Memories of Marldon

By David Best

Part 1

At the outbreak of the war, Marldon was a quiet and peaceful country village, much as it had been for the previous two hundred years.

 These recollections are those of a ten year old boy, just old enough to have seen a glimpse of the enclosed rural way of life which has now disappeared and willing to accept as normal all the exciting and abnormal things which would follow over the next few years. Today there is little difference between town and country life, where the same amenities can be enjoyed by all, but before the war a decade could have separated the pattern of living between the two communities. The town with its shops and services was a different world to the village which had retained an almost unchanged rural identity where personal differences were dropped only at Christmas and Harvest time when the harvest was so important that many villagers turned out to participate.

 The population was quite small, about a hundred houses more than half of which were scattered up to a mile in all directions, and many built where the spring waters came near the ground surface.  At other dwellings, the water would be drained from sloping corrugated iron or lean to roofs and collected in 100 gallon water tanks obtainable from all good merchants.  With a smaller number of houses, the significance of the public buildings was thereby increased.  Least popular to a child was the school house, with its high windows, inadequate coke stove heating and earth closets in the toilet block.  It was indeed a good place to leave behind in the afternoon, and perhaps if you were lucky you could cadge a ride on a mangold cart making its way up the hill to one of the farms.

 Across the way the church was kinder to little children and, more important, less hostile to small boys, although even here it was possible to pick up a cuff on the ear from an elder for letting a concealed six gun off during choir practice!

 The jewel in the crown was the Parish Hall, barely four years old and still smelling of new timber. Even in those days it escaped all forms of vandalism from local lads.  They might tie the pub door to the rail outside and run in fear of their lives, but the Hall was never abused.  It was a place where someone truly made jam, weekly whist drives (at least twenty tables so better arrive early) dental treatments for school children, magic lantern shows and now and again dances for quite old people with ladies in long dresses.  Marldon was a poor village, and many families knew something of poverty.

 An incident one August afternoon brought tears of the eyes of a hardened farm worker.  They were threshing corn close by Moor Tor and one of the men feeding the sheaves had for some reason taken off his new boots which had been placed for safety on top of the thresher.  Somehow a fellow worker fed the boots along with the corn into the machine.  The apparatus jammed immediately and ground to a halt, although the traction engine continued to chunk on. There was a bit of a row and a lot of shouting, and when they eventually fished the boots out, it was obvious that they had been ruined.  The owner almost cried and they finally got him quietened down but the damage had been done.  After the excitement of seeing grown men nearly come to blows, we watched the steam engine for a bit, then got fed up and went home.

 Marldon had one over-riding asset in its economy – it could grow grass, and to convert the grass the red South Devon Cow.  The animals outnumbered the population and in the village itself there were three working farms.  As important as the grazing of cows was the movement of cows from the fields to the farms at milking time. Sometimes different herds would meet each other on the way and cows forgetting which group they were supposed to be in would go off to the wrong place.  The resulting mix up would take a bit of sorting out at the other end. From time to time stragglers would go trotting off on their own pursued by some irate  farm hand, and the animals would become a severe hazard not to the non-existent traffic, but to the food produced from local gardens. Furzegood could be safeguarded from these incursions by the heavy wooden gates at the entrance and this feature separating parts of the village remained for many years.  Chickens would also wander down the road picking up bits thrown out for them and most found their way home again.

 Despite rural isolation, technology had started to filter through.  The roads had not long received the first covering of tarmac, thus enabling the second charabanc on the outing to follow in the wake of the first free from the customary swirling cloud of white dust.  Several motor cars had appeared.

 The vicar chose an early Terraplane, high and unwieldy and an altogether dubious vehicle, the school master more traditional in a Flying Standard and generally thought by the kids to be the fastest thing on four wheels.  The first tractor had been delivered to Love Lane Farm!  A late bus service had been laid on at 9pm running as far as Maidenway and this was available as an alternative to the last Marldon Bus, which left Paignton at 6 o’clock.

 Builders had learned how to build in brick instead of stone and a ribbon of new bungalows had just been built from the cross-road to Five Lanes, followed by another towards the village.  Hardcore had been laid to form the entrance into Belfield, but it would be many years before the developers cut the first sod.  Had the events in 1939 not occurred, a few houses would have been built sooner, but the war did account for the greatest acceleration of change in the village history. The older folks with established attitudes would not change easily, but the young, quick to latch on to new fashions, were willing to accept as normal all the existing and abnormal things which were about to happen.  From that time the gates would open and let in a flood of new faces from all parts of England and later from the U.S.A.

