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Bid To Protect Memorial From Vandals - 13th January 1967

13.1.1967 Northam Bonehill
 

News that the flagstaff at Bonehill, Northam, is to be repaired was welcomed by Northam Urban Council.
The surveyor, Mr Clive Barber, reported that although £125 had been allowed in the estimates for such a repair, it would probably cost a good deal more. Mr A C Saunders hoped that not only the flagstaff but the whole memorial would be restored.
Most of the seats had borne brass plates indicating that they had been placed there to commemorate the golden jubilee in 1887 of Queen Victoria but several of them had been removed. To commemorate the diamond jubilee there was a stone to represent each year of the Queen's reign. There were silver coins embedded but mostly these had disappeared through vandalism and deterioration.
Mr Saunders suggestd that to prevent further vandalism the memorial should be padlocked at night. The matter could safely be left in the hands of the Surveyor, said Mrs E M Hilder who presided.
It was in May 1897 that at a parish meeting in Northam Mr W Blakeney, R.N. of 'Hillsborough', Westward Ho! moved that a permanent memorial should be erected 'on the rocky knoll outside the churchyard wall.' It was decided to provide a cairn and flagstaff, the cairn to be formed from 60 pebbles from the foreshore of Bideford Bay. On these stones would be chiselled the names of some of the seamen of North Devon who in the days of Queen Elizabeth sailed over the Bay to defeat her enemies and lay the foundations of England's sea power. In the event stones in the cairn at the base of the flagstaff bore the names of Drake, Raleigh and Grenville and the Gazette of June 23rd 1897 recorded: 'Should funds increase other names of great Elizabethans will be engrave upon the remaining boulders.' This was done.
Above a brass tablet setting out the circumstances surrounding the memorial and bearing a quotation from Kingsley's 'Westward Ho!' the Gazette said, was embedded in the rock 'an authentic bronze medal cast in Rome by order of Pope Suxrus V to convey his sanction to the Spanish Armada attempting the conquest of England'. The medal was presented by Mr W Blakeney.
In a large pebble below the tablet was embedded a silver coin with the inscription 'Terra Mari Securitas 1588'. The flagstaff has subsequently been renewed.

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