Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

20 itself in, but then ‘really starts to ping’ (to use a technical phrase). Cross, the was the name given to the junction of High Street, Church Street and George Lane. In the 1920s it was a duty point for the village policeman (presumably to control traffic, since the High Street was still the Great North Road and the junction was a dangerous one). On hot days, when the windows of the Lion Hotel bar were open, the policeman could hear what was being said inside. This was how Buckden resident Frank Petherick ended up before the St Neots magistrates on a charge of using ‘very indecent language’ while arguing with a man who owed him money. Mr Petherick, who lived in Cemetery Lane, pleaded ‘guilty under great provocation’. He was fined half-a-crown. cross-dressing in Buckden has, as elsewhere, tended to be a private activity. (Two men who were prizewinners in the Ladies Competition at a 1929 whist drive each ‘played as a lady’ but without, presumably, being required to dress as one, too.) In May 1836, however, an unusual occurrence was reported to the Zoological Society of London by Captain Green of Coneygarths. He owned a ‘fine specimen of the barn-door Hen, which has assumed the Cock plumage: the change took place about three years ago.’ Captain Green later presented the hen to the Society. History does not record whether they kept it or ate it. See also Captain Green’s golden eagle and Thurlow, Thomas. Crown Inn or Crown Commercial Inn, Hardwick [MapRef 17], on the west side of the Great North Road, is now a private residence. Within living memory it was still a public house, owned for many years by Jenkins & Jones of the Falcon Brewery, Huntingdon. 19thC licensees included draper and master tailor Robert Robinson (1860s); Mrs Bass (1870s) and, by 1891, farm labourer George Middleton (assisted by his wife Eliza), who was still there in 1924. But even this long tenure was eclipsed by that of Mr Middleton’s successor, George Stocker, who did not retire until the late 1970s, aged nearly 90. Mr Stocker also farmed a couple of fields at opposite ends of the village and had a few cows. These were housed in the barns behind the Crown, but they were not milked there: his granddaughter Margaret Benjamin (née Laxton) remembers that she and her siblings were often called upon to drive them down the old Great North Road, round the Lion corner and along Church Street to the sheds beside the Manor House. Mr Stocker sold the milk in Buckden, delivering it on his bicycle with a very large can on either side of the handlebars. Only when milk had to be processed more thoroughly did he give up the round and the cows. Margaret Benjamin’s mother had quite a shock the first time she had to pay a milk bill. On Mr Stocker’s retirement, the Crown was de-licensed and became the home of his son-in-law and daughter, Mr and Mrs Bert Lumbers, who lived there for a number of years before moving into a house in the High Street. Cruel Tree. Its indication on an early map, makes it look like a field name* rather than the name of an individual feature. But in a talk on Huntingdonshire artists which Michael Knight gave to Buckden Local History Society in 1999, he included a lithograph of a watercolour entitled ‘The Felo da Se, Cruel Trees [on A1 near Buckden]’. ‘The cruel tree’ is a phrase found in hymns for Christ’s cross but here seems to have more sinister connotations. It has been suggested it was either a tree (or post) under which suicides or executed murderers were buried; or possibly a real tree used for hangings – an idea given weight by the stark description of Site 00664 in the Cambridgeshire County Council's Historic Environment Record: ‘Gallows, Buckden’. The site is placed in the fork of the A1/Brampton Hill junction; the supporting references are [1] tradition and [2] a watercolour in a family scrapbook - presumably the same picture that Michael Knight showed. The matter is made all the more sinister (but no more explicable) by the mass graves allegedly hidden under the A1 central reservation south of the gallows site, and by the chilling name of a small field shown on the village enclosure map: Cut-Throat Close. All in all, this junction seems somewhere best avoided by lonely travellers, especially after dark . (*Since this entry was written there has come to light on the 1799 Tithe Map a 24 acre field-Crow Hill Tree Furlong) Cuewen or Coren, Hugh or Hugo (d. 1568) . The career of this lawyer and cleric took him from Vicar of Buckden (1514-1530) to Archbishop of Dublin and both Lord Chancellor and Lord Justice of Ireland. Along the way he served as chaplain to Henry VIII, strongly defending the king’s marriage with Anne Boleyn. He was known as 'Hugh the Complier' for his readiness to change his religion to suit each of the five monarchs under whom he served. Curtois, Major Chauncey (1841-1905) , of Perry Road, was a sociable, cigar-smoking bachelor who played an active part in local events wherever he lived. Son of the Vicar of Hemingford Grey, he served with the Madras Infantry until placed on the reserve list in 1880. In 1891, he returned to the Hemingford vicarage, now occupied by his brother, the Rev. Peregrine Edward Curtois (1837-1899), a short-sighted campanologist who had the melancholy distinction of being almost certainly the last 19thC Anglican priest to be run down by a GNR locomotive on a GER track; in his case while absent-mindedly smoking a pipe in the middle of Houghton Viaduct. Following Peregrine’s death, Major Curtois moved to Buckden, taking over Ellerslie, a large house in Perry Road recently vacated The Crown Inn 1898 with members of the Middleton family Leslie O. Glessner