Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

37 Home Counties Trust Houses Ltd. Owners of hotels on the Great North Road, including the Lion. Hoo Close , a short residential cul-de-sac off Greenway, was built in 1968 on land that had formed part of Hoo Farm. Hoo Farm. From various papers regarding mortgages, tenancy agreements and so on it appears that Hoo Farm was never large, at least by present day standards. The Enclosure Award had awarded the land to the Trustees of the Hurst family in 1820. It comprised 165 acres in two parts. The larger part, which included what is now The Hoo on the corner of Church Street and School Lane, extended about 1.4 km. in an ENE direction from it. The smaller part was on the south side of Taylors Lane. In 1831 the farm was included in the estate of Robert Hurst Whitworth, whose striking memorial in St Mary’s Church was designed by Thomas Rickman, a leading archi- tect of the Gothic revival. The estate was divided among his three surviving sisters by lot and Harriet Hurst by that unusual means acquired Hoo Farm and the land in Taylors Lane as part of her share of a will valued at about £57,000. An acre of land connected to Silver Street by Public Road No. 11, an exhausted gravel pit owned by the Survey- ors of Highways, was sold to Harriet Hurst in 1855 for £60 and became part of Hoo Farm with the agreement of a Vestry Meeting (see parish councils ) in Buckden. In 1856 Harriet Hurst sold her land to Mr Francis Green for £9,000. The number of documents relating to the ownership of the land is large and in 1862 a Mr Dubois was asked to advise on behalf of the proposed mortgagors on Mr Green’s title to the estate. His work ran to about ten sheets of legible longhand! John Green gained possession of the lands from Francis Green for £4,600 in August 1895 by taking over existing mortgage responsibilities within the family. This figure also included the four closes totalling 56 acres in Taylors Lane but Francis was to have the use of this at a peppercorn rent. The last farmer was Mr George T. Page who also traded as a builder. His land was that east of Silver Street (including where the gravel processing plant was until 2006) and was bought from John George Green in March 1912 for £2,200 with F. C. Sydney Green as sitting tenant for the land; the farmhouse had recently been rented by a Bedfordshire farmer’s son turned fruit salesman, Freder- ick Coxall. F. C. S. Green’s tenancy ended at Michaelmas 1913. The land comprised fifteen fields or closes totalling 109 acres. There was included also a cottage and blacksmith’s shop in Bakers Lane (q.v.) tenanted by Mr Morris (sic) Milner from October 1882. The fields were all named including, for example, First Turnip Close. The gravel pit referred to earlier had been added to this close. The story of the ownership of the Taylors Lane land is less clear. Certainly some fields were exchanged with the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. One was called Twigdens Piece – a possible early connection with the builders who are now part of the very large Kier group. The fields which comprised Hoo Farm are still mostly under the plough as part of Lodge Farm. Of the rest, some lie under parts of School Lane and Greenway, while a smaller area was occupied by the Lafarge Redland aggregate processing plant until 2008. Hoobags: see under The Hoo. Hopkins, Matthew (c. 1619/20 - 1647) , the son of a Suffolk vicar, became notorious during the first English Civil war for his career as a self-styled ‘Witch Finder Generall’ . He is said to have married a Peterborough girl, Mary Starling, in Buckden Church, and to have lived here for about a year, using the village as a base from which to conduct his activities. The absence of evidence for this, however, suggests the story is apocryphal. Hornsby, Robert (b. 1814) was Superintendent of Police for Buckden and the other villages in the Toseland division in the early 1850s. As this was before the formation of the county constabulary, he reported not to a chief constable but to the local district magistrates – who dismissed him after he had ‘incurred their displeasure’. It was then found that he had been fiddling his expenses, falsely claiming reimbursement for tolls paid while making official journeys in his horse and cart. In fact he had never paid any tolls, using his position in the police to claim exemption . Hornsey, Mrs Fanny (c. 1828-1924) was one of Buckden’s longest-lived residents. When she died, just a week after her 96th birthday, the St. Neots Advertiser said of her that until the last year of her life she had a wonderful memory and told many interesting stories of the village in her youth . As this would have covered years of great change for Buckden (for the worse when the railways killed off the coaching era, and for the better with the opening of the National School), it is a pity that no one seems to have written them down! She was the daughter of John Favill, shepherd and veterinary surgeon, and the wife of George Hornsey, who worked as an agricultural labourer and later as a gardener (they lived in a cottage near the Church Street end of Lucks Lane, so he may have been the vicarage gardener). At her death she left six children, eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Hostelries Ltd were early 20thC owners of hotels on the Great North Road, including the George. Hunnybun, Edward Walter (1848-1918) , Huntingdon solicitor, amateur golfer and distinguished botanical artist. He lived in Field House, Silver Street, for a time before retiring to the Isle of Wight in 1912. In 1911 he presented some 1,700 botanical drawings to Cambridge University; they were to be used to illustrate a new ten- volume set of British flowering plants. Unfortunately only volumes two and three were ever published. The drawings remain in the collection of the University Herbarium. His sons William and Kenneth served as officers in the First World War with the Huntingdonshire Cyclist Battalions (and other units). William (1883-1960) was a member of the Buckden Golf Club and took part in Buckden Reading Room entertainments. Kenneth (1887- 1972) won the DSO and joined his father’s firm; one of the officiating clergymen at his wedding was Archdeacon Knowles (q.v.). hunting: see fox-hunting Huntingdonshire Association, the. Instituted 25 May, 1787 for ‘the speedy Apprehension, and effectual Prosecution, of HORSE and SHEEP STEALERS, FELONS, and THIEVES of every Denomination, and other DISORDERLY PERSONS committing Offences in the said County, or elsewhere, within the Distance of 15 Miles from the Town of Huntingdon, on the Person or Property of any of the Subscribers’. One of the founder members was the father of Fanny and Laura Beaumont (q.v.). The list for 1812 includes several subscribers from the Buckden area,