The swimming race from Starcross Pier. Starcross Hospital
Hugh Payne, the Starcross chemist, presents the swimming trophies.
Footage from Starcross Hospital
Children wait patiently for the Cadbury's Easter Egg
Showing posts with label Starcross pier. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Starcross pier. Show all posts
Wednesday, 2 June 2021
Tuesday, 29 August 2017
Thursday, 30 April 2015
The annual Starcross to Exmouth swim
This event has been held every year, and still is, but, sadly, the carnival atmosphere which involved the whole village is no longer. Starcross used to send off the swimmers in woolly bathing suits from Starcross pier. A flotilla of boats from Starcross used to accompany the swimmers. The Exmouth Swimming and Life Saving Society tried hard to find a way to keep the swim start on Starcross pier, but today's scary Health and Safety regulations means that the swim now has to start from a boat moored near the pier.
BUT
After years of sorting out the necessary permissions, The Starcross Fishing and Cruising Club has just built a new pontoon.
The Starcross Fishing and Cruising Club is amenable to trying to get the race started from their pontoon, if it's possible. But the same Health and Safety regulations will apply, except perhaps, it may be more feasible because the pontoon is owned and used by club members, rather than the general public.
So, with a little help from the Starcross Fishing and Cruising Club, Starcross History, and a few other village organisations and businesses, perhaps the carnival atmosphere of this historic event can one day be revived?
Well done the Exmouth Swimming and Life Saving Society for keeping the tradition going.
Monday, 23 March 2015
Please make loadsafeathers
Our project to recreate The Swan of the Exe
for the 2015 Teignmouth Trail Recycled Art in the Landscape needs more feathers
Here's 2 of them
How to make a feather
The feathers will be attached to a wire netting swan. If we get loadsafeathers, the whole of the old rowing boat could be covered with them as well. We have until July to complete our sculpture.
Here's allabout The Swan of the Exe
by Tony Dunlop on Devon Perspectives
This Victorian 10-berth folly was designed by Captain George Peacock of Regent's House, Starcross, launched from Dixons yard at Exmouth in 1860 and moored by Starcross pier. It caught fire and perished between the World Wars. Her iconic tender, The Cygnet, is the prize exhibit in nearby Topsham Museum
 | |
| Image from http://www.archive.org/stream/devoncornwallnot111amer#page/166/mode/2up |
for the 2015 Teignmouth Trail Recycled Art in the Landscape needs more feathers
Here's 2 of them
How to make a feather
- Take a plastic milkbottle and cut out long leafshapes as big as possible. Probably get 2 out of 1 milkbottle
- cut 2cm slits all along the edges
The feathers will be attached to a wire netting swan. If we get loadsafeathers, the whole of the old rowing boat could be covered with them as well. We have until July to complete our sculpture.
Here's allabout The Swan of the Exe
by Tony Dunlop on Devon Perspectives
This Victorian 10-berth folly was designed by Captain George Peacock of Regent's House, Starcross, launched from Dixons yard at Exmouth in 1860 and moored by Starcross pier. It caught fire and perished between the World Wars. Her iconic tender, The Cygnet, is the prize exhibit in nearby Topsham Museum
Friday, 20 March 2015
When Starcross railway station had a booking hall
Many thanks to Sea Urchin for this delightful story from the days when Starcross railway station was fully staffed.
A week at Starcross
It is late autumn 1955; there is sense of approaching winter as a keen east wind is whipping the water against the pier timbers. I am a young man standing on a railway platform at Starcross station on the mainline between Exeter and Plymouth in the West of England. It is a time of Elvis Presley, Rock 'n' Roll and the Cold War. For me personally, it is a time of excessive energy and of youthful optimism in a resurgent post-war Britain. In short, for me, it is a great time to be alive.
My job was a Booking Clerk on the railway, and I had been directed to the station as a temporary replacement for another young man who had been called up for his National Service. My duration of stay was for one week until a more permanent arrangement could take place.
It was a typical wayside country station, the tranquil days being past with long periods of quiet inactivity, occasionally interrupted by sudden bursts of movement on the main line or a local stopping train meandering its way to and from the county town of Exeter. In those quieter moments I whiled away my time out on the platform observing the railway scene; Starcross was an interesting place, the station was right up alongside the estuary of the river Exe and the down platform (west facing) was supported by timber piles with a series of wooden steps to form the jetty for the Exmouth ferry to tie alongside. Starcross was
an
excellent place to obtain fishing bait in the form of peeler crabs on
the mud-flats at low tide. Whilst there I made an acquaintance with a
professional 'bait man' who for a short time used to send me bait down
on the train for a small sum [to] ...Kingswear. With hindsight, I suspect these moments at Starcross would have been shared by enjoying a 'Player's' cigarette.
