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South Brent Storytellers and Archive are a not-for-profit volunteer-led community group who rely on funding to maintain our collections and create new opportunities for the public to view them.

Support our crowdfunder: Help us create a searchable, online Archive for South Brent and surrounding villages. We want to put South Brent Archive’s fabulous collections online and make them more accessible.

Donations are very welcome, to enable us to keep our annual software licences up-to-date, for the on-going purchase of archival quality materials in which to store our collections safely, and to go towards our fund to create a searchable database of all our images on a purpose-built website.

BACS payments can be made to:

South Brent Storytellers and Archive, Lloyds Bank

Sort code: 30-98-69

Account No: 44397468

A proportion of every donation is added to the John Hawkins Memorial Fund for Bursaries for Young People wishing to study heritage.

Please use your surname and first initial, if not obvious, GIFT, and where you heard about us, as the reference so that we can acknowledge your donation, e.g. FBpage, Old School Community Centre website, etc.

Up and Coming Archive Events 2026

Open Afternoon Dates

Saturday 31st January 2pm – 4pm Open Afternoon – Travel & Transport. Collect your competition entry form. Explore our resources.

Saturday 28th February – 2pm – 4pm Open Afternoon – Travel & Transport. Research your travel or transport story with the archive team.

Film Screening

Sunday 22nd March 2pm – 4.30pm All Things to All People Film screening and Q&A with the producer, Peter Nicholson. Tells the tale of the Elmhirsts early years at Dartington Hall (1925- 1940s). Includes refreshments. Tickets £6 from Artworks from February, or email to book.

This Year’s Talks (all at 2pm)

Saturday 26th September – 2pm – 3:30pm Talk – Plymouth to the South Hams By Rail – Then & Now : Illustrated talk by railway expert Bernard Mills

Saturday 24th October – 2pm – 3:30pm Talk – The History of the Automobile in the South Hams with Classic Car expert Jim Thompson

Saturday 28th November – 2pm – 3:30pm Talk – Pack Horses, Drovers and Pilgrims – local byways and lanes with Steph Bradley

Exhibition

Throughout June 2026 – Exhibition in the Corridor Gallery at the Old School Community Centre – Local Travel and Transport – From the Pack Horse to the Automobile

Volunteering with us

We are currently seeking more volunteers, so that we can open very week, so if you love local history and like talking to people, we’d love to hear from you!

We’d also like to hear from people who might like to get involved with the on-going work of helping us to catalogue existing and new collections, as well as someone who could help us to create an online database so that our collections can also be viewed from the comfort of home.

If you are interested, simply come along to one of our open sessions and let us know.

Our current volunteers are:

Steph Bradley: Manager, Researcher, Events Manager
Ben Chadwick: Audio specialist, Event support
Sue Dean: Family historian, Archivist, Researcher
Phil Dean: Newsletter, Researcher, Events support
Jo Fowler: Website Manager, Catalogue Database Specialist, Researcher
Jenni Hazell: Trainee archivist, Events support
Fira Ridgeway: Trainee archivist, Researcher
Jim Thomson: Digital Imaging, Exhibition Manager
Greg Wall: Researcher, Events speaker and local guide
Paul Heatley: historian, antiquarian book expert

What the Archive Has Been up to in Recent Months

As ever, South Brent Archive would like to express our thanks to all those parishioners of South Brent and Rattery, as well as those from further afield and on our facebook group, who have communicated with us over the past year, telling us stories, recounting memories and/or, who have either donated, or lent images to be scanned and held digitally by us. As of the end of December 2025, we have 104 Collections. Particular thanks go to Maggie Luscombe, Joy Hanson, Sister Anne Smyth, Mandy Haley, Christine Morgan, John Cranch, Andrew Leslie, Jean Sabine and Patsy Tidball, Paul Heatley, Marigold Seager-Berry, Frances Sparkes, Jean Sandry, Tony Rose, Wendy & Barry Lloyd, Jamie Webber, David Yabsley, Laurette Guest, Yvonne Hawkins, Mary Blacker, and Stephen Jenkins. Recent highlights are old Avonwick photos, an early S Brent truncheon, railway memorabilia, and a number of interesting and unique postcards and framed images related to S Brent from the 18^th – 20^th centuries.

The Archive summer exhibition will be on display as usual throughout June. The 2025 theme was the History of My House (celebrating the centenary of the sale of Marley House to Brigittine nuns) which was followed in the autumn with a series of events on local estates – BlackHall, Marley House when it was Syon Abbey, and a screening of BAFTA award winning producer and director Peter Nicholson’s film All Things to All People about the Elmhirsts’ early days at Dartington. These events formed part of the Devon History Society’s Devon in the 1920s theme.

Last year, we started an annual competition with a memorial cup and a small cash prize to recognise the work of Andy Jones, an early member of our group who together with Rowan Wylie and Steph Bradley went in to the primary school to work with the older children on storytelling skills, in preparation for work with Brent’s older residents collecting local history stories Sadly, Andy’s premature and sudden death curtailed these activities, although we do plan to revive them at some point. The cup was awarded in 2025 to Laurette Guest for her research on the Old Slaughter House, now Chapel Mews with a small cash prize awarded to Mandy Haley for her work on Farnborough.

