This is a transcription of a talk given by Douglas at the Museum in January 2026
Richard Smith : Good afternoon everyone. Thank you so much for coming along on a horrible wet day, and it’s just been getting worse, hasn’t it? Thank you very much for making an effort to come along. We do appreciate it. These winter events have helped us pay for our electricity bills – quite important to us. And afterwards we do have tea and cake and biscuits and whatever else. We hope you will stay for that. We always appreciate donations for those too. But yeah, it’s just such a nice chance also to catch up or to have a word with Doug. Just in case Doug doesn’t manage to tell us his whole life story…
So we also have, coming up on Saturday, we have the book sale. So if you haven’t already filled your bookshelves from Christmas and all the rest of it, please do come along Saturday morning and find some more books out at very bargain prices.
So today, for our last winter talk of the season, we have Mr. Douglas Beazer in conversation with Mr. Brian Earl. Now, Douglas has been a volunteer at the museum for many years. He’s been a Beaminster resident for many more, and to tell us some of his remembrances from this town. And Brian here is going to keep him on track. And I think Lynda’s in the audience as well to monitor times.
I hope you have a lovely afternoon listening to Douglas and Brian, and I’ll let you take off.
Brian Earl : Welcome to the Morecambe and Wise Show. If there is any levity, it’s not because we’ve practised it, because we haven’t practiced it. Part of the fun will be that Douglas thinks he knows what questions I’m going to ask, and it will depend on what you say as to where we go next, is the idea. Nor is it an episode of This is your Life either. But those of you who have come for a little bit of scandal, if it comes out, it will come out accidentally. This is meant to be a semi-serious discussion of what Beaminster has been like in the past, not what naughty things Douglas has done in the past. All right then. They’re very naive, Douglas, aren’t they?
Douglas Beazer : Very truthful.
BE : And it’s not an edition of Parkinson either, although, yes, you’ve already had the introduction, but my first and only guest this afternoon is the inimitable Mr Douglas Beazer, full of surprises. No doubt we’ll all learn something and Douglas may even learn something himself. So I will give you an opportunity to be surprised right at the beginning. Would you happen to know already that Douglas may well be the only volunteer at the museum who has ever been able to play the bagpipes? Douglas, tell them about your bagpipe experience, even before we start anything else.
DB : Well, Brian hit on a good note there, excuse the pun, but when I was in, when I joined, the Army in the boys’ service at Arborfield near Reading, I did all the normal things that boy soldiers do in learning, and we had a bagpipe band in there made of the boys and all that. We had various other groups, musical groups and all that, and I thought, I’ve never really tried the bagpipes. And the Scottish pipe major who was part of the staff there, we were talking to him one day and he said, “Would you like to have a go?”. I said, “Well, never played them before, you know. They won’t be the best tune you’ve ever heard.” And anyway, so he said, “Well, would you like to join the pipe band.” I said, “Alright.” So I went up to this thing, and anyway, so first of all, he got these bagpipes out of the case. That was a mystery to start with: how you unfold them, you know, because they all clip down quite quickly. And he gave me these bagpipes and he said, “All you got to do is this, this and this, put them up, so you’ve got the pipes up there and the bag there.” And he said, “When you start, just blow into that.” He said, “Keep blowing and keep blowing.” I said, “When do I stop?” He said, “No, keep blowing, keep blowing, and you’ve got to blow and push this thing in and out and if you hit the right sort of holes on the things you get a tune.” So I said, “Yeah, all right I’ll have a go at that then, shall I?” And anyway, so I got this thing, started blowing. I said, “Is that enough?” “No,” he said “Keep blowing, keep blowing.” Started this, and I said, “When do you get the sound?”. He said, “Blow a bit harder, blow it a bit harder.” Started doing this with my fingers down different holes and a sound come out of the bottom end. I don’t know what it was. “Oh,” he said, “That’s not too bad to start with, is it?”
I said, “What? You should like that?” So he said, “Would you like to join the bagpipe band?” I said, “Oh yeah, all right.”
So instead of doing something else for the first couple of terms, a couple of turns I was in there, I said, “Yeah alright, so I went to join this bagpipe band and anyway, we did a bit of practice up in one of the huts there and then we used to do the parades. Well, in the practice room in the huts it was alright for me to do this, that and everything else, but when we went out for the parades and all that, I just sort of blow gently, sort of blown up, and not too much of this business so my bagpipe career was fairly short-lived, a couple of, about six months or so, but it was worth a go anyway, you know, so that was on top of my other musical career anyway, but I’ll tell you about that, perhaps…
BE : No, you tell them now. You tell them about your other musical career. Let’s get it out of the way, Douglas.
DB : Well, it’s a fantastic musical career. I’ve always been a musical man of sorts, and anyway, my musical career was quite long-lived, and I started off when I was at the Girls & Infant School, and anyway, the instrument I started off on was the triangle. And so I used to get the triangle and beat it like this, and what it was, every so often you had to go ding, ding, like that. And anyway, so we used to hold the thing up, and instead of going ding, it went ding ding because I rebounded on the other thing. So I had a go at that and then I thought, well, I’ve got to be a bit more ambitious, so I ventured to do something a bit more ambitious and that was tambourine. And so the lady who was teaching us, she said, “With the tambourine, all you do is a hold on like this and give a bash like that and a shake.” So I thought, that sounds quite easy, you know, so I was up there, couldn’t get a decent sound out of that, I was banging it too hard. And on one occasion, I think it was because the skin was a bit weak, but I tapped it like that and the skin broke. So all I had to do was just shake it like that. So that was the triangle and the tambourine I’d mastered.
