Budleigh Past and Present

  Meg Peacocke, a poet with wartime memories of Budleigh Fairlynch Museum and the Otter Valley Association are combining to present a talk on 13 October which will give a special insight into life in Budleigh Salterton during the Second World War.   A sister of the composer Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, Meg Peacocke is a distinguished poet who was brought up in Budleigh Salterton in the 1940s.   A World War Two recruitment poster Image © IWM Local artist Joyce Dennys had suggested that the family move from the London area to Budleigh to escape the danger of Nazi bombing raids, and Meg’s father, the children’s author Rodney Bennett, served as a warden at the ARP hut on The Green.     Meg Peacocke’s poem ‘Walking to Church 1940’ is one of several compositions which give a flavour of wartime life, describing how the Bennett family made its way to Sunday servic...

Give your day a smile! Visit www.facebook.com/Fairlynch We obviously couldn’t manage to fit them into our tiny little museum, so the headline is only a dream. But it’s a dream that can be easily realised thanks to the Internet. That’s what the obvious conclusion was at the end of a day’s workshop in Exeter at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum’s offices with Claire Sully and John Brunsdon from Bristol-based Tickbox Marketing  http://www.tickboxmarketing.co.uk/ The firm has been commissioned by the South West Museum Development   Partnership to “deliver digital engagement consultancy and training” to museums across the region. That just means explaining to museum workers - volunteers included - how things like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and a load of other things that we read about today can be used to show the world what riches we have in even the most modest of our museums. The audience is already there.   Figures released by the Internationa...

  It was standing room only for children from Budleigh Salterton’s St Peter’s School when they came to Fairlynch on Thursday 11 September.     The Museum receives regular visits from schools, but on this occasion key stages took a back seat in favour of Stage 5 of the Tour of Britain.   At 11.00 am riders left The Strand in Exmouth, making their way to the race start at Clyst Hayes, just outside Budleigh. At 11.15 am off they went with 177.3 kilometres to go before the finish on Exeter High Street.     The first of many police motorcycles to arrive     Here they come!   There they go! Austrian cyclist Matthias Brändle won the stage with a time of 04:32:03.      

After my survey of Budleigh as used by so many authors as a ‘small town’ setting I’m left wondering   what the future holds. I was going to stop after Part 3, but a friend told me the other evening that he’d enjoyed my rambling in previous instalments so much that I thought I’d now go a bit imaginative in this one. If you haven't seen my previous postings they are  here  for Part 1, here    for Part 2 and  here  for Part 3. The St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, 23-24 August 1572. Painting by François Dubois, a Huguenot painter born circa 1529 in Amiens, who settled in Switzerland. Although Dubois did not witness the massacre, he depicts Admiral Coligny's body hanging out of a window at the rear to the right. To the left rear, Catherine de' Medici is shown emerging from the Château du Louvre to inspect a heap of bodies.  Image credit: Wikipedia For example, will the budding creatives who gave us Summer Storm transport us b...

Families admire the completed mosaic Fairlynch’s Lego Dinosaur Day on 28 August was a great success, with 40 children busily making a two-dimensional model of a Rhynchosaur.     A life-size version of the strange dog-like creature which lived 240 million years ago was lent by Clinton Devon Estates and had pride of place on the Museum lawn for the day.   Bones from the Rhyncosaur were found in the cliffs between Budleigh and Sidmouth in the late 19th century. Bright Bricks expert Joe Perez , seen above, was on hand to give advice. The organisation is one of the world’s most inventive design companies, creating unique models, mosaics and events from LEGO bricks.    The day concluded with the creation of a large mosaic model on the lawn, with e ach child receiving a limited edition Rynchosaur Lego kit.  The event raised £415 for the Museum, and was featured in the Budleigh Journal ....

  Visitors to Fairlynch who enjoyed the R.F. Delderfield Centenary Exhibition in 2012 will be pleased to know that the author, pictured above, has been honoured with a blue plaque at the house where he lived from 1918 to 1923 in Addiscombe, Surrey. The Addiscombe & Shirley Park Residents’ Association funded the plaque to commemorate the distinguished novelist and dramatist who later moved to East Devon. The plaque, at 22 Ashburton Avenue, was unveiled on 4 September by the Worshipful the Mayor of Croydon, Councillor Manju Shahul-Hameed, by kind permission of the present owners of the house and in the company of members of the Delderfield family.   R.F. Delderfield’s The Avenue novels, comprising The Dreaming Suburb and The Avenue Goes to War , were directly based on his life in the Addiscombe area and were later made into the successful London Weekend Television series ‘People Like Us’ (1977-8) starring John Duttine. He also wrote about t...

  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.