Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

10 working life was very practical one. The son of a watchmaker, he was apprenticed to a basket–maker and used his skill to develop a considerable business which would now be described as vertically integrated. He bought osier beds and organised the necessary harvesting. The osiers were prepared and used for basket-making in Brown's Yard in the village and also despatched for use elsewhere in the country. His son Alfred, who added market-gardening to the family’s occupations, was the grandfather of Frederick (Freddy) Brown, once Buckden’s postman and for many years noted for his gooseberries. Bruce, Robert (1810-1883) , the son of Hardwick labourer Thomas and Ann (née Virgin), was an agricultural labourer and shepherd who became a Wesleyan preacher. As a young man, he was something of a serial wedding witness, attending the weddings of: Thomas Pettit and Sarah Clark on 28 September 1829 Joseph Virgin and Martha Beresford on 6 January 1830 Joseph Russell Sallaway and Mary Audley on 18 October 1830 (the other witness was Rebecca Berrill, his own bride of 3 days before) and his brother Thomas to Sarah Wright on December 22 1836 He may have been in demand because he could write his name. By 1861, he and Rebecca had left Buckden for Eaton Socon. Buckden by-pass. There is no Buckden by-pass, only a four-lane stretch of highway opened in October 1962, which diverts the A1 away from the High Street and splits the village. Buckden Gas & Coke Company is known to have existed in the late 19thC, one of many such small town enterprises. Its chairman was Samuel Day, a St Neots attorney. At an Extraordinary General Meeting held in the Buckden postmaster’s office on Friday, 19 December 1873, it was resolved that the company should forthwith be voluntarily wound up. Unlike some, it does not seem to have produced its own gas, at least not for general use: a local historian has suggested its primary purpose may have been to provide a supply for The Towers. Buckden Hosiery Co. Ltd, 168 Regent Street, London, was the company behind the Buckden Hosiery Mill. See under stocking factory. Buckden in the 14th century: names, numbers and tags. One of the frustrations of finding out about the more distant past is that there is so little documented evidence of what life was like for the common people. However, Buckden is lucky in having two sets of names of people who paid their taxes. Moreover the two sets are from only five years apart, so that it is not unreasonable to assume that a name on one roll is the same person as one of the same name on the other. See Chapter 20 for a detailed examination of these lists, showing who paid what; how such factors as bad weather, enclosures and disease affected the size of people’s tax bills; and how people’s names were derived: for example, from occupations (Webster, Clerk) nicknames (John le Long) places local (Attwell = by the well)) and more distant (Chatteris), and Christian names (Saunder from Alexander). Some may even have arisen by mistake: wrongly copied between documents or just misheard – something that occurred again from 1841 onwards, when the national census enumerators came up against unfamiliar accents or people who had no idea how to spell their own name. Buckden, Moses (b. 1857) , master of the Grimsby fishing smack ‘Fairy’, owed his name to the fact that as an infant he was discovered abandoned in a ditch at Buckden. He was raised in the St Neots Union Workhouse and when old enough was apprenticed aboard a Grimsby fishing vessel. (Workhouse boys were considered to make reliable fishing apprentices, because Union guardians insisted that they were given the chance to experience life at sea before agreeing to sign on.) The 1871 census records him as a cook aboard an unnamed vessel working the Dogger Bank. By 1881, he was married (to Mary Jane Hudson, in 1879) and living next door to his in-laws in Grimsby. ‘By energy and perseverance,’ said the St. Neots Chronicle of Moses in October 1884, ‘he has worked his way up, and is now a skipper’. (He had in fact achieved this in 1880, aged only 23.) By 1886, he had become not only the skipper but also the owner of a larger vessel, the ‘Queen Victoria’. Sadly, The Times for 21 March 1894 records an adjudication of bankruptcy against his name; the 1901 census records him as a fisherman not at sea and with no indication of whether he had regained the rank of captain or even mate. Moses and Mary Jane had at least six children, one of whom died in infancy. Another boy from St Neots, James Freeman, was the cook on another vessel in the same fleet as Moses. He was not, however, from the workhouse; his unusual choice of career may have been inspired by his having grown up in the yard behind the town's leading fishmonger. Buckden Palace [MapRef 26]: see The Towers. Buckden Roundabout is a monthly parish journal started in 1979 by Buckden Churches Together. Its history is described in Chapter 15 . Buckden Station was open from 1866 to 1959 – but in the parish of Brampton, not Buckden. Almost all physical trace of its existence now lies beneath the (now closed) household waste recycling centre and a derelict fuel depot; they in their turn are likely to be obliterated by a new relief road. See Chapter 19 for the full story of Buckden and the railway. Budge, Miss Mabel Beauford. A Brampton rector’s eldest daughter (and housekeeper), she moved to Buckden and became a weathergirl, supplying the Hunts Post with regular meteorological reports during the 1920s. She lived in ‘The Cottage’ in old Lucks Lane, and threw open her garden during Feast Week (but not to unaccompanied children). Bugden is one of at least 15 known spellings of the village name. It is still used in speech by Huntingdonshire people (not necessarily only Bugden residents). Burberry Homes, Church Street [MapRef 7], are almshouses, originally provided for by the Charity of William Burberry for Almshouses – see under charities. Burberry Road [MapRef 1], a modern residential street that leads to the village's community centre and playing field, is also named for Buckden’s 16thC benefactor William Burberry.