Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

WHERE TO GET A DRINK 190 Street: one, the Red Lion, was opposite the end of Silver Street. The Tiger may have been next door, whether they both sold beer at the same time I do not know. 1 The Old Square and Compass is listed in an 1847 directory against the name of Daniel Mann; Mann, a jobber and victualler, lived in Church Street, as the census four years later confirms. Turn left and then right at the green called Hunts End. To the west of the green was the Black Horse. [MapRef 36] . Now a private house, it has been much altered and restored. But underneath the present rendering is the timber and plaster of an old ale-house. It had closed by 1881. Nearby on Mill Road was a later Falcon. It appears in the 1881 census return, but for some reason its entry has been almost obliterated, as has the word ‘publican’ in its occupant’s job description. Possibly it had lost its licence. If so, this was only temporary, for it finally closed in 1995. Further along still there was once an alehouse called the Quart Pot, and a short step into what is now Park Road, and probably near Swan End, was the Swan. Neither are there today. Nor were they there in 1881, leaving Victorian pub-crawlers facing a dilemma: did they now, in the interests of completion, seek their next drink a mile down Mill Road at the (Three) Mill Bills, Buckden’s furthest-flung pub (landlord: William Cornish, an employee of the nearby Bowyer and Priestley Mill)? 2 The choice is perhaps easier today: the Mill Bills is no more, nor is the Anchor, another pub known to have been somewhere on Mill Road. Better, then, to go in the other direction down Church Road and turn in to Lucks Lane, at the far end of which is a thatched cottage, that still bears the name it once had as a drinking house. It is the Bee Hive [MapRef 38] . Although it was once also a brewery, it had become another of Huntingdon Brewery’s tied houses by 1881, and customers would have been served the company beer, not home-brew, by the occupants, agricultural labourer Frederick Lymage and his family. The Bee Hive would have been the culmination of your Victorian forerunners’ quest for the best pint in Buckden: their ninth port of call—tenth if they had decided to include the Mill Bills, perhaps even eleventh if they had nipped round the back of the Falcon and wheedled a discreet half-pint out of the apparently suspended licensee. They would probably have been tempted to continue along Lucks Lane to see what Stirtloe might offer. 3 You, on the other hand, should turn right out of Lucks Lane and walk up Mayfield to the High Street. You will find yourself back where you began: opposite where the Windmill pub stood, and within sight of the Vine, the George and the Lion. It is a measure of how drinking habits have changed since 1881 that for all the ground you have covered today, your pub-crawl was effectively over in the first twenty minutes in three buildings within a few yards of each other. What were they like? The majority of the premises I have mentioned were not at all like our modern understanding of a public house. They were indeed private houses, where the head of household had paid £4.00 for a licence and installed a barrel in the parlour or kitchen. Their patrons would often have been friends and neighbours, sitting against the walls on rough benches round a sanded or sawdusted floor, their grumbling conversations occasionally interrupted by the arrival and departure of a small child staggering under the weight of a large jug to be filled to see Father through his evening at home. Some of the licensees would have brewed their own beer, others would have been in debt to a brewer. In addition to the Marshalls’ Huntingdon Brewery, other outside brewers who have owned or leased public houses in Buckden over the years include Day & Son of St Neots, Jenkins & Jones of Huntingdon, Charles Wells of Bedford, and Greene, King & Sons of Bury St Edmunds. There were also two brewing families within the village, the Wallers and the Bowyers, the latter also millers and maltsters (i.e., they controlled the brewing process from grain to barrel). 4 The small family beer-houses—and there are still more whose whereabouts remain a mystery: where were the Saracen's Head and the Hand Bells?—probably did very well when there was a public holiday, and particularly during the annual feast weeks in July. One of the Huntingdon papers near the end of the nineteenth century reported that the week at Buckden had passed off quietly, the inference being that at in some years there was a little too much liveliness—as happened in July 1900 when one well-known village character entertained a feast week crowd by taking off all his clothes ‘except his shoes and stockings’! Works consulted include Osborne, Keith The Brewers of Cromwell’s County , 1999 1 Perhaps they were the same place, having to be re-named after an incompetent itinerant sign-painter did his worst. Such things happened. 2 Mill bills were the tools used for dressing millstones. 3 Nothing. The hamlet was ‘dry’. 4 Since July 2009, Buckden has, for the first time in many years, a commercial brewery within its parish boundary. The Draycott Brewery is based in Mill Road, at Low Farm [MapRef 41] , and produces Buckden Bronze Bitter, a CAMRA-accredited real ale in a bottle.