Bill’s 1920s and all that!

• 87-year-old Sidmothian Bill Maeer.

• The way they were in wartime: Bill Maeer and his wife, Edna, on their wedding day in 1943.

Kingsley Squire talks to Grand Old Man of Sidmouth Bill Maeer

It hurts 87-year-old Sidmothian Bill Maeer when he sees and reads of the vandalism that bedevils his town.

"Disgraceful," he says.

"I can't see what the end is going to be. Only last night I went for a walk down by the market and there were kids up on the scaffolding running about.

"As for all this vandalism, perhaps I shouldn't say it, but I think it's the parents to blame. I know what my father would have done if I had broken someone's window or pulled up the flowers. Mind you, we were no angels as kids. We got up to mischief. But it is not mischief now. It is damage."

Bill was born in 1918 in the little thatched house, now a barbers shop, at the top of Holmdale and it was there that his grandmother took in stud collars by the score for the laundry, sending them back pressed and stiffened with starch.

That was just one memory recalled when we met last week to talk about the Sidmouth he has known all his life and the changes he has seen.

He fretted he would not be able to remember very much. Yet the years soon rolled away, back to the 1920s when he and his friends watched silent films for threepence in the town's first cinema at the bottom of Fore Street, sitting on wooden forms and throwing sweet papers at the pianist who accompanied the flickering screen.

Next door was a butchers with a slaughterhouse behind. All the town's butchers, in fact, had one, and cattle were taken there straight from market. Once a heifer escaped and ran amok through a shop across the road. Everyone could hear the cows hollering, as Bill put it, before being put down.

• Sidmouth's first cinema in Fore Street where Bill Maeer paid threepence to see the silent films of the 1920s

"Country life was part of town life," he recalls. "There were very few cars. Everything came and went by pony and trap and horse and cart.

“Mr Winchester came over Peak Hill from Otterton by pony and trap selling his vegetables. Ladies in long black dresses sometimes took the reins themselves or were driven to the shops. Often they did not get out, preferring to sit tight and summon the shopkeeper to come out and serve them."

Bill's father, Charles Maeer, was a haulier who delivered coal from the station to the Gas Works on The Ham by horse and wagon.

Driving tests were unheard of when he bought his first lorry. He was merely taken through the controls on the day of delivery. Next day he was out behind the wheel himself.

"Driving was not a problem because there was no one else on the road," said Bill. "You had the roads to yourself."

Nowadays, on his walks, stick in hand, through the Ham and along the seafront, he can still picture Mrs Carnell's little sweet shop selling gobstoppers and liquorice by the yard while "out beach," as the locals always phrase it, there would be blind Dappy Pinn fussing around the fishermen of the day, the Woolleys, the Harris's and the Bagwells whose boats, nets and pots were pitched, family by family, on the foreshore.

Cries of Fish Alive-O were a daily sales call around the town and anything unusual, like a monkfish, might be displayed, its mouth gaping, at York Steps beside a bucket for your pennies to help pay for broken nets.

On many a summer evening, as hotel guests strolled the seafront after supper in a procession of finery, gentlemen in dinner jackets, ladies in long dresses, a seine net would be rowed out to circle a shoal of mackerel or sprats breaking surface close in to the beach.

Fish would be your reward for helping willing hands rope in the catch.
Bill remembers the storms that collapsed great holes in the seafront in 1926, flooding the town so bad that boys could paddle a tin bath up Old Fore Street and down Fore Street. At that time, the last of the Victorian bathing huts, wheeled to the water's edge to allow ladies to undress and lower themselves into the sea with the utmost privacy, were still a feature while the rows of changing tents, backed tight up against the seawall, were the highly visible sign of a strict moral code that persisted into the 1950s.

"You were not allowed to change or undress anywhere along the seafront unless you were 400 yards past Jacobs Ladder," Bill recalls.

• Unmistakbly familiar, Sidmouth seafront in 1924, with the changing tents that symbolised a strict moral code.

