A stroll around the village of Yarcombe in the neighbouring county of Devonshire.

Travelling west out of Chard on the A30 it is not long before you come upon the sign telling you that you are passing from Somerset into Devonshire.  Drive on down through woodland until you leave the trees behind and then enjoy the wonderful scenery unfolding around you as the road meanders into the Yarty Valley and crosses the narrow bridge over the river.  Begin the climb up the other side of the valley and enter deeper into the eastern reaches of the Blackdowns and you will see the village of Yarcombe and its Norman church of St. John the Baptist clinging to the hillside ahead.

Yarcombe huddles around a steep sharp bend on the A30 main road 1.5 miles from the county border.  The centre of this small village is dominated by its church and historic public house.  Sadly, it may not have a pub for much longer as the Yarcombe Inn, a Grade ll listed building, is closed and up for sale at the moment, although locals have been campaigning to keep it open and have even been raising funds to buy it.  The picturesquely thatched pub was once a coaching inn with parts of the building dating back to the seventeenth century.   It is said to be on the site of former church buildings and may incorporate some remains from the Guest House of Otterton Priory.

The village hall car park is just a few yards beyond an awkward right turn off the A30 by the Yarcombe Inn.  It was a convenient place to the leave car while having a stroll around. 

The Church of St. John the Baptist was my first port of call.  I was able to take some photos of the church against a clear blue sky before appreciating the views over the valley from a nicely positioned bench in the crowded, but very tidily kept churchyard.

I did not go inside the church so I will leave it to another to describe.  Writing of the church over 40 years ago, Ronald Webber in his The Devon and Somerset Blackdowns (Robert Hale & Company, 1976) states:

“The church of St. John the Baptist, with its solid west tower, is a fifteenth-century structure with a few earlier traces, but it was badly restored in 1889-91 when the chancel was rebuilt.  In the centre of the tiled floor are armorial bearings granted to Sir Francis Drake by Queen Elizabeth I.  Oak from Yarcombe used in the building of a bell frame at Exeter Cathedral in the fourteenth century was brought back in 1910 to make the present pulpit which has linen fold panels from Buckfast Abbey given by Lady Drake.  The lectern is made of the original pulpit.  In the windows of the north transept is some fifteenth-century glass, and the font is of roughly the same period.”

The Church of St. John the Baptist in the village of Yarcombe, Devonshire.

Apparently in 1581 Queen Elizabeth l gave the Yarcombe Estate to the Earl of Leicester who then sold it to Sir Francis Drake for £5,000.

A few steps then took me out onto the A30 where I took some photos of the Yarcombe Inn.  If you did not know it was a pub you could easily not recognise it as such because the large pub signs which used to be on its wall have gone.

The Yarcombe Inn, closed and for sale, stands in the shadow of the Church of St. John the Baptist.

Villagers at Yarcombe in Devonshire are campaigning to save their pub.  The signs on the A30 as you enter the village.

I then crossed the A30 and walked up the footpath to an orientation plinth with an accompanying stone bench.  The views over the Yarty Valley and to the hills on the horizon were a little hazy, but I did take some photos.  The houses on this stretch of road must have some of the finest inland vistas in Devonshire.

Another 100 paces uphill alongside the A30 allowed me to look straight down on the church and its surroundings with the far side of the valley beyond – a steep walk, but worth the effort.  It was then downhill all the way back to the car-park!

The village of Yarcombe in Devonshire.  The tractor is driving up the A30.

The view to the south along the Yarty Valley in Devonshire.  The photo was taken from beside the A30 near the orientation plinth above the village of Yarcombe. 

The Crown Inn, Ilminster, South Somerset. Another public house to close!

I have read reports in the local press that another South Somerset public house, The Crown Inn in West Street, Ilminster, is set to close.  Apparently planning permission has been given to convert it into two homes.

Hopefully the street frontage will not be altered too much as, in my opinion, the Tudor style timbering looks quite picturesque.

The Crown Inn, Ilminster, South Somerset.  Photographed on 14th February 2019.

Celandines on a sunny spring day in a South Somerset garden.

A lovely fresh spring day in South Somerset so I took a photo of celandines, basking in the sunshine, in my rose border.

Celandines.

Celandines in the rose border.

Recent opinion polls and local council elections results. A sign of things to come?

