Budleigh Past and Present

A scene from the 60s: Kids help the fishermen on Budleigh beach    Image credit: Fairlynch Museum   The first thing I need to say is that Fairlynch Museum may be featured on BBC1 tomorrow, Friday 19 February, 2016 at 3.45pm. I shall of course, be watching, though with some regret. Many months ago the Museum was approached by TV company Raise the Roof Productions for permission to film the building. The company was intending to make a programme in the ‘Holiday of My Lifetime’ series, in which a celebrity recalls his or her first memorable holiday in a conversation with Len Goodman. Yes, the Len Goodman who judges all those Amazing Contestants on Strictly Come Dancing.  The celebrity in question was going to be Valerie Singleton. Is going to be Valerie Singleton. You know!  The one in the middle in that Blue Peter Annual Number 5.  Blue Peter from many moons ago o...

Can you help solve a thespian puzzle by providing information about this drama production in Budleigh's Public Hall, dated, according to the above photo, January 1926?   A local antiquarian book collector has suggested that a show which became a West End hit in the 1930s may have had its origins in a much earlier Budleigh Salterton amateur production.   For lovers of crime mysteries Victor Clinton-Baddeley is known as the creator of the amateur detective Dr R.V. Davie in a series of five novels written between 1967 and 1970, the year he died. But Budleigh-born Clinton-Baddeley had his first success as an author at the age of 25 with his travel book entitled simply Devon .   A second edition appeared in 1928.   He went on to write various light-hearted dramas and pantomimes in the 1930s. The first of his comic operettas for which he wrote the libretto was The Pride of the Regiment, or Cashiered for His Country , with music by Walter Leigh. ...