Budleigh Past and Present

  A talk about Roger Conant, founder of Salem, Massachusetts, is being given in the church where his family worshipped over four hundred years ago.  Ian Blackwell is a published author who is noted for his books on the Italian Campaign of World War Two rather than on 17th century history.  However he and his American wife Bonnie have lived for nearly thirty years in Roger Conant's birthplace of East Budleigh, and Bonnie has a special connection to Salem.  Both her parents can trace their roots to the Mayflower, and her father's family lived in Salem for many generations. Her great-grandfather was associated with the city's Peabody Essex Museum and her uncle was involved with the Salem Historical Commission.  In researching the book, as far as possible, Ian has gone back to primary sources written at the time the Conant family lived in East Budleigh, for example documents held by the Devon Heritage Centre and the National Archives.  He has also m...

  Nigel Tucker, with some of the coins from his collection I was saddened to hear recently of the death of Nigel Tucker, founding member of the Woodbury History Society, who helped to make the 2018 exhibition at Budleigh’s Fairlynch Museum such a success.     Putting together a museum exhibition can be incredibly time-consuming, especially if you decide to borrow items from places which insist on the payment of high insurance premiums and the completion of detailed questionnaires to satisfy the bureaucrats and pay the lawyers.     So when the Raleigh 400 exhibition at Fairlynch Museum was staged to honour Sir Walter in the 400 th anniversary year of his death, the generosity of kind friends and neighbours in providing items for display was much appreciated.   Coins of the period were especially interesting. Not only had they been lent thanks to a kind friend of the Museum but they were genuinely local. Maybe Sir Walter himself may have dropped th...

    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...

        An update from the studio of Budleigh artist John Washington which will be of special interest both to British Devonians with links to East Budleigh and American residents of Gloucester, Massachusetts.  John is continuing to work on his painting of the celebrated 1625 scene at Fishermen’s Field. That was when Roger Conant intervened and avoided possible bloodshed in the confrontation between fishermen from England’s West Country, led by John Hewes, and Captain Miles Standish, military adviser to the Plymouth Pilgrims: 'I thought you might like to see the fishermen who now have their characters more clearly identified in their faces,' he writes.  'Also, I’ve brought more detail into Tablet Rock at the back as that is such a well known landmark in the context of the story.' 'Next on the left hand side of the painting is to work on the hogshead salt barrels to bring them into line with the rest of the painting - more paint, more  colour, more dept...

  The statue of Roger Conant, by sculptor Henry Kitson, completed in 1911, stands outside Salem’s Witch Museum.    Photo credit: John Andrews It’s been a tough time for statues, especially in 2020. Many of them must be wondering whose turn it will be next, to be unceremoniously toppled from their plinth.   But a year or so ago, a group of East Budleigh residents decided that they wanted to honour Roger Conant, the mill owner’s son who left England in 1623 to found the city of Salem. How the Conant family mill in East Budleigh, sadly demolished in the early 20 th  century,  might have looked. Frontispiece illustration from  Upper Canada Sketches  by Thomas Conant, Toronto: William Briggs 1898 And a mini version of Salem’s statue, perhaps located near the Conant family mill, seemed an obvious tribute.   The unveiling of the statue of Sir Walter Raleigh in East Budleigh, ...

  ‘All That Was Left of Them’: The 17 th Lancers at Modderfontein. Painting by Richard Caton Woodville (1856-1927). The artist depicted the event as a classic colonial ‘last stand’ with officers and men standing back to back and surrounded during this 1901 battle of the Boer War. It’s been pointed out that in fact the battle was fought out among the rocks and stone kraals of the Modderfontein farm, and that the lances and helmets shown in the painting had been abandoned by this stage of the war ‘History painting’ – a genre which includes depicting an event or a moment in history, or a historical figure embodying a clear message – has a long and diverse tradition It covers Italian Renaissance artists showing the Adoration of the Magi to Picasso’s 1937 anti-war painting of the bombing of Guernica pictured above. It’s no longer fashionable of course, as speaker Brian Portch showed the audience at one of Fairlynch Museum’s C...

Photo by Lynne Lovatt‎, Christmas Eve 2011  from the Rolle flats in Budleigh  and posted in Facebook's Budleigh - Past and Present Well, the sun has risen on a new year and it’s time for a change! I’ve been in the habit of emailing lists of news items and features of local interest on a regular basis. The Raleigh 400 blog has done its work to mark the 400 th anniversary of the Great Devonian’s death and has closed - though I'm likely to tinker with it from time to time!   You can view it at leisure by clicking on  http://raleigh400.blogspot.com Budleigh Salterton, William Payne, 1790    Devon Archives.  Posted on Budleigh - Past and Present by  Yannick 'MrMunro' Munro‎ Budleigh and Brewster United has come back to life, and I'll be contributing to that, together with the new Facebook group Budleigh – Past and Present. Details about that and how to join are at the end of this post. Budleigh – Pa...