There was an interesting ComRes poll carried out between 15 and 17 March, the week before the Prime Minister made her latest trip to Europe to plead for more time to kick the Brexit can even farther down the road.  Its results showed that the Labour and Conservative parties were neck and neck, but could not manage 70 per cent between them!  TIG was on 7 per cent and UKIP on 6 per cent, the Liberal Democrats, longstanding opponents of Brexit, were in the doldrums on 8 per cent – presumably there was no prompt for Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.   And, don’t forget, this poll was taken before Mrs May’s foray across the English Channel to delay Brexit.

Following the ComRes poll there were some real ones last Thursday when a cluster of council by elections took place. No earthshattering upsets, but a trio of results caught my eye. 

In two wards UKIP had candidates.  In Kensington and Chelsea’s Delgano ward UKIP had 5.7 per cent of the vote, not having stood a candidate last time, and in Newcastle-under-Lyme’s Holditch and Chesterton ward their candidate increased their vote by 2.6 per cent to 12.3 per cent.

Meanwhile in Essex, Anne Marie Waters’ fledgling For Britain Movement fielded a candidate in Southend’s Milton ward and polled a respectable 5.3 per cent.

None of the aforementioned candidates came anywhere near winning, but the percentages achieved can make all the difference to other parties’ candidates winning or losing.  You don’t need to win to have influence!

Remember, these opinion polls and real polls took place while the UK Government is still supposed to be delivering the 2016 Referendum result.  If MPs overturn that result they will prove that they only believe in democracy when it suits them to do so.  They will eventually have to face the consequences of such action at the ballot box.  

Should Brexit be revoked I suspect a goodly number of those 17.4 million people who voted to leave the EU will be looking for somewhere, if they ever bother voting again, to put their X in protest.  Gerard Batten’s UKIP, Anne Marie Waters’ For Britain Movement and Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party will be there to accommodate them.  If these insurgent parties prosper at the polling booths it will be thanks to the hypocritical manoeuvrings of the Conservatives, Labour, TIGs and Liberal Democrats.

Admiral Sir James Somerville, commander of Force H, the squadron which crippled the Bismarck, at rest in a Somerset churchyard in the village of Dinder.

In the shadow of Somerset’s Mendip Hills, just north of the A371 between Wells and Shepton Mallet, is the little village of Dinder.  Within the village is Dinder House, formerly a manor house dating from the twelfth century, rebuilt by the Somervilles in 1801.  It remained their family home up until the death of Admiral of the Fleet Sir James Somerville on this day in 1949.   

Sir James Fownes Somerville was born in Weybridge, Surrey, on 17 July 1882, the second son of Arthur Fownes Somerville of Dinder and his wife Ellen, daughter of William Stanley Sharland, of North Norfolk, Tasmania.  The Somervilles were related to that great naval family, the Hoods.

Somerville joined the RN in 1897 and became a lieutenant in 1904. He qualified in the vital new field of wireless telegraphy in 1907.

He was fleet wireless officer during the Gallipoli campaign where his outstanding work in ship to shore communications brought him the award of the DSO.

In 1921 Somerville was promoted to captain and commanded the battleships HMS BENBOW, HMS BARHAM and HMS WARSPITE.  Following the mutiny by seamen in ships of the Atlantic Fleet at Invergordon on 15 and 16 September 1931, Somerville and Captain James Tovey, another future admiral, undertook an enquiry to establish its causes.   

During the Spanish Civil War Somerville spent two years as senior British naval officer off the Spanish Mediterranean Coast.  In 1937 he was promoted to vice-admiral and subsequently became Commander-in-Chief East Indies in October 1938.  However, in July 1939 he was forced to retire with suspected pulmonary tuberculosis, a diagnosis he contested.

The outbreak of World War Two soon saw Somerville back in the service of his country.  After overseeing the development of naval radar and its rapid installation aboard ships he gave valuable assistance to Admiral Ramsay who oversaw the Dunkirk Evacuation.

After the defeat of France Somerville took command of Force H, a squadron based at Gibraltar to act as gatekeeper to the Mediterranean and operate in the Central Atlantic as necessary.  He then commanded what was, in my opinion, one of the most inglorious and mistaken actions ever undertaken by the Royal Navy.   Somerville was tasked with arranging, either by negotiation or force, the demobilisation of major units of the French Fleet at Mers-el-Kebir near Oran in French Algeria.  When talks failed Somerville, with the insistence of Churchill, ordered his ships to open fire on the anchored French warships.  The bombardment resulted in the deaths of 1,297 French servicemen, the sinking of one capital ship and heavy damage to another.  Somerville himself described it as a “filthy job”.

