Budleigh Past and Present

  Every little helps: NEDPSA member Dorrie Warner and one of the many generous donors at the Tesco store on Exmouth's Salterton Road “It’s a shame you have to beg for money,” was one lady’s comment to me in Exmouth’s Tesco foyer. Yes, standing there in my yellow tabard collecting for NEDPSA isn’t the most exciting activity I’d have chosen. But the weather was rather iffy for gardening and we had to do some shopping anyway. So the two-hour stint with my friend Annie was not especially arduous. Yes, maybe the Government should be providing all the money that prostate support associations need. But fund-raising is only partly about raising cash; the other part is making people aware of an issue. Chairman of the Exmouth and Budleigh Salterton branch of NEDPSA David Warner and his wife Dorrie   In our case the issue is the potentially deadly disease that is prostate cancer. Responsible, so they say, for over 10,000 deaths annually in the UK .  ...

Museum enthusiast Rob Merkel with one of Fairlynch Museum's latest attractions For centuries smuggling was a way of life for Budleigh people. One of the best-known was the vicar of East Budleigh , the Rev. Ambrose Stapleton (c.1771-1852). He was noted for his long tenure at All Saints Church but also for the illegal brandy which he both consumed and stored in the church and in the ancient vicarage of Vicar’s Mead.   Another celebrated smuggler familiar with the coast of East Devon was Jack Rattenbury (1778-1844), pictured left. Although he came originally from Beer, Rattenbury visited Budleigh Bay at least once when he was almost caught red-handed on 29 January 1821 by revenue officer Captain Stocker with “one hundred kegs of spirits, and a bale of tea” as Rattenbury wrote in his memoirs.   Small wonder then that Fairlynch Museum ’s ‘Smugglers’ Cellar’ attracts many visitors who are happy to risk the journey down some rather tricky steps. It’s here th...

  Fairlynch Chairman Roger Sherriff writes: Budleigh Salterton is following in the footsteps of Torquay which was Devon ’s first dementia-friendly town.   Budleigh Medical Centre, in partnership with the well-established and highly respected independent home care provider Home Instead, are spearheading an initiative to make businesses in Budleigh dementia-aware. With one in four of us likely to get some form of dementia and with 880 sufferers in Exmouth and Budleigh alone it is a condition that we are all going to become more aware of.   As part of this initiative Home Instead’s Mark McGlade, pictured above, is giving presentations on what dementia is, how it affects both sufferers and their carers and how members of the public and businesses can best help those dementia sufferers we come into contact with. On 12   June Mark gave a presentation to a group of stewards and volunteers at the Museum. He gave a detailed background about the variou...

    Ancient traditions of the Inka Empire will be the subject of a talk being given in Budleigh Salterton on Saturday 22 June.   Retired anthropology professor Don Juan Núñez del Prado Bejar has devoted over 30 years to studying the spiritual practices of the Q’ero Indians, an indigenous people living in a remote area of Peru . It was Don Juan’s father, anthropologist Oscar Núñez del Prado, who brought the Q’ero to the world’s notice following a 1955 expedition to the Peruvian Andes.   The Q’ero see themselves as the last living descendants of the Inka people, believing that their ancestors fled to the mountains of Peru at the time of the Spanish conquest in the 16th century. Here, explains Don Juan, they maintained the Andean philosophy which, like Buddhism, argues that everything – from solid matter to living beings – is made up of living energy. Like the Spanish conquistadores, our own Sir Walter Raleigh, born in East Budleigh, was tempted to ex...

    Above: Photo courtesy of Christopher Wroten Every so often my attention is drawn across the ocean to the affairs of Budleigh Salterton’s sister town of Brewster , on Cape Cod . Nothing official has ever been done to seal the relationship between the our two communities in spite of references to twinning on the internet and even on that Brewster road sign: some might say that maybe it’s better that way. I’m just happy to see via Google news alerts how a small American coastal town which has so many similarities to Budleigh Salterton deals with the issues of daily life that affect us all, ranging from town finances to dog poo. Yes, the battle over whether Brewster’s Drummer Boy Park should have a special dog-walking area has raised hackles and made headlines in much the same way that the Longboat saga has done in Budleigh. The issue of wind turbines in Brewster was another bitterly fought-over area that we in the UK would recognise, though we’ve yet to...