Teignmouth Post and Gazette No 495 Friday 17 September 1976

DAY CENTRE GETS GO-AHEAD

The building of the Teignmouth Day Centre for the elderly and disabled will start on October 11. Afraid “it hadn’t got time for the waiting game”, the Town Council held an emergency meeting with Teignbridge on Sunday 5 September to approve various finance proposals.

The Old People’s Rest Centre began in a Nissen hut 22 years ago and is still used by the Welfare Committee.

The architects of the nw centre, Edward Langham and David Bate, had to overcome a problem caused by Brunel. Originally, he planned a tunnel out of Teignmouth, but changed his mind. The new centre will appear to rest on a railway facing wall, but will be built on 30ft piles.

THE OLD TOWN HALL

The old Town Hall was damaged by enemy action on August 13 1942. Something very beautiful went out of our lives. A Town Hall was a monument of brown dog-eared dusty files, cobwebby cabinets and teacups stuck to saucers; a dark cosy museum for the living and the dead, with the clerks in between. These clerks daily received abusive letters from citizens who could not pay gas and electricity bills, objected to paying rent and refusing to pay rates.

These letters were filed away, marked “Urgent”. There were scribbled notes from citizens with mumps, fleas lodgers, measles, noisy neighbours, water in the gas pipes, rats in the cellars and fire in the attic. These too were filed under “Urgent”. But these days have gone, and given way to neon-tubed council offices, and the clerks driven to a huge town hall in the sky, smelling of carbolic.

BRUNEL’S PUPILS

A book by Sir Alfred Pugsley, just published by the Institute of Civil Engineers in London, and Bristol University, draws on his diaries in great detail. He took on pupils at £1000, reluctantly. One pupil, he noted as “he gets up late”; another he admonished for being "a frequenter of Lord’s cricket ground, and indulging in billiards in the daytime”.

NEW VICAR FOR ST PETERS, SHALDON

The Bishop of Plymouth led the service of induction on the evening of Thursday 9 September for the new vicar, the Reverend Samuel Philpott. The Bishop led the vicar to touch the key in the church door and to the rope to ring the bell. He was born in a naval family in Plymouth, and became the first to follow the church organ instead of Drake’s Drum. On Saturday, he faced his first problem - the previous vicar had double booked two important weddings for the same day.

TRAWLER TALK

At the Blessing of the Boats, the port padre, Rev Ian Jones, said he often listened to the trawler radio frequency at night. The language the skippers used was unrepeatable, but the fishermen always signed off by saying “Goodnight, and God bless."