Budleigh Past and Present

This gold medal was issued by the New York-based Tiffany & Company to celebrate the achievement of those who had laid the first transatlantic telegraph cable in 1858, including former Budleigh resident Admiral Preedy CB (1817-94). I thought I would add my own bloggerel contribution to mark the Admiral's bicentenary in 2017.  It can be sung to the tune of ‘Miss Lucy had a baby’. 1. Now let us sing of heroes, who sailed the ocean blue, And of a Budleigh worthy, and don’t forget his crew. Two hundred years ago it was - from rural Worcestershire - That Georgie William Preedy came: A nautical high-flier. He passed all his exams, of course, and rose up through the ranks.   We’re sure that to an army life he would have said ‘No thanks!’ Chorus So let us raise our glasses to our Admiral Preedy! This year is very special as his bicentenary. HMS Agamemnon , launched...

  The latest arrival on Fairlynch Museum's new noticeboard is a poster advertising the free workshop on Saturday 14 November at the Exeter Community Centre on ‘Legacies of British slave-ownership.’ It's organised by the History Department at University College London. Details can be found at   http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/  The poster was circulated to Devon museums including Fairlynch. No doubt organisers of the workshop feel that there are many in the county who have strong views about the issue of slavery and the extent to which Devonians were involved in it. I touched on the issue in an earlier post following my visit to the exhibition ‘West Country to World’s End - The South West in the Tudor Age’ at Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery. To read it click  he re Devon historian Dr Todd Gray devoted a whole book to the subject in his 2007 publication Devon an...