Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

MEDICAL PRACTICE IN BUCKDEN: 1253 TO 1964 183 when Dr Williams died, and was highly regarded by his colleagues. His mother was also living in Huntingdon at the time (his father had died in Melbourne in 1915). When he moved to Buckden, he lived, like some of his predecessors, in Sherwood House, but was allowed by Mrs Williams to take over her late husband’s surgery in a cottage at Beech Lawn. A resident recalled his marked Australian accent (though wrongly ascribing it to his successor, Dr Davie, a Scot). After Dr Williams and his De Dion Bouton, his patients were surprised to find their new doctor doing his rounds on horseback, but there was nothing old-fashioned about him: his favoured off-duty transport was a motorbike, ridden in a somewhat happy-go-lucky way. He claimed to be protected from accidents by ‘an automatic sense of danger’; nonetheless, the bike may have lost him his fiancée. She was called Nancy and came from Godmanchester; The Times announced their engagement in May 1924. Some months later, it announced that she was now engaged to an officer of the Royal Tank Corps. It’s not clear why the engagement was broken off, but perhaps an incident involving the motorbike came between them. In June 1924, Robert was brought before the Huntingdon magistrates charged with driving to the danger of the public by disobeying a traffic policeman’s order to stop. He seemed a bit confused about why he had done so: he thought (he said) that the officer was waving to him, not signalling. Or was it that he had been rushing to catch a shop before it closed? Anyway, what would have been the point in stopping? If the police wanted him, they all knew where to find him. The bench was amused but unconvinced and fined him £2. Nancy’s family, leading lights in the Huntingdonshire legal profession, were probably not amused; perhaps doubts began to creep in … By the time Nancy married her soldier in 1926, Robert had left Buckden for London. Then from 1929 until his retirement in 1969 he practised in Bishop’s Stortford, where he was held in the highest regard by his patients despite his habit of keeping ferrets in his surgery. In 1966 he wrote to the British Medical Journal to explain how he had undertaken over 15,000 successful tonsillectomies in his career (many of them carried out on the patient‘s own kitchen table). He refrained from mentioning that this figure included his taking out his own tonsils with the aid of a mirror! A photograph of him in late middle age shows a robust man with a mischievous face. He had a dry wit: at an inquest on one of his Buckden patients who had died from a fall, he said that the man’s symptoms were consistent with concussion. Asked to explain on what he based this opinion, he replied: ‘On personal experience.’ A street called Robert Wallace Close suggests that the memory of this engaging man lives on in Bishop’s Stortford. Robert Elliott Davie, MC, MB, ChB (Glasgow) (dates unknown) succeeded Robert Wallace in 1925. He had served with the 8th Battalion Scottish Rifles during the First World War, winning his Military Cross for conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty under heavy fire while ensuring that wounded members of his patrol were able to withdraw to safety. He is said to have started his practice from a cottage in Church Street. Church Street is certainly his address in the 1926 telephone directory, although in 1925 he too had been living and working in Sherwood House. From 1927 until he left in 1930, he rented Oak Lawn in Mill Street as his home and surgery. The surgery was very small. The consulting room contained a desk, couch, cupboard and a bench. In the dispensary there was a pestle and mortar for the grinding of medicines. He was a much-liked doctor, known for his willingness to turn out at any time of day or night to treat rich and poor alike. When he retired in January 1930, his neighbour Archdeacon Knowles said he would miss the sound of car horn and brakes as the doctor shot out of his drive on two wheels in the early hours of the morning. The archdeacon’s tribute came at the annual general meeting of the Buckden and District Branch of the British Legion; Dr Davie had been a popular and respected chairman and a grateful branch presented him with the works of Rudyard Kipling. In 1941, Gordon Fitt of Buckden, serving with the forces ‘somewhere in the east’, wrote to his parents to say that he was in hospital but they were not to worry because ‘to his great surprise and delight’ he was in the capable hands of Dr Davie. From an entry in the British Medical Journal for 21 December 1940, it appears that the doctor himself had been wounded the previous year, having re-enlisted and been posted to the Royal Army Medical Corps After Dr Davie came Eric James Jolly, MB, ChB (Aberdeen) (1899-1968) , yet another of Buckden’s Scottish doctors, born in Dundee, the fifth of eight children of a Customs & Excise official. He served with the Gordon Highlanders in the First World War, reaching the rank of Second Lieutenant before being gassed and wounded in France. He qualified in 1923 and four years later joined Dr Davie’s practice, buying it from him in the early 1930s and remaining Buckden’s doctor until his retirement in 1964. He was fondly remembered as a ‘real character’, a down-to-earth man who while enjoying a pint and a game of darts at the George would offer to flatten a ganglion (‘Just lay your hand on the bar’) or pop round to your house later