Budleigh Past and Present

A much-loved Shakespeare play performed in a Budleigh garden at the home of   Fairlynch Museum’s co-founder Joy Gawne by a troupe of enthusiastic local actors… What more would you want for a Saturday summer evening’s entertainment?   Exeter & Countess Wear Community Theatre will stage an outdoor performance of The Tempest in the garden of Cramalt Lodge at 2 Cricketfield Lane. Members of the cast are featured on this poster. Director Jill Coram says, ‘I am particularly looking forward to directing this play with its so many facets, including betrayal, colonisation, slavery, murderous plotting and magic. Then there is of course the shipwreck and was it the shipwreck which started off a course of events which affected all the characters you will see in the play. Come along and judge for yourself!’ Jill explained that the location was suggested by Joy Gawne’s niece. ‘Once I viewed it, I felt it was perfect and lent itself beautifully to “The Tempest”.’ ...

  This image that I posted on Fairlynch’s Facebook page got a fair bit of interest recently. Yes, ‘there is a connection’ I wrote, but I left it at that. So here’s  a bit of what I’ve found during the research for my forthcoming booklet about Reg Varney which will accompany the 2016 exhibition ‘Our Little Clown’ at Fairlynch Museum.  Yes, Reg did indeed play Shakespeare. Here he is as the clown or ‘wise fool’ Touchstone, a performance for which he won praise in a 1953 production of  As You Like It at the celebrated Mermaid Theatre.  The above booklet, published in 1951 and found among Reg's papers, tells the story of the 20th-century Mermaid Theatre, the life's work of actor Bernard Miles with his wife, Josephine Wilson. His original Mermaid Theatre was a large barn at his house in the St. John's Wood area of London. This seated 200 people, and during 1951 and 1952 ...

  Sir Walter Ralegh: celebrity of the Elizabethan world of entertainment He may have been described as “a stupid get” by the Beatles in one of their 1960s songs but it seems that Sir Walter Ralegh’s reputation in the entertainment world of his times made him as popular a figure as the Four Lads from Liverpool. The East Budleigh-born explorer, courtier and author was, so Professor Jonathan Bate of Warwick University points out, “like a celebrity figure of the day and his poems were set to music – they were like the pop songs of the Elizabethan era.”   How much did Shakespeare owe to Sir Walter?  The Shakespearean Authorship Trust even includes Ralegh as a candidate among the many who may have composed work by the Stratford Bard.   Some of the characters in Shakespeare quote odd lines from Ralegh poems, notes Professor Bate.    So it’s no surprise th...

The second book of the Budding Creativity project managed by Budleigh Salterton Decorative & Fine Arts Society was launched on 1 June at the town’s St Peter’s Church.  It features the same young Budleigh heroes Peter, Caroline, Eddie and Bud the dog, whose adventures were the basis of the first book in the series. The Times of their Lives takes the reader on a trip back to the age of Queen Elizabeth I. Which ties in rather well with the opening earlier this year of the Sir Walter Ralegh Room at Fairlynch Museum. Artist Jed Falby's mural shows the young Budleigh heroes passing through the time portal in All Saints Church where they enter the colourful age of the Tudors  Sir Walter, Sir Francis Drake, Queen Elizabeth herself and even William Shakespeare all make an appearance in this ripping yarn where imagination plays as important a part as historical fact.  We learn for example that Fairlynch Museum’s thatched...