Budleigh Past and Present

Thinking of Budleigh Salterton’s nursery school playmates Belinda Lee and Sir Richard Rodney Bennett as I did recently at http://budleighbrewsterunited.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/following-star-from-budleigh-salterton.html , I was reminded of another pair of school chums in the local area from many years ago. Budleigh artist and author Joyce Dennys and her life-long friend, the writer Victor Clinton-Baddeley, both attended Park House School in Knowle although she was some six years older. Known locally as Martineau’s, the school’s results seem to have been uneven.  “This seat of learning occupied a pleasant country house with a big garden,” recalls Joyce Dennys. “I was there for a year, was perfectly happy and learnt absolutely nothing.” But as she admits in her autobiography And then there was One , the headmaster – ‘Sir’, as she calls him – must have been a good teacher: Clinton, she tells us, went on to get a double first from Cambridge.   Indeed, Eust...

  [Click http://budleighbrewsterunited.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/budleigh-in-books-part-i.html   to read Budleigh in Books Part 1 ] One of Grainger’s many books, The Solutions of Radford Shone was published by Ward Lock in 1908   Image credit: http://www.batteredbox.com I reckon that Budleigh makes a good setting for crime thrillers. Plenty of Colonel Mustards - well, not so many nowadays, perhaps. Arsenic, maybe, and certainly masses of old lace in Fairlynch Museum. Lots of possibilities of suspicious drownings, riding accidents and falls from the cliffs.  Francis Edward Grainger thought so anyway. The son of a clergyman, he had an army career before finding his vocation as an author and journalist.   He lived at various addresses in Budleigh Salterton , including ‘Almora’ at 33 Station Road, at Sherbrook Lodge and on Marine Parade.  H e died in Budleigh in 1927 at the age of 70 after writing more than 60 detective sto...