St. Budeaux, Plymouth

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For the Breton Saint see St Budoc

Today, St. Budeaux stands as a ward in the North West of Plymouth, Devon. It has a population of no more than 20,000. However, behind these rather modest circumstances of the present, the parish is arguably the oldest in the region of Plymouth.

The story of St. Budeaux begins with the first name in the history of the area - St. Budoc, the Bishop of Dol (Brittany). Many legends have grown over time surrounding Budoc. He has been portrayed as the grandson of the King of Brest, his grandfather marrying a wicked woman who set about poisoning the minds of those around her. This included Budoc’s mother, Azenor, who was outcast and banished from the French lands. She took refuge in Ireland, where she gave birth to Budoc, and both were later welcomed back to the Kingdom of Brest after Azenor’s stepmother fell ill, and upon her deathbed recanted the evil lies she had spread ([www.isle-of-skye.org.uk] & Evans, 1919).

We are told to ‘forget the legends, that his mother had a breast of gold, and that he crossed from Ireland in a stone coffin’, and instead acknowledge that he was ‘a great teacher’ (Hall, YEAR!). However, little is known as ‘the details of his life are shrouded in legend’ (Barnes & Bevington, 1963) (apparently the church of his first parish, Plouin, proudly boasts the preservation of one of his arms). Around 480 A.D., Budoc is reputed to have sailed to the South English coast, across the Plymouth Sound, until he found an inlet on the Devonshire side of the River Tamar. On reaching the land that would later name itself after him, Budoc founded a settlement and built ‘a little wattle church’ (Barnes & Bevington, 1963) in the nearby wood. The church eventually gave way to a permanent stone one, dedicated to St. Budoc, which was erected shortly before the Norman invasion.

The village is documented in William the Conqueror’s ‘last great achievement’ (Lee, 1997: 47) – the Domesday Book of 1086. Known as Bucheside, it was valued at 30 shillings (around six times the amount of neighbouring manors). There were ‘undoubtedly buildings on this land then, but exactly what they were and where they stood is not certain’ (Robinson, Vol 2 YEAR!). Even the owners of the manor and spellings of the area are inconsistent. During the course of the next few hundred years Bucheside (meaning both the main manor and surrounding area) became Bodekishide, Budeokshed, and even Bottockishide. The modern name, St. Budeaux, is itself ‘a Frenchified “elegant” form’ (Bracken, 1930).

In 1482 twenty-three parishioners of St. Budeaux church petitioned the Bishop of Exeter that St. Budeaux become a separate parish. Before then the church was dependent on the monks St. Andrew’s, (the mother church of Plymouth) for the use of their cemetery. St. Budeaux had not even its own resident minister, and so called ‘hazardous trips’ (Barnes & Bevington, 1963) were undertaken in order to travel into the centre of Plymouth for burials. Their request was granted, though compensation was to be given to St. Andrew’s in the form of 40 shillings a year for their loss of revenue in burials’ (Barnes & Bevington, 1963. & www.plymouthdata.com).

During the early Tudor period demand grew for a larger church to be built at St. Budeaux. This was completed in 1563, five years into the Elizabethan reign. It is not known how the large sum of money was raised for such a venture, but many believe it was based upon the huge ‘generosity’ (freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com) of Roger Budokshed, a major local landowner whose family had taken its surname from the area itself. Budokshed gave land to the church on a lease of 2000 years, on the condition that a penny was paid yearly ‘between one o’clock and three o’clock on the afternoon of Christmas day’ (Barnes & Bevington, 1963). The church is described by T.H. Williams at the beginning of the nineteenth century as ‘a simple edifice, and, though devoid of architectural embellishment, possesses much picturesque beauty’ (Williams, 1804).

It was at this same church on 4 July 1569 that a celebrated marriage was held between a local bride, Mary Newman, and a legendary groom, Francis Drake. Though not yet a Sir, Drake had experienced much adventure at sea. Mary herself came from ‘an important St. Budeaux sea-faring and farming family’ (Ware, 1983), and her father had served with Drake whilst raiding the Spanish coast. Drake was restless, not one for the home life, and spent the majority of their fourteen years married together ‘despoiling the Spaniards in American waters, circumnavigating the globe, serving in Ireland, singeing King Philip’s beard’ (Walling, YEAR).

