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Buckingham then: Mid 18th to 20th century
Buckingham's main economic problem had always been poor communications but turnpike roads were beginning to improve matters. Still it was difficult to travel more than fifty or sixty miles in a day. There were many journeys that required an over-night stop or at any rate a change of horses. Buckingham became a place of coaching inns - the Swan and Castle (now the Villiers), the White Hart, the Cobham Arms and the George (now both converted to other uses). Buckingham was an obvious place to break a journey between Oxford and Cambridge or between London and the Midlands. Between the late 1740s and the early years of the 19th century Buckingham experienced something of a building boom. In 1748 the Old Gaol, now a museum, was built in an attempt to win back the Assizes from Aylesbury. The old church fell down in 1776; a new one being constructed on the site of the old Castle in the 1780s. There was a new town hall as well and a branch canal, linking Buckingham with the main Grand Junction Canal, was opened. All this resulted in a boom at the end of the 18th century with the Buckingham tanners benefiting from links with Northampton, a thriving boot and shoe town.
Another setback hit the town in the mid 19th century, when Buckingham was excluded from the London to Birmingham railway line. The main line was built some miles away from Buckingham and the town had to make do with a branch line that opened in 1850. The bankruptcy of the Duke of Buckingham in 1848 had a terrible effect on the Buckingham economy and the town lost the last remnants of its county status. The wool sorting trades declined and in the 1870s, as the agricultural depression hit hard, many Buckingham people left for Wolverton, London and the new colonies to look for work. Between 1841 and 1931, Buckingham's population went down by a quarter - from around 4000 to about 3000 - at a time when the national population more than doubled.
But there were compensations for those who remained in late Victorian Buckingham. The town acquired more facilities - a hospital, mains drainage, water supply and electricity, all before 1900. Perhaps because of the interest of Florence Nightingale, who spent her declining years at Claydon House, health care in Buckingham was much better than average. There were several years in the 1890s and early 1900s when the death rate was the lowest in the country. The Church had been remodelled by Gilbert Scott, the famous local architect, there were several new chapels and existing schools had been expanded and new ones established. Perhaps Buckingham was declining in relation to the rest of the nation - but a reading of the local papers around 1900 gives a rather different impression.
There were even times when Stowe was once more the focus of attention. For some years the house was leased to the Comte de Paris, the exiled claimant to the French throne. It is said that the Comte declared that he liked Stowe because it reminded him of Versailles. Notices in French were installed at Buckingham station for the convenience of his visitors. But the real significance of the Comte was not with railways but with another form of transport. Until recently, a garage in Buckingham carried on its letter head the wonderful legend: "Suppliers of Motor Cars to the Court of France". Buckingham had become perhaps a little bit of a backwater in the railway age but the future was with roads and here it was much better placed.
Like other communities Buckingham suffered grievous losses in World War I but at least some of its soldiers were spared the futility of trench warfare in France. These were the men of the Bucks Yeomanry, the regiment that made the last successful cavalry charge - against the Turks, not far from Jerusalem, in 1917. Perhaps the most important development of the inter-war period was the opening of Stowe School, indicating a future in which the dominant theme would be education and not only education but independent education. There was some new housing, both public and private, but the full impact of the 20th century came with World War II when the bombing of London brought a host of evacuees, many of whom remained after the war and added a new energy and vitality to the town. The war also brought the reallocation of factories from London, American soldiers and airmen, construction workers and others.
And the sense of dynamism that appeared with the war continued afterwards. The population of the Home Counties was rising fast and spilling to their farthest corners and there was the Milton Keynes project beginning in the late 1960s. The implications for Buckingham were immense. But there was something missing. Buckingham has always been a little bit different from other places. The danger now was that it would become indistinguishable from the rest of outer suburbia. Lots of other places were gaining universities. Buckingham got one too - but Buckingham got an independent university.