Budleigh Past and Present

Like Yettington resident Hanneke Coates, whose story I wrote about recently, Barbara Tilbury (née Hutton) and her family were living in the Far East prior to Japan’s entry into the Second World War and suffered the misery of internment when invading forces took over their homes.    Barbara is not a local resident, but her husband David was brought up in Budleigh and his family is well known in our area. That’s just one reason why I thought Barbara’s story was worth telling.  As a child, Barbara Hutton grew up in a city known in the 1920s and 30s for its glamour and prosperity as ‘The Paris of the East, the New York of the West’.    Many of Shanghai’s grand buildings were of Art Deco design and date from that pre-war period. Top left clockwise: The former Grosvenor House, now one of the two main buildings of Jinjiang Hotel; the Peace Hotel and the Bank of China Building; Eddingburg House; Park Hotel, formerly the Shanghai Joint Savings Society ...