Lady Mary Drake, a childless woman, who had grown tired of those years alone at her home in St. Budeaux, passed away in January 1582. She was buried at the church she was married in (though, to this day, nobody is sure of the location of her tomb, which was possibly concreted over during rebuilding works in the 1860s). However, she remains the subject ‘of one of the earliest and most fanciful legends’ (Walling, YEAR) involving Drake. A popular story states that when Drake had been away for seven years his wife presumed him dead. She vowed to marry another, and was close to doing so, arriving at the ceremony with her soon-to-be husband. Drake was on the other side of the world, however, via some cosmic message, he became aware of the unfolding events. He rushed, grabbed hold of his gun, and fired into the earth. A loud explosion rippled between his wife and her intended husband. ‘It is a signal from Drake!’ she apparently exclaimed, adding: ‘He is alive and I am still his wife. There must be neither truth nor King between thee and me’ (Anonymous, 1910)

The church also played a role in the Civil War of the seventeenth century. Plymouth, and its surrounding villages (such as St. Budeaux) had sworn an oath to die for the Parliamentarian cause – punishment for not complying was hanging. Yet, just across the water were the Royalist Cornish, who took to besieging Plymouth. St. Budeaux was taken, and the church was used as a garrison, being fought for on more than one occasion with the loss of lives on both sides. By the war’s conclusion ‘the church was little more than a wreck’ (Barnes & Bevington, 1963), and was not restored until 1655 (in 1910, during the construction of new roads in the area, several cannonballs dating from the Civil War were found).

After this time, the church and surrounding village reverted back to a peaceful life once more, whose major disputes involved Rev. Thomas Alcock, ‘a loved and respected eccentric’ (Barnes & Bevington, 1963). He was vicar for sixty-five years during the eighteenth century, and often caused a ruckus, most notably with his views on brewing cider on church grounds. The area was dominated by fishing and farming, and local historian James Mildred, describes it as ‘idyllic but primitive’ (Evening Herald, circa: 1990s).

‘Until the 1850s’, writes Fleming (Western Evening Herald, 6-1-1996), ‘most of St. Budeaux stood much as it had done for hundreds of years’. But this ‘long continued quietude of this ancient parish was disturbed by the advent of the Great Western Railway, and the construction of the Royal Albert Bridge’ (Anonymous, 1910). Before this the only major building works of the past couple of hundred years had been the Wolseley Road (named in honour of Field Marshall the Right Hon. Viscount Wolseley), which opened on 15 July 1836, replacing an old track that had been ‘one of the most important riding routes’ from Plymouth to Saltash (Fleming, Western Morning News, 24-5-1984).

And further disruption was caused when in 1860 the War Department purchased much land in the area ‘for strategic purposes’ (Ware, 1980). Prime Minister of the time, Palmerston, was fearful of the stirring French, who were led by Napoleonic blood in Napoleon III. However, he was to be proved wrong, and the line of military forts that surround Plymouth were to be known as “Palmerston’s Folly”. Such upheaval had resulted in an increase of the local population, reportedly reaching 1376 in 1861 (Morris & Co’s Commercial Directory, 1870), and this meant that from this time forward ‘the character of the area began to change drastically’ (Ware, 1980).

On entering the last decade of the nineteenth century the parish would become a self contained village, a larger community with a parade of shops and improved transport, all of which would be focused on the Lower region of the village. Marshall Ware tells us that ‘we have to thank General Trelawny for developer Lower St. Budeaux’ (Ware, 1977). The General inherited a substantial amount of land in the parish from his uncle, Charles Trelawny, ‘a strict Protestant’ (Ware, 1977) in 1883.

The Trelawny family had been the ‘main local landowners going back to 1639’ (Ware, 1980), and had a colourful mix of characters since that time. These include a rich Royalist who was constantly jailed for his involvement in the King’s cause during the Civil War, an ex-Colonel who took great pride in assembling one of the most beautiful gardens of Devon, and a Jamaican Governor who raided that country’s funds for his own benefit.

On inheriting the estates of St. Budeaux, the General, before known as John Jago, took the additional name of Trelawny out of his respect to his deceased uncle. He had been living with a Catholic woman, named Fanny Wiley, ‘but in his uncle’s will, if he married her, on his death the children would be excluded and the estate would pass to his brother, Edward Jago, a bachelor’ (Ware, 1977). The General took his dead uncle’s advice, and married a Protestant, Evelyn Derwyn, at St. Pancras Church, Pennycross, on 13 April 1907. However, both the General and his bachelor brother would also follow their uncle in death by the end of 1909, and all the lands passed to their cousins, the Rooke family.

But it is what the General achieved during the time in-between that makes interesting reading, bringing about the biggest change in the 1500-year history of the area. In 1890 he formed the Barne Building Estate with the purpose of developing a shopping parade. The village was already beginning to grow due to the Royal Albert Bridge and the improvement of roads into the area from Plymouth and beyond. In the same year the London & South Western Railway opened a station to deal with growing commuter demands. When it first opened in 1890 the station had a staff of three to cope with a busy schedule. The Station Master was Mr. Edmund Tolley, ‘a well loved character, he will be remembered for occasionally holding up a train in the station for latecomers’ (Ware, 1983).

