History of Wembury

20th century

1909

Plans to build a huge passenger port here, stretching from Wembury Point to Gara Point, are rejected by the House of Lords.

1912

John Galsworthy visits Wembury in order to research his family history. This provides the inspiration for Soames Forsyte’s similar quest in Swan Song, the sixth book of the Forsyte Saga.

1927

The Langdon Estate sells the Mewstone.

1928

Wembury Point is sold and developed into two holiday camps.

1935

Ida Sebag-Montefiore gives Wembury Cliffs to the National Trust to protect them from development.

1939

The National Trust acquires Wembury Mill, which is now used as a café.

1940

The Ministry of Defence requisitions Wembury Point and builds a radar station, observation posts and anti-aircraft guns.

1956

The HMS Cambridge Gunnery School is established at Wembury Point.

21st century

2001

HMS Cambridge Gunnery School is decommissioned.

2006

The National Trust buys both Wembury Point and the Mewstone, turning the latter into a nature reserve and returning the former to its natural environment.

History of the Great Mewstone

The Great Mewstone is now a nature reserve, home to a range of seabirds. But did you know that people once lived there?

Exiles

In 1744, a local man found guilty of a minor crime was sentenced to stay on the island for seven years. He had the last laugh, since he decided to stay on the island for the rest of his life, not once returning to the mainland. His daughter, known as ‘Black Joan’, remained on the island. She married and raised three children.

A new family arrives

By the early 1800s a new family had moved in. Samuel Wakeham and his wife, Ann, set up home on the island when Sam was due to be transported to Australia. Instead, he negotiated to live his years of exile on the Mewstone. They enlarged an existing house, the odd turret-shaped building that remains today, and cleared a garden to grow food and keep some animals.

Sam might have stayed on the island for the rest of his days, had he not been caught smuggling. He was lured into a trap by an excise man and had to leave the island.

Nobody is recorded to have lived on the island since. The island was sold in the 1927 sale of the Langdon Estate and bought by Mr Stansell of Heybrook Bay for £500. He sold it on a year later to a Miss Goldman of London for £575, who then presented it to her brother as a wedding present.

Recent history

The Great Mewstone was bought by the War Office, because it was in the line of fire from the HMS Cambridge Gunnery School, formerly based at Wembury Point. They restricted public access to the island, a move that greatly benefitted the wildlife living there.

Following the decommissioning of HMS Cambridge, the National Trust ran a successful fundraising campaign that resulted in the Trust acquiring both Wembury Point and the Great Mewstone.

The old gunnery school was demolished, with work put into reclaiming and encouraging a natural coastal landscape and preserving the island to protect the birds and wildlife that have flourished there.