How it all began

On Christmas Eve in 1913 little Beatrice May Headon was picking Primroses near her home on Slerra Hill in Clovelly. The Reverend T L V Simkin distributed the parcels of Christine Hamlyn's Bread and Beef charity to the twelve most elderly poor of the parish, it was thought remarkable that many of the elderly recipients were the same as had recieved the gifts in 1912. This was a country on the eve of war, a village on the eve of change.

This is how it all began. Like many villages throughout the country Clovelly was about to commit many of her best men and women to a war that would alter the culture of a generation and set a course that would see an end to a way of life that had hardly changed in living memory. The people who were the very bedrock of the community, who lived, worked, loved and died, who were the very fabric of village society, would see differently the co-existence between those who do and those that have. The seemingly natural order was about to be tested beyond its limits and the village that would eventually emerge from the fields of war would never be the same again.

It is a journey we all know, the 1914-1918 War, trenches, bloody, muddy battles. But at home other battles were fought, the pain of loss, the fear of the unknown, the guilt of survival, the everyday continuation of village existence. It is as much a journey of new growth and new birth as that of fallen heroes, lost loved ones and the game of endless waiting. It is a Journey that begins here, with little Beatrice picking Primroses and the world turning towards war.