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Our story - so far
a brief history of WESTWARD HO!
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Our story - so far
Location: Devon
The Westward Ho! History Group was started by Maureen, Marilyn and Harry who worked as volunteers in the village information shop. It became clear to them by the number of enquiries from locals and tourists that there was no readily available information on Westward Ho!
A letter arrived at the shop from London, written by someone who had recently visited the village. This person was disappointed by the lack of information and also the state of the memorial stone at the old college. (Rudyard Kipling went to school there)
The band of three were keen historians who had being doing their family history and collecting bits and pieces of local history in a small way. Harry had been taking photographs and saving press cuttings about the village for years. So armed with their own archives and a few blown up postcards they held a small exhibition to see if they could get the village interested in a history project. Over 200 people turned up and 50 joined. The Westward Ho! Community History Project was born.
We have produced a simple history trail and cleaned up the memorial stone but realised if we wanted to do more we needed help and applied to LHI for a grant.
We are in the early stages of our project but already people are donating old photographs, documents, maps etc. We have bought a video camera and recording equipment and are doing “memories” sessions with some older members of the community.
We are deciding on the design for our leaflets and gathering information for these. We have also bought some software to improve old photographs and will start training in this next month.
In time we hope to do our own web site but as none of us are computer buffs this will take time and more training.
Most of old Westward Ho! is being pulled down and replaced by apartments and bungalows so we feel it is important to record all this quickly. For instance the outdoor swimming pool where Rudyard Kipling learnt to swim and many holidaymakers will have fond memories has been demolished for apartments.
All this is quite daunting but a lot more people are getting involved and its certainly keeping us busy.
We are now well into our project and have printed 6 history leaflets.
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