Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

LIVING OFF THE LAND 153 Browns’ orchard west of the Great North Road. At the yard women stripped the wands and re-bundled them. In the 1930s, the price was sixpence (2.5p) a bundle. The wands were then sold, being either sent away for basket-making elsewhere or used by craftsmen in the village. Richard Furbank of Stirtloe remembers them being sent as far afield as Gloucester. By the time great-grandfather Brown died in 1912, the business had expanded to include market-gardening. His son, also Richard (1853-1915), is listed as a basket–maker and fruit grower in the parish burials register. The Browns had a shed behind Bowtells (now One-Stop) in the High Street. In this shed up to sixteen people made baskets for all manner of purposes. These were distributed locally by horse and cart. Buckden's last basket-maker, Harry Frost, had a workshop in York Yard but he worked independently of the Browns. Although blind, he continued working well into the 1940s. He died in 1948. Dairying Buckden has no dairy farms now, but within living memory it had four, and three purveyors of fresh milk to the village. A flavour of the dairying business including the distribution of milk may be gained from an article (reproduced later in this chapter) about Miss Gladys Mann of Hardonian Farm . Two of the other three farms have already been mentioned: Park Farm north west of the village, and Westfield Farm to the south. The last occupant of Westfield was Mary Mann, who succeeded her father. Their dairy cows were often pastured on the opposite side of the Great North Road. That this meant their having to cross the road twice each way each day for milking made Mr Mann rather unpopular with drivers. (It is said he did not have much time for them either.) The fourth farm was Shooters Hollow on Perry Road at the west boundary of the parish, now run by Mr John Mann. This branch of the Mann family also had the of use of the Little Park (The Towers field), fields north of the village and eastwards down to the river, and for a time Stirling Farm, adjacent to the clubhouse of the present Brampton Park Golf Club. Going back a generation, John Mann’s father used to hand-milk in a shed near Carter’s Yard in Mill Road, but later only followers grazed these fields, the milkers being kept around the farm. John's father took over the milk round of Reginald Mann of Hardonian Farm, firstly using a car and trailer, then a horse and milk-float and finally a pick-up truck. Dairying was abandoned in 1961. There were others who kept dairy cattle, some just as house cows. They included the Stockers of the Crown public house on the Great North Road and the Bowyers, who kept two cows behind Jessamine House in the High Street. Cows were also milked at the Manor House in Church Street, in a barn since converted to residential use Other Cattle Clearly cattle must have been regularly raised for meat in order to supply the local butchers. The transport of livestock also provided steady trade for Buckden Station and the Cope lorries. At the time of writing, cattle are still reared on Lodge Farm for the distant meat market or slaughterhouse. Sheep Sheep seem to have been less important to Huntingdonshire's agricultural economy than either corn or cattle: they certainly do not figure very largely in Buckden’s farming, especially in recent times. An occasional shepherd is listed in nineteenth-century censuses. An early twentieth-century postcard shows sheep being driven eastwards past the almshouses in Church Street. A few sheep were occasionally agisted in the grounds of The Towers at the end of the twentieth century. Smallholdings and Allotments Before the arrival of incomers in the 1960s, many households grew at least some of their own vegetables and fruit. Eric Newman's uncle set up a greengrocery shop in the High Street immediately north of the Spread Eagle, but business was not good. In season Eric was sent out selling violets; his best trade was with the waitresses and maids at the Lion hotel. The present allotments behind Silver Street were preceded by those where Beaumont Drive and Wolsey Gardens are now, but they are not on new ground: the same area is marked as Allotment Gardens on the 1924 OS plan. A group of smallholdings which has entirely disappeared was in Van Diemens Lane off Mill Road; the land is now largely occupied by flooded gravel pits or the redundant routes of aggregate conveyors and site roads. No trace remains of a pair of houses about 400m from Mill Road. They, or at least their foundations, are visible in an aerial photograph of 1969. In 1871, Wood Farm on Perry Road was surveyed for the purpose of being divided into allotments—sixty-four in all, ranging between two and four acres each. It is not clear whether the proposal was ever carried out, either wholly or in part. See Chapter 10 for other areas of land under cultivation in 1924 and now. Herbs Mrs Elizabeth Peplow began growing herbs in 1974 at her home in Church Street, and marketed them on a small scale as ‘Herbs from the Hoo’. Mrs Peplow and her husband Reginald wrote three books on herbs. ΩΩΩΩΩ