AUGUST 2023

Our next Social evening is on Friday 08 September at 7.30pm, this is also our AGM and will be held in the main hall.

For this event our guest speaker will be Simon Dell who will be giving us what promises again to be a very entertaining and fulfilling talk entitled “The Fair Arm Of The Law”

Our AGM is an important event and gives the chance for anyone to come forward and offer to help on the Committee. The History Group prides itself on being a long running and established group within the Village, but we depend solely on Volunteers to keep running.

That’s it for now – so take care and read on once again with the wartime memories of the late David Best.

Derek .. Chairman MLHG

A Friendly Invasion

Throughout 1941, wartime distractions from school lessons became more and more frequent. All schools were overcrowded and ours shared its premises with a complete London school of 300 pupils, together with its entire teaching staff. It was therefore necessary to accommodate the influx by attending school on Saturdays, a move which was very unpopular with the boys. All day and every day the Fairey Fulmars droned away, towing the drogues for aircraft target practice.  Occasionally a Swordfish would crawl across the sky, returning to its carrier somewhere in the Western Approaches, and as time went by an increasing number of Sunderland Flying boats took time off from U-Boat hunting to touch down in the Bay and rendezvous with the R.A.F rescue launch stationed at Beacon. (Beacon Cove?).

Each night the anti-aircraft units camped out at the Beacon (where the radio masts are today) would crank up their apparatus, which would then send three powerful shafts of light rotating through the night sky.  From the air the light was visible for a distance of some 50 miles and their purpose was to act as a landmark for our own aircraft, many of which were now commuting nightly from the Coastal Command Stations in Cornwall.  It was a miserable and monotonous posting.  Occasionally one of the airmen would come to our house for a meal, and then bang out a few tunes on the piano, but they tended to live like hermits next to their own lighthouse and surrounded by the rabbits caught up in the revolving beams of light.

The arrival of the navigation aid heralded the quick departure of the anti-aircraft guns, together with the now well-known Marldon military dance band, but the fact that the light revolved unmolested throughout the war was a clear indication that it assisted the German aircraft as well as our own.

During the time the guns had been in Marldon, they had not fired once.  The only time when they might have been used was when a lone enemy aircraft dropped a stick of bombs at Compton, but the gunners insisted that the artillery could not be deflected low enough to hit the low flying plane.  This may have been true because the guns were heavy 3.7’s, more suitable for engaging high flying aircraft approaching towns.  One day at school we heard that an aircraft had landed on the golf course on the Marldon side of the windmill, so we went along later to gawk at it.  The plane was an Avro Anson, or flying greenhouse as we knew it, and it had made an incredible safe landing, missing all the tees and bunkers in the short landing space.  (NB The stump of the windmill still stands at the top of Marldon Road, leading up from Paignton).