And when I then went up to the boys’ school, Mr. Baker was headmaster up there and lived in a schoolhouse just beyond the boys’ school in East Street, and Mrs. Baker then taught us, said, “Well, they might learn how to play the violin.” So that sounds pretty good. So I thought I can be a well-known artist on that. So went across the schoolhouse on the Wednesday afternoon or when it was, to learn how to play this violin. Brought it out, took it out of the case, told us what it was all about. She gives a demonstration and said,” What you got to do is this, that and that, and all you have to do with a violin is just hold it up like this and all this business, all the beautiful tunes come out, see?” So she said, “Would you like to have a go?” I said, “Yeah, alright.” So I said, “Well, how do you hold it?” She said, “Put your chin under that bit there, hold it like this, hold it up the other end, and then with this thing, that’s made of cat gut and all that, and all you do is push that over the string, so I was there like this and she said, “If you push it up and then pull it down you’ll get some sort of tune”, so I went [violin sound]. I thought, that’s not a very good tune. She said, “No”. She said, “You change the tune every so often by using your fingers to get different length of the of the strings. So when you’re up there, your fingers are doing like this, and all you do is just gently stub up and down like this, you get this beautiful tune.” So I had a go at that, and it was going [violin sound]. And I did change the tune, but I thought, well, this is not really a big career, is it? So I put that down after a couple of terms.
And anyway, a bit towards the end of my schooldays, I thought, ah, a musical career can continue from here. And so, I thought, I knew Doug Hutchings and Ron Andrews and all, lived up Halfacre. And so Ron Hussey lived next door to us at Fairfield and he was in the Silver Band – brass band, silver band, but it was called the Silver Band – andsaid, “Are you interested in that?” So I thought, well, have a look at it. So I went up to the Drill Hall one day to start on the Silver Band, went in and they said,”What instrument do you want to play?” Well, Ron Hussey had one of these big E flat euphoniums, about this big and all that. I thought, can’t manage all that. I thought what I’d do is try something… so I said, “What do you suggest?” And so Doug Hutchings and the other bandmasters there suggested the cornet. Now the cornet, if you don’t know music, is something like a trumpet, shortened version of that. So I thought, yeah, okay, I’ll have a go at that, at least it’s easy to handle. So we used to go into, the band used to meet in the main hall in the Drill Hall, and if you were learning, you used to go off to a side room. So anyway, Mr Hutchings came in and he said, “All you’ve got to do is this, that and everything else.” So he took up the instrument. “You see, hold it like that, put this mouthpiece there and blow in and then all you’ve got to do once you blow in is just press the valves up and down and you get different notes. And so I tried this and put it up there and this noise come out the other end – wasn’t a very charming noise but it came out the other end – and he taught us how to get the different notes and you could play a scale by, you start off with low C or wherever it was, and then with one and three you get D, with one and two you get…, so like that and went on. So we’d got to learn that, and I was very proficient at that. I could do that in about five minutes, you know, each scale. Only one. And so once we’d got to the stage of knowing how to operate these valves, we were allowed to go in to join the band, and when the band were playing, all they had to do was occasionally just play a note. And so I used to go in there and very quietly play this thing. Don’t blow very, very loud, just quietly sort of be there when they were playing.
Anyway, one adventure we had was we were going to a concert in Crewkerne and this was bands from around the area, and so, as I was a member of the band, I went on this concert in Crewkerne playing fields. And it was so exciting, that’s unbelievable really. And anyway, bear in mind I was a cornet, so I’d sit in the front row with all these other cornet players.
And Doug Hutchings said to me, he said, “Now Doug”, he said, “Remember this is a contest. We’re trying to outdo the other bands that are present.” So he said, “What I would suggest you do this afternoon”, he said,”When we start to play, just lift the cornet up to your mouth like that, hands on the valves like that,” he said, “But don’t blow.” He just said, “Put the valves up and down.” So for this concert, I was there like that, you see, like that. And though some of the music had stopped and I was still doing this, but when they put it down, I put it down.
So that, in essence, was my musical career. It was quite a varied career, quite an established career. So I did enjoy it, but it gave me an insight into musical instruments, and I haven’t done anything too much since then. I’ve just let other people carry on and do that because I enjoy music but playing is a bit different. So I hope that’s given you an idea of how musically talented I was.
BE : Can you see what we’re up against this afternoon? There are two reasons why I am actually here doing this. What Richard mentioned is certainly one of them because my friend here is not only one of the most charming and courteous gentlemen I’ve ever come across in my life, he has also got the most phenomenal memory that I’ve ever come across as well. If we let him loose, telling you everything about Beaminster that he remembered, you’d be here till kingdom come, the catering division would start getting twitchy and all sorts of things. So you’re getting a glimpse of where we are here in Douglas’s sometimes surprising life. But the other reason I’m doing this in the way that we are doing it is because we’re plugged in down here. The museum prides itself on its oral history, and what we’re doing, we are recording this (God help anybody who ever listens to it!). We are recording this for posterity so that we’ve got some information about those – they’re almost grey – years now between what we can find in documents underneath the hundred years rule and what people can remember because they’re still capable of remembering. So these years like the 1950s and 1960s, there are very few people in Beaminster at the moment who could actually tell you what happened. Some of it later on will be relevant, I guarantee that. But at the moment, yes, we are plugged into the national grid here, thanks to Alastair. We are being
simultaneously broadcast live on Radio Mongolia, they’ll be pleased to know. And until all the equipment runs out, we’ll carry on doing what we’re doing.
So before we ask any more questions, let me just give you an overview of Douglas’s life so you can get some context for the things he’s going to be talking about. So dates and times and things like that. So I can tell you that the man next to me
was born in 1948. Don’t do the sums.77! Same age as King Charles III. And I have researched this carefully. I have noticed, and I don’t know whether you know this at all, but you were born the day before Jeremy Beadle. Did you know that?
DB : No, he was born a day after I was born.
BE : It must be that. You’ve lasted longer than he did. So that’s the vintage we’re in.
So Douglas was not born in Beaminster. He arrived as a babe in arms, so he doesn’t remember anything before he came to Beaminster, and his parents moved into the council estate we’ve talked about already up at Fairfield. So you’re going up Tunnel Road on the left-hand side, presumably it was in the middle of nowhere then, wasn’t it really, and there was virtually nothing on the way up apart from The Lodge on the left-hand side and fields on the right- hand side where Windy Ridge was on the top of there. So he was one of the… Were you the first tenants?
DB : We were some of the first tenants in there.
