Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

14 After being collected by enumerators the census schedules were copied into census enumerators’ books (CEBs). The CEBs were then sent to London where census clerks used them to compute various local and national statistics. Although the original schedules up to and including 1901 were destroyed, the CEBs were kept and were made public after 100 years. 6 June 1841 3 April 1881 30 March 1851 5 April 1891 7 April 1861 31 March 1901 2 April 1871 2 April 1911 Chadwick, Elizabeth , the Amateur British Golf Champion in 1966 and 1967 and Curtis Cup golfer, was known when living in Buckden under her married surname of Pook (Liz to her friends). Her abilities in sport were cruelly altered by an operation on her back which went wrong. The quotation ‘Misfortune is an occasion to demonstrate character’ most certainly applies to this coura- geous woman. For more information, see Chapter 16 of One Hundred years of Women’s Golf by Lewine Mair (1992). Chandler, William (c. 1808-1850) was a post office employee who lived in Church Lane (Lucks Lane). In the 1841 census he appears as a ‘Postboy’, the ‘boy’ being part of the job description rather than a description of William himself: he was thirty-one, married for nine years and had four children (at least one other had died in infancy). There were several types of postboy: some travelled, riding with the mail coach or driving a post-chaise, others - including William - worked out of a post office, delivering mail to their own and nearby villages (in William’s case with the handicap of not being very good at reading or writing). In 1849, alas, he was convicted of a rather pathetic fraud: ‘embezzling 2 pence, monies of H. M. Postmaster General, at Southoe’ - i.e., having been paid to frank two letters, he pocketed the money and franked them with old stamps. For this he was sentenced to three months’ hard labour. Other petty crimes followed and he ended up in the St Neots Union Workhouse, dying there in 1850. Left to bring up their children (six of them now), his widow, Catherine [née Middleton], spent the rest of her life in poverty, living in a stud and thatch cottage in Lucks Lane and working as a laundress. She died in October 1877, on the eve of what would have been her forty-fifth wedding anniversary. Although both she and William were buried in the churchyard, there is no record of their grave[s]. charities. Buckden has been blessed with a number of benefactors over the years, who bequeathed money, land or buildings to be used to improve life for the poor and the old. Among them are: William Burberry. Under his will of 1558, the rental income from property in Buckden and Stirtloe was to be distributed to poor families each Good Friday. (In time, part of the distribution took place in mid-December.) By 1825, it was no longer enough just to be poor: you had to be deserving and industrious. There was to be nothing for families where either or both parents were of a notorious bad character, i.e. ‘idle or drunken, continually quarrelling in the neighbourhood, or regularly absenting themselves from Divine Service.’ In 1850, a further condition excluded ‘any parents who permit their children on the Lord’s Day, and at other times, to wander about the village, and create disturbances, to the annoyance of the other inhabitants’. The Burberry endowment included fields bordering the western side of the Great North Road, a hundred yards or so south of its junction with Perry Road. They are now known the Windmill Allotments (see under police trap for a less charitable use to which they were once put). Susannah Travill. In her will of 1692, she left £100 to be invested, the income to be given to the poor widows of Buckden. James South (1768-1834) was a half-pay infantry captain whose will provided funds for the building, furnishing and maintenance of almshouses for ‘four of the oldest poor women and four of the oldest poor men born in the parish of Buckden’. Edward Maltby (1770-1859) left £100 to the poor of Buckden. This may have come as a surprise to them: by the time he died, he hadn’t been in the village for nearly thirty years, having in the interim become a bishop (first of Chichester and then of Durham). They probably remembered him - if they remembered him at all - as someone given to preaching very long sermons. These bequests, together with The Dole Charity and the Allotments for Reeveman, Constable and Hayward , are now known as the Buckden Parochial Charities. For a detailed description of how they are administered, see Chapter 12 . Other benefactors had a particular concern for education. They included: Robert Rayment, who died in 1661 and in his will instructed his heirs to arrange for an annual payment of £10 to be made to the vicar and churchwardens to enable them to employ someone to teach the children of poor families. John Green (1706-1779), Bishop of Lincoln, who in his will gave the vicar and churchwardens £200, the dividends or interests of which were to be paid annually to the parish schoolmaster. According to the Charities Report of 1836, he had already donated a house and garden for the schoolmaster’s use. John Linton (1792-1877), of Stirtloe, who in the early 1850s enlarged the schoolhouse at his own expense. Miss Mason, who left the endowed boys £1. 9s. a year in her will. George Cornelius Swan, sometimes S wann (1716-1788) gave the parish £80, which enabled it to erect a small workhouse in Mill Road. For more details, see parish workhouse . For further details, see Chapter 12 ‘Buckden Parochial Charities’ and Chapter 13 : ‘Education in Buckden’. Charles Court, High Street, is a late 20thC courtyard development in the grounds of Coneygarths (q.v.) . Chequers, the. There can be no doubt that Buckden once had an inn of this name - it and its landlord, Thomas Smith, are both mentioned in the London Gazette for the 26 October 1686 - but knowing where it stood is another matter. Cherry, Edward (1842-1927) was the great- grandfather of Ann Brown, wife of Frederick Brown, popular Buckden postman and smallholder. Mr Cherry’s retirement, due to rheumatism, at the age of 83 from his job as roadman after 56 years’ service was reported in the local press. He experienced the end of road tolls and considered that the road surfaces deteriorated afterwards because people did not have to pay. He and his wife Mary had at least nine children, one of whom, William Henry, was also a roadman. cherry orchards were once a feature of Buckden. Eighteenth century records show Thomas Ford, baker,