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Westward Ho!
Westward Ho! photos
Displaying the first of 70 old photos of Westward Ho!. View all Westward Ho! photos
Westward Ho! maps
Historic maps of Westward Ho! and the local area, hand-drawn by Ordnance Survey and Samuel Lewis. View all Westward Ho! maps
Westward Ho! area books
Displaying 1 of 26 books about Westward Ho! and the local area. View all books for this area
You can read extracts and browse photos from these books.
Memories of Westward Ho!
Displaying a selection of personal
memories of Westward Ho!.
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Holidays
I lived in Bideford from 1944 till 1947 when we moved back to London, but I spent every Easter and summer holiday back in Bideford and nearly every day at the beach in Westood Ho!. Such happy times spent there.
Happy Days
My father was in the Home Guard during the Second World War, and we three children spent our school holidays with him at Westward Ho!. My sister says we travelled to Bideford and then by gas bus to Westward Ho!. Daddy had a flat in the old naval officers school. We spent glorious days on the beach, although you could only use part of it, because it was mined. Sometimes a siren went off, and we would have to run home and open the windows when they were exploding a mine, this was to prevent the windows shattering. There was a swimming pool built in the rocks, which is still there. The tide would go out for miles, and people often lost the clothes they left on the beach as the tide swept in so swifly and caught them unawares. A firework factory blew up one day, and the fire was horrendous with fireworkds going off and loud explosions. We stood on the balcony of our flat and watched for... Read more
Devon memories
Burrough House
My grandparents lived here from the 1960s until 1998, living in the flat. We used to spend our summer holidays here and had great fun!
Abbotsham School In The 1960's
Growing up at Fairy Cross, Alwington and as our village school had closed in the late 1950s we had to catch the school bus daily morning and afternoon to Abbotsham Primary School. (Shown in the centre back of the picture next to St Helens Church). I started in 1963 in the "little ones class" of the two roomed school. Mrs Elston was my first teacher there and she had also taught at Alwington School before it closed - Miss Ball was the headmistress throughout my time there. I can remember the outside boys toilet block in the playground (no flushing then) before they were replaced later in the decade and also there was an old victorian cloakroom (never used by us then - complete with all the hooks and very dusty and dirty because nobody went in there but we could look in through the locked gates) and after one summer holiday break we came back and found that Miss Ball had a new office thanks to the old cloakroom... Read more
Family Connections.
This picture was actually taken in the early 1960's and later turned into a postcard. The man on the motorbike is my late father, John Ridd, who was a local farm manager at the time. The motorbike by the way is a BSA Bantam - he was the only person in the village who had one like it!
My Many Walks to And From Abbotsham 1957
At the side of the Post Office is a single track lane that leads to the cliffs, half a mile along the lane past the farm was a large thatched cottage named "Rixlade". In 1957 our father Major William (Bill) Hay was stationed as O.C. at Fremington camp near Barnstaple, from our home town of Aldershot in Hampshire. As a southern townie from the London commuter belt moving to the quiet but beautiful south western village of Abottsham, in a cottage almost at the cliff edge over looking the sea, was kind of lost on a eighteen year old teenager with girls on his mind. Bearing in mind in those days of fewer motor cars, the only car in our family belonged to the head of the house, and the fact there were only two buses a week, one Wednesday and one Friday, from the village to Bideford. My feet soon learnt to pace out the three miles from the cottage to the bus stop in Bideford to catch the bus to my... Read more
School Days
As a boarding pupil at Grenville College I used to walk up to Abbotsham in sunny summer weather from Moreton House with my Sunday packed lunch. It was a very quiet village and one of my main memories is the range of old carvings on the pews in the old church.
The village was also on the route of our cross-country runs and it was the point at which the final effort needed to be made to beat the visiting team.