Many senior officers in the Royal Navy thought at the time, and after the war, that the order from Churchill and the War Cabinet to open fire on erstwhile allies was wrong.  Stephen Roskill in his Churchill and the Admirals (Pen & Sword Books Ltd. 2013) writes:  

“While working on my war history I had many interviews and much correspondence with Cunningham, Somerville and North, the three admirals concerned in the attack on Oran and related plans.  None of them ever budged from the view that, given more time for negotiation, the tragedy could have been averted.  On 9 January 1950 Cunningham wrote to Admiral Lord Fraser, then First Sea Lord, that 90 per cent of senior naval officers, including myself, thought Oran a ghastly error and still do.”

In May 1941 Force H was called on to help the Home Fleet in the hunt for the BISMARCK.  Somerville’s masterly handling of his squadron led to HMS ARK ROYAL’s Swordfish aircraft crippling the BISMARCK with torpedoes thus allowing Admiral Sir John Tovey’s battleships to catch and sink her.

In 1940 and 1941 Somerville’s ships regularly and successfully supported vital convoys to Malta, but after flying off reinforcements of aircraft to that besieged island HMS ARK ROYAL was torpedoed and sunk by the German submarine  U81 on 13 November 1941.

Following Japan’s entry into the war Somerville was sent to the Far East in February 1942 to command a reformed Eastern Fleet.  Many of his ships were obsolete and his fleet was in no condition to confront the powerful Japanese carrier group which forayed into the Indian Ocean in the spring of 1942.  All Somerville could do was to retreat out of range of the Japanese until they withdrew to the Pacific for their next confrontation with the American Navy.

It was not until the spring of 1944 that Somerville was able to undertake offensive operations.  By this time his fleet had been reinforced by more modern units including the aircraft carrier HMS ILLUSTRIOUS and, operating alongside the American carrier USS SARATOGA, air strikes were launched against Japanese oil installations on Sumatra and Java.

In August 1944 Somerville left the Eastern Fleet to take up the post of Head of the British Admiralty delegation in Washington, a position he held from October 1944 to December 1945.  He made a great success of this mission and even became friends with the blunt and short-tempered Admiral Ernest J. King, the anglophobic American chief of naval operations.

On leaving the Royal Navy in 1946 he retired to Dinder House becoming Lord Lieutenant of Somerset.  He died in Dinder on 19 March 1949 of a coronary thrombosis and is buried there in the village churchyard of St. Michael and All Angels.   His wife Mary, whom he married in January 1913, predeceased him in August 1945.

Sources.

Churchill and the Admirals, Stephen Roskill (Pen & Sword Books Ltd. 2013)

Oxford Dictionary of National Biographies.

https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/36191

Iain Dale, broadcaster and political commentator, insults Italian tank commanders on ConservativeHome.

Iain Dale, broadcaster and political commentator, has written an article on ConservativeHome in which he opines that the courage of some Conservative Cabinet Ministers is equivalent to that of Italian tank commanders.*

Referring to recent votes in the House of Commons dealing with Brexit  he writes:

 “Let’s start with the four Cabinet Ministers, eight junior ministers and two PPSs who failed to obey a three-line whip and abstained on the No Deal amended motion.

They deserve to be named. They are Amber Rudd, Greg Clark, David Gauke, David Mundell, Stephen Hammond, Richard Harrington, Tobias Ellwood, Robert Buckland, Alistair Burt, Margot James, Anne Milton, Claire Perry, Vicky Ford and Bim Afolami.

Two others, Sarah Newton and Paul Masterton, voted against the three-line whip. At least they had the honour and courage to resign, unlike their abstaining colleagues.”  Mr Dale goes on to say: “Some weeks ago, we were told 40 ministers would resign if they were whipped to vote for a No Deal Brexit. A couple of weeks ago we were told a dozen would do so. In the event only one did. These ministers have all the courage of an Italian tank commander with one forward gear and four reverse gears.”

In my opinion such a comparison is an outrageous insult to Italian tank commanders!

*https://www.conservativehome.com/thecolumnists/2019/03/iain-dale-after-all-their-bluster-about-resigning-abstaining-ministers-took-the-cowardly-way-out.html#comments

Ernest Bevin born in the village of Winsford, Somerset on this day in 1881. A giant of British politics during war and peace.

