Ron Frampton met Caroline Collett at her home in Lyme Regis. This is Caroline’s story:

‘I was born in Bradford in 1962 and christened at Bradford Cathedral, where my parents had married six years before. My mother’s family can be traced back to Yorkshire’s West Riding – Keighley, Cononley, Haworth – as far back as the 16th century. As a girl, my great grandmother Hannah attended Spelling Bees in Haworth run by the Brontë sisters. My mum’s family were cabinetmakers, school teachers, lead mining engineers. There were artists too: my great uncle was the painter Percy Moore and my great great uncle was Sir Arthur Reginald Smith, the Yorkshire Dales watercolourist. My father’s family, the Hansons, were a Yorkshire family too, though presumably, given the name, of Danish or Viking origin at some point! My only West Country connection comes through my father’s side: my great grandmother Rose Milton was a fisherman’s daughter from Bristol. She married a policeman from Galway and they moved north in 1916.

Bradford’s great industry, the wool trade, played a big role in the life of both families. My father’s great uncles were mohair and alpaca merchants and my maternal grandfather sold worsted goods all over Scandinavia at the turn of the 20th century. My father worked in the wool trade too in the 50s, selling behind the Iron Curtain, before the whole industry collapsed.

When I was six months old we moved to Harrogate and I grew up in the same house my father still lives in now. I was a day-dreamy child and very close to my brother, never happier than playing together in the fields behind our house, weaving through the long grass, counting the rings on tree trunks, looking for frogspawn and newts in the ponds. I was a tomboy too and I loved football. I remember going to one primary school fancy dress party as George Best, a lone footballer in a sea of fairies and princesses!

I came out of myself a lot in adolescence and discovered boys and punk rock – and politics. I joined the Anti-Nazi League when I was 14 in protest at the rise of the National Front. I was then particularly involved in the anti-apartheid movement and in the Miners’ Strike in the early 80s, when I collected money and even picketed power stations. The crushing of that strike broke my heart politically and I was never as involved in politics again.

Academic life came fairly easily to me, especially languages and, when I was 18, I was awarded a scholarship to Oxford to read French and German. I loved the subjects and the buildings and liked my tutors well enough, but I found my co-students quite a dull lot on the whole. The one great exception was my future husband, whom I met there, although we had a long and winding road to travel before we found each other again seven years later!

After university I worked in publishing for a year before getting a lucky break and joining MTV’s press department just before the channel launched in Europe. The channel was run with a work hard, play hard ethos and I had a great time there, helping to plan the launch party and taking two private jet loads of pop stars to Amsterdam and back in one night! I remember sitting at Platform 7 at Victoria Station ticking off the register – Donny Osmond, Boy George – and thinking how surreal it all was.  I went on to write all of MTV’s hourly news bulletins for a while before deciding I wanted to present, which I did for the next couple of years on Channel 4’s Network 7, Motormouth on ITV and The Rough Guide to Careers on BBC2. I enjoyed it all but really I was happier behind the camera in my next job, as a producer/director on BSB’s daily Film Show. I went to all the film festivals – Cannes, Deauville, Berlin – and interviewed many great actors and directors – Martin Sheen, Donald Sutherland, Antony Hopkins, John Hurt, Martin Scorcese, Sidney Lumet. I even met my all-time idol, Lauren Bacall, who was everything she should have been!

The dream job came to an end with redundancy when Rupert Murdoch bought BSB and merged it with Sky. After a spell recruiting celebrities for charity, I went back into PR and ended up as Communications Director of global design company Fitch in 1992. I got married the following year and our two sons, Mark and Harry, were born in ‘95 and ‘98. By that time I had formed my own company as a specialist publicist for creative companies, particularly designers and architects. I have a great bunch of clients now, including the UK’s leading product designers Seymourpowell, who designed the world’s first hydrogen fuel cell motorcycle, the world’s first cordless kettle way back when, and who are now working with Virgin Galactic on the world’s first tourist spacecraft!

We moved to Lyme from London in 2002 and we love our life here. My mother suggested we come on holiday here when our second son was born and we just fell in love with it there and then. My mum died last year and I love to think she chose Lyme Regis for us somehow. Our boys have settled so well here – one is at Mrs Ethelston’s in Uplyme and the other has just started at Colyton Grammar School. We love the quiet and being near the sea and we’ve definitely become more eco-conscious since we moved here – we recycle, buy organic meat and have organic veg delivered every week! It’s a good life. Dorset people have a nice dry humour, like Yorkshire folk, and it’s wonderful to be connected to nature again. I feel to have come full circle.’

