At its last meeting, the Parish Project Group was discussing the idea of recording the memories of older people living in the parish and would like anyone interested in o get in touch. Please ring Jocelyn Ponting on 830341. We are particularly interested in people born and bred locally or who have had local connections back in the past. We already have some memories and here are some snippets from them:

            Dorothy Bone at 83 (recorded in 1986): Her mother came here in 1905 when Dorothy was about eighteen months old and rented a cottage for her father who was due out of the Navy where he was a regular. The only phone in the village was in the Post Office, which was used to summon the doctor who used to come out on horseback. She was able to describe the seven shops which were in the village then as well as the Post Office. There were also three shoemakers, four dressmakers, a coal merchant (Mr Burner!), three firms of builders, two blacksmiths, and two working water mills.

            Robert D. Yabsley at 95 (recorded in 1994) Remembered when there was a pond near Broom Hill covering about an acre which supplied water to a turbine at Wakeham which drove farm machinery. When it was working a lot of water came down the stream at Ashford Farm where he lived. There were about 140 children at the village school when he went there and four teachers. He later went to the grammar school in Kingsbridge, which he left during the First World War to help on the family farm where he remained for the rest of his life.

            Elsie Elson née Perrin born at Lixton 1907 in a family of six boys and six girls. Her father did all the thatching on the farm. She walked to the village school from the age of five to fourteen. Her father would not allow the children to use the Chantry Road so they went across the fields to Wakeham Lane and then down the road from Shorta Cross. She thought there were about a hundred pupils and the four teachers were Mr Denton, (the head teacher who lived in the school house), Miss Kitt, Miss Hannaford, and Mrs Stevens. The family later moved into the village and lived at Mount Pleasant Cottages on Rock Hill where they shared the stand-pipe for water with other residents including Bill Elson who she later married.

            Tom Steere born 1903 wrote a booklet about the village in the 1900s, which is still available from the church. In it he recalled the two sawyers who used the two sawpits near the Kings Arms (now the Fishermans Rest) on the site of what is now Timbers Roundabout (hence the name). One balanced on the tree trunk being cut, resting on two poles across the top of the pit and the other in the pit at the other end of a nine-foot crosscut saw getting the benefit of the falling sawdust! When not so employed they manned the coal barge plying between the village and Bantham, which was occasionally cleaned out for the Sunday School outing to Bantham.