At the present time we have a Labour Party leadership which appears unenthusiastic, and that’s putting it mildly, about Britain’s membership of NATO and the retention of nuclear weapons.  Furthermore, on March 7 an article in The Telegraph by Steven Swinford informs us that “Britain’s equality watchdog has announced a formal inquiry into the Labour Party’s handling of anti-Semitism cases amid claims that the party broke equalities law.” *

In such circumstances we should remember the contribution made by Ernest Bevin, a patriotic anti-communist who was a giant figure in the Trade Union Movement, Labour Party and British Government both in time of war and peace.  Today is the anniversary of his birth in the village of Winsford which sits within the borders of Exmoor National Park 10 miles southwest of Minehead in Somerset.

Ernest Bevin was born at Winsford on 9th March 1881.  His mother, Diana, was married to William Bevin, an agricultural worker who, by 1877, had deserted his family.  Therefore Ernest Bevin’s father is not known.  He was one of 7 children.

After his mother’s death he lived with his sister and her husband.  Bevin left school in 1892 and worked on farms until 1894 when he moved to Bristol to join his brothers, Jack and Albert.

In Bristol he worked mainly as a conductor on trams and as a van driver until becoming a paid official of the Dockers Union in 1911.  While in Bristol he attended chapel, becoming a Sunday School teacher and Baptist preacher.

By May 1920 he was Assistant General Secretary of the Dockers Union and as his trade union role was centred on London he moved there with his wife, Florence Anne Townley.

Bevin played the major role in creating the Transport and General Workers Union from the merger of 14 unions with his own Dockers Union as its core.  The new union came into being on 1 January 1922, with 300,000 members.  Bevin was elected General Secretary and by the late 1930s he was leading the largest union in the country, with 650,000 members.

He took a determined stand against communist challenges to trade union leadership and was suspicious of the egotism of intellectual socialists.

In May 1940 Bevin was top of the list of Labour figures who Churchill wanted in his War Cabinet and he agreed to become Minister of Labour and National Service in Churchill’s coalition government.  He became an MP for the first time in June 1940 being elected unopposed for Central Wandsworth.  Bevin was a staunch supporter of the war effort and believed “it is a social obligation to defend your own homestead”.

He so successfully mobilized and directed labour into essential war industries that Britain achieved a higher level of civilian mobilization than any other of the nations at war.  Bevin oversaw a great extension of collective bargaining, wage regulation, trade union membership and general transformation of working conditions.

Possibly second only to Churchill in the wartime government, Churchill himself looked upon Bevin as a possible successor should anything happen to himself.

After the war Bevin became Foreign Secretary in the Labour government and formed a close association with Prime Minister Attlee which contemporaries said was one of the most successful political partnerships in English history.  He had a deep distrust of communism and the Soviet Union, was firmly committed to the British nuclear deterrent, and played a key role in the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.

Failing health caused him to be replaced as Foreign Secretary in March 1951 and he died at his home in Westminster on 14 April 1951.

*https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/03/07/labour-faces-formal-inquiry-handling-anti-semitism-amid-claims/

No-deal Brexit food crisis. Keep calm, drink tea and eat bread pudding!

The final countdown to Brexit has coincided with my wife having a new kitchen, complete with new gas cooker, installed.  The inaugural pudding she baked was a traditional Old English Bread Pudding – and delicious it was too!  

A traditional Old English Bread Pudding.

So, with the prospect of a no-deal Brexit crisis resulting in food shortages and empty supermarket shelves, according to the more hysterical media reports, what contingency plan could be better than to stock up with enough of the ingredients needed to maintain a plentiful supply of bread puddings, and of course tea, milk and sugar, until the food convoys from our friends in North America and Australasia battle through the EU economic blockade – or the traffic jams at the Port of Dover?  

A traditional Old English Bread Pudding - just about to be tasted!

We won’t count on food parcels from the Swiss Red Cross as no doubt they would be intercepted by Herr Juncker’s army of customs officers as they cross the French and German frontiers.

Just in case the crisis is prolonged and we might like to vary the menu a little my wife is checking the recipes for Taunton Toasts, Mendip Munchies and Priddy Oggies.      

Update March 5th.
I submitted this blogpost to the Western Daily Press as a letter and I am flattered to report that it was published today with the title " Stockpile now before 'Brexit Doomsday'".