BE : It was built just after the war in there. A new tenant in a new council estate bit in there. He was in Beaminster through his childhood and schooldays. When he was 16 and left school, he went into the Army – you’ve heard that alluded to already – and he was in the Army for 24 years. So a great chunk of his life wasn’t spent in Beaminster. What we’re going to try and talk about today are the bits on each side of that. Not belittling anything he ever did in the Army or anything like that, but we’re interested in memories of Beaminster rather than memories of anywhere else. So we’ll be talking a little bit about his school days in Beaminster, then when he came out of the Army and came back and settled in Beaminster, that has been the rest of his life since. So half of that was a working life, another half is the retired life that we’re into. So we’re talking about him being in Beaminster between 1948 and 1964 and then again from 1988 to the current day, so you can sort of work out what was going on in those sorts of times.
So I’m going to ask you Douglas now: just to start off, what out of all the things that you remember is actually your earliest memory of Beminster from when you were a tiddler?
DB : Well I mean, when we lived at Beaminster, we had the green in the middle of the estate, and we used to build a big bonfire, Bonfire Night, there. We used to use the green for playing cricket and sports and running out. But I think my earliest memories living up there was that mum had six children. There’s John, my older brother, myself, Robert, my younger brother, and then Frank, my youngest brother. And then, delightfully, Denise, my youngest sister, and Janet, my younger sister, who are here this afternoon, I’m pleased to say. But Mum had six children. Father, Dad, was working in Crewkerne, so the day was taken up with that. But Mum used to take us all down town, doing some shopping and all that, going to the different shops that were there, which we’ll probably mention a bit later on, and that was quite an entourage to go down town, you know. There was perhaps Janet and Denise in the pushchair and us four boys walking on.
But it was quite a marathon because as Rich…, as Brian said, there was nothing between basically Tunnel Road corner and Fairfield except for the odd cottage. So it was quite a trek to come down town. And a wonderful array of shops, which we’ll speak about a bit later on. But I think my first memories were of coming down town and the play we used to have on the green up at Fairfield. But also in the early days was that I can remember we used to have a fair in Bridport [NB: he meant Beaminster!] and this came from the agreement many many years ago, the warrant and all that, and Townsends from Weymouth used to have a fair that travelled around this part of the country. And they always used to come to Beaminster twice a year, once in late spring and once in early autumn. And they used to come from wherever they’d been to on a Wednesday afternoon and they couldn’t come down in The Square until four o’clock on the Wednesday afternoon, so they used to park up on Tunnel Road and all that. Then they’d come down, park their vehicles wherever they could to in The Square and then they would build the fair in The Square, and they had over on the side nearest to Brassica’s they used to have the bumpers. big bumper things there, so you get two people in a car, drive around, bump into each other, and the swingboats were down by where Cilla & Camilla are now. Tey had a roundabout by where the Christmas tree stands. They had side-stalls like penny slot machines and gun machines and coconut shies along the main road. Then in the middle they had another stall, hoopla and all that. And that used to be built from the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and they would open on the Friday night, and then close again, and then open on the Saturday afternoon and the Saturday evening,
and then late Saturday night, but Sunday morning they would pack it up and they’d have to be gone by 12 o’clock midday on the Sunday, so they should go off to say Chard or wherever they’re going to. So that was a feature twice a year which they did enjoy but again, coupled with that in my younger days, I joined the Cubs and Scouts and they met in the Scout Hut which was in Short’s Lane, just up where you up through to the new Magna housing estate before you got across to the Vicarage. The scout hut used to be in that field there before they built it. So we had the Cubs and Scouts there, and also I joined the Army Cadets later on, but based around those features, that was my early sort of life: the fair, joining these organisations and all that. Not the same group of people, but we used to mix together with everybody and do those sort of things together.
But just on the side of that, certainly the boys – I think the girls had their way of doing things: dolls houses and all that – but the boys, we used to go up, and sometimes the girls as well, we used to go up to the countryside and play all day out there, and we’d be out all day, I mean, in Fairfield, not that there was any great division, but generally speaking the area around Beminster was divided up between the gangs: Fairfield had Cockroad Copse and Horn Park; Gerrard’s Green had the Common; Duck Street (St Mary Wall Stree)t had Lower Copse at Parnham; Hogshill Mead had the Edmund Coombe Coppice; Pattle had Broadwindsor Road around to Horn Park. So we used to go off there and we’d be gone for most of the day, especially on holidays, climbing trees, making camps, this sort of thing. So the childhood days were very, very enjoyable. There’s a lot to do, a lot to see, and we did enjoy it, I must admit.
BE : Did you have inter-gang warfare as well then?
DB : Well, let’s put it like this, up at Cockroad Copse, as you go up past the Groves Nursery, there’s a lane goes down to the left. That goes down to Cockroad Copse and subsequently down to where Numatics were and Clipper Teas are now. But if you go down that lane there, that’s Cockroad Copse. And just as you turn left, that’s the lower side. Now, part of that was on the upper side towards Horn Park. That was for the Fairfield gang, and the Pattle gang had, sorry, the Pattle gang, they had the lower bit and on down through there. And one time the Pattle gang come and built a camp in our place. So we thought, we’ve got to do something about that, so we knocked it all down and we built one in their park. And then next week they knocked that down. So we then got together and made a truce and so we built camps in each other’s territory. You didn’t have stipulated territory, but that was a general sort of rule where yours finished and theirs started. So we all had our own, but we used to go out virtually all day in the holidays. And, you know, most of the weekends go upthere climbing trees, making bows and arrows, this sort of thing. So it was really a good country upbringing and able to do that. And sometimes we had the girls come along with us as well for no unintentional reason, just to be part of the gang.
BE : It does sound like Beaminster’s answer to West Side Story.
DB : Yeah.
BE : Right, let’s pretend that life wasn’t an eternal holiday for you, where you could go out and play in your gangs in Cockroad Copse or whatever it was. You went to school. You’ve already alluded to the fact that you went to school.
Just tell us first of all, before your own memories of you being at school, what was actually the educational set-up in Beaminster at the time you were doing it? Which schools were they and how did you go from one to other?
