Budleigh Past and Present

  This gold medal was struck by New York jeweller Tiffany & Co to mark the successful laying of the transatlantic telegraph cable in 1858  ‘Not much happens in Budleigh Salterton,’ they say. ‘Saltertonians don’t like change.’  Well, I beg to differ.  In fact I would go so far as to say that at least two former Budleigh residents have changed the course of world history.   I learnt about the first shortly after my arrival in the town back in 2008. Admittedly, my source was Wikipedia. Not the most reliable perhaps, but the story of how General John Graves Simcoe had unwittingly saved the life of the USA’s first President, George Washington, during the American War of Independence is so picturesque that it deserves a glorious mention in our town’s annals.  The second Saltertonian – well, actually he lived in Little Knowle – came to mind not just because Fairlynch Museum is honouring his memory with a bicentennial tribute in its...

J.M.W. Turner was inspired to paint ‘The Slave Ship’ in 1840 after reading The History and Abolition of the Slave Trade by Thomas Clarkson. In 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong had ordered 133 slaves to be thrown overboard so that insurance payments could be collected. This event probably inspired Turner to create his landscape and to choose to coincide its exhibition with a meeting of the British Anti-Slavery Society. My blogging is less frequent nowadays, but every so often researching Budleigh’s local history sends me back to the keyboard to record yet another curious and sometimes important discovery. The latest find relates to my earlier investigation into the early life of the 19 th century scientist Henry Carter FRS, and specifically into the question of his education. Who paid for it? And why? And how come his benefactor, Budleigh resident John Campbell was such a wealthy man?   The answer came from the discovery of the Cam...

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  Yes, Budleigh welcomes everyone! Well, the nation finally voted for Brexit; for, in the words of a Hungarian academic who had once taught at the University of Exeter, ‘the comforting Englishness and timeless values of Budleigh Salterton’. Stephen Pogány's article, Budleigh Salterton: Brexit And The Quest For A Mythic England , can be read at https://www.socialeurope.eu/author/istvan-pogany/ Professor Stephen Pogány, pictured above, remembered the fine summer weekends that he had spent with his late wife on the pebbly beach of what he described as our ‘wonderfully retro’ town with its splendidly evocative name.   The article that he published on the world wide web back in June, a few days after the Referendum result, was of course seized on by at least one local journalist, keen to show that Budleigh had made its voice heard in this most unexpected upheaval of the B...