Budleigh Past and Present

This is a post which originally appeared on my Great War at Fairlynch blog, which you can find via Google. I found that Facebook did not like linking to the site because apparently the automatons believed that it contravened 'community guidelines'. ???!!!  Maybe there's some politically incorrect content that I've been oblivious to. Anyway I'm reposting here in the hope that Budleigh & Brewster will be acceptable.    War memorials come in all shapes and sizes. Not many people would associate this drain cover with the Great War. But whenever I see it as I walk down my garden path I think of Alfred and the son that he lost just a few years before he built our 1920s house on Exmouth Road in Budleigh Salterton. Alfred Demant had moved from Highgate in London to live in the Budleigh area at some time after 1911. He and his wife Amelia Maude Louise had taken up residence in Ivy Cottage – now Yew Tree Cottage – next to the Baptist Chapel ...

  Budleigh Salterton War Memorial Well, I’ve stuck out WW1 for almost half of its grim catalogue of senseless slaughter. But as the centenary of 1 July 1916 approaches, with its list of eight men from the Lower Otter Valley who lost their lives on that one day alone, I simply cannot go on.   As readers of The Great War at Fairlynch http://fairlynchgreatwar.blogspot.co.uk/ have seen, I had originally intended to mark the centenary of each of the 168 casualties linked to the area with a commemorative post on the above website. In most cases an account of their lives has already been published on excellent sites like the one at http://www.devonremembers.co.uk/  in which researchers from Fairlynch have already been involved.  Inevitably there were extra details which I wanted to explore, or photos that I felt could add to the picture. But there are limits! The two-year Great War at Fair...

  Visitors seeking local memories of the 1914-18 world conflict have only another six weeks to go until the main season ends at Fairlynch on Sunday 27 September.   Our Great War exhibition can be seen again briefly when the Museum re-opens during the school half-term before finally being dismantled.  But our neighbours in Exmouth – all volunteers just as in Budleigh – staged their own Great War display and their museum remains open until the end of October. Exmouth is just a few miles along the coast from Budleigh Salterton. So it’s no surprise to find, from a rummage in the archives, that at least a dozen men associated with the Lower Otter Valley who died on active service during World War One also had links to the larger town. As at Fairlynch, there are photos of local men who served in the conflict.   Among...

A Friend of Fairlynch has generously donated this charming Joyce Dennys portrait to the Museum. Regular readers of my scribblings will have noticed that the name of Joyce Dennys has cropped up frequently over the years on this blog, and many visitors to this year’s ‘Great War at Fairlynch’ exhibition will have admired the famous VAD recruitment poster that she designed in 1915. As an effective piece of propaganda it ranks alongside equally successful wartime appeals such as Kitchener’s ‘Your Country needs you.’ Most of Joyce Dennys’ artwork on display at Fairlynch is on loan from Budleigh Salterton Town Council; you can see some examples at     http://budleighbrewsterunited.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/more-joyce-dennys-paintings-on-display.html Her paintings are among the favourite items at the Museum enjoyed by both visitors and volunteers. So the news of the latest donation by Friends of Fairlynch Michael and Valerie Jackaman has been received with...

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

  Thanks are due to Colin Wells, of Dawlish, who recently donated this six-page 1966 auction brochure to the Museum. He came across it in a box of local maps which he’d purchased, and thought that it would interest us as part of the history of the building.  Our late President Priscilla Hull recalled how the house was bought “at a reasonable price” following a public appeal which was launched in 1967. “This realised about £3,500, so four interested people bought ‘Fairlynch’ between them, and leased it back to the Trustees of the Committee of Management.”     Also shown here is a Great War photo of Brigadier Phillip Wheeler Bliss and his wife Monica on their wedding day, published in the Weekly Dispatch .  The couple lived at Fairlynch from 1949 to 1964. Brigadier Bliss had a distinguished military career, about which I will write in due course on my Great War blog.