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.

Sue Stevenson has been one of the best known - and most hardworking - members of the community since she moved to Cornworthy from her native Leicestershire to marry her farmer husband Mike in 1955. They bought a prefab house which came down from London on a lorry and erected it on the farm as their first family home. Sue is also one of the longest serving stallholders on Totnes Market where until recently she sold the family’s free-range eggs every Friday.