Thoughts out of the blue
Seeing this recently erected blue plaque outside Simcoe House, the summer residence of General John Graves Simcoe (1752-1806) on Budleigh Salterton's Fore Street Hill, reminded me of my early blogging days here and the excitement I felt on discovering that a resident of our town may well have shaped the history of the USA. True, the story of how Simcoe saved the life of America's first President may be apocryphal but in my enthusiasm for reviving Budleigh's somewhat low-key transatlantic link with a small town on Cape Cod I was happy to accept the incident as genuine when I came across it at http://schools.tdsb.on.ca/jarvisci/history/rangers.htm Anyway, even if it's not, the story of a British soldier's sense of decency and honour in refusing to shoot an enemy in the back is a kind of reassurance that even in wartime human beings can be shown as not totally savage. And so the legend took its place at http://budleighbrewsterunited.blogspot.com/200...