"Torquay in the Great War" by Alex Potter

[Moonraker]

As a child I lived in Torquay and so was keen to read this title in the Pen & Sword series. The town's notables during the Great War included Agatha Christie, Sir Herbert Plumer (who lived there as a schoolboy) and Percy Fawcett (who visited his family there, apparently in a state of shock after his war experiences.)

The author had access to some very good letters written by Torquinians on active service, including the Reverend J T Jacob, a local vicar who became a chaplain on the Western Front.

The author, himself a Torquinian, studied the Great War at university and efficiently summarises various battles in which townsfolk took part. I'm perhaps being over-subjective in wishing there had been a little less international background and a little more about the town itself, including "RAF Torquay", which gets four lines and one passing reference.

New Zealand troops were prominent in Torquay, with nine villas accommodating discharged soldiers awaiting repatriation. "Hundreds" of local girls succumbed to their charms, got married and emigrated to New Zealand.

A minor curiosity is the rendering of Lloyd George's name with a hyphen - something I can't recall seeing before.

There are 15 photographs and 30 pages listing local casualties. In all, 128 pages, price £9.99.

Excerpt here

Moonraker

[Plumer17]

As a child I lived in Torquay and so was keen to read this title in the Pen & Sword series. The town's notables during the Great War included Agatha Christie, Sir Herbert Plumer (who lived there as a schoolboy) and Percy Fawcett (who visited his family there, apparently in a state of shock after his war experiences.)

The author had access to some very good letters written by Torquinians on active service, including the Reverend J T Jacob, a local vicar who became a chaplain on the Western Front.

The author, himself a Torquinian, studied the Great War at university and efficiently summarises various battles in which townsfolk took part. I'm perhaps being over-subjective in wishing there had been a little less international background and a little more about the town itself, including "RAF Torquay", which gets four lines and one passing reference.

New Zealand troops were prominent in Torquay, with nine villas accommodating discharged soldiers awaiting repatriation. "Hundreds" of local girls succumbed to their charms, got married and emigrated to New Zealand.

A minor curiosity is the rendering of Lloyd George's name with a hyphen - something I can't recall seeing before.

There are 15 photographs and 30 pages listing local casualties. In all, 128 pages, price £9.99.

Excerpt here

Moonraker

I'm going to break my cover here and admit that it was me that wrote this book

The Lloyd-George thing you mention is one of those infuriating typos that creep into a book. For some reason my word processor took to automatically changing it to using a hyphen and in the midst of editing delirium I managed to totally over look it and it also slipped through the external editing process. It was only a month after getting the published version that I was flicking through it and noticed the mistake. I was not happy with myself after that, heh.

Did you enjoy the book? It's the first one I've written and it's always a bit nerve wracking seeing reviews of it. It morphed out of a final year university dissertation idea that was scrapped and then took on a life of its own, I can only hope it partly lives up to some of the more experienced authors who put out local histories of the war recently.

As for the 'international' aspect of things, indeed it is probably about 40% made up of this. The reasons being the following:

1. Information on the Torquay home front during this period is rather sparse, however to expand it into a Torbay book would have been a little too large for the format and would have resulted in chopping out interesting information on Torquay and focusing upon Paignton and Brixham to greater detail which wasn't my intention. As such I decided to follow both the home front and the actual fighting of the war itself in parallel to provide enough content. A lot of the best letters come from the soldiers discussing the battles etc, which I was very reluctant to leave out and which I think are very important to understanding the town's experience. I feel too many studies of towns during the war focus exclusively upon the home front, whereas I also wanted to tell the story of the Torquinians who served as that is an integral part of the town's history. One of the problems with Torquay during the period is also the lack of photographs, which required slightly more print than photographs compared to similar books.

2. With Herbert Plumer being a prominent figure associated with the town, having spent a good deal of his childhood living up in Wellswood, it provided a useful framing device for looking at the experience of Torquinians who served and the performance of the generals themselves, one being an adopted Torquinian. To look at Plumer's experience required a little more depth on the battles than would be standard if just recounting casualty rates etc. The public tend to view these characters as distant aloof idiots and I felt that focusing on one from Torquay would help break that view a little as I realised this book may be read by many people interested in local history/the centenary who aren't WW1 history buffs and who may follow a Blackadderish view of the war (I studied under Dan Todman briefly at uni, so his views on the war are quite influential to me, along with the greater post 80's view on the war and I wanted to work them into the book in my own hamfisted way).

More detail on RAF Torquay would have required consulting RAF archives which unfortunately there wasn't the time for (despite being interesting!) and ultimately I decided it wasn't the core theme of the book, the same with naval experiences although Coronel and Jutland feature prominently because of their local death toll. Hopefully in the future someone might be able to do some supporting research on the naval aspect, of which RAF Torquay was intimately associated with, perhaps in conjunction with Brixham's role in the war.

Hopefully the book provided you with some enjoyment and interesting anecdotes. I particularly liked the letter from the angry local resident who was being accused of being a German spy/collaborator in early 1915. Such British sarcasm and passive aggressiveness in him. I also particularly liked Gilbert Winget, shame he died so early in the war, as his letters were always great to read.

[Moonraker]

Hi Plumer 17

Typos - yes, I know only too well about those, and also about spotting infelicities after the book is printed (in some part due to over-familiarity with what I've written). Curiously, I'm reading another military book of the 1910s in which the author also hyphenates "Lloyd-George" - and spells "Field Marshal" with a second concluding "l". (Well, he did serve in the Fleet Air Arm ...) The book was published by Spellmount, an imprint of the respected History Press, whose copy editors should have known better.

As admitted above, my comment on the "international" content was subjective. My own interest is in the Home Front at the expense of overseas experiences.

As well as being brought up in Torquay (in a house behind Livermead House Hotel), I spent a lot of time in Wellswood a dozen years ago, so was interested in the local references. My researches into New Zealanders on Salisbury Plain threw up some references to their presence in Torquay and I did a little research in to that, which your book fleshed out.

I found the NZ website

Papers Past

useful, and it has a number of articles referring to Torquay which, at very quick glance, mostly offer information you gleaned from other sources.

Yes, I did enjoy the book and shall offer it to my ex-partner who remains in Wellswood. I had rather hoped that she might give it to me as a Christmas present, but instead she got me a Great War jigsaw. So I actually bought a copy!

Moonraker

[Ghazala]

Look forward to reading it.

[TEW]

The New Zealand contingent in Torquay is of interest to me as the discharge depot had outlying farms as far as the east edge of Dartmoor. For some reason not yet fully understood Seale Hayne has a number of photos of 'Lemon Squeezers' at work on farms, in some cases the actual tractor can be ID as the same as reported in NZ Newspapers as belonging to the discharge depot.

Oddly, the 'Lustleigh' outlying farm shown in photos held by natlib.gov.nz is not in Lustleigh but lies adjacent to Kennick Reservoir. Seale Hayne have photos of the same farm. Probably, as Seale Hayne had just reverted to being an agricultural college after time as a military hospital there may have been instructors there to assist with ploughing techniques (guess work at present)

TEW