Budleigh Past and Present

This post is the first of many which commemorate the people, linked in some way to Budleigh Salterton, who died while on active service  during WW2 . Their names are recorded on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website at    https://www.cwgc.org/ Richard Vivian Warren, serving with 1st Battalion, 15th Punjab Regiment, is thought to have died of pneumonia on 10 September 1939, aged 24, at Yatung during a forced march through Tibet. It was the first WW2 death of a serviceman listed on Budleigh Salterton's War Memorial, and it occurred just a week into the war.   Why Tibet, I wondered? I had not heard of it as a theatre of war in WW2. Most people think of Tibet before it was taken over by China as a remote mountainous land which seemed closed to the outside world. To some extent the country enjoyed its isolation and a high degree of autonomy before its annexation in 1951, but during the early part of the 20 th   century more than a hundred British o...

It’s barely credible that my azaleas are flowering in February and indeed that February has arrived, preoccupied as I have been with the life of Reg Varney. But now my forthcoming biography has gone off to the printer and I’m back to blogging with a vengeance, realising that I haven’t yet posted my Object of the Month on Fairlynch Museum’s noticeboard. So here it is for your enjoyment along with my attempt at some matching verse, and when the rain stops and the wind dies down I might toddle along to Fairlynch for the noticeboard update.   Click on the image to make it bigger. 

Our new poster for the 2015 Fairlynch exhibitions. Click on the image to make it bigger.

Fairlynch Museum's Local History Group is still seeking people from Budleigh Salterton and surrounding villages with information for the 2014 WWI tribute exhibition

    With the approaching centenary of World War One many museums, including Fairlynch,  will be dusting down their 1914-18 memorabilia and even thinking of acquiring items for exhibitions. For those planning to mark the centenary whose budgets are limited there are plenty of replica packs such as the ones currently being marketed by the National Museums of Scotland . Its World War One memorabilia pack consists of replica documents including a Joining the Ranks booklet, a Patriotic Pledge card, a Kitchener postcard, an I.D. card, an Invasion leaflet, a Help to win the War leaflet and recruitment cards.  Genuine material can still be picked up locally however. One of the items on offer at the Bicton Street Auction Rooms in Exmouth is a 1915 first edition of Some ‘Frightful’ War Pictures by the celebrated illustrator William Heath Robinson (1872-1944). At this early stage in the war when the book ...