Summary, Reviews, Index

Victor Lock was the coffin maker for the area and talks about measuring the deceased and the rituals followed in people’s homes before undertakers became commonplace.  He explains how he made the coffins in elm and how the graves were dug to fit the template he’d provided for the grave digger who was also the stone cracker, breaking stones by hand for the roads when he was not digging the graves.

Victor also describes growing up on a remote hill farm in the 1930s. He tells of war breaking out and vast numbers of  American troops arriving on the previously empty common and building a permanent camp near the farm.  He talks of regular tank practice and artillery fire on the moor behind and describes German bombers flying low over the farm at night to bomb Cardiff on the opposite side of the Bristol Channel.

As the war ends he describes taking on a proper apprenticeship as a carpenter and what he had to do in order to buy his first tools.  He describes erecting and working on wooden scaffolding and his tentative joining of a newly formed trade union, something almost unheard of at the time on Exmoor.

John Pile and wife Blanche talk about traveling seamstresses coming regularly round the farms to do all the mending, and midwifes coming to deliver babies, about paddle steamers arriving at Lynmouth, and the early cars in motor trials at Beggar’s Roost.

They talk about food; about gathering, preparing and cooking laver (seaweed), about pig-killing and offal sausages, about snaring rabbits, making junket from milk still warm from the cow, and about lamb-tail pie and plucking fowl.

They talk about the pony-riding shepherds and about tramps knocking on the door in the Depression – large numbers of ex-servicemen from the first world war looking for casual work.  They tell how gipsy caravans regularly visited the farms, and describe the impact the evacuees had when they arrived in the area, and how the Exmoor ponies were rounded up from the common and broken in ready for the fairs.

Their story ends with contract shearers taking over from the traditional sheep shearing parties. These had been made up of local farmers all arriving at each of the farms on ponies with their hand-shears rolled up in their white shearing suits on their backs.

Ted Lethaby talks about his grandmother’s bakery with the walk-in oven and delivering bread to the entire area on ponies. He talks about his first job on the farm where he hand-milked and then carried the churns from house to house as he measured milk into people’s jugs which they’d left for him on their kitchen tables.

He talks about joining the home guard and about driving the bus on the Minehead to Lynmouth run, and reversing it up Countisbury hill after the Lynmouth Flood – because he couldn’t turn it at the bottom. This continued backwards and forwards the entire day as he kept ferrying all the people from the bottom up to the top.

He also tells of his time as one of the first AA patrolmen and the early cars coming up Porlock Hill, and how he had to keep buckets of water ready at the top to fill radiators that had frequently boiled over.  He talks about having to salute members each time as they passed, and about having always to be at the AA box at 11am for the daily phone call from head office.  That AA box, incidentally, still stands at the top of Porlock hill, and is one of the only remaining in the country, now a scheduled monument.

Roy Kellaway talks about the art of making and thatching haystacks and about the teams of coffin bearers at his grandfather’s funeral.

He tells about the Brendon village bakery which his father ran, about lighting the fire for the oven and about the deliveries of bread in a horse and cart. He talks about the communal well, their early sanitation system and later an electricity supply. He mentions the Brendon saw mill, talks about gardening as a lesson at school and about how all school was cancelled for months when war broke out so the children could dig the school air-raid shelter.

He talks about magic lantern shows, hand delivering telegrams before there were any telephones in the area and then his first job of hauling timber out of the woods with heavy horses.  His final job was running the Brendon stables which he did for many years. His chapter ends with a description of his time as second horseman to the Master of  Staghounds.

Unforgotten Exmoor Volume One:
ISBN Number 978-0-9557119-8-5