One day, whilst in such a mode, I casually noticed in the distance a muffled rumbling and a billowing of smoke snatched away sideways by a brisk east wind heralding the approach of a steam hauled non-stop express bound for London. I recognised the locomotive as a former Great Western Railway 'King' class, resplendent in glistening green, burnished copper and polished brass, hauling a rake of more than a dozen fully laden coaches carrying hundreds of passengers. Heavily loaded, the engine was in full stride straining hard in the collar, as the carriages sped by I became aware that each set of windows were occupied by faces pressed hard against the window, eagerly scanning the estuary and open English countryside; it took a little while before I realised that all the faces were black. With the red tail lamp receding only wisps of white smoke accompanied me as the station returned to its tranquil self.
Again,
with hindsight, I guessed the train was a special boat train from
Plymouth to London and the passengers were immigrants arriving from the
West Indies; they were answering the government's call to do the jobs
the British would not do.
I had been aware of the government's invite to former colony workers to come to England to supplement the labour force, but this was the first time I had witnessed reality in action. I asked myself where all these people were going to live? Who would meet them at the station? Who would look after their needs? How would they find a job? I considered these questions and many more in my young mind; I marvelled at the organisation and planning that had gotten them thus far; little did I know I was witnessing the embryo efforts of Britain's fledgling mass immigration programme.
All this happened a long time ago, but the memory of that day has never left me, the rest as they say is history. Oddly, the story for me did not end there, if I may indulge a little longer, I would like to tell you the sequel to this tale.
Twelve months later, I too marched off to serve my two years National Service in the Royal Air Force. One day in 1957, when half way through my service at RAF Stafford in the Midlands, I was sauntering away from the station cookhouse after a midday meal when I fell in step with a stranger among many strangers, for it
was
a large camp. We engaged in conversation, (as you do) the usual stuff:
where do you come from and what was your job? Well, slowly but surely
after a little while, it dawned on both of us that our answers were
corresponding most uncannily, and both realised in a way we had met
before, for I was talking to the guy whose job I had relieved for a week
at the railway booking office at Starcross some two years earlier. We
both had a good laugh.
We continued walking and he told me he was stationed at RAF Lichfield which was about ten miles away and had only come over to Stafford for the day. His job was MT (Motor Transport) so I asked him if he knew a Bob Mitchelmore from Dartmouth (I already knew that Bob was stationed at Lichfield).
He was taken aback and fished out from his back pocket a set of irons (knife, fork and spoon-carried at all times) and proffering them to me he said, 'Do you know who these belonged to?'
Looking suitably puzzled I replied, 'No, whose are they?'
He then went on to tell me he had lost his own irons (probably stolen) so Bob Mitchelmore gave him his as he was leaving the RAF after completing his length of service.
My stranger, (whose name I have now forgotten) and I parted company agreeing it was a small world; he told me he himself would soon be going home to Starcross and his old job on the railway, as he too was about to finish. I never saw or heard of him again...
A week at Starcross
It is late autumn 1955; there is sense of approaching winter as a keen east wind is whipping the water against the pier timbers. I am a young man standing on a railway platform at Starcross station on the mainline between Exeter and Plymouth in the West of England. It is a time of Elvis Presley, Rock 'n' Roll and the Cold War. For me personally, it is a time of excessive energy and of youthful optimism in a resurgent post-war Britain. In short, for me, it is a great time to be alive.
My job was a Booking Clerk on the railway, and I had been directed to the station as a temporary replacement for another young man who had been called up for his National Service. My duration of stay was for one week until a more permanent arrangement could take place.
It was a typical wayside country station, the tranquil days being past with long periods of quiet inactivity, occasionally interrupted by sudden bursts of movement on the main line or a local stopping train meandering its way to and from the county town of Exeter. In those quieter moments I whiled away my time out on the platform observing the railway scene; Starcross was an interesting place, the station was right up alongside the estuary of the river Exe and the down platform (west facing) was supported by timber piles with a series of wooden steps to form the jetty for the Exmouth ferry to tie alongside. Starcross was
an
excellent place to obtain fishing bait in the form of peeler crabs on
the mud-flats at low tide. Whilst there I made an acquaintance with a
professional 'bait man' who for a short time used to send me bait down
on the train for a small sum [to] ...Kingswear. With hindsight, I suspect these moments at Starcross would have been shared by enjoying a 'Player's' cigarette.One day, whilst in such a mode, I casually noticed in the distance a muffled rumbling and a billowing of smoke snatched away sideways by a brisk east wind heralding the approach of a steam hauled non-stop express bound for London. I recognised the locomotive as a former Great Western Railway 'King' class, resplendent in glistening green, burnished copper and polished brass, hauling a rake of more than a dozen fully laden coaches carrying hundreds of passengers. Heavily loaded, the engine was in full stride straining hard in the collar, as the carriages sped by I became aware that each set of windows were occupied by faces pressed hard against the window, eagerly scanning the estuary and open English countryside; it took a little while before I realised that all the faces were black. With the red tail lamp receding only wisps of white smoke accompanied me as the station returned to its tranquil self.