The new station seems to have added to General Jago-Trelawny’s enthusiasm, and he became so keen on the idea of the growth of the village that he even installed his lawyers, Prance & Prance of Plymouth, into Yeoman’s Terrace when it was built in 1892. Yeoman’s Terrace (the name Yeoman, a Saxon word, apparently chosen suggests Ware due to the General’s Saxon ancestry) became the bedrock of future development in the area. Consisting of 13 houses, the magnitude and upheaval of the like had never been seen before.

Meanwhile, the General set about with more schemes. During the 1890s up came Trelawney Avenue (misnamed with the added ‘e’), Morris Park Avenue (No. 9 was home to the Police station, and also the registrar of births and deaths for the parish), Coldrenick Street (named after the Trelawny family home, Coldrenick Manor, in Menheniot, Cornwall), Sithney Street (after Sithney in Cornwall, where the Trelawny’s once owned property), and Tudor Terrace (chosen, suggests Ware, because the Tudors favoured his ancestors).

In 1895, the building that would soon become the centre of the majority of twentieth century life in the village was erected – the Trelawny Hotel. The General had sold the site (of 6272 feet) to Joseph Stribling for the sum of £157. Stribling then set about securing a large loan of £4,300, with which he used to pay for the building of ‘two bars, a bar parlour, club room, coach house, outbuildings, stables and yards’ (Ware, 1983). The Hotel was the leading voice in the new technological changes, and was the first of the St. Budeaux buildings to be lit by electricity. However, Stribling himself did not reap the fruits of his labour, having died suddenly in 1897.

And with a selection of premises to choose, many traders found suitable shops to operate from. In October 1895 the Plymouth Co-operative Society purchased Stuart House in Trelawney Road for £900, which was converted into a grocery and butchers for an extra £339, opening in time for Christmas to the villagers. This was a first for the area. Now, residents no longer had to travel by train in order to buy their shopping. And the Co-op was followed by ‘a hairdressing and tobacconist shop’, owned by Tom Occleshaw, that was ‘lit by oil lamps and was later the first shop to have gas lighting’ (Ware, 1980). Meanwhile Mr. Truscott, ‘a highly respected baptist’ (Western Evening Herald, 25-9-1992), started a bookmakers business, the Menheneott’s opened a dairy, Mr. Blackmore ‘sold cream and butter’ (Ware, 1980), and Mr. Eastlake sold general amenities. And extra services were included in the form of the butcher Mr. Robertshaw, who ‘sold meat from his van on Tuesdays and Saturdays’ (Ware, 1980). Now the residents of the parish had all that could want within walking distance of their homes.

An Evening Herald article (circa 1990s) states that the ‘land hungry and overpopulated industrial centre of Devonport…’ had been edging closer to St. Budeaux since the 1870s. The Act was pushed through by Mr. A.B. Pilling, the Town Clerk of Devonport, ‘whose foresight initiated and successfully carried through this union of town and country’ (Weekly Mercury Special, 1908). The amalgamation was a necessity for the people of Devonport, though the villagers of St. Budeaux at first opposed the Act. Indeed, the actual language of the Plymouth Directory of 1899 states, in a forceful tone, that the area was ‘annexed to Devonport’.

However, Devonport (a town of a considerable population) seems to have persuaded the locals, having ‘pledged’ (Plymouth Directory, 1899) considerable improvements, in roads and communications, to the growing area. And such efforts to improve the existing facilities meant that upset would be caused to the existing scenery. A prime example of this was the removal of the Millbrook cottages in 1899, which had for so long been a part of the landscape. In their place came the Victoria Road, ‘named after the Queen’ (Hancock, 1934), which would connect the North and South of the village together in a proper manner for the first time, giving a direct route through the parish.

What manner locals craved was improvement to the train service, which was hindered by an old wooden bridge (connecting St. Budeaux to Devonport), known to many as “Shaky Bridge”, or “The Switch-back”, ‘because it was all ups and downs’ (Ware, 1980). It was replaced by a more sturdy structure, the Camel’s Head Bridge, and this enabled the Devonport & District Tramway Company to provide a speedy and efficient service from Devonport, through St. Budeaux, and all the way to Saltash Passage, linking those from the town centre of Plymouth to Cornwall.

The tramway company was particular inventive when it came to advertising, having bought a quarry in St. Budeaux that was converted into a tea gardens (named Little Ash Tea Gardens of Saltash Passage) in a bid to ‘get more passengers’ (Western Evening Herald, 12/7/1991). Postcards were printed and success began to show, with more than 20,000 visitors a year (a grand sum, considering the population of the village at the time was below 2,000). The same company also had eyes on the rights to the Saltash Ferry (which for centuries had belonged to the Duchy of Cornwall), but despite a series of struggles between 1898-1900, nothing came of it (source: 25: Tamar Bridge – 1961-1986).

