Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

MEDICAL PRACTICE IN BUCKDEN: 1253 TO 1964 181 demonstrated in July 1886 when Ballard was sent for to Hardwick Lane to attend a seriously ill five year old, William Carter. By the time he got there the child had died. At the inquest held the next day at the Spread Eagle, Ballard gave it as his opinion that the boy had died of heat apoplexy from lying too long in the sun—it was an exceptionally hot month. In Huntingdon, Ballard threw himself into public affairs, becoming an alderman in 1879 and mayor in 1886; in addition he was the President of the Literary and Scientific Institution and active in both the church and politics (as a Conservative, much to the regret of the County News : ‘but the Doctor is—alas!— none the worse for it.’). He died at fifty-five from erysipelas. Most of Buckden’s leading families were represented at his funeral in St Mary’s Huntingdon: the Hunts County Guardian reporter assiduously noted such names as Marshall, Green, Linton, Cranfield and Roxby. He left a widow, a daughter and two sons; his eldest son appears to have started and then abandoned medical training. Despite being only briefly resident in Buckden. Donald McRitchie, MB, CM (Aberdeen), LRCS & LRM (Edinburgh) (1854—1926) may well have been the village’s longest-serving doctor. He was born in Inverness, the son of a chemist and druggist. Both he and his younger brother David assisted their father in his shop before going on to medical school. Apart from a spell as an assistant physician in Aberdeen, he seems to have come straight to Huntingdonshire, primarily to work at the county hospital. He shared his house in Huntingdon with his brother (who predeceased him by many years). His reputation was that of an extraordinarily kind man, known for adjusting his fee according to his patients’ circumstances (a box of matches to treat a tobacconist), and often ‘forgot’ to charge his poorest clients. He never married. His grave is in Huntingdon’s Primrose Lane Cemetery; his last request was to be buried next to his best friend. For six years, Frederick Thomas Good, MD, MRCSEng, LSA (c.1855-1894) was the senior partner in the Buckden practice of Good & Hillyer—although he never lived in the village at all. The son of a chartered accountant, he was born in Edinburgh of English parents. In 1878, he bought the practice of one of St Neots leading doctors, John Jewel Evans. He lived in Evans’s house until 1883, when he moved to 20 Market Square to take over another important practice, that of the hugely popular Dr Samuel Wright, who had just died. A clearly ambitious man, he was presumably unable to resist taking on the Buckden practice when Dr Ballard died in 1888—but by then he felt the need for a partner: W. H. Hillyer, who became Buckden’s first resident physician for nearly 20 years. The two doctors shared many interests outside their work. In 1890 they were both founder members of the St Neots Golf Club, and Fred Good—such a gregarious man was surely Fred to his contemporaries—was its first secretary. The club’s annual dinners were entertained with recitations by Dr Hillyer and songs from Dr Good's wife, Mary (who was also a golfer). He was also president and treasurer of the St Neots Rowing Club . There was widespread shock when he died at the age of only thirty-nine in January 1894, from complications following pneumonia. Mary and her family left the market square for Cambridge Street; she outlived her husband by over thirty years. Now in sole practice in Buckden, William Henry Hillyer, MD(Durham), LRCP, MRCS (1863- 1945) was a canoeist, golfer, actor, cyclist, footballer, tennis player, beekeeper, balneologist, parish councillor and Buckden’s doctor through most of the 1890s. He was the son of a French-born clergyman who had trained as a missionary—although by the time William was born he was the rector of Ashby in Suffolk. 1 William had first appeared in the 1890 Buckden directory as the junior partner in Good & Hillyer, based in ‘St George's Place’. This is not an address you will find on today’s village street map. The 1891 census shows that it was a separate household within the building that houses the George: the ‘St’ presumably echoes the fact that the inn had recently been known—not for the first time—as the St George & Dragon. The occupants are twenty-seven-year-old Dr Hillyer and two elderly ladies, a housekeeper and her sister. Donald McRitchie was still appearing under the Buckden entry in trade directories, but the two doctors do not seem to have ever gone into formal partnership. W. H. Hillyer soon moved to a large rented house on Perry Road. It had only just been erected by local builders the Page family (q.v.), and the doctor chose to call it ‘Ellerslie’ after his mother’s house in Balham. From here he embarked on a life of dizzying exuberance, throwing himself into almost every social and sporting event in the village, from running the Reading Rooms, acting in plays and winning prizes in flower shows to being on the village football and cricket teams (he was a cricketing all-rounder: in a typical performance playing for the bachelors in a Single v Married match in 1897, he made the highest score (37) and had a hand in the dismissal of five husbands). It is clear he did not suffer any of the usual financial hardships facing a young doctor at the start of his career. His surgery furniture included a Chippendale 1 It is not clear whether this was a change of vocation, or reflects the result of concerns about the state of the church in Suffolk.