Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

38 among them Thomas Usher, Captain Green, William Chapman, William Bowyer of Diddington, James Mann of Leighton (father-in-law of John Gace Langley [q.v.]), Mark Moon, Charles Norman, John and William South, the vicar, the bishop, the bishop’s son, the bishop’s steward,, and brewer Joseph Baxter (q.v.). Hunts End [MapRef 35] is an area south of the Church Street/School Lane junction that includes a triangular green bounded by roads and surrounded by shops and houses. A plan in the Norris Museum shows that the green once contained a pond, apparently bounded by a wall on the north side. Adjacent were a pound (q.v.), and at one time a set of stocks, as well as a cage where less law-abiding villagers were placed ready for transit to the local jail (this was later used to house the parish fire-engine). One 17thC source places the stocks near the church gate; perhaps the increasing secularisation of the law or the fastidiousness of later generations led to their removal to Hunts End. By the early 20thC the pond had fallen into disrepair and was filled in by a local farmer – see under pond . (It appears to have dried up – or at least shrunk – even earlier: Pc Tom Jarvis recorded policing Salvationist meetings on ‘Pond Green’ in the summer of 1887.) In his 1971 history of Buckden School, the then headmaster records that in Edwardian times the children would be assembled on the village green on Empire Day (27 May) ‘to salute the flag and sing the National Anthem’. One present resident remembers attending a fair on the green in the years before the Second World War. During the war itself the green was the scene of a startling encounter between a lady of quality and a small field gun; this is described in Chapter 17 The green is now home to a bus shelter, the village sign (erected at the millennium), two of three trees planted on the occasion of the coronation of King Edward VII, and, to replace a decayed horse chestnut, a young oak tree planted and donated by Mr T. F. Hayward OBE to celebrate his ten years as chairman of the parish council. In 2001, the late Tilly Farmer-Wright, parish council chairman 2000-2003, instituted a tradition of decorating one of the trees with lights over Christmas and New Year. Hunts Game Protection Association was set up in the summer of 1898 to discourage poaching. In 1901 it successfully prosecuted two Buckden labourers for stealing 29 partridge eggs. In an uncharacteristic fit of leniency, the St Neots bench fined them only 2s. 6d. an egg (the recommended rate was 5s.) plus costs. Two of the magistrates were Buckden landowners, and probably had a shrewd idea of the amount the two men could afford to pay: one had at least eight children (two of whom were to die in the First World War). It would be nice (but probably sentimental) to think that the magistrates may also have felt some slight distaste at the way the arresting officer had gone about his work: he had effectively persuaded one man’s wife and son to shop him. The Association lasted until at least the 1920s; as well as working closely with the police it used to employ two detectives of its own. Hurditch, Rev. Herbert Russell: see Elima ΩΩΩΩΩ I Ilsley, Joseph Charles (1861-1884) . Enter Buckden Cemetery by the lych-gate in Lucks Lane, walk straight ahead until the path has passed through a row of trees, and look to your right. A few yards away you will see a grave quite distinct from those about it: not grey and upright, but a polished pink coped stone. It bears the names of Joseph Charles Ilsley and his mother, Eliza Thomson. Joseph was the manager of the brewing department of the Lion and Lamb public house. In this, he was following a family tradition. His father, his mother and both his paternal grandparents had been in the licensed trade (his maternal grandparents, however, had been Northamptonshire fishmongers). His mother had taken over the Lion on her first husband’s death in 1873; in 1877, she married Henry Thomson, member of an inventive Buckden family. Henry then became the licensee (‘publican and engineer’). On the morning of 7 June 1884, Joseph had gone to work in the Lion’s brewery. At one o’clock his mother goes to fetch him through for lunch. At first she finds no sign of him, but on a second visit is horrified to see his hat lying at the bottom of a fume-filled fermenting-vat. She raises the alarm—‘Send for the doctor!’—family and neighbours come running—brave young man is lowered into the vat on a rope—brave young man is frantically hauled up again, insensible—iron hooks are found—Joseph finally dragged out—Dr McRitchie arrives—one look: ‘Life extinct, carbon- ic acid gas’—can do no more than resuscitate brave young man. The funeral took place on 17 June. Shops were closed as a mark of respect, and the route to the cemetery was lined with villagers. Joseph had been a popular young man. His mother outlived him by nearly forty years. Even before her death in 1922, at the age of eighty-four, many had forgotten the real, harrowing circumstances of her son’s accident. ‘Drowned in a tub o’beer,’ they would say, looking into their tankards with a shudder. Then, cheering up, ‘What a way to go!’ In October 1888, a painful, but less serious, accident befell Eliza Thomson’s 11-year-old nephew, Frederick Putman. He was drawing beer in the Lion, when the barrel rolled on to his foot, crushing the big toe, part of which had to be removed by Dr Good. This experience seems to have led him to opt for a safer career as an apprentice in the neighbouring shop of Buckden's musical butcher, Francis James Smith (q.v.). inclosure award : see enclosure award . Ivelbury Close, High Street, is a small late 20thC housing development. It was built on the site of a large private residence, Ivelbury, which with its gardens was lost to the 1962 by-pass of the High Street. ΩΩΩΩΩ