Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

15 enjoying the fruits of one in Silver Street (1763), and in 1780 a cherry orchard was among several pieces of land of which Mary Russell Burder became tenant. There are still individual cherries trees in the parish, but the orchards do not seem to have survived into the 20thC. chickens and ducks seem to have thrived in Buckden at the end of the 19thC. The St. Neots Advertiser carried more small ads from Buckden than from any other village, offering eggs at so much a sitting from prize-winning White Leghorn and Buff-Orpington hens, and Aylesbury and Minorca ducks. Among the advertisers were miller Joseph Lantaff, one of the two Robert Kings (both brewers by trade), and Sidney Green and Miss Louisa Green of the High Street. The latter were members of the gentry, as was Alfred Hallett Esq, whose effects - auctioned when he left the village in 1898 - included ‘Six Capital Poultry Houses with Runs’ together with 150 prize fowl, a large number of egg-boxes, a grand piano and a Cakebread’s Patent Egg Preserver. Allen Cope (q.v.) continued Buckden’s poultry tradition well into the 20thC with the large flock he kept at Hunts End; a later (1940s/1950s) poultry farmer was Mrs H. M.(Peggy) Rogers of Kenways, Lucks Lane. Children’s Home, Silver Street. This small home was built and run by Huntingdonshire County Council on a site just north of the old White Horse forge. One of those brought up there has fond memories of both the home and the kindness of Buckden people. In 1974, the Local Government Act 1972 led to the County Council becoming part of an enlarged Cambridgeshire. Two years later the home was closed, and is now a private house. A row of cottages previously stood on the site; as late as the 1940s, their occupants took their Christmas birds to the bakery across the road to be roasted. circuses used to visit Buckden from time to time, sometimes pitching in a field behind the Spread Eagle. A small one arrived in the village on 10 July 1899 (probably to coincide with Feast Week). Short-staffed, it sought to recruit two handymen to help with ring work and clowning. Sadly, history does not record whether any resident took this opportunity to pack their trunk and say hello to the circus. Cobbett, William (1763-1835), who is known to have visited Buckden in 1806, was a radical politician, journalist, farmer and hater of tea (he thought it made men effeminate, led women into prostitution, and killed pigs). College Farm is a lost name; it was presumably the nearest farmstead to College Green , a name once given to the area now known as Hunts End. Collins, James (1869-1920) was one of three Buckden residents included in a list of suspicious characters ‘residing within the Buckden beat’ that appears at the front of the police journal for 1887/8. From this we learn that he was 5' 3'' with blue eyes, light brown hair and a fresh complexion. It comes as small surprise that the 1901 census finds him in Cambridge prison. However, by 1904 he was out again and working as an ostler at the George. We know this because he was involved in a fight with a customer (see under entertainment in Buckden ). When he died in 1920, the Hunts Post referred to him as a ‘somewhat remarkable character’, whose amusing antics had offered a good deal of merriment at local fetes (they included doing a striptease in the middle of a Feast Week celebration). Sadly, he fell out of a tree while working at Coneygarths, permanently injuring his back, and for the last six or seven years of his life was confined to bed at St Neots Workhouse Infirmary, the cost of his maintenance being met under the Workmen’s Compensation Act. He was known locally as ‘Ikey’ and may also be the ‘Long Tip’ Collins whose nickname arose from his having celebrated the completion of repairs to the church steeple in 1895 by standing on his head on the very top of the scaffolding. It certainly seems in character. Coneygarths (sometimes Coneygarth or The Coneygarth ) [MapRef 27] is one of Buckden’s more interesting listed buildings, unusual among the older High Street houses nearby in that it has a front garden rather than giving straight on to the road and is not in the red brick that characterises the street scene. In part it goes back to the 17thC and has strong associations with the Bishops’ Palace across the road, but of all its successive occupants it is the Green family, who lived there from the end of the 18thC into the 19thC, who played the most prominent part in Buckden life. For more on the Greens and on the house itself, see Chapter 8 Cook, Edward was a Buckden postman who developed a new strain of wheat shortly before the First WorldWar. His round included Graveley where, one day in 1910, he plucked an unusual ear of corn from a field. It was peculiarly thick, exceptionally long, had an extraordinary number of grains and was on a remarkably thick, strong stalk. He took it and grew it on the following year. By 1913 enough grain had accumulated to sow three acres (1.2ha). The height of straw was about five feet (1.5m). Unfortunately, it has not (so far) been discovered whether the wheat eventually met with commercial success. The lengthy trials required before a new plant variety can be marketed might have been discontinued when the First World War began, or the upheavals of war may have led to the relevant records being lost. Cooper, Amy née Royse (fl. late 16thC) . ‘It was a blonde,’ Raymond Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe once observed. ‘A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.’ We don’t know the colour of Amy’s hair, but she was the wife of a bishop – Thomas Cooper (Lincoln 1571-84 and Winchester 1584-94) – and if ever there was an episcopal wife likely to drive her husband to kick a hole in something, Amy was it. Thomas’s friends found her ‘too light’ for him from the beginning; in the early days of their marriage she was believed to have had affairs with at least two men; her behaviour inspired undergraduates to compose admiring (but rude) rhymes; and perhaps most exasperating of all she threw the manuscript of the bishop’s dictionary into the fire. In one important respect, however, she was beyond reproach. Like her husband, she was very fond of Buckden; so much so that she returned here after his death and leased the parsonage, from which she ran a working farm with the help of her brother, Richard. Cope, Allen Edward (1905-1977) , farmer and livestock transporter, was born in Chichester and moved to Buckden when quite young. Having tried various jobs after leaving Huntingdon Grammar School, he decided to go into business buying and selling fruit. One day he was at Buckden station with a load for the local goods train. A cattle dealer who was there collecting calves remarked that if only Mr Cope had a van he could take the calves to Little Paxton for him. This gave him food for thought, and he