DB : Well, in Berminster we had three schools. We had the girls’ and infants’ school, and that was in Hogshill Street. As you go through, up from Hogshill Street, go past the estate agents on the right-hand side, further down, and on the left-hand side, you’ve got an archway goes in under the… Well, just past there, you’ve got an entrance goes in what are now flats and apartments. That was the girls’ and infants’ school. And then we had the Boys’ School up at East Street. Now, if you go up East Street, on the right-hand side, you’ve got those rails in front. So that was the boys’ school. And then we had the grammar school, which is just opposite where Hanover Court is now.
Now, at the girls’ school, that was the girls’ and infants’ school, so you went there. Mother took me down on the first day, dropped me in at the gate, where the entrance is now. That was all the playground for the infants and all that. The girls’ playground was at the back. Now, girls’ and infants’ school was down there, so everybody went there, boys and girls went there for three years, and they had classrooms in that school there, but also we had a classroom in the car park right by where the short-stay car park is now, and that was a wooden classroom, a hut, that was donated by Mr Tindall who used to live in the Manor House, and that was the Tindall Hall. That was one of our classrooms. Miss Rogers used to take the class there, and I remember one time – we had girls and boys here as well – and one time she was teaching us to do knitting.
Now the girls, they’d give us some needles, give us some wool and said, could you just knit this? So the girls in the class were going [knitting noise] and they did a dishcloth about six inches square in about 20 minutes, you know. The boys were there with the needles going like this, you know, and after about three hours we’d done about four stitches. But anyway, it was very good educational. But with both schools, and to a point, the grammar school, the classrooms were around the town, the recreation was done in the Public Hall, the school dinners were done up at the top floor of the Red Lion, and on the North Street side of the Red Lion upstairs was where the girls’ and infant’s school had their lunches, and on the right-hand side where the bar is now upstairs, that’s where the boys’ school had their lunches. And the girls used to come down at lunchtime, got that door in North Street, and the boys used to come up from the boys’ school, go in under the archway and up the backside there. And so that was the lunches. The sports were done in the Town Hall. Sports were done either on the playing fields or we used to use the grammar school field, which was up where the primary school is now. And so we did our bit there.
Then after the 11-plus exam, we moved to the boys’ school. Now the boys’ school, as I say, was up East Street. They had gardens right up the back at the lane there, which we used to look after. That’s our horticultural bit. They, again, had classrooms around the town. One classroom was in the Masonic Hall. The other classroom was in next-door here to the museum, which was the Congregational room. That was one there. Again, we used to go to the Public Hall for gymnasium and for sports up to the playing fields or wherever. So you can see there is always pupils walking around Beaminster at all times of the day, going here, there and everywhere else. And while we were at the boys school, they decided to enlarge on the criteria and so they got in contact with the Forestry Commission, and we helped the Forestry Commission do a bit of
arboricultural work out at Chedington, just north of South Perrott. We had a plantation down there. We used to plant trees, clear the ground and all that.
The grammar school had the main part of the school where School House Mews is now. And where you go into School House Mews, that was the playground. And across the other side of the road where Hanover Court is now, that was where the school, the grammar school, gardens were, and they had some laboratories up there as well as all that stuff there.
They had the.. the field up by where the new school is now, that was one of the recreation schools, and they had where the primary school is now, that was their other recreational field, and that’s where we used to go sometimes for some of our sports. But also they had a… as you go up where the school is now, where the primary school is now, where the bungalow for the caretaker is, backs on to to The Beeches they had an orchard in there and that’s where we used to go scrumping in there, some apples, lovely apples in there, go scrumping.
BE : This is during school hours was it?
DB : Well sometimes late school hours, but sometimes weekends.
But then of course in 1963 they built a new school up at Newtown. And so all the girls’ and infants’ school, the boys’ school and the grammar school all closed down December 1962, and came together and we opened in the new school in January 1963. Now, when the new school opened in 1963, Jack Wharton was the headmaster then, and I’ll touch on this a bit later on, but I got to know the builders up there, and [?] them a cup of coffee. And so I spoke to Alfie Gibbs, who was the new caretaker, looking after the new school. And I said, “Now, when we open on, in January, Alfie”, I said, “Which…
Mr Gibbs, sorry, which door are we going to use?” He said, “That one there, right next to the assembly hall.” So I was up there, eight o’clock in the morning, queued up, and when we opened the school, I was the first pupil in that school on school days. And you may well remember that in 1963 we had all that snow. So later in the day, we had to close the school down and then they opened a bit later in the week. So I went up and queued up again. So I was the first pupil in that school on school days.
BE : So you ingratiated yourself with the caretaker. But from what I can gather from conversations we’ve had, you ingratiated yourself with almost anybody who was digging the road up or painting a house or whatever it was. You’re a historian, is the way this works out. Marie Eedle, who wrote the 1980s book about the history of Berminster, based most of her work on what Richard Hine had done in 1914. He was a collector of facts more than anything else, and he got most of his information from a guy called John Banger Russell, who was an attorney in the town, who wrote things down but never actually published them. But Russell used to like describing himself to anybody who asked the question as “a curious person”. So would you say you were a curious person, Douglas?
DB : Inquisitive, curious. Some might say nosey, but I wouldn’t. I was very…
BE : We’ll have a vote later on that.
DB : And so when anything was going on in Beaminster, because the school was up there, we lived up there and all the other reason, I would sort of have a look to see what was going on. And things like when they changed the course of the river, as you go down, as you’ve got the playing fields’ entrance, you’ve got a grille on the drive – well, they put that in when they changed the course of the river which went from there across the road down through Newman’s… down through Bugler’s Yard where Bugler’s Mews are now and across there and joined the river down behind Church Street cottages. They also did some alteration to the sewer which came around by the Village Bakery down past The Square, Church Street. So generally went round sort of seeing what people were doing, what they were doing, whether they were building a house, painting a house, and also I got on well with the builders at the school because that was quite a major project that kept trying to find out a bit more about that. And so I used to go up there and see them. It got so good that I was able to go up and have a cup of coffee with them, you see. And anyway, so I used to go up there sometimes after school and move a bit round, pick up a bit of timber and all that sort of thing. And anyway, so I used to go and see them, cup of coffee and all that sort of, and they used to update me what’s going on. And anyway, I watched the progress of the school being done, and took part and laid the odd brick here and there, not very professionally, but just sort of put one in the wall.
