Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

WHERE TO GET A DRINK 189 The White Horse Silver Street L R Button The Black Horse Hunts End Across the road from the George is the Lion [MapRef 24] (which like the Vine, had its own brew- room, the scene of a tragic accident in 1884—see under Ilsley in the A to Z Section). The oldest Buckden hostelry still in use it has been variously known as the Lion and Lamb, the White Lion, the Lion and Flag, Ye Olde Lion and the Lion Brewery. The licensee in 1881 was Henry Thomson, who described himself as a publican and engineer, the latter being a trade he shared with most of the men in his family. 1 He was the second husband of the remarkable Eliza (née Puttman), who was associated with the management of the Lion for nearly forty years. She was the wife of one licensee, Joseph Ilsley; the licensee in her own right after Joseph’s early death; the wife of Henry Thomson, and the mother-in-law of Henry’s successor, Augustus Shelton Thackray, brewer and ‘wine & spirit & hop merchant’. When in about 1902 Thackray left the Lion to manage his brother’s building company in Huntingdon, Eliza went with him and turned his family home into Ilsley House, a boarding establishment for bank clerks! Even then she retained an interest in the affairs of the Lion (but not its brewery) as it was now owned by her other son-law, Alfred H. Boutell. Crossing carefully back to the other side of the High Street—modern traffic having replaced the 1881 hazards of runaway horses, packs of speeding penny-farthings and the dung from passing dairy cattle on their way to and from milking—your next destination is the former Spread Eagle Inn [MapRef 33], a comparatively long walk. On the way you will pass Coneygarths [MapRef 27] , now a private house, but believed to have once—long before 1881—been called the Mitre, an appropriate name for an inn so close to the bishop’s palace. The Spread was a small eighteenth-century coaching inn, with a courtyard, stabling and an older cross-wing. In the inn’s heyday, this wing housed the ostlers and other staff, but in later years it was occupied by a sequence of small businesses. In 1881, the landlord was William Worley, a drainer as well as a publican, and if your visit had been in January, you might have been lucky enough to find him celebrating his victory (or possibly his son’s: they had the same name) in a St Neots skating championship. Just to the north of the Spread, the Old Falcon once stood, a humbler public house than the Spread (whose ostlers may have felt more at home drinking there). It closed in the 1840s, its buildings being used as shops and cottages until replaced by the present row of 1960s housing. In 1881, therefore, you would have had a longish walk to the Crown [MapRef 17] , the next public house and the last on the Great North Road before it left the village. It now stands on the other side of the A1, visible as a dark red brick building only to be reached from the High Street by a pedestrian underpass. You may wish to spare yourself the journey: it too is now a private house. The landlord in 1881, Darrington Clarke, also had a secondary business as a thatcher, employing one man, Henry Hart, who ‘lived in’. (A previous landlord had been a draper and master tailor.) Its situation would at first suggest it was the local for the residents of the nearby hamlet of Hardwick, but given that it stood right beside the entrance to Park Farm, the home of the man who employed most of them, they may have preferred to retire to the Spread Eagle or the White Horse [MapRef 46] . This latter beer-house was much easier to reach from Hardwick in 1881 than it is today: you had only to stroll across the Great North Road and down Silver Street, originally the (Hoo) Baulk, a green lane running from Park Farm to Church Street. The junction of Silver Street and Church Street was then the focus of a number of businesses and shops: a bakery, a shoe and boot maker, a corn chandler, a slaughterhouse and a dairy to name a few. Here too was the White Horse, another house owned by the Huntingdon Brewery. Beside it was a forge, and most of the licensees combined the roles of landlord and smith. In 1881, it was run by John Jeakins, who had taken over both forge and pub from his father; by the time he died in 1890, the Jeakinses had been at the White Horse for forty years. Both forge and pub are now closed, but there is still the ring in the forge wall to which waiting customers tied their horses. These horses were likely to have been from local farms, rather than the coach or riding horses of the gentry. The smith probably also repaired implements. Earlier in the nineteenth century, there had been other public houses on this stretch of Church 1 See under Thomsons in the A to Z Section