18 Nov 2005 - World War 2 evacuee returns!

Berwick Coates, a retired teacher and local author, returned to our school recently to help children understand what life was like for children during the Second World War.

This photograph shows him finding his name on a photocopy of the school admission register in 1940.

Children were fascinated to find out so much about his childhood at this school all those years ago.

A week or so earlier Ray Liverton also visited our school to tell us his boyhood waretime experiences. Ray was a local Devon boy and remembers the evacuees arriving; there were about 70 in all mainly from Bristol and Croydon. One of his main jobs as an older pupil at the begining of the war was to clamber on the school roof and camouflage it with paint. Perhaps this would not be allowed these days.

Click on the external files to see Mr Liverton talking to the children and one of the model spitfires he made as a young boy our of pieces of shrapnel he found.


Children also visited the Albert Museum in Exeter for a simulation of a real air raid which was so lifelike some children were almost in tears!