Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

12 wisely, on (see Hodgson ). As the 18thC progressed, the term ‘canal’ was also applied by designers such as ‘Capability’ Brown to the long narrow artificial lakes they incorporated into their landscapes. Mr Edleston would have been well aware of this, and quite likely to have pointed out to the surveyor that the Towers’ lake had been informally called a canal since at least 1820: with the result that the 1926 OS plan identified it as “The Canal(Fish Pond)". Thus an antiquarian’s desire for precision may have led people to think the Towers’ garden canal and the equally rectilinear stretch of water in the Valley were actually the remains of an abandoned commercial waterway. (A cottage terrace in Hunts End is said to have been built to house canal engineers, and hence has become known as Navigation Cottages. It may be it was actually built for the navvies (navigators or diggers) working on the railway , although if so, it was remarkably soundly built for men who were essentially itinerant labourers. The terrace has also appeared in at least one census as Vine Cottages.) Canning, Percy World Men’s Conker Champion 1992 renowned for his prize-winning vegetables and home- made wines. Captain Green’s golden eagle achieved international fame when the following report from The Naturalist for May 1837 was reprinted throughout the 19thC in several newspapers, magazines and annual reviews – abroad as well as in Britain: ‘Fierce and wild as the golden eagle generally is instances have occurred in which it has been thoroughly tamed. Captain Green of [Coneygarths in] Buckden in Huntingdonshire has now in his possession a splendid bird of this description which he has himself trained to take hares and rabbits.’ The Captain also owned a transvestite chicken – see under cross-dressing . Carters Boatyard, Mill Road, situated between the Ouse and Mill Road on the bend before the Offord and Buckden flour mills bridge, was founded by Brian Carter, who bought the land in 1949 and developed it as a boatyard and residential caravan site. In the early 2000s, some time after it had passed out of Mr Carter’s ownership, developers submitted a number of proposals for more intensive use of the land for (mainly) second homes. Cartwright family. George Cartwright (1787-1850), keeper of coaching inns, came to Buckden from Eaton Ford to take over the Spread Eagle. With him came his family, including his wife Elizabeth Henson (1785 - 1856), the daughter of a Yaxley blacksmith, whom he had married in 1808. A sociable man, he soon became a familiar figure in Buckden. As well as being an innkeeper, he was also a minor national celebrity, famous as the skilled and unusually polite coachman of the York express. According to the sporting journalist ‘Peter Pry’, he was ‘bony, without fat, healthy-looking, evidently abstemious; moreover not too tall, but just the proper size to sit gracefully.’ He was considerate of his horses and his ‘personal equipment’ was ‘modest, respectable, in good taste’. He could also be sharp-witted. Driving back from Welwyn one night in 1834, he overheard a passenger reading out the description of John Ellis, a young clerk employed by the Cubitt brothers, London’s leading builders. He had absconded with the firm’s weekly wage payout: £600 in sovereigns and new half-sovereigns (over one thousand gold coins – ‘It was certainly not a convenient parcel for a man to carry along the road who was walking,’ said a witness). While enjoying breakfast in the Spread Eagle, Cartwright noticed his wife serving a man matching Ellis’s description, who paid for a glass of brandy and water with a new half-sovereign. He immediately took him into custody and with the help of one of his neighbours, farmer and churchwarden Thomas Bowyer of Jessamine House (q.v.) and conveyed him before the Huntingdon JPs. They ordered Mr Bowyer to take him to London, to Bow Street Magistrates' Court. The following month both Bowyer and Cartwright had to give evidence at Ellis’s trial at the Old Bailey. He was convicted, but received only three months’ confinement thanks to pleas for mercy both from his employers and from the jury, who all agreed that he had acted while driven temporarily mad by the death of his baby son. Presumably George Cartwright’s prompt action earned him a share of the £50 reward offered by Cubitts. Sometimes, however, he was less perceptive. In 1833, while surveyor of the highways for the parish, he allowed a Buckden labourer, Samuel Plumb, to con him out of 7s. by pretending to be destitute. ‘Whereas’ – according to the case presented to the Huntingdonshire Quarter Sessions – ‘Plumb had just received 1s. 6d. from Robert Circuit [Sirkett] for work done and he could procure more work to keep his family and himself.’ In October 1836, the Cartwrights moved on to the George, a big step up but not a well-timed one: the railways were coming. In his eulogy of Cartwright, Peter Pry wrote that towards the end of his life his excellent qualities ‘had gained their reward; he was well-to-do, lived regularly, [and] had a happy family’. This was an incomplete summing-up. His last years were not without tragedy. In 1839, the Cartwrights’ younger daughter, Mary Anne, had married a London ‘man’s mercer’, Henry May. In 1847, aged only 28, she died suddenly while in Buckden. She is buried in St Mary’s churchyard. Cartwright himself died in February 1850 from ‘suppression of urine’ (thought by the Victorians to be associated with corpulency, so he may have lost the elegant figure admired by Peter Pry). He had lived long enough to see the unstoppable spread of the railway bringing an end to his kind and a temporary end to Buckden’s prosperity. His widow took over the George and the farm. This was not an unusual occurrence: women, particularly widows, were often active in the village’s commercial life. Nineteenth century trade directories list not only Elizabeth Cartwright but also several others who succeeded husbands or other male relatives, among them Martha Perrin (blacksmith and wheelwright), Jane Faulkner (pork butcher), Charlotte Smith (beer seller), Elizabeth Clack (builder) and Mary Riseley (carrier). The Cartwrights’ eldest daughter, Elizabeth Henson Cartwright (b. 1816), became a teacher, specialising in music; she is shown in the 1864 Post Office Directory as having a ladies’ boarding and day school in the High Street. Like most such schools, it also took in small boys. One of these was six-year old J. R. Langley, the sub-postmaster’s son; looking back sixty years later, he remembered her as an ‘acid spinster from 40 to 50 years of age’ who ‘instructed me in the usual approved branches of knowledge’. The ‘instruction’ consisted chiefly of his having to learn Mrs Sarah Trimmer’s Catechism by heart.* Despite this