responsibility to his eldest son, another John George, who served as a Lieutenant (later Major) in what was now called the Huntingdon Militia Rifles, as well as farming the 165 acres still in hand. 1 In 1895, John George took over the family’s outstanding mortgages and with them his father’s interest in Hoo Farm. Most of this land lay to the north-east of the farmhouse, where the Greenway housing estate now lies, its name being derived from the family. After his father’s death, Frank moved back to Coneygarths, where he remained until he died in 1908. The report of his funeral described him as having been a genial, well-made man, thoroughly conscientious and tenacious in his opinions. A large congregation assembled to see him off at the church, for, despite being a Commissioner of Income Tax, he was well-liked in the village, rather more widely so than his father, whose hunting down of the 1830 rioters, long service as magistrate and membership of the Huntingdonshire Association [for the suppression of poachers and other felons] would not have endeared him to some in the labouring class. Frank had a strong interest in parish affairs. He was a trustee of the Buckden Parochial Charities—indeed, the trustee for a time in 1885, when disputes led to all his fellows resigning—a school manager, a patron of the village cricket club, which he allowed to play in the grounds of Coneygarths, and secretary of the Buckden and Diddington Horticultural Society. Two sons Frank had married twice. His first wife, whom he met and married in Surrey where he was learning the art of estate management as steward to the countess de Morella, died within the year at the birth of John George. In 1864 he married Louisa La-Page Norris from Halifax, by whom he had a second son, Francis Charles Sydney (often referred to simply as ‘FCS’ to distinguish him from his father). FCS continued his father’s interest in the welfare of the village, serving as both a county and parish councillor and as the horticultural society’s secretary. He lived alone at Coneygarths, but for two servants, but until 1913 was the tenant of the Hoo Farm land his brother John George owned. John George had left Buckden in the mid- 1890s for Houghton, where he lived as a man of private means and served as a JP for Huntingdon. He had two sons, both of whom were to die in the First World War—see under Green memorial in the A to Z Section. The later years The last link between the Green family and Coneygarths was broken when the house and 84 acres of land were put up for auction in May 1919. They were bought by Mr Percy Priestley, partner in the Offord and Buckden Flour Mill. He did not have to move far: he lived opposite the almshouses in Church Street. After his death in 1935, his widow stayed on, and there were several more owners over the subsequent years. Keeping an old property such as Coneygarths well maintained became increasingly difficult in the changed social and economic climate that characterised the Second World War and the decades that followed. In 1 The family also had a lively interest in the 1840s railway boom. Captain Green was on the provisional committee of two small local companies, and his daughters Frances and Margaret contracted to subscribe for 250 poundsworth of shares in the London and Croydon (Orpington Branch) line, an eight-mile stretch of atmospheric railway. Unfortunately for the young ladies, the line was rejected by parliament. On the other hand the atmospheric railway system proved to be a failure so their money would have gone anyway.