WDHG Oral Histories

Ten year old Peter Rennells had to leave his home in Canterbury when it was flattened by a German bomb in 1939. He spent the next five years in Ashprington and, as he told John Hitchins, it changed his life forever.

Born in 1936, Terry Collings has spent all of his life in Ashprington, Tuckenhay, Yetson and Cornworthy. His grandfather ran a market garden near Stoke Gabriel, taking vegetables by horse and cart to sell in Paignton, and his father helped in the business.

Tuckenhay Mill closed in 1970 after 141 years of paper making. Five years later Peter Wheeler, a surveyor who had already begun the restoration of industrial buildings at Camden Lock in London and had taken regular holidays in the South Hams, along with his wife Kay saw an advertisement offering Tuckenhay Mill for sale. It was a challenge he could not resist.