Summary, Reviews, Index

Four more ordinary Exmoor people share their life stories with over 150 photographs taken from their own family collections.

John Hoyles was born and brought up in the Brendon valley.

His mother cooked at the Staghunters and John spent every evening in his early years in the kitchen at the back of the pub.  He tells of the early characters that collected in the bar and of the toasting, the pub games and the customs of that time.

At home he had to fetch all the water for the house in a bucket, and he tells of growing up during the war years, of pig-keeping and bell-ringing, of ‘tying the road’ at weddings, and of how even the Brendon schoolboys received rifle practice in preparation for a possible German invasion.

After the war his parents took over the Rockford Youth Hostel and he describes how this was run with up to sixty guests sleeping on bunk beds in communal rooms.

In the early fifties his parents moved again, this time taking over the Blue Ball pub up at Countisbury, and John describes this old coaching Inn where the only water supply came from a tank of rainwater from the roof, and of how they fitted hand pumped petrol pumps in order to attract custom.

John Pedder was from seafaring stock. His grandfather owned six ketches which were worked from Lynmouth harbour to both sides of the Bristol Channel and then beached at high tide and unloaded into carts or onto pack horses before the tide returned.

His family had been Postmasters at Lynmouth since the 1880s and it was his grandfather who took the telegraph message that led to the famous overland Lynmouth Lifeboat launch.

His father had been the local agent for the Paddle Steamers which called every day during the season at  Lynmouth where they had to wait out in deep water as there was no quay.  His father took all the bookings and arranged for the packets to be rowed out by local fishermen to these steamers to collect the passengers.

John himself followed in the family footsteps, going to sea for six years and then taking over at the post office. He tells about growing up in the war years, about small-boat herring fishing, evacuees arriving, swimming in the open-air sea pool in the harbour, and about the Lynmouth flood in which he was trapped on the highest roof and how he saved his father’s life.

Josie Floyd (nee Richards) was born at Broomstreet, a farm overlooking the Bristol channel.

One side of her family were Ridds, of Lorna Doone fame.  She describes the local Culbone church, the smallest complete parish church in the country, set deep in the coastal woods and so remote that it is only approachable on foot.  It is also where all the gravestones of previous generations of her family almost fill the little graveyard.

She describes galloping back through these woods as a young woman in the pitch dark from the Regal cinema, keeping her head low so as not to catch overhead branches and trusting the horse not to tumble headlong down the cliff.  She also talks of riding the same horse to the local dances and changing on arrival in the stables.

She tells of German U boats in the channel, of seeing southern Wales being continually bombed at night and of her cousin who was accused of being a German spy.  She talks about collecting sphagnum moss to be used as medical dressings for the troops and how, after the war, her sister Sheila had left Exmoor for ever, emigrating to Australia on a £10 ticket.

David Westcott can trace his immediate family to the Porlock area for more than 500 years and grew up at a time when ladies still rode side-saddle.

His grandfather was the secretary of the Exmoor Pony Society and David describes the round-up of the ponies on the fenceless common and how they were driven over two days to the Brendon and Bampton pony fairs.

He describes the fishermen at Porlock Weir and his fishmonger uncle who salted herring in barrels and how he took the young David all over Exmoor on his fish round.

He talks about how he and his friends as lads collected pocket money by pushing the early cars up Porlock Hill when they had run out of momentum, and about a cider brewing curate with only 52 sermons – one for each week of the year – and about the Porlock Weir choir and how he had to hand pump the organ in the church.

He tells of starting work on the family farm where he ploughed with a horse and a single furrow plough for the first ten years until they got a tractor.  He also describes how he and his father carried two milk churns each on a yoke down to Porlock Weir every morning to deliver milk  into the jugs of the forty odd houses on their round.

He also describes the three terrible winters that occurred in his lifetime – 1940, 1947 and 1963 – and of how horses always coped far better in those conditions than any wheels could.

Unforgotten Exmoor Volume Three:
ISBN Number 978-1-7397944-1-5