And anyway, when the school opened, that was Phase One. Phase One of the school was the big assembly hall, the big classroom block you can see from the field, and part of the science block, which has got the roof there, and that was Phase One.
Phase Two was another classroom block between the main classroom block where the, basically where the swimming pool and the playground are now, that was Phase Two, plus finishing off some of the other buildings, so anyway I used to go and see the builders as I said just now, and when the school opened in 1963, Mr Wharton, Jack Wharton was the headmaster, and the builders had seen it, because the Phase Two was being built between parts where the school pupils get to get access to, so the builders weren’t very happy with that because, I suppose, and then health and safety as we know it now. Anyway, so they had a word with the headmaster, Jack Wharton. Anyway, in assembly one morning, Jack Wharton said to all the school assembled, he said, “Right”, he said, ” We’ve had a message from the builders. They’re building Phase Two. It interrupts sometimes with school life and on school property.” He said, “As from today, nobody but nobody, with the exception of Douglas Beazer, is allowed to go on the building site.” So that went down wonderfully well, I thought. So at break time, instead of going for out in the play and all that sort of thing, I used to go across to the builders and have a cup of coffee. My friends quite envious for some reason, I don’t know why, but that’s how it turned out. And so I was interwoven with the building of the school, the opening of the school and the ongoing purposes.
BE : I think you qualify as a curious person, which is how you’ve built up your memory of all of these things. So were you allowed, unlike me, I have to say, were you allowed to earn extra pennies by having bits and bobs of jobs outside of your school days as well?
DB : Well, yes. When I was still at school, I had several Saturday morning jobs and I started off, now, as you go up to a road past Windy Ridge where we live now, you’ve got Beaminster House on the left-hand side up in the [?]. That was always known as The Lodge and that was owned by Major Bridgeman. Now we lived at Fairfield, and David Hussey and myself, we got a Saturday morning job down at The Lodge working for Major Bridgeman and we had several parts of that job. The first thing we did in the morning, go down in the morning, they were obviously having breakfast so we went in the back door in little pantries there to do… And the first thing we used to do in the morning was we used to clean the knives and forks and we used to polish the shoes and all that. So what David and I used to do was alter that, so one week I’d do the knives, David’d do the shoes, next week I’d do the shoes and he’d do the knives. But once we’d done that for about an hour, we’d then go out and help Bert Holmes, who was a gardener, and do an odd little job, pull up a few weeds, something like that. Not very, not very gardener-wise, but if he wanted us to do a job, we’d do a job, clean up the path or whatever it was. But Major Bridgeman was very specific, because they had a path that went from The Lodge, Beaminster House as you know it now, down through the wood at the back of those houses on Tunnel Road opposite Windy Ridge now, through there, and you know up in the wood, you’ve got that wooden bungalow, well, the path used to come down through the wood, down past that bungalow to Newman’s Corner. Now if you look at Newman’s Corner from Hogshill Street, look across there, you’ve got a wall, and in that wall there’s a gateway. Now that was the old gateway for the footpath that went up through there, so that Major Bridgeman and his wife didn’t have to walk all the way down the lane and down Tunnel Road. They could walk through the wood, down Newman’s Corner, and on down town. Now Major Bridgeman was very specific, and every Saturday we had to sprinkle new sawdust on the whole of that path. They had a mountain of sawdust kept up at The Lodge, so we’d get several barrowfuls, sprinkle it on the path so it’s nice for Major Bridgeman to walk down. And Major Bridgeman’s place, it originally owned all that ground where The Beeches are now, but if you go up over The Beeches, sorry, just as you start to go over The Beeches, you’ll find the first house on the left-hand side, there’s a lane, there’s a hedge goes off at an angle. That was the hedge of the wood that belonged to The Lodge.
And there was also a drive, a path, a laneway went up there, turned right at the top, and there’s an entrance that goes into The Lodge at the top of that entrance. And if you go up over The Beeches, just as you get to that big tree, you look through and that’s the old entrance in, main entrance into the, what was The Lodge. That tree, when they built The Beeches, there was another one on the other side, they had to take that down because that lane went round and then went in through there and that’s where Glen Evans had his piggery. There was a piggery in there, and all where Windy Ridge and that are now, that was all fields, where Glen Evans used to grow various crops. And for several years he grew potatoes. And some of the boys from Fairfield, we used to go over and help him with that crop growing. And when he had potatoes through there, we used to go through there and pull out the weeds. Well, after this had been going on for a couple of weeks, he wasn’t very happy with that. He said, rather than cut the weed, rather than pull the weeds out, just cut everything off the top. He said, “That means we’re going to propagate the potatoes a lot easier.” So that’s what we did, but it got so bad, I mean, we were doing almost all daylight hours over there, and one week, he had to come to pay us – we
only earned about sixpence an hour and that – he couldn’t pay us, and he said, as from now, he said, stop for a week and then just do a couple of hours a day because it was costing too much money to get that. But we helped to do the [?].
Anyway, so going back down to Newman’s Corner, years and years ago, there used to be around just a junction there, the road coming down from the fire station gave way to the main road. Now on the corner, where that pavement is now, there used to be a border in the front of that with a little lawn at the back, signpost and then a seat. And on behalf, when I was working for Major Bridgeman, I used to look after that border, cut a bit of grass, keep the bench clean and all that. And so that was the first Saturday morning job I had.
I then did several jobs delivering newspapers, some in the morning and some at night, and particularly on the evening one, the Echo. I used to do a paper round doing the Echo and I used to deliver those papers for Mr Wright. Now Wright’s had the paper shop opposite to where Symonds & Sampson’s place is now, where Robbie Roskill’s got his office. That was their paper shop. Part of that was the paper shop and part was Mr Hussey’s leather shop, but they had it all through then.