"It was an offence under the bye-laws and, if caught, your name would be taken by the beach supervisor.

“The same sort of thing applied to hawkers. Nothing was allowed to be sold along the front. Charlie Parrott tried it once with his ice cream cart and they told him to go home."

Bill first attended All Saints School where the teacher, Miss Purchase, sat the pupils in benches tiered up the wall. The better behaved were higher up, the worst lower down so they could be easily reached for a clip around the ear.

"Later on, when I was at Kings, Ottery, one of the mistresses spotted me eating a cake I had bought in Sidmouth when I still had on my school cap. I was in front of the headmaster next morning for eating in the street in school uniform. I had a good telling off and 100 lines."

Discipline, as he remembers it, was the bedrock of good behaviour. In those bygone days the policeman, the doctor and the schoolmaster were the respected figures of authority in the community. Step out of line and you were for it, especially where Police Sergeant Champion was concerned. He patrolled the town with a pebble in one finger of his white gloves to give extra sting to that proverbial clip!

Yet this remarkable old timer, spritely still, recalls a happy, carefree childhood, playing football in the street, scrumping apples and making a trolley out of pram wheels and wood.

"We were happy because we did not want anything," Bill says. "We did not have the televisions and computers the kids have now. Today they have everything and they are still dissatisfied because somebody has always got something different and they want it. We had our toys and we were content in our own way.

"It was only after the war, to my way of thinking, that things started to go haywire. A lot of the old regulations, like changing on the beach, were blown away. Up to a point I do regret it. Sidmouth was a different place then. There was respect for people and property. Now that's gone."

The biggest change he has seen, however, is the demographic transformation in Sidmouth as a retirement town.

"Some would say you are being snooty when you talk about Sidmouth being a changed place because, as locals, you did not want newcomers coming in," he says.

• Sidmouth seafront, 1947, with the old beach groynes that stopped the shingle being swept away by storms.

"But they have and a good thing, too, I suppose, because without new people, without employment, the town would have died. After all, you can't stand still. You have to go forward. So when you talk about "incomers" they are the people who brought money into the town.

"Nevertheless, I loved the old place like it was. Old Fore Street was always Back Street to us locals then and when you went down the pub of an evening you were not going down to the Dove, the Anchor or the Commercial. You were going down to Gus Prideaux's, Harry Fry's or Jack Duffet's.

"They were the licensees and, like their customers, they were locals, too. In fact, most of the families here were related in one way or another. Everyone knew you. You couldn't go far down the town without they were all there talking. Now, when I go on my daily walks, hardly anyone speaks to you. I can sometimes go for a week and not speak to anyone I know."

Bill, married in 1943, was widowed three years ago and twice a week, never fail, he visits his wife Edna's grave.

The war service of William Leonard Charles Maeer, the father of two daughters, was honoured by the Lord Lieutenant of Devon in the certificate for service to his country. He joined the Territorial Army in 1938 and served in the Devonshire's before transfer to the airborne glider infantry which took him through the D-Day landings without a scratch. He came home in 1946 to work, first, in Vallances Sidmouth Brewery, then selling cars for Northcotts, a local garage, before joining the staff at Slades Garage in Salcombe Road.

There 20 years, he was one of the town's best known faces, finishing up as general manager and a friend to all. He misses the old familiar faces, not least the late Ted Pinney who served on the town, district and county councils for well over 40 years and with whom, as a young man, he played polo off Port Royal inside ropes weighted in the sea by pebble bags.

"Ted did wonders for Sidmouth," says Bill.

“So did the old urban district council, Bertie Pike, Ernie Whitton and Co. Ted could be a menace.

“But he had Sidmouth at heart. As long as he was on the council he saw to it that Sidmouth did not suffer. Sad to say there's been no one to take his place."
Footnote: The Herald is grateful to Mrs Tiny Tapley, another Sidmothian, for the loan of the old photographs of Sidmouth published in this article.

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