Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

22 D Davie, Robert Elliott, MA MD ChB MC was Buckden’s doctor in the 1920s. See Chapter 14 Medical Practice in Buckden . Deane, the Rev. William Hodgson MA (Oxon) (1857-1932) was vicar of Buckden from 1901 to 1911. An energetic music-loving Mancunian, he was an admired singer who founded and conducted the Buckden Choral Society. He was also a considerable all-round athlete: a leading amateur golfer (probably one of the founding members of the Buckden golf team); the captain and opening bat of the Cricket Club, and still a tennis player in his seventies. He was also a St Neots Rural District Councillor. He arrived in Buckden with his wife – a Northamptonshire rector’s daughter – three children, a governess (the delightfully named Lizzie Lilley), an elderly nanny, a young (22) cook, and a housemaid. Deaths from Wild Beasts in India. This Government report that appeared annually for over 40 years must have made nostalgic reading for Buckden’s several old India hands. Deaths from wild beasts were not unknown in Buckden, either - at least, not if you count bees as wild beasts. An unfortunate donkey was stung to death in Mill Road by bees in 1886; the village rallied round and bought the owner a replacement. deer park. The bishops of Lincoln had a deer park in Buckden from early in the 13thC. Royal permission was needed to enclose land for keeping deer, and the original grant was made by King John to Bishop Hugh (not yet too saintly to enjoy hunting) ‘in recompense for injuries done during the interdict’. Further grants were made, and the park finally took a crescent shape, in the north-west of the parish, curving round to accommodate the hamlet of Hardwick. There was a moated house for the parker (the moat was to keep the deer out of his garden). We know from parkers’ accounts and from a survey made in 1647 that as well as providing food for the bishops’ table, and recreation in the form of hunting for him, his household and for the king whenever he chose to exercise his rights, the park was an important source of wood, both timbers and coppicewood. In 1647 the park contained 425 acres of land; 200 fallow deer; 28 coppices of different ages; and nearly 7000 oak trees. It was sold to a London alderman, Christopher Packe, who seems to have presided over its destruction. By the end of the 17thC all the deer were gone and the park was enclosed into fields. It survives in the name of Park Farm. Defoe, Daniel. Between 1724 and 1726, the author of Robinson Crusoe published a series of letters under the title A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain . ‘Bugden’ is briefly mentioned in Letter 7: Defoe visited the Bishop’s Palace with its ‘very pretty, though small’ chapel, and was enchanted by a trompe l’œil organ in an organ-loft ‘so properly placed and well painted, that we at first believed it really to be an organ’. The lifelikeness of the organ is also mentioned by James Sargant Storer in his The Antiquarian Itinerary (1818), although he places it in St Mary’s Church rather than in the palace chapel. De Grammont, Corisande [‘Corise’] Armandine Sophie Léonice Hélène (1782-1865) was a sensual, intelligent, ambitious French aristocrat whose rise to the heights of English society nearly came to a premature end in a Buckden fireplace. On their way to Edinburgh in the winter of 1802, she and her mother stopped to spend the night at one of the village inns. As a frozen Corise twirled eagerly round in front of the bedroom hearth, her gown billowed out and caught fire. Hearing shrieks, her mother rushed in, saw her daughter engulfed in flames, threw her to the ground, found herself on fire also and fainted – as did Corise. Luckily this enabled a passing manservant to extinguish both ladies by rolling them up in the carpet. Having thus escaped a death that befell all too many fashionably-dressed women in the early 1800s, Corise went on to marry the hereditarily grumpy heir of the Earl of Tankerville and eventually become London’s most scandalous and sought-after political hostess. Douglass, Frederick (c. 1817-1895 ) was one of Buckden’s most distinguished 19thC visitors – possibly the only person to have both visited Buckden and appeared on a US postage stamp (though some people think he must share this honour with Clark Gable). He was an escaped slave who became America’s most charismatic black abolitionist, a noted orator, writer and editor, and a friend of Abraham Lincoln. He and his second wife visited Buckden in the autumn of 1888, while on their honeymoon. They were staying in St Neots with an English friend and supporter from his early days, Julia Griffiths (c. 1810-1895). Now she was Mrs Henry Only Crofts, a Methodist preacher’s widow in poor health earning a precarious living from a small girls’ school. To cheer her up he drove her in a donkey-cart to Buckden to visit the graves of two of her nephews. They had apparently both died young, while students at Cambridge; unfortunately it has not yet proved possible to identify them. dovecotes, like fishponds and coneygarths, were a welcome source of fresh meat for the better-off and their households, and for poachers. In return for minimal husbandry, each pair of dovecote pigeons not only produced up to sixteen chicks (‘squabs’) a year but also provided valuable dung, feathers for pillows, quarry for falconry and, later, targets for shooting-parties (see under Pigeon Shoot Committee ). In the 17thC, a royal proclamation required dovecotes to have soft earth floors: this was because the birds’ droppings were a source of one of the ingredients of gunpowder (potassium nitrate, known as saltpetre). The impregnated earth belonged to the king, who licensed saltpetre-makers to dig it up and cart it away, so giving shot pigeons the unenviable distinction of having been, as it were, dropped by their own droppings. Buckden had at least two dovecotes, both now gone: one to the west of the George Hotel and one on the north side of Mill Road. The first of these, a two-storey brick building with a pyramid roof, dated from the late 17thC or early 18thC. It was demolished in 1961. It may originally have been built to supply birds to the Bishop’s Palace, but by 1722 it was being included in the lease of the George. The second was described as ‘an 18thC square building with a pyramidal roof, located to the north west of Oak