Carol Beard

World War 2 Memories – Don Lugger

as told to Carol Beard

I remember being told a story by Don Lugger whose uncle was farming at Lincombe near Salcombe during WW2. About 18 years ago, Don was on a boat with us motoring up the estuary towards Kingsbridge. As we passed Lincombe, Don told us that when he was about 11 years old, he was staying with his uncle and cousin. One day, a German plane came up the estuary. At the time the boys and uncle were taking a loaded cart up the lane above Lincombe, the cart being drawn by two horses harnessed in tandem. Don was riding on the front horse, I think, maybe his cousin was too. The wheeler horse was shot and killed but the boys, uncle and leading horse were unscathed.

Don passed away in 2008 and I haven’t found anyone else who heard Don tell this story. But Salcombe had two or three raids during 1941 and 1942 with both loss of life and livestock – see notes supplied by the Salcombe Museum. Don’s uncle was definitely farming at Lincombe at the time.

Don also mentioned that during the war, the men in the village set up a rifle range in a small disused quarry in The Meadow below Scobbiscombe Farmyard. The quarry has now been filled in, but it was just above the track towards the gate into Long Gearn wood.

The Mattress with a hole – and other stories. Carol Beard

When I was young, I often slept on a horsehair mattress with a patch about a foot square in it. This was a reminder of an incident when an incendiary bomb came through the roof of my grandparents’ house in Dorset. Amazingly the bomb didn’t go off but went straight through the bed and down into the room below. Fortunately my aunt had just got up and the family were downstairs. My grandfather put a bucket over the bomb and saved the situation – at least I believe so. My real point to the story is that “make do and mend” then took place and the mattress was mended.

Sweets were one of the last foodstuffs to be rationed. Apparently this ended in 1953. I can just remember going go the local sweet shop with my pocket money, really because now we could – all those jars of sweets on shelves all round. Strangely, once rationing was taken off there was no longer the same emphasis on buying sweeties.

My father could not enlist as he was a bad asthmatic. I think this had quite a demoralising effect on him. My mother’s three brothers were all serving abroad. Recently, my 85 year old cousin told me that, as a boy, because his father was away on duty, he and his mother came to live with the grandparents in Hereford. My cousin says that he was aware all the time of the tension in the household caused by the worry of the three sons away – my grandfather had lost his only brother in the First World War. One of the three brothers won a MC but could not hear the King’s words when it was presented to him. He had been fighting in North Africa and the result was bad tinnitus and a suicide later on.

My parents were married from this home in Hereford in June 1940 — the wedding date was brought forward when the news was coming through that France was falling. My father had none of his family present at the wedding as my other grandfather, a doctor/surgeon, would not leave his daughter who was very ill with rheumatic fever, contracted at her Land Army billet.

My father was teaching in Sherborne, Dorset during the war years and was in the Home Guard, my mother was doing the milk round and taking in a lodger from a nearby army station. Father was pretty upset when the cricket square he had just been mowing received a bomb slap in the middle! Sherborne had one fatality in a bombing raid; it was thought that the target was the railway line. Later he took over a school which had been relocated temporarily during the war from Dumpton Gap (near Broadstairs) to Crichel House in Dorset, where it was safer. The school never returned to Kent, remaining in Dorset nearer Wimborne.

One useful result of the war years was that my parents, like so many others, became keen on growing veg. and kept this up long afterwards…

05/05 2025