Penny Johnstone met Hugh Clark MC, at his home in Crewkerne.  This is Hugh’s story:

‘Fourth of five boys, I was born in 1923 in Chingford, Essex, as was Mary, my wife. However, her grandfather had a tailoring business in Crewkerne and both her grandparents and great-grandparents are buried there. We moved down when I retired in 1987.

My parents were Christian Brethren who are probably the most non-conformist of the non-conformist churches. At the church we attended, they had a special mission for children that involved a lanternslide show illustrating the story of Pilgrim’s Progress. Its horror pictures would be censored now, but the fright, more than anything, was what really led to my conversion at the early age of ten.

When the war started I was still at school so I didn’t think it would really affect me. But when I was nearly 18, I realised that people were being called up and a certain number were being sent to the coalmines. That filled me with horror so I began to think about volunteering. At the time I was working in my father’s plastics factory. Their main line was combs, but their involvement in war work and experimentation led to them becoming pioneers in squeezy bottles. When I told my manager I was joining the army he said: “You can’t do that, these are reserved works”, but my reply was “You try and stop me.”

I settled on the Royal Artillery as being not so bad: you had transport, you weren’t right up at the front and best of all, with the right exam results you could go in with a view to a commission and spend the first six months at university before training. Ironically I ended up in the Infantry and was posted to a glider-borne battalion. Kings College, Newcastle, turned out to be rather irrelevant, but I achieved matriculation, so had something to put on my CV. I was commissioned into the RA on 4th July, 1943.

As a Christian I think killing is wrong, but I don’t look upon war as murder. As information gradually came out about the horrors going on in Germany, I realised we had to put a stop to it.  I think being an officer in action was easier than being a private soldier; you didn’t have time to think about yourself. In March 1945, my battalion in 6th Airborne Division, took part in the landing, east of the river Rhine with the brief of taking a bridge over the Issel. I was responsible for the lives of 28 men in a life and death situation and although only 21, matured very quickly. It was only after the war that the nightmares started.

Looking back at the incident that earned me the Military Cross – blowing up the bridge – when we had fixed bayonets and were charging, with no idea what we might meet in the pitch dark. I think in those circumstances you just accept responsibility, take command and make the decisions necessary.

Palestine, where I was posted later, was difficult.  It was a very volatile time, peacekeeping between Jews and Arabs, liked by neither. Jewish refugees from war-torn Europe were allowed in on a quota basis, but many arrived illegally in small, overcrowded boats, enduring terrible hardship. We had the unpleasant job of trying to round them up for detention, which involved searching villages and houses, tearing up floorboards and looking in cupboards. I was relieved when in March 1947 I returned home to be demobbed, but while in Palestine I had the opportunity to visit many places of biblical interest and was baptised as a Christian in Jersusalem.

Adjustment was hard: one day you were a captain in the army with authority and the next you were in civilian clothes and just a nobody. The Ministry of Labour offered me a three-month business-training course, but I was now married with less money to live on than I’d been paid in the army.

Eventually I got a job with a firm of flour-millers, Heygates of Northampton. I was with them for twenty years and during this time became a Crusader leader, running a boys’ bible class, rewarding work that lasted thirty years.

Soon after moving to Crewkerne, we responded to the Civic Society’s request for volunteers to set up a museum. Within three years Mary was chairman of the committee and I was secretary.  We set it up in 1987, but had to find new premises after five years. People thought we were mad; when we found the present building in Market Square, it was all boarded up. There were rooms upstairs where you had to walk the plank because the floor had caved in.  In the back part the main beams had rotted through. Luckily the Lottery came along and we managed to get a grant of £408,000. After everyone’s hard work we were delighted when Princess Anne agreed to open the new museum in 2000.

We are no longer involved, but Mary was awarded an MBE for her efforts. We’ve made no end of friends down here and are active members of St Bartholomew’s Parish Church.

Our four children have all done well for themselves and we now have 11 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Crewkerne is lovely, retirement has been really good and in many ways it has been the happiest part of our 61 years of marriage.’

