Britannia Royal Naval College Dartmouth

I was born in Dartmouth in 1944 and I moved away in 1964 when my husband was stationed in Plymouth and then Singapore when we came back to this country we ended up in Plymouth again but my heart will always be in Dartmouth,I love all the photographs on here and I think this is an interesting site,Thankyou.

After WW2, it seemed that several relatives of our family escaped the enforced wartime restrictions of the Midland Cities, and some moved to Devon, settling initially in Torquay, and started catering businesses. Our family had a close relationship to our two female cousins and visited then frequently. In those austere post-war years with nearly everything remaining on Ration long after the War, the persistant Holiday-Makers who ventured to The Devon Riviera in the English damp summers, were eager to be catered to. Eventually my cousins moved to Dartmouth and ran a seasonal Fish & Chip Shop on the main street beneath the imposing BRNC College on the hill above the town. - little did I think then that those big ornate Entrance Gates would have a bearing on my future. As a pre-teen in the early 1950's, I was raised with unusual thoughts on receiving largess from people - my cousin said that I could always ask them for Fish & Chips as a snack - I thought that this would be an imposition, and used my own pocket money 'to buy' from another F&C shop down the road - unfortunately I was spotted by my cousin eating them walking down the street, and my parents gave me a stern talking to. My Twin and I would walk the quayside with our hand-fishing lines dangling breaded hooks into the Briney, and pulling up tiny eels that squirmed on the hook until they ended up tangled and knotted around the line and were then cut off wasting the hook - I suppose that they could have been re-deployed as bait for something 'larger'. - Further down the quay, returning fishermen were unloading their catch - on the quayside was a 6-inch dia. head of a beheaded Conger Eel still snapping with vicious teeth at passing people, including us - 'they die at sunset' we were told. I then thought that we had been fishing for baby Congers!!! That experience however did not kill my aspirations of activities in the sea, or later on, upon it. To this day, I hold fond memories of my times in Dartmouth, but not so fond memories of BRNC in later years.