A pacifist in Budleigh Salterton: H.G. Wells (1866-1946)

Not too many Budleigh people know that a great literary figure known as ‘the father of science fiction’ stayed in the town. Even fewer know of him as a pacifist. Budleigh Salterton was renowned in the past as a favourite retirement place for military types as well as a health resort.

It was during a cycling holiday in Devon that H.G. Wells and his wife stayed in April 1897 with author George Gissing and his sister Margaret at 4 West End Villas – now 14 West Hill – in Budleigh. Ten or so years older than Wells, Gissing is thought to have been attracted to radical pacifist and anti-imperialist ideas partly derived from his reading of Russian literature, particularly from Leo Tolstoy.  Later, Wells himself is likely to have been influenced by pacifist and socialist ideas through his membership of the reformist Fabian Society.

Wells’ most famous science fiction novel The War of the Worlds anticipates the role of devastating modern weapons with the Martians’ use of heat-rays and toxic gas against humans. The novel’s publication in 1898 came at a time when the desire for world peace was in the news. On 29 August, 1898, Czar Nicholas II of Russia issued an invitation to all nations to confer over the limitation of armaments, observing that ‘the intellectual and physical strength of nations; labour and capital alike, have been unproductively consumed in building terrible engines of destruction’.

Wells' book Little Wars, published in 1913, was seemingly an explanation of rules for conducting a war game with toy soldiers. In reality it reflected the author’s view of how such activities could replace actual wars. ‘How much better is this amiable miniature than the Real Thing!’ he wrote. ‘Here is the premeditation, the thrill, the strain of accumulating victory or disaster — and no smashed nor sanguinary bodies, no shattered fine buildings nor devastated countrysides.’  

Another novel by Wells which appeared in the following year was The World Set Free. Set in 1956, it described the effects of a devastating world war fought with atomic bombs, ending with the establishment of a ‘World Republic’

As World War I approached, Wells became more and more focused on the threat to world peace posed by what he saw as German militarism.  His 99-page pamphlet The War That Will End War, published in 1914, proclaimed:  ‘This is now a war for peace. It aims straight at disarmament. It aims at a settlement that shall stop this sort of thing for ever. Every soldier who fights against Germany now is a crusader against war. This, the greatest of all wars, is not just another war — it is the last war! England, France, Italy, Belgium, Spain, and all the little countries of Europe, are heartily sick of war; the Tsar has expressed a passionate hatred of war; the most of Asia is unwarlike; the United States has no illusions about war.’

A second pamphlet, The Peace of the World, appeared in 1915. A year later saw the publication of Wells’ novel Mr Britling Sees It Through, composed ‘at a time of universal barbarism and cruelty’ in the words of Russian writer Maxim Gorky, who described the work as ‘the finest, most courageous, truthful, and humane book written in Europe in the course of this accursed war’.   

In the post-war period, on 15 April 1929, Wells delivered an address entitled The Common Sense of World Peace to the Reichstag German Parliament in Berlin. It was published by the Hogarth Press. But by 1933 the Nazis were burning his books.

H. G. Wells is pictured here one day before his 60th birthday, on the front cover of Time magazine, 20 September 1926.

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'It might have been us': a British army veteran's thoughts: Patrick Campbell (1897-1986)

 

Patrick (‘Pat’) Campbell retired to Budleigh after a career in teaching, and wrote four books.  The Ebb and Flow of Battle (1977) and In the Cannon’s Mouth (1979) were based on his experiences during World War I, when he served as Captain and Second-in-Command of 150 Army Brigade in the Royal Field Artillery. He was awarded the Military Cross, though he points out in The Ebb and Flow of Battle that the award was made based on a senior officer’s blatantly fictional account which is reproduced in the official citation. ‘I was distressed when I read it,' he tells us. 'It was not true that I had inflicted heavy casualties on the enemy.’  

The Ebb and Flow of Battle deals with events in 1918 and is not an obviously anti-war book.  However a noticeable theme is the author’s emphasis on the common humanity shared by both sides in conflict. Campbell had fought in Belgium, at Ypres and at Paschendaele during the previous year, but was struck by the more peaceful landscape of Northern France where he arrived in March after sick leave.  ‘Ypres had been all shells and shell-holes, mud and desolation, but here there was grass, and men played football only three miles from the line,’ he writes. An observation post gives him ‘a wonderful view’ over enemy-held territory.   ‘At Ypres I had never seen a living German soldier, except prisoners. Now I saw some, and it gave me a strange feeling. They were our enemies. They had to try and kill us and we had to try and kill them, but they looked like ourselves and were doing ordinary things.’ 

