Summary, Reviews, Index

In this the second volume of Unforgotten Exmoor, four more venerable characters, all Exmoor born-and-bred, share their life stories and photographs.

Joan Hooper (nee Davis) was born in the Porlock Vale and had eleven brothers and sisters. Her father was a carter and her mother took in washing.

For the first ten years of her life she shared a bedroom with her grandmother who in her youth had gone from house to house collecting for the Crimean war.  One of Joan’s earliest memories was of collecting dirty laundry from all the hotels with her Grandma and then helping her mother with the hand washing.

On leaving school she went into service as an under lady’s-maid to the Pilcher family, and tells of her responsibilities and experiences in their grand London and Porlock homes.

When war broke out she married, and with just a few sheep in a borrowed field and by ‘going halves’ with the owner of the field, she and her husband gradually built up an entire flock and enough capital to take on Bromham farm at the top of Porlock hill, where they spent the rest of their working days.

In the second chapter Barbara Durman (nee Canning) tells how she was brought up by Dr Head the Rockford doctor and his wife, when her own mother died just two weeks after she was born.  She describes in great detail the day to day life of a remote rural doctor travelling everywhere on foot with his doctor’s bag in the days before the National Health service was set up.

She talks about growing up during the war years, about American servicemen on Exmoor and their jeeps, and about trips to Wales in the paddle steamers which stopped at Lynmouth.  She tells of black-outs and home guard exercises on neighbouring farms, and of dancing in the back corridor at the Rockford Inn to war songs played on a wind-up gramophone.

Above all though, she gives an inspiring and life-affirming account of the vibrant community living in Rockford at the time.

Ivy Archer (nee Lock) was born on a farm above Brendon at the beginning of the first world war and can remember a time before motor vehicles had arrived in the area.

She talks of an endless stream of visitors to the farm, peddlers and gypsies on foot, tradesmen and neighbouring farmers on ponies, and of course well-to-do holiday-makers who were collected from Lynton railway station by her father in a horse and trap and who stayed in the main farmhouse while she and her family lived in the adjoining cottage.

She provides vivid descriptions of how her family saw to the holiday-makers’ every need in a house without electricity where all water had to be collected in buckets from the stream outside and heated inside over an open fire, and where the toilet was a board with a hole in it suspended over the same stream further down the hill.

She talks about her father, a well known singer whose hand-written song book was started in the 1890s and is only now being seen for the first time outside the family. It has a number of Exmoor versions of carols and songs, two of which appear to be completely unknown in the national collections.

Ivy’s account starts more than a hundred years ago and ends in the second world war when she became a land girl.

The final chapter is about Jim Sanders, farmer, singer and diarist who for  sixty years recorded the details of day-to-day life on his remote hill farm.

His chapter begins with extracts from one of these diaries following the course of events for a full year. These entries are recorded in single sentences, entirely without comment, and with equal weight given to both the momentous and the mundane, and gradually build up to give a vivid insight as to how things actually were, and the shape that each farming year took through the seasons.

He tells of his taciturn father who was gassed in the first war, of ploughing, mowing and tilling with heavy horses, of haystack building and thatching, of hedging, trapping and weed pulling, and of course he tells of the choirs and all the singing, the singing for which he has such a reputation so widely over Exmoor.

Unforgotten Exmoor Volume Two:
ISBN Number 978-1-7397944-0-8