 The effect was staggering in the village where even the children knew nearly all the inhabitants. The strangers would bring with them new customs, an innovation and, being for most part, young men, a good measure of vitality and glamour.

 Within a few brief years, all the new faces would be gone and after 6^th June 1944, an air of sadness would descend as half the population left for the beaches of France.

 For a time the village slipped back into its old ways, but the aftermath of a visiting army had left its mark, and things were never quite the same again.

 The peace is shattered as war comes to Marldon.

            Memories of Marldon   by David Best

    Part 2 - continuing a schoolboy’s look at Marldon during the War.

During the early part of 1939 the Government had foreseen the possibility that war might occur, and plans had been made for the evacuation of children from the major cities.

Devon was pronounced a safe area and even Plymouth was considered suitable to absorb the thousands of schoolchildren who would be sent to the County.  The Marldon contingent arrived not long after that sunlit Sunday when war was declared, and we were sent down to the Meadow to look at the young Londoners who had arrived and were being allocated to different households.  Some were very young and could have had no idea why they had been sent from one end of the country to the other.  All looked scruffy after the day’s journey and, with their labels and instructions tied to them, resembled a delivery of parcels.

The war had in a small way started to affect the village.  Some people resented the autocratic system of billeting and enforcement, but all the children were well cared for.  Many had not seen cows or even a field before, and were quite lost in this strange world devoid of traffic and chip shops, but they quickly integrated with the village children and learned how to survive in the country.

The influx imposed a great strain on the village school, but as time went by and nothing happened they drifted away in ones and twos and most were back home in time for the large scale London raids which came in the following year.
When the siren sounded, we would leave the school and troop up West Lane in twos.  At first this diversion from lessons was great fun and a tremendous waste of time, particularly as most of the alarms were false, but after a while it lost its attraction and we became bored just hanging around looking at the flowers.  Furthermore, the lane was all right on a fine day, but it turned into a sea of mud in the rain, so the rambles were discontinued, and then when the siren sounded we hid under our desks instead.  Later, when the alarms became more and more frequent, even this was considered a bit sissy, so we were expected to carry on as if nothing had happened.
 
During the period known as the “phoney war”, the British and French armies had come to a standstill, but the picture was very much different at sea.  The Merchant Navy was taking a hammering, and in that year German U-boats sank 215 merchant ships, together with two capital ships of the Royal Navy.  Survival therefore depended on producing as much food as we could and salvaging whatever raw materials were available in the country.  The village played its part in this reclamation and the Council removed iron railings from many houses, although farms were generally exempt.

The school Headmaster was an outstanding organiser, and he set up squads of schoolchildren equipped with trolleys for the collection of scrap metal.  The most fertile places were the farms, and we tramped many miles, from Widdicombe Farm, Occombe, then to Compton, collecting old bedsteads and saucepans and things.

At first the exercise was productive, and part of the playground took on the appearance of a breaker’s yard, but as time went by it became obvious that the best chunks of scrap required heavy lifting equipment and lorries to cart it away, so the collection service petered out.  Nevertheless, the children had entered into the spirit of the occasion with gusto, as all children will, and it was felt that they had made a valuable contribution to the War Effort.

At school the curiculum included such things as operating stirrup pumps and how to extinguish incendiary bombs and making hay boxes to keep food hot, although few of us would ever have to fall back on this knowledge.

As the war progressed, tractors with foreign names such as Oliver and Caterpillar started to come through from Canada and the USA.  Some of the tracked vehicles could climb mountains and there was a minor agricultural revolution as the village took on a new look when fields were ploughed which had never been touched before.

Early in the 1930’s, a collection of dog and quarantine kennels had been built on land adjoining a house near Marldon Cross.  The project never really took off and in 1937 the kennels were converted into a sort of basic holiday camp with the addition of several old railway carriages in the grounds.  By 1939, the camp had not been occupied, but sufficient work had been done to make the premises habitable, so they were taken over by the War Office just in time to receive elements of the BEF (British Expeditionary Force) following the evacuation from Dunkirk on 4th June 1940.  Marldon had become a military base and would remain so for the next four years.

