Oh What A Time... - #100 Devon with Josh Widdicombe (Part 2)

Episode Date: January 27, 2026

This is Part 2! For Part 1, check the feed!Yes, despite the fact we’re closer to episode 200 than 100, this really is episode 100! (We’d planned this ep a long time ago but only just got round to recording).For the first time ever we’re joined by a guest and it’s Devon native and friend of the show, Josh Widdicombe.In this episode we’ll discuss everything Devon related: Devon’s own Sir Francis Drake, the educational experiment that was Dartington Hall and one of the west country’s most notorious prisons.If you’ve got anything to send us, you can always send it in via: [e-mail] if you want more Oh What A Time, you should sign up for our Patreon! On there you’ll now find:•The full archive of bonus episodes•Brand new bonus episodes each month•OWAT subscriber group chats•Loads of extra perks for supporters of the show•PLUS ad-free episodes earlier than everyone elseJoin us at 👉 patreon.com/ohwhatatimeAnd as a special thank you for joining, use the code CUSTARD for 25% off your first month.You can also follow us on: X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepodAnd Instagram at @ohwhatatimepodAaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice?Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk).Chris, Elis and Tom x Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Oh Water Time is now on Patreon. You can get main feed episodes before everyone else, add free, plus access to our full archive of bonus content, two bonus episodes every month, early access to live show tickets and access to the Oh Watertime Group chat. Plus if you become an Oh Water Time All-Timer, myself, Tom and Ellis will riff on your name to postulate where else in history you might have popped up. For all your options, you can go to patreon.com forward slash oh what a time. Hello and welcome to part two of Devon where our guest this week is Josh Whitacom

who has suggested as our subject, Devin, of course. And Josh, you have a new podcast. Yes, listen to the Museum of Pop Culture is about much lower brow stuff than this. It's about popular culture told over it. More parts than you think it deserves. And Crane is on the first episodes

which are about Mr. Blobby and it's available on podcast apps and no one wants plugs to go on any longer than that. So let's get on with hearing about Devon. All right, part two I'm going to tell you now about Dartington Hall. Yeah, I want to know about this. Known as Devon's Engine of Ideas. Did you know it, Josh, you've been there for two weddings,

but did you know of it as a place of education? No, it's quite a good place to cater for large numbers. It's got an art centre nearby as well. But it doesn't feel like a huge place of ideas. Well, yes, Dartsinson Hall sits on a hill above Totnes in Devon. And it's a magnificent medieval manor. It was originally built in the 1300s by the first Duke of Exeter. For centuries, it was exactly what you'd expect

in an aristocratic country estate. But in 1925, that all changed when a pair of Anglo-American millionaires who had a very different plan for it. And their names were Dorothy and Leonard Elmhurst. And they didn't want it to be a stately home. it to be a social experiment, a place where you could rethink education and rebuild rural communities and plug the arts straight into the bloodstream of society, which I would say is that feels like a very Devon thing. Like seafaring or whatever it was you said before. Yeah,

yeah, seethora like, I don't know. Like lay lines, all that stuff, the arts. The arts. I'd say the arts has got it. The arts is a big deal around the country, isn't it? Basically, when I go to Glastonbury and I see hippies walking around. It's in Somerset. Yeah. But I mean, you know, people walking around looking like New York. and Faulkner, dressed in clothing that looks like is made out of postal bags. This kind of interesting artistic fair is what I associate with Devon. Give me your picture of Devon, Chris. Your five things you associate with Devon.

With the greatest of respect to Chris, I think when Chris thinks of Devin, he thinks of the South West Brackets General. Yeah. Yes. Everything from Truro to Swindon. West of Hook Services on whatever. motorway that is. Then I think we're into bandit country.

Right, okay. So for me, it's people who look like Newton Faulkner. It is. It's everyone's in a band. Everyone's in a band. I reckon you grew up knowing at least one witch. Cheese rolling. That's summer set, isn't it? Lay lines. I don't know if they

cross into Devon, do they? Devining rods. Devining rods. You know, when you want to go search a source of water. Yeah. Lots of people not wearing shoes or socks. Right, okay, yeah. So if we go back to the 1920s now, so rich outsiders, there's a tradition in England,

rich outsiders were beginning to kind of buy up English castles and start reinventing them. So one famous parallel is St Donnatt's Castle in South Wales, which was bought in 1925 by the American newspaper tycoon, William Randolph Hurst, and he poured money into it restoring it. Yep, biggie. And decades later, that became the Atlantic College in 1960.

So Dartington's arts institutions, followed soon after with the Dartington College of Arts founded in 1961. So Dartington wasn't a quirky one-off. It was part of this broader interwar trend of old aristocratic Britain being refitted as a playground for modern ideas. So let's talk about these oversee owners that bought Dartington House. So I'll start with Leonard Elmhurst. He was born in Yorkshire in 1893 into a comfortable family. But then the First World War happened, devastated the world, and several of his brothers were killed.

