Budleigh Past and Present

  Above: The 2011 poster advertising Fairlynch exhibition 'Survival!'   With the ‘Sea, Salt and Sponges’ exhibition at Fairlynch Museum about to close in early November I am now thinking of how to dispose of all the display material. Obviously many of the artefacts will be returrned to the owners who kindly lent them. But what of all the display boards which told the stories of heroic Budleigh characters like Murray Levick and Henry Carter, the subjects of our exhibitions of the last few years?   Does the recycling centre have to be their only destination just because of lack of storage space in the Museum?                                                   Canadian connections: The book Public School Explorers in Newfoundland by Dennis Clarke, published in 1935,  focused on...

Actress Jenny Coverack i nside Scott's Hut, dressed as Kathleen Scott Photograph copyright © 2006 Marketa Jirouskova We were awestruck by the courage and suffering of former Budleigh resident Murray Levick and his companions displayed in last year's Fairlynch exhibition 'Survival', and moved by actress Jenny Coverack's performance as Kathleen Scott in Budleigh Salterton's Public Hall.         Meredith Hooper, during a visit to Fairlynch Museum's 'Survival!' exhibition in July 2011   Now comes the final stage of the centenary commemoration of Captain Scott's tragic Terra Nova expedition with a BBC Radio 4 drama to be broadcast on Tuesday 5 February, from 2.15 to 3.00 pm, with Sam West as Scott and Emilia Fox as Kathleen. 'Kathleen and Con' by author and Antarctic expert Meredith Hooper is based on the two volumes of extraordinarily interesting letters written by Robert Falcon Scott and Kathleen Bruce. The dram...

Above: On show in Fairlynch. (L-r) Harry Dickason, Victor Campbell, George Abbott, Raymond Priestley, Murray Levick, Frank Browning.   These six men, the northern party of Captain Scott's last expedition, stand outside the entrance to the snow hole in which they have just spent the 1911-1912 Antarctic Winter in darkness. Photo taken 24 Sept 1912. Photo credit: Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge Half-through the final year of Fairlynch Museum 's exhibition about the epic story of Scott's Northern Party it seems an appropriate moment to record some recent enthusiastic comments from visitors, made since this season's opening in mid-April. Free admission is bringing in many more of them than in previous years, and 2012 being the centenary of Scott's death - as well as that of   R.F. Delderfield's birth along with the Year of the London Olympics and the Royal Jubilee - may see even more in the coming months. The 'Survival!' ex...

Volunteer helpers at Budleigh Salterton's Fairlynch Museum have acted swiftly to reassure families that as far as they are aware no scenes of depraved penguins are on display in its display about Antarctic explorer Murray Levick and his companions. Organisers of the 'Survival!' exhibition at Fairlynch Museum admit that photographs taken by Levick are on display, along with a book about the creatures written by the explorer and published in 1914. "We are a family-friendly museum, and the last thing we would want to do is to shock our visitors by revealing what penguins got up to in their natural environment," said the Museum's press officer Michael Downes. His statement comes after the revelation by the Natural History Museum that Murray Levick, the doctor and zoologist on Scott's last expedition, deliberately withheld from publication descriptions of sexual shenanigans among the Ad é lie penguins that the explorer had witnessed and ...