Budleigh Past and Present

  The statue of Roger Conant in Salem, USA. Image credit: Teresa Conant; www.wikitree.com    Next to Salem Common stands a 9-foot high bronze statue of the Massachusetts city's founder, Roger Conant, born around 1592 in the pretty Devon village of East Budleigh. ‘An imposing, imperious white man,’ is how one of his embarrassed 21 st century American descendants described it recently, at a time when statues of white men have been crashing down both in the USA and in Britain following the Black Lives Matter movement.   Photo credit: John Andrews and  Destination Salem  www.salem.org It doesn’t help that the statue stands outside a former church which has now become Salem’s Witch Museum. Even if you know that the figure most definitely does not represent a witch – ‘rigid and judgemental’ as it has been described by a modern historian of Salem – the statue with its stern Puritan gaze puts one in mind of the cruel witch trials which took place a dozen or ...

  The statue of Roger Conant, by sculptor Henry Kitson, completed in 1911, stands outside Salem’s Witch Museum.    Photo credit: John Andrews It’s been a tough time for statues, especially in 2020. Many of them must be wondering whose turn it will be next, to be unceremoniously toppled from their plinth.   But a year or so ago, a group of East Budleigh residents decided that they wanted to honour Roger Conant, the mill owner’s son who left England in 1623 to found the city of Salem. How the Conant family mill in East Budleigh, sadly demolished in the early 20 th  century,  might have looked. Frontispiece illustration from  Upper Canada Sketches  by Thomas Conant, Toronto: William Briggs 1898 And a mini version of Salem’s statue, perhaps located near the Conant family mill, seemed an obvious tribute.   The unveiling of the statue of Sir Walter Raleigh in East Budleigh, ...

The face of a hero as created by Vivien Mallock FRBS One of the eye-catching exhibits in Fairlynch Museum’s ‘Beyond the Boyhood’ display in the newly refurbished Sir Walter Ralegh Room is the Budleigh Salterton Venture Art Club’s version of the famous Millais painting. As a work in progress it was featured elsewhere on this site.  Another rather special artefact in the exhibition is a life-size bronze face created by sculptress Vivien Mallock when she was working on the statue of Sir Walter now standing in East Budleigh. Vivien Mallock’s Raleigh statue being unveiled on 7 February 2006 by (l-r):  HRH The Duke of Kent, Steve Baker, who was chairman of East Budleigh Parish Council, Hugo Swire MP, sculptress Vivien Mallock   The statue was unveiled by HRH the Duke of Kent in 2006 and occupies a focal point in the village near All Saints Church. Its origin was not without controversy. East Budleigh residents had ho...