Penny Johnstone met Val Bailey at his home in Lower Holditch. This is Val’s story:

‘Born into a fourth generation army family in Edinburgh, I was destined for Wellington, Sandhurst and the Black Watch.  My destiny changed dramatically when, at 13, I decided I’d prefer to go into the Royal Navy.  I knew nothing about it and the only warship I had seen was from my prep school at Seaford overlooking Beachy Head in Sussex.  However, I was rushed through the system and sent to Dartmouth Naval College in 1933.

My father lost all his money around this time – he had it in a private bank that went bust – and became a courier for Sir Arnold Lunn, who really started package tours.  School holidays were wonderful; I used to join him wherever he was in Europe. If I wasn’t with him I spent time with my mother and stepfather, going to amazing parties; their friends were racing drivers and pilots so I had a lovely time driving around in Barnarto’s Bentleys and Kindersley’s aeroplanes!

Dartmouth was exactly like a public school, but just a bit harsher I think. I was physically beaten regularly, but never resented it. It was part of a disciplinary system that doesn’t exist any more but there was a reason for it: if you were dealing in ships, there were damn great bits of rope and wire hanging around and you had to be constantly alert and to have what we called the seaman’s eye. The whole time you were scanning, so as not to miss the man overboard, funnel falling down and so on.

When I passed out from Dartmouth at 17, I took part in the Coronation Fleet review with about a thousand ships in the Solent, before being posted to the West Indies. Then followed blockade patrol for the Spanish Civil war and two years as midshipman in a cruiser on the South Africa station. That was a very glamorous life: lots of hospitality on board, flags on the quarter deck, bands playing and so on. I still love Sinatra and big band music, which I think of as part of my life.

Then it was back to England, and as a 19 year old, when war broke, I set off for the Mediterranean in a destroyer. We were one of the escorts to the aircraft carrier Ark Royal at Mers el Kébir, and saw action at Oran. At last we were doing what we had been trained for. The camaraderie was terrific: you made friends and experienced things you can’t replace by going across the North Sea in a little boat, or climbing Everest. We didn’t think in terms of challenges; you just woke up in the morning and wondered what would happen that day.

I volunteered to fly, trained in England, and joined Ark Royal in 1941, flying Fairey Fulmars.  They were fine at the time, but they could only do 247 knots vertically downwards so were no match for the Japanese Zeros.  The Ark sank when I had been on her for about three months. We were torpedoed at twenty to four in the afternoon and didn’t sink until ten to six in the morning. So she just filled and slowly rolled over. I was the last chap off. The ship was horizontal, so we just walked into the water and off we paddled into the night’s ocean. It was a moving moment.

After the war I was grounded because I got vertigo and lost my physical balance. I married June, my wife, and we had two and a half lovely years in Washington DC, where our daughters were born. I then served at the Admiralty and in Argentina, (where as a naval officer I was privileged to indulge my passion for polo relatively cheaply) before my final posting as the Commodore of the barracks in Plymouth.

I left the navy in 1968, and with June’s wholehearted support bought Lower Holditch farm with 50 acres, for our first foray into farming. The Earl of Devon’s farm manager, to whom I was introduced, was breeding South Devon cows on the same acreage and after talking to him I decided to follow suit. So I found myself overnight – with the wonderful Fred Beeching as stockman, who, with his wife, used to tolerate my lack of knowledge with smiles – wrestling with damn great animals. The shock and actual physical hard work, including pulling calves out of cows and building the farm unit, were followed by the pride and satisfaction of establishing a new life.

It was a great transition, and a marvellous way of changing completely from never having got my hands dirty except on a bridle. I was very much the apprentice, with all the farmers longing to tell me how to do it, and I’ve never regretted my decision. My first and continuing impressions of those times and subsequent years were the kindness of my neighbours and the help they all gave to an interloper. My farming was made possible first by the patience of one of these neighbours, Jack Turner, subsequently by his son Leslie, and if I last that long, by Andrew, the third generation.

It is hard to overestimate the pleasure of good neighbours and the satisfaction of knowing that after a lifetime of travelling the world, Lower Holditch in England’s West Country is the best place to live.  My house is 500 years old and I love the fact that when I look out of the window, although the glass has changed, I am looking through the same hole in the same wall that generations of farmers have looked through.’