NOVEMBER 2023

We are now selling tickets for our Christmas social evening which features the very popular and much sought after MAGGIE DUFFY, partnered by BOB THOMSON .. so be prepared for an evening of song, humour, wit and music!
The evening on 01 December (7:30pm) will be all ticket, just £5 for Members and £10 for non-members .. and we are now advertising the event through various outlets as Maggie has such a large local following.
Mulled wine and a ‘goody bag’ will be available for all members – non-Members are invited to bring their own refreshments.
If you were a member and have not yet renewed, then now is the time to do so as tickets for our social evening are now on sale to everyone, so if you don’t renew you will be charged the full price.
We are holding our membership fee to just £10, which is extremely good value for Social evenings and access to our large local Village archive.
Members can renew and purchase tickets from 34 Millmans Road.
Non-members can purchase tickets from our Village card shop (John & Pam).

Remember – NO TICKETS WILL BE ON SALE ON THE NIGHT

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

The action came on 30th May 1943, during the last Torbay air raid that year, when St. Marychurch Parish Church received a direct hit.  At the time of the explosions, I was cycling towards Marldon Cross with a friend, and we raced off to Torquay to see what had happened, not knowing that in those few seconds 45 people had been killed and 50 buildings demolished.
We arrived almost as the dust was settling on the rubble in the road, and we joined a few men pulling away pieces of timber and brickwork.  Very soon a pair of legs appeared under the debris, and I wondered how I would react to seeing my first dead body.  After about 10 minutes a man was dug out who must have been walking along the pavement when the bombs fell. Miraculously, he was still alive, for he muttered something like “bloody Germans” as they carted him off on a stretcher and everyone was rather pleased.
I wonder how many of the rescuers on that day remember the hundreds of “naughty” French girlie postcards scattered in the rubble.  One shop had previously been a newsagent, so they could have come from there.  By present-day standards they were fairly tame, but in those times an adult rarity, so I picked up several and took them to school the next day, to the delight of the boys, but they were confiscated by a master, and I got a ticking off.  On that Monday, we learned that several of our friends were among those killed at St. Marychurch.

Unknown to us, whilst we were scratching away in St. Marychurch, an even greater tragedy had occurred a mile further away.  As a consolation for our loss, we went along to look at the Focke Wolf 190 which had crashed onto part of a house in Teignmouth Road, and evading the police cordon, we boys managed to get at it to drag away a few souvenirs.
In 1943 there was a steady build-up of American troops and vehicles in and around the camps at Marldon and by 1944 the vast accumulation could not be bottled up any longer. There was an urgent need for additional training space, so almost without notice pieces of land were considered and the army moved in. This was wartime and anything could happen.
At school we were horrified as the American soldiers took over our playing field at Cricketfield Road and surrounded the encampment with barbed wire.  Then a Headquarters unit and coloured American engineers took over land at Shiphay and moved in perilously close to the Girls’ Grammar School.  The next to go were the fields and gardens of Cadewell, which had previously been the grounds of a large country estate.  This latest move went some way to supplement our sports activities for it was here, surrounded by the magnolia trees, that we learned to play the “Yanks” at baseball.
In the early months of 1944 when the air was crisp and the ground hard with frost, the bulldozers and cranes arrived.  At the time some of the machines were a novelty in England and were still in the development stage.  Without notice, they moved into three fields off Farthing Lane, the missing pieces of hedgerow today still marking the spot where the entrance was made.  The Engineers would spend all day moving piles of earth around and getting used to the machines, and sometimes in their boyish ways would relieve the monotony by holding silly competitions and races with the lumbering giants. In the evening after school we would go along to the site and they gave us rides and taught us how to drive them.
The machines would be used later to clear the invasion beaches of road blocks and no doubt may have been used to bulldoze a pathway through the decimated city of Caen.
As a change from watching the bulldozer games, we sometimes went down to the quarry at Kiln Road where the combat troops practised their climbing skills.  The soldiers in this area formed a major part of the American 4th Army who would go ashore at Utah beach in Normandy.  Midway between Utah and Omaha beaches were the 100 foot high cliffs of Pointe du Hoc, dominating the beaches.  These cliffs, thought to be heavily fortified, would have to be taken if the plan was to succeed.  The cliffs rising from the sea were not dissimilar to the rockface at the quarry in Kiln Road, so any training here would be useful.
One day, a convoy of amphibious vehicles arrived from the docks at Plymouth to add to the clutter of transport already in the village.  They were directed to a field behind Singmore Road, where they carried out their compass checks and had their ancillary equipment fitted, which was supplied separately in crates.  The DUKWs were built on the standard U.S Army truck chassis and therefore had a reasonable turn of speed, particularly when coupled with an enthusiastic driver!  However, the vehicles were cumbersome and in the narrow country lanes the handling qualities left a lot to be desired.  It was not surprising therefore that more than one villager had a nasty fright when the monsters returned each night from their daily paddle in the sea.  Later, many of these vehicles were to sink as they carried desperately needed anti-tank guns ashore through the choppy seas off Normandy.