Buckden residents and visitors show their generosity over Christmas

 

 

Buckden residents and visitors alike showed their generosity over the Christmas period and throughout 2008 with significant donations to charities, including the Manorlands Hospice, the Home Farm Trust and the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust.

 

Carol singing around Buckden by villagers, including many members of the Buckden Singers group, raised £310 on Christmas Eve. The money has been sent to the Manorlands Hospice at Oxenhope near Keighley, run by the Sue Ryder Care charity. Sue Ryder was born in Yorkshire in 1923 and served with the Polish section of the secret Special Operations Executive during World War II. Having seen the effects of war, she began relief work for sick people. Later in her life, she became Lady Ryder of Warsaw. She died in October 2000. Manorlands is a late Victorian house set in large gardens in Oxenhope. It was opened as a hospice in 1974 and provides specialist care for patients with cancer and other life limiting illnesses from Airedale, Craven and Bradford. Manorlands aims to meet the practical and emotional needs of families and carers as well as those of the patients. Each year around 640 patients and their families benefit from its services. As well as in-patient care, there is a day therapy unit, a community specialist palliative care team who visit people in their own homes, and a team of bereavement counsellors. The hospice costs £1.6 million to run each year and relies heavily on community fundraising and voluntary donations.

 

Meanwhile, two days after Christmas, an Old Time Dance in Buckden raised a surplus of £78.33 for Buckden Village Institute funds. The packed Buckden Christmas Dance was the climax of a year-long campaign and programme of dance classes to revive and reinvigorate a tradition stretching back generations but now in decline in so many places. The dance, led by the Tim Boothman Dance Band, featured ‘old hands’ as well as those taking to the old time dance-floor possibly for the first time. It was organised by Lynn Thornborrow, who has lived at the top of Wharfedale all her life. Official prizes were awarded by dance instructor Rosemary Boothman as follows: Best Couple, Albert and Elsie Snowden of Haworth; Best Female, Vera Wiseman of Kettlewell; Best Male, Clifford Lambert of Kettlewell; Most Enthusiastic Dancers, Dick and Maggie Walker of Starbotton; Tim Boothman Band Prize for Best Supporters of Old Time Dancing, Bev and Gill Owen of Buckden. The origins of many Old Time Dances are now obscure but they probably fuse many elements, including 19th century military customs, Scottish ceilidh reels and even Norse influences. The names of the dances themselves reveal a rich cultural history: Buttered Peas, Dashing White Sergeant, Dinky Two Step, Huntsman’s Chorus, Imperial Waltz, Military Two Step, Eva Three Step, Circassian Circle, Swinging Six, Lomond Waltz and Pride of Erin Waltz. The Dashing White Sergeant, for example, dates back to 1826 and was obviously influenced by the Napoleonic Wars.

 

During November and December 2008 Christmas card sales and a coffee morning at West Winds Yorkshire Tearooms in Buckden raised a total of £666.22 in aid of the Home Farm Trust. The Home Farm Trust is a national charity providing care for people with a learning disability and support for their carers and families. In Leeds the trust provides day-care packages and supported living arrangements for 65 people in 16 houses around the city.

 

And throughout 2008 customers and guests at West Winds Yorkshire Tearooms in Buckden provided £129.33 for the Home Farm Trust and £136.22 for the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust by buying postcards donated by West Winds. The money raised for the Home Farm Trust will help fund day-care packages and supported living arrangements for people with learning disabilities in Yorkshire. The money raised for the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust will go towards conservation work in Grass Wood near Grassington in Wharfedale, run by the charity. Grass Wood is a limestone nature reserve rich in flowers such as St John’s wort, bluebell, lily of the valley, herb Paris, green hellebore, bloody cranesbill, wild strawberry, rock rose and orchids, together with a rich variety of birds such as wood warblers and green woodpeckers.