The British Newspaper Archive is a subscription website with over 30 million searchable scanned pages from the 1700’s to date from papers throughout the British Isles.
Unfortunately hardly anything published in Devon has been scanned since the 1950 papers and virtually no papers published outside Plymouth or Exeter papers, i.e. no Torbay papers!
The search method is to enter key words, for example Churston Races, and see what comes up.
Having done this I have found that races were definitely held in 1880, 1881,884, 1910, 1947, 1948 and 1949.
Does this mean that the races were not continued after this time? No idea as the relevant newspapers have not been scanned.
Anyone who has tried manual newspaper research will know how tedious it is to check every page of even a single newspaper, being sure to have missed nothing significant.
- Does anyone remember these races?
- Did they continue beyond 1949?
- What sort of races were they?
The 1946 event was heralded as the first for 25 years.
Research by Dennis R Sheen, Galmpton and Churston District Local History Group, Feb 2019.