By August, the ebb and flow of battle finally saw the approach of victory for the Allies, but with it, the author’s keen sense of losses suffered on both sides. ‘In the evening I took the horses to water in the little river Luce, we crossed no-man’s-land, we went inside what had been enemy land in the morning. His front-line trench was full of bodies, all Germans, they were the first dead Germans I had seen for a long time, I had never seen so many in one place. The sight of them gave me no elation, as once it would have done. Satisfaction yes, we had won a great and totally unexpected victory, but elation no. In March our front-line trench must have looked like that, full of brave Jocks and South Africans.’

The similarity in scenes of slaughter is in contrast to the peaceful landscape. ‘It was a beautiful summer evening, and the little river Luce was beautiful. It was like a little river in England and the flowers growing at the water’s edge, where my horses were drinking, were English flowers. The water was so clean, the field in front of me looked utterly peaceful, but only fifty yards away there was that trench, full of dead Germans, we should see them again on our way back, the grey faces, the poor twisted bodies. They had been bayoneted by the Canadians in the morning, you can’t take prisoners in a  front-line trench in an attack. Wives, mothers, sweethearts, would not know yet, they would still be writing letters, but the letters would never be read. It might have been us.’

A month later comes a moment of sympathy for a single enemy figure spotted by chance. It comes as Campbell overlooks the ‘unspoiled country’ beyond the last line of German defences on the Western Front known as the Hindenburg Line: ‘undulating hills, villages, little woods, villages fit to live in, trees that bore leaves, a hillside without shell-holes. It was like a Promised Land,’  he muses. 

‘I saw a German cart being driven along the road behind the canal, close up to the line. I could have shot at it if I had been in communication with the battery. The man was driving furiously, he knew his danger, he must have been delayed in some way and daylight had caught him, now he was galloping back towards safety, whipping up his horse. I was probably the only Englishman who saw him, and I could do nothing . But after one moment’s regret at my impotence I felt sorry for him, I hoped he would escape, I was glad when he reached a bend in the road and was hidden from sight.’

Patrick Campbell – ‘Soldier, Schoolmaster, Writer’ – died on 26 June 1986, aged 88, and was buried alongside his wife Camilla in St Peter’s Burial Ground, on Moor Lane, Budleigh Salterton.

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A visitor to Budleigh: pacifist or appeaser?

While King Edward VIII is famous for abdicating the British throne, he is also remembered as a celebrated visitor to East Devon Golf Club in Budleigh Salterton, where he played a round of golf in 1921.

The visit must have been one of the highlights of his two-day trip as Prince of Wales to Devon and Cornwall, during which he wrote to his mistress Freda Dudley Ward of feeling 'so
lonely and bored and fed up and depressed’. A low point during the royal tour was meeting the crowds of well wishers, and dignitaries such as the Bishop of Exeter, of whom the Prince wrote that he ‘looks quite mad and is anyway revolting with a scraggy beard’.

Later, as Duke of Windsor following his abdication, he and his wife, the former Wallis Simpson, embarked on a ten-day private tour of Nazi Germany in October 1937. His supporters saw him as a potential peacemaker between Britain and Germany, but the British government refused to sanction such a role, opposed the tour and suspected that the Nazis would use the Duke's presence for propaganda.

The Windsors dined with high-ranking Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Göring, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Albert Speer, and had tea with Adolf Hitler in Berchtesgaden. The Duke had a long private conversation with Hitler, but it is uncertain what they discussed, as the minutes of their meeting were lost during the war.

On 8 May 1939, a few months before the outbreak of World War II, the Duke recorded a radio broadcast during a visit to the World War I battlefields of Verdun, his first since abdicating in 1936. In it he appealed for peace. These are his words:

‘I am deeply conscious of the presence of the great company of the dead, and I am convinced that, could they make their voices heard, they would be with me in what I am about to say. I speak simply as a soldier of the Last War whose most earnest prayer it is, that such cruel and destructive madness shall never again overtake mankind. There is no land whose people want war.’

The broadcast was heard across the world by millions. It was widely regarded as supporting appeasement, and the BBC refused to broadcast it. It was heard outside the United States on shortwave radio and was reported in full by British broadsheet newspapers.