Leonard was at Cambridge when war broke out and he was judged unfit for action. active service. So he volunteered for the YMCA working overseas, including India. And after the war, he went to America and he studied agriculture at Cornell University. And he was there he met Dorothy Whitney. Now, Dorothy was a New York Airs and philanthropist with an unimaginable amount of money. Her husband had recently died during the Spanish flu pandemic. And he left her at 17 years old, $15 million, which in today's term, in terms is being left half. a billion dollars. Right. I would be dead and I would die an idiot. Put you, you're 800 quid to shame, you're saying. Yeah, yeah. That's incredible, isn't it?

Half a billion dollars at the age of 17. If you'd have been left that money at 17, what would you have done with it? Yeah. I'm dropping out a sixth form. I don't think my A levels mattered to me so much. Oh, no, no. I mean, if you've got three good A levels, you'll have them for life. I'd have definitely done my A levels. Can't take A levels away from anyone. My friend Bob won 120,000 pounds when he was 16 in a Kellogg's competition. Wow. That's the competition? Which is mad.

It was for a World Cup where they had to write a poem in about, it was France 98. It would have been, I think, in the run up to that. And then three people were chosen from these poems to go and do a penalty shootout against Peter Shilton at half time at QPR. Okay, well, that's easy then. You just have a penalty in his life. So they made... 120 grand. It was then split,

admittedly between him, his brother and his sister, his parents made him do that. So he got a third of it. 40 grand. Still, yeah, still incredible, though. But he won 120 grand at the age of... Kind of a thing to put on a teenager, isn't it?

Yeah. I don't know whether I agree with that. But I don't think Kellogg's would do that now. No. You make teenagers take penalties for 120 grand. As a family, you tempted to bring in a ringer at that point, when you get you...

Yeah. Some semi-pro football. Let's go. But let's go back. to Leonard Elmhurst. So he's now met Dorothy Whitney. And so Leonard, when he's doing his degree at Cornell University, but he does it at speed.

I didn't realize this is an option. He was meant his course was four years. He did it in just two. And by 1921, he was back in India, traveling and gathering ideas for rural reform. Between 1923 and 1925, he circled the globe twice. I'm starting to question

if he did have the right, to get off World War I on medical reasons, because he seems fine. That is a great point. I was watching All Quiet on the Western Front again this month, and I fixated on the idea of how I would get shot in a place which would put me out of the war but wouldn't kill me. What would be the way you do that for going over the top?

Ideally, you want a shot in the foot, but I don't know how you do that. Do you put your foot over the top of the trench? That's a bit obvious, isn't it? Well, the most lethal injury in World War I, I know this, is like the thigh bone. Because they hadn't really figured out how to heal that. So your blood would clot and you'd die. No, surely the head. Go for the head, they were yelling.

Please go for the head. I guess if you get shot in the head, is it class as an injury? If the thigh bone was the most dangerous, people would wear their helmets on their thighs. Surely. They didn't do that, didn't they? So that's just, you're wrong. Well, hello at Oh, What a Time.com. I think I'm right. I've read that somewhere.

So let's now get into how Dartington's engine of ideas really begins. So Leonard have become deeply influenced by the work of Rabindranath Tagore. He's an Indian poet and thinker. He won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1930. Yeah, 1913, yeah. Tagore believed education should be creative, liberating, rooted in the world and connected to nature rather than confined to classrooms and exams. Leonard had actually even worked as Tegor's secretary in India.

So when Leonard and Dorothy married in April 925, they move into D'Artington Hall, which was in terrible condition, but they begin restoring it with his vision to turn it into Devonshire Rural Reconstruction Institute, the likes of which Leonard had seen in India. And Tegor himself actually went to D'artington in 1926 while touring England. So it's quite an extraordinary image, like one of the world's most famous thinkers, walking into a medieval hall above topness to inspire a new kind of England

but ultimately just inspiring a couple of weddings. Wow. So almost immediately, Dartington begins to turn into what one newspaper called in 1926, the home of a school of adventure and experiment. That became Dartington Hall School and it was as progressive as interwar Britain could possibly handle.

So it's not Eaton or Harrow. It's the opposite. So some of the things they did in this school was like no prefect system. So everybody was kind of on the same level. That feels so mundane. I thought it was going to be so much more. Yeah.

Yeah. Like lessons at no fixed time you want to hear, isn't it? Yeah. Not no prefects. Yeah. You know all the teacher's first names. Yeah. My grand, same grand,

went to a school, Summerhill School. I don't know if it's still going, but which was run by guy called the A.S. Neal, who was a king of this kind of education. It was one of those. The kids make up all the rules schools. They, yeah, the kids in charge.