Looking back on that time, it was one with little fun or social life for the troops. They had arrived tired and exhausted, an assorted rabble from different units and it was some time before they got back on their feet and in some sort of order.

After that followed a programme of intense activity and hard work as they prepared for the invasion which was expected, and indeed Operation Sea Lion had been ordered by Hitler for September 14th.  The camp was ringed with gun emplacements to protect the base, and in corners of some of the fields evidence of this work still exists today.

A unit of the Home Guard was formed, and groups of villagers in this “Dad’s Army” set off in the evenings equipped with shot guns and dartboards to man strategic places.  A detail of 6 men were posted in shifts on the high ground at the Beacon, and they slept at night in a hut in the grounds of the reservoir.  The hut had been built as a crude workman’s store with large gaps in the sides, so one of the men from the village papered it inside with newspaper to keep out the draught.

They would patrol the hilltop for two hour periods, in pairs, whilst the others slept, and the purpose was to act as a look-out and not only keep an eye open for Germans, but to report any fires or lights in the Torbay area.

One night, the system nearly went into reverse.  The Beacon, even in mild weather, became bitterly cold at night, and it was the practice to heat up bricks on the stove, wrap them in empty sandbags and use them as bed heaters.  On this occasion the bricks were a little too hot, and they ignited the bags (already treated with an inflammable material to withstand the damp), and the whole lot went up in smoke, very nearly burning down their own headquarters.

Everything that has been said about that unique band of men is entirely true, and they would be the first to admit that often they had laughed themselves to sleep thinking about the antics they had been up to.

             Memories of Marldon, by David Best

                Article 3 - the first bombs and air raids.

The first bombs to drop in Devon, and amongst the earliest in England, fell on 6th 
July 1941 at Galmpton, where production of Admiralty launches had started and at precisely 8.45 a.m. on 10th July a stick of nine high expolosive bombs fell at the Beacon straddling the roadway and damaging a small gypsy caravan.
(NB. Giving the year as 1941 may have been a typing error or lapse of memory on David's part as the Group has copies of the original Reports of the Torbay Air Raid Precautions Joint Committee, which gives the year of these first raids as 1940.)

I was half a mile away, dawdling to school with two girl evacuees who had been billeted on a neighbour nearby.  During the explosions we lay back in the hedge wondering what was going to happen next and the younger of the girls started to cry.  After a while the noise of the aaeroplane faded away so we picked ourselves up and went to school.

Later in the day we went along to see what had happened, and found several policemen keeping a crowd at bay and guarding some holes in the fields.  The next day the holes were still there so they lost interest and went away, leaving the craters to the kids, who dug out bits of shrapnel for souvenirs.

On 11th July, ten bombs fell at Churston, again with no warning and on the 15th it was Brixham's turn when four high explosive bombs were dropped, one of which sank the coal boat “City of London”.

This was the period following the Battle of Britain and things were really beginning to hot up locally when at 6.44 p.m. on Tuesday 20th August, two bombers and a fighter dropped a stick of bombs on Newton Abbot railway station doing an incredible amount of damage.  In 1941 events in the war had taken a turn for the worse and this incident at the time was heavily censored.  The full extent of the damage was even kept from local people, but 14 people were killed, 15 seriously injured, a railway engine wrecked and extensive damage was done to the station and track.

The winter of 1940/41 brought a heavy fall of snow.  At the start of the war the beach floats had been stacked at the Holiday Camp and put into “mothballs” for the duration; the troops were quick to see alternative possibilities and used them as sledges until the snow melted.  Inevitably they all finished up at the bottom of fields where they rotted away and disintegrated over the next few years.  Shortly after this, the troops vacated the camp and were replaced by girls of the ATS who stayed for about six months.

After the early months of 1941, it was becoming clear that Torbay was becoming one of the areas for enemy activities and in that year there were sixteen enemy raids during which a great number of houses in Torquay and Paignton were damaged.  These raids were overshadowed by the heavy raids on Plymouth on the nights of 21st and 22nd March, and the glow in the sky from the burning city was clearly visible from Marldon.

After these raids a battery of heavy anti-aircraft guns was positioned at the Beacon, no doubt with the intention of picking off some of the enemy aircraft as they came in.

