Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

31 G Gale family: There were Gales in Buckden over 300 years ago. Among their many descendants are Jocelyn, Judith and Barbara (twins) and Celia, the daughters of Stan and Wyn. Here they tell the story of their father's life and share memories of their own happy childhood. We lived at numbers 18 and 20 Mill Road. When we were growing up there were no housing estates, just fields and farmsteads to roam and play in and where we lived we could play tennis in the road – it was that quiet! A photograph of 1953 showed the family outside our house which was gaily decorated to celebrate the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. You wouldn’t see our Dad as he was behind the No.2 Brownie box camera. We sisters hope to portray the lively and colourful side of our mum and in particular our dad. He was born in October 1912. He grew up in Buckden and lived here all his life. He attended the village school until the age of 13 years. On leaving he went to work next door to his home, at the Hosiery Factory (now Buckden Day Nursery). He was a keen tennis player, playing both on the courts behind the factory and at the vicarage. It was at the vicarage where he met Winnie Kiteley, who was in service and lived there. They eventually married at St Andrews church in Kimbolton, and soon afterwards he went to work at Harley’s Aircraft Landing Lamps based at Great Paxton. Together with his wife and several village friends, Dad inaugurated the Lincoln Imps Concert Party, putting on several shows before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. He also thoroughly enjoyed playing the piano at the Falcon on Fridays and Saturday evenings. As our dad was a volunteer member of the Fire Service he was exempt from call-up. He was a keen gardener and poultry man, he had an allotment in Silver Street and at one time was helped on it by an Italian prisoner of war. He reared hens and pigs at the bottom of the garden and we as young girls used to help with the feeding and collecting the eggs. He was a keen member of the Parish Council and for some time was its Chairman. There were the occasions of the village May Days on the village green. All of the villagers became involved in the event. We have a photograph of our dad leading the procession dressed in a white fur coat and top hat and striding out carrying a mace, this just sums him up. The over-60s nights were another occasion where our mum and dad were part of the committee that entertained the over-60s in the Rifle Range, where the Burberry Almshouses now stand. Our mum, along with the others, was responsible for the catering, all of which was produced in the Rifle Range kitchen. Our dad was responsible for the entertainment and we as daughters also had to be part of the show. I played my piano accordion and my cousin Marilyn Flint and I would sing. Even my sisters’ husbands didn’t get away with not being involved in the shows. Whether or not our dad wrote the scripts for the shows (which would not have surprised us) he certainly directed them. I remember those evenings being such good fun and there was always an appreciative audience all of whom were our neighbours and friends. Gale’s corner was once the local name for the junction of George Lane and the High Street, so called after the corner shop kept by baker and bootmaker William Gale. The bakery was later taken over by John James Papworth and the junction then became known as Papworth’s corner. gardening , both for pleasure and a source of food, has long been a popular pastime in Buckden, with the later years of the 19thC seeing the annual gardening shows establishing themselves as a major village event complete with athletics and Buckden’s other favourite recreation, dancing. For a detailed look at gardening in all its aspects, see Chapter 10 . George, Prince of Wales (1762–1830). ‘Bishop Tomline had the honour [on 10 January 1814] of entertaining the Prince Regent, afterwards King George the Fourth, to dine and sleep at Buckden.’ The Prince charmed his host and hostess and the other guests, as Mrs Tomline made clear in a long letter to her sister. While at the palace he interviewed some French officers, who were being held at the notorious Norman Cross Prison Depot near Yaxley. This was far from being the only time he was in Buckden, however. In 1818, Mrs Scarborough, landlady of the George, wrote of her respect for the Prince ‘whose favours I have often been honoured with at Buckden’. George Hotel or Inn, High Street (at times also known as the St George & Dragon , the George and Dragon Commercial Inn and (Heaven help us) as Ye Olde George) [MapRef 23] . The present hotel takes up only part of what had been a substantial inn, famous in coaching days for its ‘vast size and elaborate arrangements’. The first surviving written reference to the George as an inn was on 14 May 1662, when the churchwardens recorded spending two shillings for drinks, food and the use of a room there when collecting a levy and tax. A fortnight later, Samuel Pepys’s diary records ‘Mrs Pepys and maid by coach from George Holborn Conduit [in London] to Bugden’, possibly to the George, where one can imagine them being collected by Pepys’s uncle and aunt, then living at Brampton. A reward notice in the London Gazette of 14 July 1687 suggests that the landlord of the time was a Mr John Spencer; if so, he may be the person of that name whose burial in June 1695 is recorded in the parish register. His successor may have been William Longland, who was certainly the landlord at the time of his death in March 1714. Longland was succeeded by George Lake (or Late), who seems to have left in or by 1722, when the lease of the inn was put out to tender. It was no longer the building that Pepys would have known: ‘..there is a new Brick Building erected of Eleven Rooms, sashed [i.e., with sash windows, made fashionable by royal patronage], and a newWine Vault and Granary, with other new Buildings beside the old Inn, which consists of large Brick Buildings, with very good Stabling, Out-houses, and a large Brick Dove-House, with Orchards and Gardening, and with other necessary Conveniences for an Inn.’ The George appears to have been one of the Thornhill Estates’ Buckden holdings at this time: those interested in further details of the lease were directed to see either George Thornhill or William Hook, vicar of Doddington (i.e., Diddington, home of the Thornhills). An exact chronology of the inn’s 18thC landlords is not easy to determine but in December 1760, William South announced that he was succeeding his uncle John Hastings, who had died the previous month. The Hastings family were active in village life for most of the century: at one