Now with that Echo round I used to start off in the paper shop, go round Hogshill Street, round The Square, Duck Street, up Shadrack Street and on round the top, everything. Now, going round the town, I used to deliver to various shops. Now, Mrs. Lassam across the road from there where the Indian restaurant is now, she was major fishmonger and vegetables. So she’d take one into her, get the odd apple there, and then go on around the town. Now, three particular shops they used to deliver to in The Square were The Tuck Shop, and that was where the Mayfair office is now. And you may well remember years ago, The Tuck Shop sold sweets. Remember, years ago, the sweets used to come in those big glass jars like this and I used to go in there and take the paper into The Tuck Shop and from the Tuck Shop I used to get threepennyworth of knobbed-up sweets, and all the hard-boiled sweets used to clunk together after a while, so he used to take some out of the pot, put them in a bag, put them in (I used to have this massive great big paper bag for delivering the papers), put them in there, and used to gobble them up, going on the paper round, you see. And anyway, on another occasion, I used to have to deliver to the Carter’s store. And Carter’s is where the Co-op is now. Now Carter’s, as you look at it, that was the, what is the Co-op now, and the other cash-it part of the Co-op, that used to be Sill’s the chemist before they moved up to where they are now. So I used to go into Carter’s to deliver the paper in there, and Carter’s used to do broken-up biscuits. (Correct.) So I used to go in to deliver the paper, and I used to ask for threepennyworth of broken-up biscuits. Big bag like that, put that in the paper bag, go on and deliver, gobble these apples, these biscuits, as I went round.
Some I used to have, when I eventually got home, only a few, but had some, which the girls could share as well.
Anyway, so I used to go on and do that one, and on another occasion, not the same day obviously, but another occasion, I used to deliver to Hodges bakery shop. Now Hodges bakery shop is, if you go down Church Street next to the bookshop, you’ve got the hairdresser’s shop. Well, that used to be Hodges bakery. Now Hodges had branches in Bridport, but they had a bakery there and they had a grocery shop opposite to Robbie Roskill’s office now, which is now a house, just on the side of that lane going up. So Hodges had the grocery shop up there and the bakery shop down there. And when I used to deliver the Echo in there, I’d go up the stairs inside, give it to the lady in there, and I used to buy threepennyworth of stale cakes in there, another big bag full of that, put them in there, see? And that was great. But I used to go in there quite often and it got such a racket with the lady in there that – you remember years ago, they used to have those big wooden trays, baker’s trays about that long and about that wide – well, they had a lovely stand in there with all these trays at an angle.
And they had the stale cakes on the bottom, the bread, bread, and all these lovely cakes at the top, you know. So I used to go in, take the paper in there, she used to get me the stale cakes off the bottom, but because I went in so many times afterwards, I used to get my stale cakes. She’d get the bag out, go across, and take all these cakes off the top shelf. That was my stale cakes, brand new cakes, you know. So I lived on stale cakes for… on stale cakes for a little while, delivering those cakes there. So I did several paper rounds for quite a long time, enjoyed that.
Then I started getting a Saturday morning job for Fletcher’s the butcher’s. Now, Fletcher’s butcher, as you go up over Prout Hill, just past the youth club, you’ve got that grey-painted with a big shop window. Well that was Fletcher’s, a butcher’s shop. And so I did a Saturday morning butcher’s round for them. Now, Denis McLaren and Bill Pommery, two of my great friends, they worked in the shop full-time and what they used to do – I only went down on a Saturday morning and did a round – what they used to do was, on the Friday, all the people that had ordered meat, they would cut all this meat up for them, put a label on it, put it on a tray and put it in the fridge. So the Saturday morning, I could come in, go into the fridge, take it round to the back room, sort my round out, and I used to do two rounds, one from the shop there, up through here, East Street, Woodswater Lane, Gerrard’s Green, North Street, back to the shop. We’d have a cup of coffee, then I’d go on round the other side of Beaminster, you see. So I used to take this tray of cut-up meat and labelled-up meat, put it in there and sort out what I wanted for the first round, and I had one of them butcher’s bikes with a big basket in the front, so I used to put it in there and the garage next door used to keep the bike in there, so I’d put the bike on the stand and take this basket, put it in front of the bike, and then I’d go off on my first round. So I put all the meat in order so I could take somebody that lived in East Street off the top like that, so cycled on my round up round East Street and down Woodswater Lane before I took the shortcut up to Gerrard’s Green. Well, one Saturday morning, I was going down through or going to go down Woodswater Lane with this, this butcher’s bike basket full of meat, and I always used to go over the bridge but I thought one Saturday morning I’d go through the river. Now, as it is now you’ve got a smooth concrete road going through the river but in them days it was all stones and pebbles and all that. So I thought, that’s it. So what I decided to do was pedal down, put my feet up like that, and straight through the river. So I went straight through the river, see, got almost to the other side, contacted the bank, and the blooming bike fell over. The basket went over, all this meat fell out, all over. I thought, bloody hell, I don’t know. I didn’t know pork from lamb or any [?] the pork. So I put the bike back up again, took this meat, picked up the label, put that on there, put it all back in the basket again, and went all up round and done the deliveries. And to this date, if anybody here knows, sorry, but to this date, I haven’t had any complaints about people getting the wrong meat, you’ve wronged them out and all that. So that… I came back, and we had a, used to have a cup of coffee, Mackie and Bill used to make the coffee, and we used to get it in the bakers where the paper shop is now, or the flower shop is now, and I’d a swig of coffee one day and I thought, this don’t taste right. And I said to Mackie, he said, no, it’s all right, it’s all right. Anyway, in the end I found out he put a bit of paraffin in there, hadn’t he, you know, in my coffee. Anyway, when we finished, we used to sweep the garage out, you see. By this time the trade had dropped down a bit, because it was nearly sort of one o’clock, we used to sweep the garage out. And Mackie and I’d go in there and have a chat and all that. And there was a lovely lady (if she’s here today, thank you very much indeed) but there was a lovely lady who used to live up Whitcombe Road, June Ward. She was a lovely lady.
