Budleigh Past and Present

Continued from   https://budleighpastandpresent.blogspot.com/2020/07/ww2-75-yes-budleigh-was-bombed.html ' Moorcroft', Lansdown Road, offered by Lord Clinton to Belgian refugees in Budleigh during World War One. Perhaps Austrian Jewish refugees were offered work as maids in the 1930s in grand Budleigh houses like this. Moved and curious as I am when reading stories of the plight of refugees, especially those who have somehow found themselves in our local area, I am continuing on the theme of an earlier post about the German Jewish boy R. Muller, who was evacuated to Budleigh during World War Two.  Sadly no one has yet contacted me to say that they knew him, but at Exeter Synagogue they are making enquries.  A 1915 poster published by the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, London. It shows a soldier standing defiant as a woman and child flee a burning village in Belgium  Image credit: www.loc.gov The early years of World ...

Continued from  https://budleighpastandpresent.blogspot.com/2020/07/ww2-75-experience-of-world-war-two.html Continuing my reminders of the impact of wartime 75 years ago in Budleigh Salterton I noted some sad events. Fairlynch Museum records various instances of damage caused by isolated air raids.   The most tragic case was on 5 July 1941, when a bomb fell on 31 Armytage Road, pictured above, killing 35-year-old Florence Davie and two children — Joyce Davie aged eight, and Joyce Lowe, aged eleven. A few doors away, at number 35, another fatality was 70-year-old Mary Ann Sanders. Another bomb hit 10 Clinton Terrace, killing Doris Hadden, aged 38.   Pages from the wartime register recording Budleigh casualties resulting from enemy action The names of those injured on that date were recorded in a manuscript register of the time. A total of 15 casualties were similarly recorded during further incidents on 17 April 1942. T...

  Sculptor Frank Meisler's ‘Kindertransport – The Arrival’ (2006) stands outside London’s Liverpool Street station.     A project established by the Association of Jewish Refugees, it pays tribute to those Britons who aided the rescue of 10,000 Jewish children from the Nazi persecution which led on to the Holocaust.  Image credit:  Wjh31  I’m not certain of being around for the centenary of the outbreak of World War Two. So 2020, the 75 th anniversary of the war's end, seems a good time to reflect on those terrible five years that my parents’ generation endured. Especially as it may help to put the relatively minor disaster of Covid-19 into perspective.   Sadly, the grim pandemic has meant that Fairlynch Museum’s VE Day display may not be seen by as many visitors as it deserves. Here’s a testimony from the Museum’s archives which relates to the early years of WW2 rather than to 1945. ...

  ‘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...