Dreaming of Budleigh across the Atlantic
Fairlynch Museum volunteers gave a warm welcome to Canadian Adam Bunch, left, including an evening at East Budleigh’s Sir Walter Raleigh pub You probably won’t have come across Adam Bunch unless you picked up one of the hundreds of little postcards that he left around the town to make us reflect on events more than 200 years ago – a bit like a Banksy historian. You see, Adam is a proud and passionate Canadian with a special interest in his home city of Toronto. And, unlikely though it may seem, Budleigh has a link to the city and its province of Ontario through a former resident of our town. General John Graves Simcoe, born in Northamptonshire in 1752, is revered in Canada for many reasons. As Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada for five years from 1791, he founded Toronto and was instrumental in ending slavery in North America. He also introduced institutions such as the courts, trial by jury, English common law and freehold land tenure. And to prove what a c...