For 2026 our focus is on Travel & Transport in and around South Brent and our exhibition title is Local Travel – from the Pack Horse to the Automobile. Competition entries for the Andy Jones Memorial Cup 2026 will be available from the Archive, and afterwards from the Old School leaflet case, on Saturday 31^st January – our first Open Afternoon (2-4pm) of the year.

This year’s autumn talks will be on the same theme with talks on local railways, the history of the automobile in S Devon, and Drovers, Pack Horses and Pilgrims – Local byways and lanes.

Our fundraising endeavours from 2023-2025 succeeded in raising £7000, which we have used to have a bespoke website built. Our final training session is in January, and we hope to launch at the end of March. The website will have within it an online catalogue of items held within the archive, which is timely as there are planned renovations at the Old School, which will greatly enhance all of the services within the centre, but for the interim we may need to move and close the archive collections to the public to keep them secure until the building work is complete. We’ll keep you updated.

This year’s Spring event is a reshowing of the Elmhirst film followed by a Q&A with the producer Peter Nicholson on the 22^nd March from 2-4:30pm at the ~Old School Hall.

The Archive team for 2026 are: Sue and Phil Dean, Jim Thompson, Jo Fowler, Ben Chadwick, Steph Bradley, Fira Ridgeway, Jenni Hazell, Paul Heatley, and Greg Wall. We sadly lost 2 volunteers in 2025 – Pam Sparkes though ill health, and John Hawkns, who passed away in September. Together with Yvonne, his widow, we have inaugurated the John Hawkins Memorial Fund which will continue to accept funds to be allocated to young locals who wish to pursue a career in Heritage.

We’d like to extend a special thank you to our collaborators over the past 2 years: Richard Cleave of Moortek for wonderful IT support, Marigold Seager- Berry for her super talk on Blackhall, Peter Nicholson for letting us screen his film All Things to All People, Sister Anne Smyth, (retired Mother Superior of Syon Abbey) for interviews, and making images available to us for our Syon Abbey panels in the 2025 exhibition and Annie Price of Exeter University Archive for permission to show copies of images from their special collections, as well as Joy Hanson and Adrian Wardle for their invaluable contributions to the Syon Abbey event in October. We’d particularly like to appreciate David Yabsley, George Beable, Jamie Webber and John Cranch for consistent contributions to our understanding of local history.

Thank you too to all the inhabitants of the dwellings which are believed to have once been part of a Barracks between Totnes Road & Plymouth Road, who have returned permission forms for us to contact the country archaeologist regarding research into the former Barracks. We need one more form to be returned so that we can go ahead. We will be in touch with more information in due course.

In print:

If you like reading about local history you might like to view our back copies of the popular Imag that sadly went out of publication at the end of 2025. The Archive team, particularly Lily Style and Steph Bradley regularly contributed local history articles. From the end of 2025 the archive submit their articles to the quarterly Our Dartington parish magazine instead. Copies are available at Rattery Village Hall.

Join us!

The Archive will inaugurate the Rattery subgroup of the Archive on Tuesday the 3^rd February from 10 -11:15am at Rattery village hall during the weekly coffee morning. New members welcome. We will be cataloguing the Rattery Village Hall collection so that it can be included in the online catalogue of the new website.
The Archive are looking for a very part time pro bono treasurer– anticipated 2 hours a month. Email us if this could suit you. info@southbrentarchive;org.uk

Follow us!

You might like to join our very popular Facebook page. We currently have over 1700 members with almost daily posts. https://www.facebook.com/groups/sbstorytellersandarchive

If you do not follow social media but want to keep up with our activities please email info@southbrentarchive.org.uk SUBSCRIBE ME to receive our new quarterly newsletter. The latest editions are also available for download below.

Please note that we will only be accepting donations of new physical collections by prior arrangement in 2026. This is because of the planned building work on the Old School. Contact us in advance to arrange this. info@southbrentarchive.org.uk

Finally, a huge thank you to all of those who supported our fundraising activities, whether by attending one or more of our events, or by donating to our Crowd Funder. Our most recent crowdfunder is still open with funds being used to purchase new digital hardware and software to enable us to digitise our images efficiently and get them website ready. To donate please click here.

Donations

Whilst we are open to receiving new items for the Archive, in fact, we love receiving new items and collections, and spend many happy hours perusing them, we would ask that they have a connection to South Brent parish and its outlying villages and farms, including our side of Dartmoor, as we are very much a local archive and do not have the space to house items relating to further away places.

If you have items of wider Devon interest, the place to take your memorabilia is:

Devon Rural Archive http://www.devonruralarchive.com/

The Devon Heritage Centre, https://swheritage.org.uk/devon-archives/visit/devon-heritage-centre/ or, if they are photographs, to Totnes Image Bank.

Items of regional or national interest can be offered to the new archive and museum in Plymouth, The Box, https://www.theboxplymouth.com/contact-us

Please note that there is also an Archive in Modbury: contact: monicayunnie@btinternet.com