Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

43 Huntingdon reminded him of Holland, being ‘all covered with willows’. Laundry Cottage , High Street [MapRef 28], is an early 19thC house, so named because its excellent water supply made it ideal for washing clothes, linen, etc. In 1891 it was occupied by widow Eliza Jubb, laundress to the Marshall family at the Towers across the road; the family also employed her daughter Louisa as a domestic servant. Mrs Jubb later moved to Yorkshire as a tobacconist. Between the two world wars, the cottage was the home of the Brown family, whose father brought up six children after the death of his wife. They are best-known for their osier business (q.v.) and the large fruit enterprise they ran on land to the west of the A1: apple and plum orchards and thousands of gooseberry plants. Leadens Lane. This rural thoroughfare linking Stirtloe and Mill Road also gives access to the ‘Water Board Road’, a favourite area for walkers. It was for a time in the 1860s/1870s also known as Burton’s Lane or Stirtloe Road; its present name probably derives from the time of John Leaden (fl. 1890-1910), who had a market garden at the junction of the lane and Mill Road. The lane has one dwelling, Martins Farm (formerly Leaden House), and Buckden Sewage Works. Library , Buckden. Few of those using Buckden Library will be aware that it owes its existence to the advent of unrestricted submarine warfare during the First World War. Residents had previously had access to private circulating libraries and the Reading Room library in Church Street, but had not had their own public library. The war brought home to the government the vulnerability of Britain’s food supply. In a few decades the nation had moved from producing four-fifths of all it ate to producing only about a half. As the war ended, therefore, the government set out to attract people back into the countryside and into commercial and home food production. Agricultural Training Centres were set up to help wounded ex-servicemen become smallholders, and the Land Settlement Facilities Act 1919 and Allotment Acts in 1922 and 1925 opened up allotments to the whole population (not just the labouring class). Ministers also hoped that better facilities might encourage those moving into the countryside to remain there. Hence the Public Libraries Act 1919, which transferred responsibility for libraries from borough councils to county councils and removed some of the restraints on the opening of new libraries in rural areas. In 1926, Huntingdonshire introduced a village libraries scheme, with the new post of county librarian attracting a large number of applicants. It is not known when the first public library service reached Buckden; it was certainly served by a library van in the 1930s, one of whose drivers was the Buckden author Frances Turk (q.v.). During the Second World War, the village schoolroom was opened on one evening a week as a branch of the public library. By the 1970s, a library was established in temporary accommodation at what was then the south end of Manor Gardens. The County Council’s threat to close it in 1995 led to the largest and most agitated public meeting seen in Buckden for many years. It was reprieved and incorporated into the Millennium Community Centre in 1999. Library, the Buckden is a collection of works on theology, archaeology and local history founded by WilliamWake, Bishop of Lincoln from 1705 to 1716. For the next 120 years, every clergyman preferred to a living in the diocese was expected to donate a book to the library. The practice ceased in 1837, when Buckden was transferred to the Diocese of Ely. The books continued to be housed in a room above the inner gatehouse, but responsibility for them passed to the vicar of Buckden. There had in fact been a separate parochial lending library, a Bray library, in the parvis at St Mary’s Church since the mid-1690s. (Thomas Bray (d. 1730) was a Wiltshire clergyman who encouraged the setting up of parish libraries throughout England and Wales; he kick-started the one in Buckden with a grant of £1.) In 1874, the two libraries were combined and their contents removed to Huntingdon, initially to the Grammar School and then, in 1890, to the newly erected Archdeaconry Library. In the 1960s the collection was finally transferred to Cambridge University Library, where it was stored as ‘Huntingdon Rare Books’ in the Bible Society Library. Lincoln, bishops of, two buried in one grave, not. The scholarly Bishop Thomas Barlow (1608/9-1691) is said to have asked to be buried in the same grave in the chancel of St Mary’s Church as his equally scholarly predecessor and namesake, William Barlow. The reason for such a request is unclear (the two were not related). Perhaps it was modesty, meanness or just a desire to face the resurrection in the company of a fellow-intellectual. Sadly there is no evidence to suggest that his wish – if indeed he ever expressed it – was acted on. See also Suffolk, dukes of, two buried in one tomb. Linton family. The Lintons of Stirtloe House, who came from Lincolnshire, were major landowners and one of Buckden’s leading gentry families throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their story is told in Chapter 7 The Manor Gardens Library August 1999 after closure