Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

17 was still able to make the cabs look as if they were made of timber. By now, Mr Cope had seven lorries and employed six drivers. They travelled far and wide, no longer serving only local farms. Often the firm was asked to undertake quite special jobs, such as fetching show animals from as far away as Scotland to start new herds. One of Mr Cope’s proudest moments was when he was asked to transport a horse to the London stables of the Royal Horse Guards. It had been chosen as their next Drum Horse, and he remembered it as a beautiful giant of an animal, yet so gentle. Some of the land at Hunts End was orchard, and here some two hundred hens were kept, the eggs going to the Egg Marketing Board. During the late 1940s, pig-rearing was added to the holding. At any one time he had up to three dozen animals in successive stages of fattening. Cope, Thomas (born c. 1822; died 1895) was a Buckden carpenter whose adventures as parish constable in the mid-1850s demonstrate why those elected to this post were often prepared to pay someone else to do the job. The Huntingdonshire Quarter Sessions records show that during those years he was beaten up by several disgruntled (or drunken) residents while trying to carry out his duties. Most of his assailants came from the same family, one of Buckden’s more rambunctious and, when it chose to be, elusive clans. Animosity boiled over in 1855. On 4 October, Thomas Cope attended St Neots magistrates’ court to lodge a complaint that one member of the family, Jonas, had been selling beer from his house on a Sunday ‘during the hours of Divine Service’. Jonas did not react well to this, or to being fined £1. 0s. 0d., and Thomas begged the magistrates to bind him over to keep the peace: ‘for I am,’ he said, ‘in bodily fear of him.’ The magistrates complied. Two days later, Thomas spotted one of Jonas’s younger brothers, William, on whom he had been trying since May to execute a warrant for poaching. William fled through a hedge. As Thomas pushed through after him, William seized a stake, hit him over the head - ‘smashing his hat to pieces’ - and repeatedly struck him across the body. Another brother, Samuel, then appeared and began kicking Thomas in the ribs, giving William the chance to escape. Thomas was saved by the arrival of his fellow-constable, William Ekins, and the two of them subdued Samuel and dragged him off to the village lock-up (a cage at Hunts End). Before they could finally get him inside, however, the constables had to fight off an attack by Samuel’s mother, two of his sisters and yet another brother, James. A large crowd watched with interest, but pointedly refused to offer the police any assistance. Samuel, James, their mother and their sisters were brought up before the St Neots magistrates on 10 October. The womenfolk were fined 5s. 6d. each, with costs, and the men were committed for trial at the next Huntingdon Quarter Sessions, where each was sentenced to three months hard labour. Thomas Cope did not appear at the magistrates’ court, Mr Woolley, Buckden’s surgeon, having certified him as unfit to attend through injury. Justice did not catch up with William until June of the following year, when he, too, received three months for his assault on Thomas. Copping, Alexander Charles Edward (1859-1924) was a prominent resident of Buckden for forty years. He was born in Yaxley, but grew up in St Neots. His father John was a remarkable policeman, one of the first senior officers (superintendents) appointed to the newly formed Huntingdonshire County Constabulary in 1857. He remained in service for fifty years, rising to hold the twin posts of Chief Superintendent and Deputy Chief Constable. He was a very ‘hands-on’ policeman, often taking a close interest in quite minor cases, particularly those in Buckden. This may in part have been because Alexander moved to the village in 1883, shortly after marrying Annie Sarah Harrison, a farmer’s daughter from Great Staughton. Alexander did not follow his father into the force. He found work as a corn merchant’s clerk, then became a flour salesman for Buckden & Offord Flour Mills. So successful was he, the firm made him a partner in 1916. In the same year he represented the company before a military appeal tribunal (q.v.) in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent their stockman Stanley Currington from being drafted into the army. A leading freemason (Past Master of his lodge), he also he played a prominent role in the social life of the village: Hon. Sec. of the Reading Rooms, actor in comic plays, leading light of the Buckden Choral Society, cricketer (in his youth), cricket and athletics competition administrator, and member of Buckden Golf Club. In his spare time he particularly enjoyed gardening: the grounds of his home at Oak Lawn were much admired, and he was a committee member of the Buckden and Diddington Horticultural Society. He also shot, and played bicycle polo and tennis. He had in fact been playing tennis on the day he fell terminally ill. His funeral began with a ‘sadly imposing’ procession accompanying his body on the parish bier from Oak Lawn to the gate of the churchyard. Here it was met by three clergymen, the choir, and an escort of freemasons carrying sprigs of acacia in their white-gloved hands. These ‘emblems of brotherly affection’ were later dropped on to the coffin as it lay in its grave. The Hunts Post description of this funeral is detailed and fulsome, perhaps to make up for the unfortunate heading in the previous week’s paper: DEATH OF MR A COPPING IS IT ECONOMICALLY NECESSARY? Coulson: see Zachariah. County Gaol and House of Correction, Huntingdon. Sixty years after its opening in 1768, conditions in the first county gaol had become so frightful that a replacement had to be commissioned. It opened in 1829, and the inside of this ‘ spacious pile of buildings’, became familiar to some residents of Buckden. The 1851 gaol census, for example, includes six people from the village. Two were not prisoners: Elizabeth Sladen was the wife of Thomas Smith, the gaol’s First Turnkey for several years in the 1840s and 1850s, while Elizabeth Eady, the Smiths’ fifteen-year old nursemaid, was the daughter of a Stirtloe labourer. The prisoners from Buckden were three labourers and a beer-house keeper. No doubt it was of comfort to them to know that the gaol was ‘situated in a convenient and healthy situation’, although this may not have been immediately apparent to anyone unfortunate to be in the extension built in 1850: its defective air-shaft left some prisoners half-suffocated in their cells and others seriously ill from breathing ‘the impure atmosphere’. Discipline was imposed through the ‘silent and separate’ system: individual cells, no talking in the exercise yard or the chapel, the threat of regular visits from the chaplain, and spells on the tread-wheel (which one member of the