More improvements came to the village, in the shape of new schools, a library, paving and lightning on the streets, all the facilities that the growing community needed. Yet despite these new structures the area still retained elements of country life. An article from 1989 (Fleming, Western Evening Herald, 14-4-1989) states that by the turn of the twentieth century St. Budeaux was ‘little more than a country village’. Indeed, Mr. Eddie Prowse, in an article of the early nineteen-eighties (Western Morning News, 24-5-1984) describes moving to the area 80 years before ‘was like moving into the country’.

In 1908, a Weekly Mercury Special was published, the headline: ‘St. Budeaux’s Future’. It advertised in delicious tones the open space available in the village and the big steps made since the amalgamation act just ten years before. It depicted the parish as ‘one of the most promising, picturesque, and delightful suburbs’ of the Plymouth area. And if anyone had any doubts about St. Budeaux being isolated in the woods, the same paper gloated that ‘the postal and telegraphic service is all that can be desired’, while those lucky enough to live in the village would be able to access both sea and moor land air, ‘fresh and invigorating, all the year round’.

The above is a flattering view of the parish at the time. However, such a position was not to last forever. In 1914 in the shadow of the First World War, St. Budeaux was amalgamated, with all the other towns and villages of the area, with Plymouth to become a city. The village was now swallowed whole by this new creation. It was a case of simple mathematics: more people meant more housing, and the loser here would be the green-fields on the outskirts of the city.

Construction was constant and there was not a corner one could hide from the change. This is shown nowhere more clearly than in the erection of churches from this time forward. The steady inflow of parishioners prompted locals to build the Church of St. Philip (1913), St. Boniface (1916), and later, St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Church (1933). Meanwhile other churches, most notably Methodist, were built in three other locations in the parish. This is staggering, taking into account that before 1885 there was just one church to cover the whole parish.

But, such a speed of progress towards morphing St. Budeaux from a leafy village to urban community would undoubtedly cause heartbreak. The demolition of locally admired homes and farms had occurred as far back as the middle of the Victorian period, however, the casualty list reached new peaks on entering the twentieth century and hit heated frenzy by the time the “Roaring Twenties” ended. The 1930s would be the decade the bulldozers reigned supreme in St. Budeaux.

The hands behind this activity were those belonging to the Plymouth Corporation, the organisation that was forced into such a course of action due to the growing numbers of people in the city. The Corporation had already seen the fall of the ancient Barne Farm (1916), and the ‘picturesque’ building “Newlands”. “Newlands” in particular had a colourful history, the land for its foundations having been reclaimed from the sea, and its home later used as a sick bay for a local decommissioned training ship which had become a permanent fixture, anchored in the river Tamar. It was demolished in 1922 to make way for a road.

Others would follow it. 1935 was a peak year for the Corporation, as they demolished Moor Farm (to make way for new estates), the ancient Manor Farm of King’s Tamerton, and Lower Ernesettle Farm (a carpark would replace it), and many more throughout the parish. The Corporation seems relentless in its efforts, buying up the estates of the principle landowners of the time, this including the Trelawny family property that had such a long association with the area.

The vicar of St. Budeaux church of the time, Rev. T. A. Hancock, was appalled by these actions and voiced his concerns. In the late 1930s the widening of the Crownhill Road (which cut right through the parish, and just beside the church itself) was proposed. Plymouth had become the most congested city in the South West of England, beating the likes of Bristol and Portsmouth, and this was constantly rising (Unknown Newspaper, 1938). The widening of the road was a possible solution. Hancock was not one to make such an agreement. Called a ‘popular vicar’ (Ware, 1980), who ‘took a keen interest in local history’ (Ware, 1980), his enthusiasm resulted in two booklets. In 1938, Hancock stated (Unknown newspaper, 1938) that improving the existing road would only invite more traffic to ‘the oldest part of Plymouth’. He added: ‘Everything we have here will be ruined if the proposals go ahead’. But the Corporation did not heed his advice, and went ahead with construction.

The Second World War, or more precise, the German bombers, finished the job that the Plymouth Corporation had started. During the blitz of 1941 the Germans bombed many homes in the area, the most notable buildings being the St. Peters Mission Chapel (built in 1885 in memorial of Admiral Sir Peter Richards), and Barne Towers. Neither was re-built, and the flattened land of Barne Towers had the displeasure to play host to a service station for the remainder of the twentieth century.

A ‘housing explosion’ (Evening Herald, circa 1990s) resulted from the rebuilding frenzy of the post-war period. The majority of the centre of Plymouth had been gutted, and a new vision was underlined for its future, which included expansion to the green areas places such as St. Budeaux. It was at this time the last of the farms disappeared from the map of the parish, all having now ‘fallen foul of the developer’ (Robinson, Evening Herald, 3-6-1989).

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