Again,
with hindsight, I guessed the train was a special boat train from
Plymouth to London and the passengers were immigrants arriving from the
West Indies; they were answering the government's call to do the jobs
the British would not do.I had been aware of the government's invite to former colony workers to come to England to supplement the labour force, but this was the first time I had witnessed reality in action. I asked myself where all these people were going to live? Who would meet them at the station? Who would look after their needs? How would they find a job? I considered these questions and many more in my young mind; I marvelled at the organisation and planning that had gotten them thus far; little did I know I was witnessing the embryo efforts of Britain's fledgling mass immigration programme.
All this happened a long time ago, but the memory of that day has never left me, the rest as they say is history. Oddly, the story for me did not end there, if I may indulge a little longer, I would like to tell you the sequel to this tale.
Twelve months later, I too marched off to serve my two years National Service in the Royal Air Force. One day in 1957, when half way through my service at RAF Stafford in the Midlands, I was sauntering away from the station cookhouse after a midday meal when I fell in step with a stranger among many strangers, for it
was
a large camp. We engaged in conversation, (as you do) the usual stuff:
where do you come from and what was your job? Well, slowly but surely
after a little while, it dawned on both of us that our answers were
corresponding most uncannily, and both realised in a way we had met
before, for I was talking to the guy whose job I had relieved for a week
at the railway booking office at Starcross some two years earlier. We
both had a good laugh.We continued walking and he told me he was stationed at RAF Lichfield which was about ten miles away and had only come over to Stafford for the day. His job was MT (Motor Transport) so I asked him if he knew a Bob Mitchelmore from Dartmouth (I already knew that Bob was stationed at Lichfield).
He was taken aback and fished out from his back pocket a set of irons (knife, fork and spoon-carried at all times) and proffering them to me he said, 'Do you know who these belonged to?'
Looking suitably puzzled I replied, 'No, whose are they?'
He then went on to tell me he had lost his own irons (probably stolen) so Bob Mitchelmore gave him his as he was leaving the RAF after completing his length of service.
My stranger, (whose name I have now forgotten) and I parted company agreeing it was a small world; he told me he himself would soon be going home to Starcross and his old job on the railway, as he too was about to finish. I never saw or heard of him again...
Tuesday, 10 March 2015
Starcross to Exmouth Swim
The Starcross to Exmouth Swim used to be an annual village event. Starcross used to turn out to watch the spectacle as the swimmers lined up at the end of Starcross pier.
Does anyone have any photographs of this Village Event? When did it stop? and why?
Well, the swim still takes place every year, but not many people in Starcross are aware of it:
The Exmouth Swimming and Life Saving Society have an annual Starcross swim. Here's the 2014 results
Read all about the swim HERE
HERE'S an article and some brilliant photographs of the 2012 swim; from the Exmouth Journal
The Exmouth Swimming and Life Saving Society's 2013 Starcross to Exmouth swim didn't take place from "Starcross Jetty" for the first time in 2013, but went from a boat moored nearby. Read all about that HERE
Perhaps the new Starcross History club could revive some of yesteryear's carnival atmosphere for this year's event? The date of the 2015 Starcross to Exmouth swim isn't yet published.
Does anyone have any photographs of this Village Event? When did it stop? and why?
Well, the swim still takes place every year, but not many people in Starcross are aware of it:
The Exmouth Swimming and Life Saving Society have an annual Starcross swim. Here's the 2014 results
Read all about the swim HERE
HERE'S an article and some brilliant photographs of the 2012 swim; from the Exmouth Journal
The Exmouth Swimming and Life Saving Society's 2013 Starcross to Exmouth swim didn't take place from "Starcross Jetty" for the first time in 2013, but went from a boat moored nearby. Read all about that HERE
Perhaps the new Starcross History club could revive some of yesteryear's carnival atmosphere for this year's event? The date of the 2015 Starcross to Exmouth swim isn't yet published.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)