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Jenny Jenkins - My LHI Story
More about our Project
from Village Green magazine
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from Village Green magazine
Location: Devon
Tall Tales from Braunton - an extract from an article about the Beating the Bar project published in Devon Rural Community Council's quarterly magazine Village Green (issue 91, March 2003)
Seafaring yarns from 20th century North Devon mariners have been rescued and retold in a new booklet published as part of a Local Heritage Initiative project.
The idea for our project came from two former sailors, now Braunton Museum Trustees, says chairman of trustees Jenny Jenkins. “Len Baglole pointed out to me that there’s only a few of the old ones left, and soon all their tales and knowledge could be lost forever.”
Len is one of 13 surviving local mariners with first hand experience of “beating the bar” - navigating safely past shallow waters over a bar of coarse sand and gravel at the entrance to the Taw and Torridge estuary.
Sid Crick, born in 1913, and still working until 1994, tells fascinating tales about his salmon fishing days: “We caught a 42lb salmon in 1935,” he says. “I had to hook him out, so it was lucky he was big and quiet, it would have been a problem if he’d played up.”
Life was harder under sail, with cramped quarters and wet vessels in winter. And when the weather was too bad to go to sea, the men gathered seaweed for farmers to use as fertiliser on the sandy soil.
“You’d never hear about these things first hand unless you took part in something like this project,” says Jenny.
The photograph shows (left to right) Len Baglole, Bill Mitchell and Sam Mitchell outside Braunton Museum.
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