Pictured are Sir William Orpen's portrait of Edward, Prince of Wales, and the photo of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor meeting Adolf Hitler in 1937, from Wikimedia

You can hear the Duke of Windsor's broadcast at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pG4bu5LJUTo

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To conform or not to conform? The case of Richard Conant (1622-1688)

That was the big question for 17th century English people in matters of religion, including the inhabitants of the village of East Budleigh, if they wished to avoid being persecuted for their beliefs.  

Whether to accept the ritual and beliefs of the Established Church of England, or to follow a non-conformist route and be known as a Dissenter. Such was the route chosen by the separatist Plymouth Pilgrims of 1620 when they sailed away from England to America on board the Mayflower.

The historian Clifford K. Shipton wrote that in his religious beliefs Roger Conant, baptized at East Budleigh’s All Saints’ Church in 1592, was far from being a non-conformist like the Plymouth Pilgrims.

Roger would have found ‘the simple ceremonies at Plymouth lacking in the religious consolation he had experienced in the ritual of the old church at East Budleigh’, wrote Shipton in his biography of Salem’s founder. ‘He would have been deterred by their radical religious tenets which were foreign to his upbringing in the church.’

So the case of a 17th century vicar of that East Budleigh church is interesting, especially as this was Richard Conant, Roger’s nephew. Born in 1622, the son of Richard Conant and his wife Jane, née Slade, he studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, famous as a hotbed of religious non-conformity. In 1644, during the English Civil War between the King and Parliament, he replaced the royalist vicar of Otterton, Richard Venn, ejected by parliamentary officials.

With the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, it was the turn of Richard Conant the non-conformist to be ejected as vicar. However, from 1672 until his death in 1688, we find him as vicar of East Budleigh. He had apparently agreed to conform to the Established Church.

But had he really? Two books from his study, entitled A Saint or a Brute and The Life of Faith and mentioned in his Will, stand out as indicating perhaps that his religious sympathies still lay with Dissenters. The author was the English theologian Richard Baxter, who, having been expelled from the Church of England, became one of the most influential leaders of the non-conformist movement. Nowadays he is commemorated by the Church of England on 14 June.

Interesting for American descendants of the Conant family is that the bequest of both books was made to his ‘dear sister Mrs Mary Veren of Salem in New England’. Both Mary Conant and her sister Jane had followed Roger Conant to New England, crossing the Atlantic in 1635.

A further point of interest is that Richard Conant’s appointment as vicar of All Saints’ Church had been supported by Richard Duke, the MP and lord of the Manor of Otterton who held the advowson of East Budleigh – the right to appoint Anglican clergy. He has been described by historian Eveline Cruickshanks as a possible Dissenter, and has been noted as providing stone for the building of Salem Chapel, a place of worship for non-conformists on the outskirts of East Budleigh.

By the time of the 1744 Episcopal Visitation Returns – the process by which bishops of the Church of England gathered information about their diocese – East Budleigh seems to have had more than the average number of dissenters. The vicar, Matthew Mundy declared that there were ‘About a Hundred Families in the Parish; thirty of which, or near that Number, are Dissenters of the Presbyterian sort’, along with ‘one woman in the Parish supposed to be a Roman-Catholick’. 

Pictured here is a page from Richard Baxter’s A Saint or a Brute alongside the list of East Budleigh’s vicars.

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Budleigh Lions and World Peace Day

Every year on 21 September, the United Nations invites the world to mark the International Day of Peace – also known as World Peace Day.

The Day was first established in 1981 by the United Nations General Assembly, in a resolution sponsored by the United Kingdom and Costa Rica.

The date initially chosen was 11 September. Two decades later, that day in 2001 saw a series of four coordinated attacks launched by the militant Islamist al-Qaeda group against targets in the US, including the World Trade Centre close to the UN headquarters. The General Assembly unanimously voted to choose 21 September as a new fixed calendar for the International Day of Peace, designating it as a period of non-violence and global cease-fire.

Lions clubs all around the world, including Budleigh Salterton’s, promote peace through activities including the Club’s Peace Poster and Peace Essay competitions.

Find out more about Budleigh Lions at https://www.facebook.com/Budleighlions

Information about the Lions' Peace Essay is at https://www.victa.org.uk/victa-calendar/lions-peace-essay-2024/

If you are interested in the history of early America, and Roger Conant as a peacemaker in troubled times you can join the Devon Peacemaker Festival Facebook group at 

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A pacifist in Budleigh: George Gissing (1857-1903)

Not too many Budleigh people know that a great Victorian literary figure, considered in the 1880s as one of the three greatest novelists in England, stayed in the town. Even fewer know of him as a pacifist, for Budleigh Salterton was renowned in the past as a favourite retirement place for military types as well as a health resort. 

