Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

18 governing body defended as relieving the monotony of the prisoners’ day). In the old gaol, how you fared had depended on whom you knew: Buckden innkeeper Mrs Jane Scarborough (q.v.), for example, had always been regarded as a respectable woman. When she was gaoled for a year for theft, therefore, she was treated well while serving her sentence, being put in a cell with congenial companions already known to her (which prompts the question: how did she know them if she was so respectable?). Cowling, John George (b. 1863) was a Buckden-born plumber and decorator who became Mayor of Northampton in 1925. At his installation, he reminisced about the early 1880s when he was courting his future wife, Annie Coomber, a railway porter’s daughter from Offord Cluny. In those days, he said, there was still no bridge over the Ouse. To reach her he had to be rowed across or even carried over on a man’s back. Cowslip, Mrs Dolly , spirited daughter of an inn landlady (or is she?), is one of the heroines of Tobias Smollett’s novel The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves . See fiction, Buckden in. Craft, Percy Robert (1856-1934) started his working life as a repertory actor, sometimes playing twelve parts in a week. When influenza damaged his ability to remember his lines, he went to art school – where he was a multiple medal winner – and became known as an organiser of exhibitions and a painter and illustrator in oil, water- colour and pastel. Between 1899 and 1905 he and his wife lived in ‘The Cottage’, Lucks Lane. During this time he exhibited at the Royal Academy in at least two years, 1901 and 1902. He was a member of the Reading Rooms committee and a popular participant in its entertainments as a singer, recitalist and comic actor: music-hall interests shared by a later artist who lived in Buckden, H. J. Sylvester Stannard (q.v.). Craft was also a keen fisherman and towards the end of his life gave a series of radio talks on deep sea angling – which he knew well, having spent ten years in Newlyn before moving to Buckden (their Cornish maid, Annie Cotton, came with them). A devout Christian and a man of strong principles, he volunteered for the Royal Army Medical Corps early in 1915 (despite being at fifty-nine well over military age) and served until summer 1918. Prints and posters of some his works are still sold; unfortunately none seems to be of Buckden or its environs. There are, however, some of his paintings on display in Hinchingbrooke House, portraits of three members of the Linton family of Stirtloe. They were moved to Hinchingbrooke after being found in a barn. There is also a tantalising reference in the St. Neots Advertiser to the ‘much coveted prizes’ offered by Mr Craft to the winners of a sedentary village triathlon (whist, dominoes and draughts); might these been examples of his own work? And if so, might they still lurk unrecognised in a Buckden home? They might, of course, have simply been freshly caught fish. Cranfield family, farmers and philanthropists . There were Cranfields in Buckden in the 17thC and early 18thC; they may or may not be related to William Cranfield (1831- 1901), who came from Bedfordshire to Buckden in the late 1850s to take on the tenancy of Park Farm. At its peak (1871), the 1000 acre farm employed 59 workers: 35 men, 17 boys and 7 women. William Cranfield was a national figure on the agricultural scene: an exhibitor of prize-winning Lincoln sheep and Shorthorn cattle at Smithfield, and a member of the Royal Agricultural Society’s judging panel for ‘miscellaneous inventions’. It was, however, three of his children who were to make the most lasting impact on the parish: Mary Cranfield OBE, and her brothers William Walker Cranfield and Henry Cranfield. They were the chil- dren of their father’s first marriage, to Mary Walker (1826- 1866), also from a Bedfordshire farming family. Mary (1855-1940) and her brother William Walker (1856-1931) were born in Bedfordshire, Henry (1862-1916) in Buckden. There were no children from William senior’s second marriage, to Jane Bowyer Burrell, the widow of a retired Yorkshire farmer. The two older children were privately educated: William Walker in Kempston at the uncompromisingly named Bedfordshire Middle Class Public School, and Mary at Boswell House College, a small boarding school for girls somewhat inappropriately sited next door to a pub (the Railway Arms) in Croydon. As a family, the Cranfields had a strong social conscience, from which Buckden benefited greatly. They were the moving force in the provision of the Rifle Range (q.v.) and its associated recreation rooms, and gave strong practical support to local sports, particularly cricket. Henry played a leading role in the organisation of local military training during the First World War and was held in high esteem throughout the county for his work on council and other public committees. He was clearly a man of more than ordinary energy, who caught people up in his enthusiasms. His sudden and early death in a freak riding accident was mourned in local newspapers under headlines that would not have disgraced a major national tragedy. The Cranfield tendency to think big was very apparent in him. In July 1908 the Hunts Post reported that he had twenty-seven of his own carts and wagons simultaneously engaged in carting hay on his meadows at Brampton . cricket in Buckden. Sadly, there is no formal record of Buckden Cricket Club’s history but it is known to have been founded in 1891. Its centenary was celebrated with a dinner at the George Hotel in Buckden for about sixty members, including past and present players. The George had also been the preferred venue for the club’s 19thC annual dinners (and had catered its smoking concerts, held in the Maltings in George Lane). The founding date of 1891 suggests that the moving spirits included Buckden’s two doctors of the time, Frederick Good and W. H. Hillyer, both young men, both sports-mad. Other useful players in the early days were W. H. Deane, vicar from 1901 to 1911; Peter McLeod, a Scotsman who worked as coachman/groom to Sir Arthur Marshall at The Towers and then took over the Spread Eagle; John Wallage, Buckden’s policeman from 1887 to Percy Craft at work