Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

34 Green (1789-1882). Their story and that of their house is told in Chapter 8 ; see also Captain Green’s golden eagle; Hodgson, John, and the following entry. GreenMemorial, High Street [MapRef 25]. This was erected in September 1923 by John Green in memory of those from the village who had died in the First World War. They included his two sons, who were: Second-Lieutenant Alan Green of the 1st/5th South Staffordshire Regiment, who was killed on 13 October 1915 during the 46th Division’s assault on the Hohenzollern Redoubt near Loos-en-Gohelle, Belgium. The Division lost 180 officers and 3,583 men in the first 10 minutes of battle. Alan Green’s body was never recovered. He was 20 years old. Captain John Green, RAMC , Medical Officer to the 5th Battalion, Sherwood Foresters, who was awarded a posthumous VC for his conspicuous devotion to duty during the morning of 1 July 1916 – the first day of the Somme. Approaching the enemy lines he found a badly wounded fellow-officer, Captain Frank Robinson, caught up in the wire. Although himself injured, he managed to free him and drag him to a nearby shell-hole. Here he dressed his wounds while under almost constant attack from bombs and rifle grenades. He then sought to guide him back across No Man’s Land to safety. They had almost succeeded when Captain Robinson was wounded again. John Green stopped to help him, only to be hit and killed instantly. His body was not recovered until the following spring. At the time of his death he was 27 years old and had been married for six months – to the day. Frank Robinson died of his wounds two days later. The memorial stands on land that belonged to Coneygarths, the home of the Green family for several generations. The brothers are also remembered on the war memorials of both Buckden and Houghton-with-Wyton. green, the village: see Hunts End. Greenway is a long, curving residential thoroughfare joining School Lane to Mill Road, and is a central part of the road network built to serve the new houses erected during the major expansion of Buckden in the latter half of the 20thC. It was engineered to form part of a new bus route, but is not now used for this purpose. The name reflects the fact that it is on land once owned by the Green family. H Haigh, the Rev. Daniel (1812-1875) was Buckden's vicar from 1850 until his death, which occurred at the vicarage. He was the son of a Leeds merchant (although he was born in Manchester: perhaps his mother returned to her own family for the birth). He was educated at Leeds Grammar School and Catherine Hall, Cambridge. Hardonian Farm, Hardwick Lane , now Hardwick House, was a dairy farm with a prize-winning Channel Island herd kept by Reginald Mann, whose father Ernest had become the landlord of the Spread Eagle (q.v.) before the First World War. (Ernest also kept cows, milking them in the paddock behind the inn.) Miss Gladys Mann, Reginald’s daughter, remembers life on the farm in Chapter 9 Hardwick Dene, Hardwick Lane, built in the 1920s in the style of an Edwardian gentleman’s country residence, stands overlooking open countryside to the west of the A1. Since 1990, it has been a residential retirement home, at present (2009) managed by Sohal Healthcare Ltd. Hardwick Lane is a narrow, deep-sunk, badly maintained, poorly drained road that was once effectively the main street of the tiny hamlet of Hardwick. It was never intended to bear the weight of traffic that it now does. Irritating as those who live along it today find the way its surface is regularly broken up by running water after heavy rain, they are at least spared the equally regular flows of sewage that their 19thC predecessors had to bear. Hide ( sometimes Hyde ) , Henry (1811-1889) . His is a classic Victorian rags-to-respectability tale. Born in Buckden, the son of a shepherd, he began his working life as a farm labourer. According to his obituary in the St. Neots Advertiser , he left while still a young man to try his luck in the Australian goldfields. There is a problem with this story: the discovery of gold in Australia was not announced until 1851, by which time Henry was already 40 years old – and, as we know from the census, was still in Buckden, living with his brother’s family in the High Street. ‘Young man’, therefore, is a journalist’s touch of romance. But there was every reason for a man in his forties to consider leaving the village. With the coaching trade and its ancillary employments being driven out of business by the railways, the local working population had already begun to decline. To Henry – middle-aged, unmarried, without a home of his own – his fate must have seemed all too likely to match that of his elderly parents: pauperism and the almshouse (or, worse, the Union Workhouse.) No surprise, therefore, that some time in the early 1850s he decided to emigrate. It was the right decision. He made enough money as a ‘digger’ to buy a farm in Australia. After 16 years he sold up and returned to Buckden as a man of independent means – which meant the name of ‘Henry Hide, esq.’ appeared among those of the gentry in local directories. He was, said the Advertiser , ‘a person of a very retiring disposition and much respected’. Towards the end of his life he was in ailing health, and his death was hastened by a fall from a cart in Huntingdon, which dislocated his thigh. The outbuildings of Hardonian Farm, Hardwick Lane now part of the private dwelling Hardwick House.