Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

MEDICAL PRACTICE IN BUCKDEN: 1253 TO 1964 180 years surgeon of this parish’, but unfortunately does not say exactly how many. He was certainly here by the time of his marriage in January 1822. He is listed in trade directories for 1830 and 1839, but does not appear in the 1841 census, although this does show his wife Jane and daughter Ellen Bennett Waller living in the High Street. Jane is said to be living on independent means—a description more usually given to an unmarried woman or a widow than to a wife, and one that suggests that Henry was on a prolonged absence from home rather than simply being missed off the census by mistake (he does not, in fact, seem to have been recorded anywhere in Britain in 1841, although Waller is so frequently mis-transcribed as Walker or Walter it is impossible to be certain) . Such an absence could also explain why young Dr George Woolley, Henry’s partner and successor, was not living with the family as might have been expected, but lodging further down the High Street—it would have been improper for him to remain in the Waller household in the absence of the husband and father. However, Henry was back in Buckden to witness his daughter’s marriage in 1844, and seems to have remained here until at least 1854, the year in which his wife died. By 1861 he had retired and was lodging with his unmarried sisters in Chelsea; ten years later he was living in Hemingford Grey. He died of bronchitis, at the age of 85, at Northampton’s General Lunatic Asylum. His daughter’s marriage was to William Fox, a Godmanchester farmer and threshing-machine contractor 20 years her elder. Despite a spell in the Isle of Wight’s Royal National Hospital for Consumption, she lived to be 79, dying in 1902. George Newnham Woolley (1815-1874) was himself the son of a surgeon. Born in Petersfield, Hampshire, he was 15 when he was baptised, together with his two sisters and his four brothers. This crowded ceremony took place not in Hampshire but at fashionable St Luke’s, Chelsea, the family having by this time moved to London. The 1841 Buckden Census finds him as a newly qualified surgeon, living in the High Street (probably in Sherwood House). However this seems to have been temporary job, possibly as a locum for the absent resident surgeon, Henry Waller. Woolley spent the next few years abroad, first in Sierra Leone and then in the West Indies, where he married the Irish-born Henrietta Charlotte Blennerhasset. Their first child was born in Kensington, in 1845 (possibly at the home of Dr Woolley, senior, who had a practice in the area). The family had settled in Buckden by 1847 when their son, George John Blennerhasset Woolley, was born. They are in the censuses for both 1851 and 1861, their home and surgery almost certainly being in one of the houses between Coneygarths and York Yard—most probably York House (q.v.). Dr Woolley also appears in trade directories for 1852, 1854 and 1862 . At some time during 1860s, however, the Woolleys’ marriage seems to have broken up. In early 1864 George resigned from his post as the medical officer for District 6 of the St Neots Union, and was replaced by ‘Dr Ballard of Buckden’, which suggests that George had already given up his village practice. He then moved to the large Lincolnshire village of Bardney to become one of its GPs—but he lived in lodgings run by a sailor's wife, and his family did not join him. In December 1866, there were the beginnings of a national panic when it was rumoured that the Black Death had returned to England and was raging through Bardney. George and a colleague brought the outbreak under control and reported to the medical journal The Lancet that it was actually epidemic cerebro-spinal meningitis. It was deeply unpleasant, as George found out to his cost, but was not about to lay waste to the kingdom. In his last years he suffered from heart disease. He was still in Bardney when he died in 1874, and was buried there. Mrs Woolley had moved to Hunts End and stayed on there, alone, until her death in 1883 at the age of sixty-four. She shares a grave in Buckden cemetery with her daughter Charlotte Mesmey, who appears to have married a soldier and died in Sarawak—the headstone has unfortunately sunk into the ground, obscuring this part of the inscription. One of the Woolley children followed (almost) in his father’s footsteps by becoming a dentist. Dr Woolley’s successor, William Waddell Ballard, MD(St Andrews) MRCSEng., LSALon. (1833—1888) , was Buckden’s surgeon for nearly twenty-five years, although he lived in the village for only five of them. He was born in Folkestone, and trained and practised as an apothecary (chemist and druggist). After taking his degree he worked with Sir William Jenner, one of the leading physicians of the day. Having bought George Woolley’s Buckden practice early in 1864, he got married in June of the same year. His bride was Helen Baker, the daughter of a Kentish brewer. His two eldest children were born in Buckden in 1865 and 1868. Although he is listed in an 1869 Buckden directory, he was already in the process of moving his family to Huntingdon (28 High Street, now a solicitors’ office), having decided, said the Hunts County News , that village life could not content him for long. At some point after 1876 he shared his Buckden practice with a young Scots doctor, Donald McRitchie. But apart from a brief sojourn in Buckden, McRitchie also lived in Huntingdon, only four doors along from the Ballards. Between 1871 and 1888, therefore, Buckden appears to have had no resident doctor. The disadvantages of this were