Budleigh Past and Present

  Shackleton in 1901, aged 27. Portrait by an  unidentified photographer  Visitors to Fairlynch Museum’s Antarctic exhibition a few years ago were fascinated by the story of former Budleigh resident Murray Levick and his five companions, members of Captain Scott’s ill-fated ‘Terra Firma’ expedition. The group succeeded against all the odds in surviving the six-month polar winter, sheltering for much of the time in a snow cave. Antarctic expert Meredith Hooper and me at Fairlynch's 'Survival!' exhibition in 2012 Fairlynch’s exhibition was praised by, among others, the writer and broadcaster Meredith Hooper. The Australian-born Antarctic expert was one of the guest authors attending Budleigh Salterton’s 2012 Literary Festival to talk about her book The Longest Winter: Scott's Other Heroes.   The Endurance, listing heavily, immediately before being crushed by the ice, October 1915.  Photo by...

  I enjoyed visiting the current exhibition at Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum a few days ago. It’s called ‘West Country to World’s End - The South West in the Tudor Age’ and I’ll write more about it in due course. A well produced book of the same title accompanies the exhibition, which I enjoyed so much that I bought a copy. Budleigh people will admire the impressively life-size portrait by an unknown artist of the area’s great Elizabethan hero Sir Walter Raleigh and his eight-year-old son Walter. On loan from the National Portrait Gallery the work was painted in 1602 when he was enjoying Queen Elizabeth’s favour, and shows in great detail, as the printed commentary explains, the expensive clothes worn by father and son: Sir Walter is wearing a jacket embroidered with seed pearls while the boy’s blue suit is silver-braided.   This link on the excellent and useful Wikipedia will take you to see it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WalterRaleighandson...