Budleigh Past and Present

  Continued from 6 July 1945 AIRCRAFTWOMAN 1 ST CLASS FRANCES JOAN WATTS (1922-1945) 475349, Women's Auxiliary Air Force https://budleighpastandpresent.blogspot.com/2024/01/aircraftwomam-1st-class-frances-joan.html       Buenos Aires (Chacarita) British Cemetery. Image credit: www.ww2cemeteries.com On 13 November 2016, just over 70 years after the end of WW2, a ceremony was held at the British Cemetery in Buenos Aires. The cemetery contains 11 headstones of casualties from the war. It is here that the name of Lieutenant Evan MacDonald Macrae appears rather than on Budleigh Salterton’s War Memorial. Yet the 30-year-old died not in Buenos Aires but in Burma. His connection with Budleigh is not obvious, but the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) record lists him as the son of Evan Macrae and his wife Doris, n é e Wild, of Budleigh Salterton, Devon. The CWGC listing ‘ Evan Mac Macrae’ is surely a typographical omission. Evan and Doris Ma...

Continued from 20 October 1940: A Budleigh Burial in 1940: Corporal Harry Goulty (1898-1940) The Buffs (Royal East Kent Regiment)   https://budleighpastandpresent.blogspot.com/2020/11/ww2-75-20-october-1940-budleigh-burial.html   Only by chance did I see mention of John on one of the sides of the pedestal which marks his parents’ distinctive grave in Budleigh Salterton’s St Peter’s Burial Ground.   It seemed a shame that lichen and a few tufts of grass should continue to obscure his memory, even though his own grave is far away in North Africa. And I was intrigued by the story of yet another child of a Budleigh resident who was also a high-ranking army officer, and, like so many other former Budleigh residents, born in India. So here is John’s story.       He was the son of Major General Kevin Martin DSO and his wife Hilda Martin, n é e Burkinshaw. Major General Martin was still a serving officer at the time of John’s death, living with Hild...