And yet, at around the time he was writing his novel The Crown of Life, a desire for peace was in the news. On 29 August, 1898, Czar Nicholas II of Russia issued an invitation to all nations to confer over the limitation of armaments, observing that ‘the intellectual and physical strength of nations; labour and capital alike, have been unproductively consumed in building terrible engines of destruction’. In a letter that Gissing wrote the following year to his German friend and writer Eduard Bertz, he described the novel as containing ‘a rather vigorous attack on militarism’.

According to Gissing’s biographer Jacob Korg, these radical ideas were derived from the author’s reading of Russian writers such as Leo Tolstoy, whose sympathy with the dissident Spiritual Christian group of militant pacifists known as Doukhobors is well known.  Gissing felt that Russian spirituality could serve as an antidote to British Imperialism. 

Gissing and his sister Margaret had spent the spring of 1897 staying at 4 West End Villas – now 14 West Hill – in Budleigh, a town which he had discovered in February 1891 when living in Exeter. They would be joined there by the author, journalist and fellow-pacifist H.G. Wells and his wife. No doubt Czar Nicholas’s invitation would have been one of their subjects of conversation, perhaps contributing to Gissing’s thoughts as he composed The Crown of Life, which was published in 1899.

The novel attacks the role of the press as a fomenter of war. It is notable for its character Lee Hannaford, an inventor of destructive munitions, described by one expert on Gissing as ‘a grotesque, a ludicrous demon’ with ‘near mad Strangelovian inclinations’. Hannaford is used by the author to fix attention upon ‘a sinister aspect of industrialisation at the end of the nineteenth century’.

Here is Gissing’s depiction of the sanctum in which Hannaford works: ‘hung about with lethal weapons of many kinds and many epochs, including a memento of every important war waged in Europe since the date of Waterloo. A smoke-grimed rifle from some battlefield was in Hannaford’s view a thing greatly precious; still more, a bayonet with stain of blood; these relics appealed to his emotions. Under glass were ranged minutiae such as bullets, fragments of shells, bits of gore-drenched cloth or linen, a splinter of human bone – all ticketed with neat inscription. 

'A bookcase contained volumes of military history, works on firearms, treatises on (chiefly explosive) chemistry; several great portfolios were packed with maps and diagrams of warfare. Upstairs, a long garret served as laboratory, and here were ranged less valuable possessions; weapons to which some doubt attached, unbloody scraps of accoutrements, also a few models of cannon and the like.’

By contrast, the novel’s character John Jacks yearns for the day when a new world statesman appears: ‘I want someone to talk about Peace – and not from the commercial point of view,’ he tells us. ‘The slaughterers shan’t have it all their own way… civilization will be too strong for them, and if old England doesn’t lead in that direction, it will be her shame to the end of history.’

Sadly for the idealistic Gissing, it was a time of growing militarism and eventually a bloody war which consumed one of his two sons. Rifleman Walter Gissing died in a hail of shellfire on the first day of the Battle of the Somme at Gommecourt, aged 24; his body was never identified or buried in a marked grave in the ensuing chaos.

Photo of Gissing c.1880, from Wikipedia

If you are interested in the history of early America, and Roger Conant as a peacemaker in troubled times you can join the Devon Peacemaker Festival Facebook group at 

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From Budleigh to Nicaragua: Brothers in conflict

The Central American country of Nicaragua barely makes it into the world news media nowadays. Not so long ago its civil war between opposing forces of the so-called Sandinistas and Contras was grabbing the headlines for the ferocity of the conflict and for the inevitable involvement of the US and Russia.

The Nicaraguan civil war tragically split a family with strong East Devon links. Born in Lympstone in 1868, Frederick William Fley later moved to Budleigh Salterton before deciding to cross the Atlantic and settle in Nicaragua’s coffee-growing region of Managua.

The story of how his grandsons found themselves fighting on opposite sides in the country’s civil war of the 1980s was reported by the world’s media as a tragic example of the way in which the conflict had torn families apart.

‘Uncles shot at nephews, brothers at brothers, and we even know of fathers and sons who were on opposite sides of the conflict,’ as Nicaragua-based journalist Carlos Powell wrote so poignantly.