Mackie really fancied her very, very well. So did everybody else, you know. And anyway, we were in Swifty Garage one day, and I said to Mackie, I said, “June’s coming down the road”. So we went back in there, stood on our brooms like this, you see, while June came down and went past the garage. And as she went past the garage, Mackie pushed me in front of her. I said, “Thank you for everything, Mackie”. I said, “Sorry about that, Mrs. Ward.” And she had a few words with Mackie, which was, I think, what Mackie wanted, you know, but those sort of things happened, and it made the Saturday.
The other job I had very quickly was where you’ve got Dexter’s now, Sam Gibbs used to have two shops there. Where you go into Dexter’s now was the butcher’s shop, and where you have your table meals, that was the fruit shop run by his daughter. Well, Maurice Hymas was Sam’s son-in-law, married to Margaret. He ran the butcher’s shop. And after a little while he got some greyhounds and used to keep them up in the garden at the back. And he was talking to me one day and he wanted somebody to walk these greyhounds. I said, “Yeah, alright, Maurice, I don’t mind walking for it”. This is my later school years, of course. And I said, “What do you want to do?” He said, “Well, if you take ’em out for a walk each morning”, he said, “I can do the training after that.” So I used to take ’em up around Crooked Lane and different places for a walk, you know, and at odd times Maurice’d say to me, he said, “Well, let’s go up on the downs and give ’em a walk up there. So he had a little A35 butcher’s van. So we got into this van, greyhounds in the back, shut the door, went up on to the top, got on the top of the downs. I went around the back, opened the door, took the greyhounds out, sat in the back, these two greyhounds on the lead, and then Maurice would drive the van on along the downs road, making it fast. So these grounds were galloping along like this, you know, and then we stopped the other end. So it gave me quite a bit of training for that. But one morning, he said to me, he said, “Dougie”, he said, “If you walk on up towards the tunnel this morning”, he said, “I’ll come and pick you up. That’ll give ’em a nice walk, see.” I said, “Yeah, alright, OK”. So I got these greyhounds out, put them on the lead, walked up Tunnel Road, got up past the vets, got on a bit further, I come to the tunnel, see, and I thought, Which way should I go? Should I go across the downs or shall I come…? Well, they did say the main road, so I thought, oh. So I kept on the main road, walking these two greyhounds. And anyway, a bit later on, Maurice come up in the van and he said, “I wondered where the hell you got to.” I was nearly in Mosterton by Whetley Cross. He thought he was only going to go to the tunnel and come back. But I’d walked almost into Mosterton with these two greyhounds. So they had a good walk that morning.
But that was mainly about just as I left school, I got a Saturday morning job working in the garage where my father worked in Crewkerne, just down by the station. But when I used to go to work, I used to stand on top of the station, look at the trains, and then go to work and do the same coming back, cycled to Crewkerne and back.
BE : We’re going to jump now. We’re going to jump or we’ll never get through to what you did yesterday. So you’ve been through your school days, you’ve had your part-time jobs, and you’ve told us all about shops in Beaminster along the way, and things like that. We’re going to pretend that you’ve gone off with the military and done whatever you were doing, and every so often you’d come back on leave. At the end of it you came back for good. What I think people might be interested in is, were you detecting during that time that Beaminster was changing from your schooldays?
DB : Yeah, if I can very, very, just very, very quickly… I had 24 lovely years in the Army. I got the top of my tree. I worked for, as a mechanical engineer and I worked to support variable command special forces, NATO and all that. I thoroughly enjoyed that, but I was due to get a, going for a, commission because on the top of my tree but they generally give me a three-year commission so I decided, right, I’m going to come out now, and so I came out, and then I decided that I had to have some work, so I started working for myself for a couple of years, and then I went to work for Newman’s, sorry, no, I tell a lie, I worked for Whites in Bridport, who were the plumbing people, and spent a bit of time in there before they cut down on the staff. I then went to work for Newman’s doing their work up there because we did electrical plumbing and boreholes for farmers and all that. So we did that for a big wide area, and scrap and all that sort of thing. And then I went to work for Pattemores, milk tankers and mechanical work and all that, and that was before I then went to join Yeovil College, and I joined Yeovil College in 2003 and I had 20 years of Yeovil College in the mechanical support side, as well as a bit of teaching, and I was a governor there for eight years, but from the time I left the Army to when I come back, things had changed, I suppose, quite a bit. Obviously, new places had been built, new places, new people living in there and all that sort of thing. But it had changed. But I was able to keep up with it, and do the things I wanted to do. I joined lots of organisations within the town, things like the British Legion, where I was Parade Marshall for 20 years, and joined the Lodge over here, joined the museum later on, but joined a lot of the organisations because Beaminster over the years had given me so much, that I thought I wanted to give something back. And so, as part of that, about 18 months after I left the Army, there was a vacancy come up on the Town Council. So I went to join the Town Council, put an application in for that, and I got elected on to the Town Council, and I had about 25 years on the council and I did all sorts of jobs, this sort of thing. For instance, one of the things I did was I asked a question one day about what organisations there were that people could join, and so all the council had then was just a sort of half-sheet of A4 with a few names on it. So they said to me, “You want to do it?” So I sent a letter around to all the organisations I knew, getting details, and I compiled a leaflet with all the organisations in it, and in the early 1990s, 1993 or 4, do you know, there were 73 different organisations in Beaminster, so that remained with the council. The Yarn Barton took it a little bit later on, and in recent years it has depleted in number. Also I stood on planning, and when places were, when developers built places they could call them what they liked, but when they were got so far they had to be officially named and two estates come to mind in that context. One is Windy Ridge where we live now, and that was called Ashleigh Rise. Now, it had no real connection with Beaminster because at that time we didn’t name things after people or places. It was just a name come through. (Except for Hardy’s Close which is named after Thomas Hardy who’d died). So when Windy Ridge [NB: he meant Ashleigh Rise] came up I said, “What’s this got to do with Berminster? Nothing at all”. So I suggested, well, that’s always been known as Windy Ridge, so I’m going to propose to call it Windy Ridge. Everybody agreed with that, and so it was called Windy Ridge. A similar thing happened with Horn Hill Rise at the top of The Beeches. That was called some fantastic name, and I said, well, that’s got nothing to do. So this was another occasion of course. So I said, “Look that overlooks Horn Hill View, so why don’t we call it Horn Hill View? So everybody accepted that so that’s why it’s called Horn Hill View now.
