Setting the Scene
Totnes town in the 1940s. Note market gardens and greenhouses on what is now called The Southern Area (© Totnes Image Bank and Rural Archive)
Totnes has long been an important market town for the South Hams, and during the period focused on here, its population was around 4,000 (it is now more than twice that). During the period being explored here, Totnes was passing through, and emerging on the other side of, a World War. Alan Langmaid (now Museum Administrator of Totnes Museum) sets the scene.
The whole of Britain was a tired, weary, drab place. It had gone through six years of a very serious war, only 20 years after another very serious war that had completely wiped it out. Totnes was empty. It was dirty, and like everything else it was tired. Nobody could afford anything, very few people had cars. We had no car, we didn’t even have a telephone or a television.
This is, however, at some variance with Ken Gill’s recollection of Totnes as having “the feel of a prosperous town”, and also David Heath, who said “when I was growing up in Totnes in the late 40’s and 50’s it was a thriving market town well served with a wide range of shops of that time. Large numbers of people came in to shop from the surrounding villages on market day and generally the town had a feel of prosperity about it.”
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