Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

42 standards: his father was said to have lived to 93, his grandfather to 95 and his grandmother to 105. Education was important to the Langleys. Only Mary Ann and John Gace Junior appear to have worked solely in the business, Mary as a draper’s assistant and John as a grocer, draper, news agent and stationer. All the other children had some association with teaching, as follows: Sarah As well as helping in the Post Office, Sarah ran a private ladies’ school in the High Street. Millicent taught music until her marriage to Thomas Moore, tailor, cycle agent and (later) ‘preacher of the gospel’. Edward Mann (BA London, MA Trinity, Cambridge), known to his friends as ‘Triangles’, married his Australian- born cousin and taught mathematics at his old school, Bedford Modern, for 40 years. He was also Hon. Sec. of the Mathematical Association, and Founder-Editor of its journal. Elizabeth junior married Buckden teacher William Baxter, who became the headmaster of a boys’ boarding school in Windsor. There was one more son. James Robert went up to Oxford as a non-collegiate student, obtaining his BA in 1879 and MA in 1883. In between the last two events he got married. Twice. In the same year. To the same woman. She was Aoltia Mira, daughter of Buckden engineer and inventor James Thomson. Their first wedding was in January 1881, at the Church of St Philip, Battersea. It seems unlikely that either of their families knew about it. The only recorded witnesses were two Battersea residents from the house where Aoltia had stayed long enough to obtain the necessary residence qualification (James Robert came down from Oxford, giving his occupation as ‘tutor’). In June 1881 came the census. It recorded Aoltia and James living back in Buckden with their respective families; both referred to themselves as ‘single’. Their ‘official’ wedding took place in Buckden in October. Perhaps family disapproval had driven them into their first, clandestine wedding – it is noticeable that the second was witnessed only by Thomsons: Aoltia’s brother Henry and her sister Sarah (another schoolmistress). Against this, however, is that the following year the two families co- operated in a joint business venture, the Phoenix Memnon Company Limited. See Thomson Family . James and Aoltia’s son, Arthur Gace Langley, was born in Buckden in 1882. In 1891 he was living with his paternal grandfather in Buckden, while his parents were in a two- room flat in Oxford where James was now studying medicine, his twelfth year as a student! Ten years later all three were living in an apartment in Clerkenwell. James was now a freelance writer and Arthur a draughtsman. Some time before the First World War the family returned to Buckden, where James and Aoltia lodged with Aoltia’s eldest sister, Sarah, while Arthur, now an art editor for an international news service, lived at the Post Office in an otherwise all-female household (his aunts Mary Ann and Sarah, and their two young assistants, aged 19 and 17 respectively). James thereafter earned his living as a lecturer and unofficial village historian. In 1932, he took part in the ‘ Pageant of the Centuries ’(q.v.) at The Towers. He died in 1939 and is buried in Buckden Cemetery. Arthur also acted in the pageant. He had joined the East Anglian Royal Engineers at the outbreak of the First World War, rising to the rank of Captain and winning the Military Cross. His post-war career has not been traced – unless he is the Captain Arthur Langley who practised as a bonesetter in Paddington through the 1930s. Between 1881 and 1885 the Langleys seem to have given up their retail business: Kelly’s Directory for the latter year lists them only as running the Post Office. The grocery and drapery side had been managed by John Gace junior and the wife he married in Wiltshire in 1879, Edith Caroline [Kidner]; but by 1885 it had been taken over by a Russell Hardley. By 1888 John and Edith had emigrated to Canada, settling in the Vancouver area. Their family papers are now in the library of the University of British Columbia. They include two letters written by John Gace senior in 1891, the year before his death. Sarah Langley succeeded her father as sub- postmistress (postcard views of Buckden occasionally surface, issued by ‘S Langley of Buckden Post Office’). She was assisted by Mary Ann, who had been running the household since their mother died in 1889. They continued the business until the 1920s; Mary Ann died in 1926 (and was buried in Bedfordshire); Sarah died in 1929. Both sisters are commemorated on the headstone to Sarah’s grave near the lych-gate in Buckden Cemetery. The three employees from 1851 soon moved on to other things. The house servant, Hannah Gore, left to marry Thomas Gore (a cousin, perhaps). In 1886, by an odd twist of fate, their daughter Mary Ann married a member of the Thomson family, Aoltia Mira’s brother James. The apprentice, Edward Titchmarsh, left to found a long-lived family grocery and drapery in Royston High Street; one of his grandsons became a senior mathematical professor at Oxford. The dressmaker, Elizabeth Piggott, married Dennis James Robinson in 1856. Born in Hardwick, he was a tailor and the son of a master tailor (and publican). By the time of his marriage, he was working in London. Elizabeth returned there with him as did her brother John, yet another tailor. See also Aoltia, Bowtells of Buckden, Post Offices, telephones, Thomson family. Lark End is one of the short, bird-named streets leading off Vineyard Way. Lauder, Sir John (Lord Fountainhall) (1646–1722) was a Scottish criminal advocate, judge and political com- mentator. In 1667 he found the road between Biggleswade and Buckden a ‘sad way’ (it obviously got no better: many years later Daniel Defoe called it a ‘frightful way’ and ‘terrible road’). Lauder stayed the night in Buckden when he met a party of fellow Scots coming down from Edinburgh. The countryside between Buckden and