But at that time, in the early ’90s, when I came home on leave, I used to circulate round. And I used to go into The Greyhound. And that’s where Lynda and her previous husband were landlord and landlady. And it was a good drinking pub. And they used to accommodate the farming on a Monday and their ladies with them on a Friday or something, keep it open. But I used to go in there and Lynda always told me that the tale went round, that lock up your daughters, Dougie Beazer’s coming home on leave. What that meant, I’m not quite sure. I think it was the nicest possible way. Anyway, so I used to go down drinking. Anyway, a bit later on, Lynda and her previous husband gave up The Greyhound and split up.
And anyway, I knew Lynda quite well, nothing unrewarding, nothing that I shouldn’t be doing.
BE : Don’t listen to this by the way.
DB : And anyway, Brian Page with the football club had organized a sports day up in the playing fields, and Brian asked me if I’d do the PA system. I said, “Yeah, all right”, so I had to sit in the window of the pavilion giving all these sports and all that. Well, Lynda was up there with her mother and with her daughter, Dawn – lovely, lovely girl – and anyway, they were doing these different races and they had a sack race for the children, you see. So that was all right. Dawn had a sack and took part in the sack race. When they got the other end and finished, all the kids put the sacks down. So Brian said, “Why don’t we have an adult sack race?”. I said, “Yeah, all right.” So I announced this: that there would be now a sack race for adults, and anyway, so I said, you pick your sack up down the bottom end, come to the start line, and we’ll do it. Lynda was stood there with her mother and I said over the PA, I said, “Come on Mrs Green… Mrs Hart”, I said. “Pick up your sack and have a go to the sack race, so she looked in the… what am I doing that for, so she got the sack and took part in the sack race. Anyway, the whole thing went on. And anyway, we got to the end of the day and was very successful and all that. So I was there thanking everybody, including the organisers and all that, and on my own accord, Lynda was there with her mother and with Dawn, so over the PA, I said, “Well, come on, Mrs. Hart, when you go back…” (she lived in the lower end of Fleet Street then) …I said, “Come on Mrs. Hart, when you go and put the kettle on, I’ll come round for a cup of tea.” She looked at me a bit blank, so we shut everything else, everybody was clearing off, so instead of going, because we, I, bought the house, number 69 in Fleet Street, which is just on the corner of the playing field where Bunty lives now. And so, I went back round to where Lynda lived and knocked on the door and said, “I’ve come for my cup of tea”, so I went, they said, “Come in” so I went in, had a cup of tea. So I said to Lynda, I said, “What are you doing tonight? Do you fancy going out for a drink and something?” So Lynda was saying, “Well, I think that…” So Lynda’s mother said, “Go on”.
She said, “Go on.” So Dawn and her mother was encouraging. So I took Lynda up to the [?] Arms at Askerswell for a drink. And then we blossomed from there, and then we got married in 1991, which is very, very nice and the best thing I’ve ever done. So we got a lovely thing with Dawn and all that. So that was part of that.
So continuing on my career in the council, in 2007 to 2009, I was elected as chairman of the council. And so because I did enjoy what I did, I thought we want to enlighten us, and the chairman and mayors get invited to a day out to different towns within the county. And I’d been to a couple of these, so I decided, in conjunction with the council, that in 2007, somewhere about April time, May or whatever it was, we decided we’d have a civic service in the church. So we invited the people from the Beaminster and the surrounding villages to come to the church for this civic service. And during that service, we took an oath of leave to serve the people of Beaminster. And anyway, that was quite successful. So the following year, 2008, we decided we would have this civic service, not just for the people of Beaminster, but for the whole of the county of Dorset mayors, South Somerset and East Devon because we had been invited to civic days in that area around. So we organised a civic day for 2008 and so we first of all, we met, we invited all the mayors and chairmen across Dorset, South Somerset and East Devon, and they came here, we met in the Public Hall, we had morning coffee there, we then had a coach take us up to Numatic for a tour around the factory up there. We came back to the Public Hall, had lunch in the Public Hall. In the afternoon we walked down here, we had a tour in the museum and then we walked from here to the church to have a tour of the church, and as we’re going through The Square the bells are ringing. So a couple of these ladies from the council we were hosting, they said, “Who’s getting married today then?” I said, “Nobody”. I said, “They’re all ringing because you’ve come to visit us.” So that was done to welcome the people from all parts of the county.
They were most taken up with that. And after the tour of the church and the churchyard, we went back to the Public Hall for afternoon tea. And it stands out amongst everybody I’ve spoken to then and since then, it was really, really enjoyable, really, really nice. We promoted Beaminster and that’s the only two civic services we’ve ever had and it’s the only civic day we’ve ever had. So it was very, very nice.
BE : I’m going to stop you. I’m going to stop you.
DB : I finished there in 1990.
BE : I’m going to stop you because in Mongolia, it’s past their bedtime.
DB : Oh, is it?
BE : I think what we should do, because I think you’ve got the idea now, is we will move into the refreshment phase, so you can carry on asking all of those questions of Douglas that only you may be interested in the answers to, rather than doing it that way, governing either his time before he went into the Army, during the Army, or since he’s come back from the Army but we’ll call a halt on that because I suspect, if nothing else, that the electrics are going to run out of juice in a minute as well. And I’m going to say thank you very much on everybody’s behalf for your reminiscences of Beaminster in those grey days.
DB : I’d just like to say thank you very much indeed. I’m lucky to have you as friends within the town, Lynda my wife and Dawn our daughter, Denise and Janet my sisters, and Beaminster in general. It’s such a lovely place to live. I wouldn’t change it for the world.
RS : Thank you. Thank you both very much. A good time to stop, I think, Brian, because otherwise people won’t get their tea and cakes. So please do join us for tea and cakes. And I said before, donations always welcome, but more important, have a nice chat with Doug.