The artillery unity brought with them their own piano and a full size dance band, and it was not long before they were performing in the Village Hall. No-one had seen anything like it before.  The noise was deafening in a hall which had previously never seen anything much larger than a trio, and very soon the events became a major attraction.  

Girls would come up from the town forsaking the thousands of aircrew trainees in the seal front hotels to dance with the soliders at Marldon, and social barriers were lowered as villagers started to accept this new life style.  Surprisingly, it was the old ladies who moved with the times first.  They had seen this sort of thing before, and were not going to be left out of this one, so they came along to watch, bringing with them their knitting and picnic supper.  They would stay for a couple of hours, then go home to bed having thoroughly enjoyed themselves in the rapidly changing world.

In a way the evening entertainment filled a gap at a time when all the news was bad and they were merely tasting a bit of whatever life was left to any of us.  However, their appearance gave the evenings an air of respectability and also gave them quite a lot to talk about the next day.

In 1941 I was confronted with a bit of a problem, because I changed schools in the later part of that year, and was expected to work harder at my lessons.  Each day I left Marldon where all the action seemed to be happening to cycle along the deserted lane to Torquay (now the old Ring Road).  The only relief from the monotony of the journey was the daily arrival of a squad of army engineers, who travelled in their trucks to a wooded area a mile outside the Village.  Access to the project was closely guarded, but after several months the vehicles failed to arrive, so I went to investigate,   some distance from the road.  There was no trace or any sign of construction work.  Small boys are adept at discovery, so I was able to find the trapdoor entrance , which led down a flight of steps to a bunker equipped with water tanks, lights and a telephone.  I was also horrified to discover that the bunker was in fact an arsenal filled with explosives and ammunition, so I went away with the awesome knowledge of a military secret.

Many years later, it was revealed that in the early stages of the war there was a serious possibility that the country could be overrun.  Winston Churchill therefore had ordered a network of hideaways, as they were called, to be constructed, and these would be manned by local people who would carry out guerilla activities against the enemy and survive as best they could.

The bunker I found that day after school was intended to be manned by the Marldon Home Guard.   It is fortunate that we never experienced German occupation, for the units would have soon been winkled out, resulting in heavy local casulaties.

          Memories of Marldon by David Best

Part 4 - 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).

As fortunes changed in 1942, and the possibility of invasion receded, the camps emptied and the (British) troops moved away, although the Devon Coast camp was still occupied mainly by Italian aliens interned for the duration.  However, in that year, a decision was made which would have a major effect on villages like Marldon. Operation Bolero was agreed between England and the United States to move two million American servicemen to England to assist in the assault on Hitler’s Europe.

The first United States troops reached Marldon in the early months of 1943.  Initially the soldiers were the coloured non-combat engineers, whose job it was to prepare the camps and to lay on various services for the main body of men which was to follow.  In battle their duties would include such things as following up the fighting units to clear the debris and bury the dead.

Nevertheless, in Marldon they represented the first arrivals of the American Army and were treated as absolute equals in a way which they had not enjoyed in their own homeland.  The troops were a credit to the Army, and as their popularity increased social evenings were arranged for them and many were invited into people’s homes. 

As the build-up increased, the young white conscripts arrived, taking over the camps and bringing with them their American brand of youthful ego, together with centuries of inbred colour prejudice.  From time to time violent scenes occurred both in the village and in the towns, more often when girls became innocently involved.  It was difficult for the village to understand at a time when the whole country seemed united and indeed racial discrimination was as yet almost unheard of anywhere in England.

Anyway, something had to be done, and the military authorities allocated various units to separate zones.   One boundary line was drawn at Churscombe Cross and soldiers from an outside area crossed this line at their peril, whether they were walking a girl home or not. 

All the American troops had an affinity with the local schoolchildren and they quickly recognised that we were the first link in the social chain.  We told them such things as which part of England they were in, and where the best girls were to be found, and they responded in their easygoing manner and natural generosity, with luxuries we had not seen since the war began.   Moreover, they seemed especially well-equipped with all the good things in life.   Their PX (Post Exchange) unit within the camp was one of the largest and most important buildings.  In this warehouse the troops could buy anything from gramophones to lipstick and nylons, and many of the goods overflowed as gifts or currency into the village.

In the pubs, trade became brisk as glasses chinked away in the evenings. If the war continued like this, life would not be too bad.