You can read more about the Fley family in Nicaragua at https://budleighpastandpresent.blogspot.com/2023/12/from-budleigh-to-nicaragua-fascinating.html

If you are interested in the history of early America, and Roger Conant as a peacemaker in troubled times you can join the Devon Peacemaker Festival Facebook group at 

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Sir Michael Morpurgo’s In the Mouth of the Wolf (2018)

Just a few miles south of East Budleigh is the coastal town of Budleigh Salterton, where for five days in September and a weekend in March writers come every year to talk about books on a vast range of subjects. 

Established in 2009, Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival is one of the leading cultural events in the South West. Author Sir Michael Morpurgo has written almost all of his 150 books while living in Devon, and was one of the speakers at the first Festival. He spoke at three subsequent Festivals, in 2014, 2017 and in 2018, a year  which saw the publication of his book In the Mouth of the Wolf.   

Anti-war messages come across strongly in his work, but Morpurgo also respects those like his uncles, Francis and Pieter Cammaerts,  who fought for peace in WW2 and whose stories inspired the writing of In the Mouth of the Wolf. 

A socialist and pacifist, Francis, as Morpurgo explained in 2018, ‘decided he could no longer stand by while others were fighting for his family’s survival, and for the beliefs and freedoms that were so precious to him’.  

For the author, the decision of the UK to leave the European Union was wrong. ‘My family fought for peace not for Brexit,’ as he put it. ‘My uncles’ lives taught me that peace must come first, before prosperity. They helped make Europe a place of peace at last, of free peoples.’  

If you are interested in the history of early America, and Roger Conant as a peacemaker in troubled times you can join the Devon Peacemaker Festival Facebook group at 

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Music for Peace – Vaughan Williams

In 2005, the Budleigh Salterton Festival of the Arts was launched. The title reflected the aim of including a variety of art forms – from art exhibitions to jazz concerts, drama, but especially classical music. 

 Inspired by twenty years of successful Budleigh Music Festivals and seeking works which have been influenced by a desire for world peace,  one thinks of such works as the ‘Agnus Dei’ with its plea ‘Donna nobis pacem’ by a range of composers, including J.S. Bach in his B minor Mass. Frank Bridge, Benjamin Britten and Sir Michael Tippett are among British composers who were inspired to create music inspired by the horrors of the world wars.  

Two very well known works by Ralph Vaughan Williams, pictured here, could also be considered. By contrast with Tippett, Vaughan Williams is not known as a pacifist, as is clear from a letter he wrote during WW2, dated 17 December 1941. ‘I will not argue with you about your pacifist scruples which I respect though I think they are all wrong,’ he told Tippett. ‘However wrong & dreadful we think war (and we all do) – here it is & we can’t shirk it – & surely we can all do a little bit to try & bring it to an end.’ 

His ‘Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis’ has nonetheless been interpreted by some as having an anti-war sentiment due to its emotional and sometimes dissonant nature. It is true that the original work by Tallis, ‘Why fumeth in fight,’ is a setting of a religious text rather than an anti-war statement in itself. Yet at least one critic has gone even further, claiming that ‘The Lark Ascending’ was written, while the composer was staying with friends in Margate, on a hill overlooking the harbour, as a lament for the troops departing like cattle to be slaughtered in France.  

Referring to Vaughan Williams’s earlier, equally famous work, he concludes in an article written for Classic FM: ‘In its historical context, the ‘Tallis Fantasia’, premiered in 1910, is therefore a cry of pain for a world about to tear itself apart on the battlefields of Flanders and the Somme.’  He continues: ‘It could be argued that the whole of his music holds a clear-sighted mirror to the squalid and bloody century that he witnessed, which is not the least reason he became increasingly preoccupied with trying to better that world.’

If you are interested in the history of early America, and Roger Conant as a peacemaker in troubled times you can join the Devon Peacemaker Festival Facebook group at 

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The evolution of ‘Blessed are the Peacemakers’: June 2020 – Aug 2021

Between June 2020 and August 2021, when his painting was unveiled at All Saints’ Church in East Budleigh, Budleigh artist John Washington carried out much research into the background of the events of 1625 involving Roger Conant and Myles Standish at Cape Ann, Massachusetts. 

His research included online study of the actual landscape, as well as taking account of descriptions by people of the time. Standish, for example, was noted for his small stature. A contemporary, Thomas Morton, referred to him as ‘Captain Shrimp’. 

In these images you can see how John’s painting progressed, including the moment when he decided to scrub Roger Conant and start again. 

If you are interested in the history of early America, and Roger Conant as a peacemaker in troubled times you can join the Devon Peacemaker Festival Facebook group at   https://www.facebook.com/groups/700424602802079