Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

21 by Dr Hillyer (q.v.). His brother’s widow and at least one of her daughters came to live with him, and he took care to provide for them in his will. On the morning of 27 June 1905 his gardener brought him his customary glass of milk, only to find him lying on his bedroom floor, dead of a cerebral haemorrhage. His hobby was woodworking. Cut Throat Close: see Cruel Tree . cycling played a major part in restoring the fortunes of Buckden after the lean years following the collapse of the coaching trade in the 1850s. It is hard today to understand the social changes brought about by the coming of the bicycle - or more precisely, by the coming of the safety bicycle in the 1880s. Relatively cheap, relatively easy to master, it offered an exhilarating freedom to both men and women. (Particularly young men and women on sociables (cycles with side-by-side seats): mixed bicycling parties were not as easy to chaperone as the traditional Sunday afternoon walk.) The railway had accustomed people to travel farther from their home town or village, but it was a formal method of transport that took them at speed through the intervening landscape. The bicycle enabled people to use their brief leisure time to explore a wider world than ever before. Urban clerks and shop assistants could exchange the gloom of the city for the fresh air of the countryside; farmworkers could expand the rural gene pool. Not everyone welcomed the new freedom. Debates raged in newspapers and medical journals about the health benefits or risks of bicycling, especially for women. By 1902, however, The Parson’s Handbook (a sort of liturgical workshop manual) was advising clergy faced with badly- attended Sunday morning services to ensure they finished Matins early enough to allow young people time to get their bicycle rides in before lunch. cycling clubs and cyclists. From the early 1880s onwards every self-respecting town and large village acquired a cycling club. A snide item in a local paper suggests that Buckden Cycling Club was not always taken seriously by non-members: ‘It is whispered,’ said the St. Neots Advertiser in May 1901, 'that the Buckden Cycling Club will have to purchase an Ambulance to bring home the pieces when they go for a run.’ In 1904, an anonymous correspondent in the village drew the attention of the Advertiser’s readers to the strange behaviour of a handful of ‘Buckden cyclers’, who regularly rode to St Neots and back. The writer clearly expected his readers to recognise the sinister purpose that lay behind this apparently harmless exercise. The freedom to drink in the town pubs, safe from the disapproving eyes of ‘her indoors’ back in Buckden? We shall probably never know. As well as its own cycling club, Buckden hosted some of the national clubs, for whom it was a useful staging-post on competitive or recreational rides to and from the north, such as the popular ‘Dick Turpin’s Ride’ between London and York. Members of the prestigious North Road Cycling Club, founded in 1885 to ‘promote fast and long distance cycling on the Great North and other Roads’, had a particularly close association with the George, which they used as a training centre. A world quadricycling record was established at Buckden in 1888. The machine was the large and peculiar ‘Three in Hand’, built by the Rudge Cycle Company. It was nearly five feet high, weighed 120 pounds, had four 30- inch wheels and three riders. The lead rider was a world- famous American cyclist, Stillman G. Whittaker, known as ‘the Little Yankee’. He and his team set up their headquarters at Buckden’s George and Dragon in November and spent the next six weeks in training. They decided to go for the record on 14 December. Fog and a head wind delayed their start until after lunch. Despite the surface of the Great North Road being described as ‘half frozen, half mud and all rutty’, they flew along the measured mile in 2 minutes 29 seconds (four days later they bettered this time by ten and four/fifths seconds). Their amazing speed of over 24 mph was claimed to be the fastest man had ever travelled under his own power. The machine went into production the following year, selling for £36 (‘suitable for two ladies and a gentleman, or three gentlemen – can be made suitable for three ladies if desired’). In 1891, Buckden was the starting point for a successful attempt on the 12 hour cycling record for ordinaries: Mr R. C. Nesbitt completed a round trip of one hundred and seventy-five and a half miles in the allotted time, taking in Hitchin and Peterborough (twice) on the way. Sadly for the village he was not a member of the Buckden Cycling Club. (‘Ordinaries’ were the ungeared bicycles popularly known as penny-farthings.) But cyclists, especially racing cyclists, were not always popular in Victorian Buckden (or Huntingdonshire generally). They might be welcomed as good customers by blacksmiths prepared to repair broken frames and chains, and by the keepers of inns such as the George and the Spread Eagle, but many people regarded them as a menace as they sped along the Great North Road in near silence – no tell-tale clatter of hooves – alarming livestock and knocking down pedestrians. Indeed, when in July 1894 a group of tricyclists competing in a 50 mile race rode into a horse and trap just south of Buckden, the Chief Constable seized on the accident as an excuse to ban road racing in the county, even though the fault lay with the driver of the trap. ‘Paced races’ (timed trials) were permitted a couple of years later, but were not without incident: one competitor’s record-breaking ride through the Fens took him through the jurisdictions of eight separate magistrates’ courts. Each of them summonsed and fined both him and his support team for furious and dangerous riding. See also Robinson’s Garages and Shelton, Henry. The Rudge “Three in Hand”