In the 1930s, Douglas Matthews, living in Staverton, relied on horse-drawn traps to travel into Totnes. By the 1940s, cars were becoming a more common site, although during the war petrol rationing had ground most of them to a halt. As a child growing up in Totnes in the 1960s, the sum total of the transport devices owned by Alan Langmaid’s family was his roller-skates, or later, his bicycle. For most people, transport consisted of public transport. Alan told me “I didn’t travel very far. Nobody travelled very far. My mum took the bus to work in Paignton and it was a regular service, like clockwork. She disappeared at 8.25am and reappeared at 4.30pm every day”. The pre-Beeching railway network made a great difference to some of Totnes’s outlying villages. John Watson, the founder of Riverford Organic Farm, recalls setting off on the train from Staverton station for a romantic ski holiday in the Alps, complete with skis.

Gradually the car became a part of everyday life. Marion Adams recalls that although as a child her sole form of transport was ‘Shanks’ pony’ (meaning her feet); the car gradually became a fact of life. “I don’t remember when cars became a feature of everyday life, it just kind of got bigger didn’t it!” For Vera Harvey, transport was restricted to cycling, walking and making use of the free train travel the came with her father’s work on the railways.

Val Price’s father bought a car in late 1952, and lovingly built a garage to keep it in. However, she recalls that he rarely used it, never using it to pick her up from school, and never taking it out during the week, given that everything he needed was within walking distance. It was only ever used on weekends, for trips to visit relatives.

Totnes High Street, with horse-powered transport very visible (© Totnes Image Bank and Rural Archive)

By 1963 Totnes was busy in terms of traffic. Alan Langmaid recalls, “There was just as much traffic as there is now, cars, vans and trucks. Not very big trucks, the biggest you would get would be like a horsebox. Just enough to get under the arch, it would usually be heading up to the cattle market”. He remembers traffic by the 1960s being noiser than it is today. “Although there was less of it, exhausts were louder and tyres made more noise. People hooted a bit more”. Children coming from the rural communities around Totnes who attended Redworth School clearly required a lot of buses to get them to and from school (Alan Langmaid recalls, in the early 1960s, fleets of “these 1936 Bedford buses”), and there was even a boarding house in Totnes (on the site of Morrison’s supermarket) where students stayed over, which closed in the 1970s.

Twenty years later, the car has arrived, and has two way access up, and down, the High Street (© Totnes Image Bank and Rural Archive)

Traffic was still, at that time, two-way up and down the High Street (see Figure 4 above), which necessitated, as Margot Vickers relates, “a man standing at the corner (where the entrance to Castle Court is now), where the road turns left. He had a board which said stop or go”.

Outside Totnes, traffic was sparse. Alan Langmaid talks of a friend, Charlie Simmons, who took Alan out for a walk towards Ashprington looking for conkers. It was very cold, and the only traffic was the occasional tractor. “One came along and offered us a lift which we took, because we were absolutely frozen, even with woollen mittens. Fingers and feet absolutely frozen to the bone”. The rural roads were far quieter than they are today.

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