Budleigh Past and Present

Antarctic artefacts: Former Fairlynch Museum Chairman Roger Kingwill, right, shows Professor Lloyd Davis some of the material used in the 'Survival!' exhibition to mark the centenary of Captain Scott's Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole So many travellers and explorers associated with the Budleigh area have made their mark in distant lands that it’s no surprise to find overseas visitors in Fairlynch Museum keen to trace family trees or eager to see where their forebears lived. Professor Lloyd Davis, who holds the Stuart Chair in Science Communications at the University of Otago in New Zealand , was a recent visitor searching for information.   Wildlife enthusiasts from that part of the world will know Lloyd as a leading authority on penguins, on which he’s written many scientific papers. He’s even written a book   Penguin: a season in the life of the Adelie penguin , which is a story of penguins and Antarctica as seen through the ey...

Volunteer helpers at Budleigh Salterton's Fairlynch Museum have acted swiftly to reassure families that as far as they are aware no scenes of depraved penguins are on display in its display about Antarctic explorer Murray Levick and his companions. Organisers of the 'Survival!' exhibition at Fairlynch Museum admit that photographs taken by Levick are on display, along with a book about the creatures written by the explorer and published in 1914. "We are a family-friendly museum, and the last thing we would want to do is to shock our visitors by revealing what penguins got up to in their natural environment," said the Museum's press officer Michael Downes. His statement comes after the revelation by the Natural History Museum that Murray Levick, the doctor and zoologist on Scott's last expedition, deliberately withheld from publication descriptions of sexual shenanigans among the Ad é lie penguins that the explorer had witnessed and ...