FEATURE
Bankside House
In the days when the majority of men in Deeping St James were agricultural labourers, the Buck family must have seemed like property magnates! William was a baker who owned the bakery in Church Street. The Buck’s also owned ‘The Ship Inn’ in Eastgate and ‘The Woolpack’ in Horsegate. In the late 1840s the cottage, now 61 Church Street, was in the ownership of Thomas, the son of William and his wife Elizabeth. After the wedding of Thomas’s younger brother James Parker Buck to Ann Loweth in 1847 they moved into the cottage. A little later on in 1855 at auction Thomas bought two small houses with their yards and gardens adjoining another two roods of land where 63 and 65 Church Street now stand. Two years later Thomas added to his portfolio by buying the two cottages that stood where Bankside House now stands. When Thomas died his eldest son, James Tansley Buck inherited the cottages. James was born in 1844 to Thomas and wife Jane Buck née Tansley. After leaving school he served an apprenticeship with John Crowson and he qualified as a Master Builder and Carpenter and set up his own business in South London, working in Bermondsey and Camberwell as well as returning periodically to supervise the building of property in Deeping St James. On the death of his Uncle James in 1901, James pulled the old cottage at 61 Church Street down and built the one that survives today. He also had the cottages at 59 Church Street demolished in order to build Bankside for his retirement. It had been his long-held ambition to retire to a new house in Deeping St James, but 14
pressure of work elsewhere kept him away from the task himself. Instead Messrs Alfred Arch Crowson were contracted to build number 59. Alfred was the son of James’s apprentice master, John. James would return from London from time to time to check on progress, staying with his sister Susannah Panton who lived with her family at 63 Church Street. Looking up, the date stone of 1911 is visible and it is true that with his commitments elsewhere James did not get the time to live out his retirement in Deeping St James, but he did die in his beloved Deeping on 30th December 1915. The properties were left to two nephews, William and Thomas Buck, who by this time had moved to America and sold the properties on to their second cousin, another James Parker, the son of James Parker Buck and Ann, née Loweth. The life of an agricultural labourer was not for James Parker who had joined the Army in 1867, serving with the Royal Engineers, in 1871 recorded as being at the school of Military Engineering in Gillingham, Kent. After serving for more than eight years he left to join the West Yorkshire Constabulary. On his 1876 application form he is described as 5ft 10 and three quarter inches with a fair complexion, hazel eyes and brown hair. But the life of a PC did not suit him and he returned to the Army in 1877 as a 2nd Corporal in the Royal Engineers. Three years later he married Louise Jeanette Moores, at which time he was a NonCommissioned Officer in the Royal Engineers. Louise was from Poole in Dorset and before her marriage had been a draper’s assistant, working in Bournemouth. James served in Egypt fighting in the Second Egyptian War, protecting the Suez Canal and helping to build a railway for which, in November 1882, he was presented
