St Thomas railway bridge where Paddy had his tarpaulin shack
Photo by Sarah Scaife, taken Oct 2007
St Thomas circa 1950
By Dave Gill
I've lived in St Thomas all my life. We were living there when my dad was a foreman on the Princess Hay in 1949. It went on until 1951. They cleared the whole site. Mum worked in the canteen at the back of Catherine Street by the police station. I remember going in there with the old steam boiler blasting off, and the bus drivers in there.
I did a paper round for Thomas's Newsagent. Funny it had that name. Thomas's in St Thomas. It was the last building before you got onto the Exe Bridge. There used to be a guy - he was called Paddy - he had a tarpaulin shack, pitched up against St Thomas station. It was at the far side outside the pub there, directly onto the road. He sold anything and everything. It's funny, not everyone can remember it but I remember it really clearly.
There were the cottages at Foxhayes. In behind, the fields went up. Cleve House was the only house. Mrs Jones and her son used to let riding stables there and we used to ride ponies up across those fields. That was in the 1960s.
Up the top of Newman Road, Bowhay Road was the last road before the countryside. Those fields off the council estate were our playground. I can visualise every corner where the frogspawn was, where the toads were. Everyone knew "roly-poly hill". There was a lane that went up beside this twisted oak tree. It finished up at the top of Cowick Barton, up past the allotments. You used to walk up there when you were courting. There's not many places you can go now without the drone of a motorway.