Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

THE PARISH COUNCIL: A HISTORY OF THE GOVERNANCE OF BUCKDEN VILLAGE 166 village organisations. The parish council allocated the money raised from the sale of the Mayfield site, and the final £110,000 was borrowed by the council to be repaid through the village precept over a period of ten years. Not only did the new building provide much needed facilities for village clubs and societies and an extension for the Village Club, it also provided accommodation for the library and the village pre-school playgroup. At the same time as this joint venture was completed the VHT built the new sports pavilion. Throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s the council had to consider plans for the further provision of housing in the village and at each stage it was committed to trying to ensure that the houses built were not too cramped and of suitable design for a village environment. A walk around the village suggests that on the whole it succeeded in its aims. The announcement in 1997 in the new County Plan that 45,000 extra houses would be built in Cambridgeshire by 2016 sounded alarm bells. The council argued most strongly that there should be no further development in the Huntingdon and St Neots area without ensuring that there was an adequate infrastructure in place: it felt that more work was required on roads, services, police, schools, doctors’ surgeries, hospital facilities etc. At the same time it again launched a defence to protect Buckden from further expansion. When parish councils were first formed, the overseers - those hangovers from the days of the parish vestry - continued to be responsible for the collection of monies to meet the costs of the council’s responsibilities. This task was later performed by the parish clerk, and later still a village precept was collected as part of the overall rates collected by the county and district councils. In 1909 the first precept was agreed at £10; it was still only £30 in 1947, in 1957 it was £140, in 1977 it was £6250 and by the late 1990s it was over £20,000. The apparently large increase is due not only to inflation and the greater demands placed on the council, but also to the fact that the village is some six to eight times larger now than it was in 1907. The precept is set by the council itself, which can set it at whatever level it wants but must observe a ‘duty of responsibility’. Throughout its history of over one hundred years the council has consisted of villagers who have tried to provide the best for their village—sometimes they have succeeded. As the chairman in the 1990s reported to an annual parish assembly, ‘The council tries to act as agents for the village and sees its role as a channel through which to focus the needs of the village as a whole.’ APPENDIX ‘….the loo was in a tiny shed at the end of the garden.’ The evacuation of London at the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 meant that a large group of schoolboys and their teachers found themselves in Buckden not as visitors entering only hotels or shops, but as long term residents intimately sharing family life in households at every level of village society. For some of the boys—from, admittedly, the comfortable suburb of Muswell Hill—there were aspects of their new life that came as a shock. The memory of them was still vivid over fifty years later for William Medhurst (Tollington School 1936-43) and Peter Allen (1936-42): William: ‘Water still came via a manual pump over the kitchen sink and whilst we did enjoy the benefit of electric lights, the loo was in a tiny shed at the end of the garden. This sanitary arrangement applied to most of the village in those days and night-soil buckets were emptied once a week by a council worker who made the rounds with a horse-drawn metal tank on wheels. Rumour had it that at the end of the week, usually every Thursday, this tank would be emptied into the river at Offord...’ Peter: ‘It was a passage back in time—to long stints pumping water , doing homework by oil lamps, farms where they still used horses, and the extraordinary quiet of the countryside at night. I doubt if any of us had been aware of villages only 60 miles from London without electricity , mains water or sewers. ‘But’, he added, ‘I am sure it was all an education in itself and an experience I should not want to have missed.’