Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

WHERE TO GET A DRINK 188 whom only six identify themselves as selling from premises we would think of as ‘public houses’ today. The number declined as the century went on, but over the same period beers became much more potent—which would have been something to bear in mind had you embarked on a pub crawl round all the licensed premises in late Victorian Buckden. You would have needed to make fewer stops, but the end effect would have been the same! However much you might like to, it is no longer possible to reproduce that Victorian night out (and morning after): Buckden now has only six licensed premises: two off-licences, one pub, two hotels and the village club in the community centre. But a walk round the village can still give us an idea of just how easy it was to get a drink in, say, 1881. A beer lover’s circumambulation Until it was demolished in January 2010 the first building on your left as you entered the village from the roundabout was a cottage that had once been a public house called the Windmill [MapRef 20] . Although Buckden’s last working windmill [MapRef 16] was not far away on the other side of the Great North Road, it is thought the pub itself may have stood on the site of an earlier mill (an 1839 directory lists Richard Barton of the High Street as both a beerseller and a miller). In 1881, the Windmill’s landlord was Arthur Cherry, beer seller and agricultural labourer. The Windmill was a very small house, but it was not unusual for the landlord of even a quite large pub to have two (or more) jobs, and for his wife—if he was married—to be the one who sold the beer and ejected the drunks. By 1891, Mr Cherry and his family had moved across the Great North Road to a market garden, and the pub was in the hands of William White, Jnr, publican and posting-master. 1 By the turn of the century, Mr White, too, had moved: to Church Street, to become a cab proprietor (and later a domestic coachman), and the Windmill’s landlord was market gardener Edgar Cook. As you walk on up the High Street today, the next house you pass was once the home of the village policeman: possibly a mixed blessing for the licensees of the Windmill. Barely a hundred yards further on, you find yourself at the Vine [MapRef 21]. In 1881, it may already have announced itself by the heavy aroma of malt and hops, for this was an inn which had its own brewery, as the landlord in 1881 acknowledged, describing himself as a brewer and publican. He was Robert Crisp King, a comparatively recent arrival who would still be there in twenty years time, the last nineteenth century landlord. 2 Today there is a large blank and reinforced wall facing the road, but if you go into the car park you will see the doors and windows that may show where the brewery was. At one time, there was apparently yet another alehouse no more than a minute’s walk from the Vine, standing just beyond the forge and goosing shed [MapRef 22] . But by 1881, its name—if it ever had one—had disappeared and instead of a drink you would have found only Miss Sarah Mason’s small school for girls and Buckden’s sub-post-office. Today these, too, have gone, destroyed in the twentieth century when a new, south-facing façade was added to the next, and still thriving, licensed premises, the George Hotel [MapRef 23] . In 1881, you would have entered the George Inn (as it was known in 1881) by an impressively canopied door giving straight on to the pavement. At this time, it was one of the tied houses owned by Huntingdon Brewery, the profits from which helped maintain the Marshall family in the comfortable surroundings of Buckden Towers on the other side of the High Street. It was by then no longer the mighty coaching inn it had been until the arrival of the railways thirty years before, but already the increasingly popular pastime of long-distance cycling was beginning to restore its fortunes, a process which would be completed in the early twentieth century by the advent of the motor car. (Buckden was home to an AA patrol scout by 1911). Round the corner from the George was the Old Tap [MapRef 15] (now part of the Anne Furbank dress shop), described in 1925 as ‘the rooms used by generations of post boys, the old settles, fireplaces and adjoining stables marking the scene of former activity when the call came to ride north and south post haste.’ 3 It was also said to have been frequented by the ostlers and other hotel staff in their off-duty or waiting time—and the preferred drinking place of highwaymen who could listen in to find out who was staying at the George worth holding up. There seems to be no evidence that any robbery ever took place which was initiated in the Old Tap. The stables at the back of the George have been replaced with flats, but they once showed some very clever brickwork that would still have been visible in 1881: a rounded corner, to prevent damage to building and coaches, which gradually became square as it rose to the feed storage loft. 1 A posting-master kept horses and traps or other light vehicles for hire; the hirer could return them or leave them at another inn or stable in the same ‘posting line’ 2 The last landlord of the twentieth century was Hugh Grundy, former drummer of the sixties’ rock band, The Zombies 3 Richardson and Eberlein The English Inn Past & Present Batsford