It was like, it was much more extreme than no prefect. The Lord of the Flies. Well. Did it work? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I don't know what, I suppose, what does did it work mean, Tom?

You absolute square. That's a very good point. Yeah. I take my question back. Yeah, because you think it's all about GCSE results, don't you? Every time your children get home from school. did it work today? Did school work?

Did they grade you today? And if so, what was it? Yeah. Are you achieving? But you're right. Also, no prefects really speaks to the time as well, isn't it? That's such... There might be more.

To be fair, it felt like he was at the start of a list. Oh, yeah, there is more. So no officers training corps, no Latin and Greek, no separation of boys and girls, no compulsory chapel, no flag waving or patriotism. You don't have to do PE, and there's no corporal... That's a good one. No corporal punishment. Oh, get out there and do P.E. man, for God's sake.

What do you think the take-up is for rugby in the winter months? The only thing that has held strong as P.E., of their changes, everything else has come in in every other school, really. So for the 1920s, it's quite ahead of its time. Yeah. So it attracted children of the artistic and intellectual classes. There's got a great alumni list, the novelist Jasper Fjord. Oh, yeah.

The creator of Bagpuss and I've a... the engine. Oliver Postgate went there. Oh, okay. The biographer Claire Tomlin, the artist Lucien Freud. Oh. Yeah. So did it work to answer Tom's question? He'd say no because none of them are lawyers or doctors.

Quite a few interesting ideas came out of Dartington School. So the Labour Manifesto for 1945 Let Us Face the Future was drafted at Dartington. It's author Michael Young, later Lord Young of Dartington, had been a pupil there and was part the wider Dartington circle.

The Arts Council of Great Britain was shaped by a movement at Dartington. And the Arts Council of Great Britain obviously persist to this day, but gained its royal charter in 1946. But Dartington's real genius was that it attracted remarkable people because it had two unbeatable advantages.

Firstly, the setting was beautiful and amazing. And also the second is that money's just not a problem. Because, as we mentioned, there was a half a billion knocking about it. Yeah. So how long did the school go on for? Well, so it was founded in the 1920s, and it persisted until 1987,

when it was closed down after declining numbers and like bad publicity. And one of the biggest blows was a tabloid scandal in the early 1980s involving the headmaster and his wife. The headmaster's wife had posed for pornographic top shelf nude photos. Oh, no. Darted to the Hall School closed in 1987. The numbers have been declining, but there was also other issues.

There was discipline, issues, drug issues and general chaos at the school. It just became engulfed in so much scandal and bad press that the reputation collapsed and the school closed in 1987, yeah. But hell of a story. Absolutely, yeah. What a remarkable place. Would you have wanted to go there? No, I think I spent a lot of my secondary school years feeling quite scared because there was just a bit of sense of mayhem at my secondary school.

And I think I'd quite like a few more rules. That's going to say. Yeah, I didn't want to pioneer anything when I was a teenager. I just wanted to do my GCSEs and be left alone. Would you have liked it, Josh? No, but I can certainly see the appeal on a quiet life. Yeah. And do you know what?

As far as schools are concerned, rules are good. I think corporal punishment, if you're getting rid of that, then what the hell's going on? Sorry, if you'd offered me the options in the 1920s, I'd have definitely taken that over a traditional 1920s school. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If I was doing your feature one-day time machine,

I'd prefer to go back to that than I would to a nearby comprehensive, although it wouldn't be a comprehensive, whatever. I just think it's a difficult sell for the parents, isn't it? Do you want to send your kids to a normal school or this school? That's a total experiment. And if I'm first time for everything, eh? Obviously, they only get one star button education, so why don't you put it all on a wing of a prayer

and see what happens. Right, now, as most people, including Josh, of course, no, Plomuth. Plomoth. Sorry, I messed up straight away. I think that's the earliest fumble for you, Elle, that I've ever seen. Yeah, Plummouth. But do you know what I thought, I like, it just sounds like Devin. Like, there's places, when I drove down to visit Josh over New Year's on the way to Exeter.

There were so many place names that made me laugh out loud. Winterbourne Zagatron. Yeah. Like, what is this place? It's like Middle Earth. Quibblen. Well, you know about Westwood Ho, don't you, Chris? No, go on.

Westwood Ho, you must know this, Ellis. Yeah, it's got an exclamation mark. It's the only place with an exclamation mark at the end of its name in the UK. You're joke. How is that allowed? Why not? Have some chill out. I played a great game with Claire in the car the other day.

We were in Norfolk. Here we go. Where you name... But you go to a car park at around one in the morning. You remember Gillian Telford, don't you? So you name... This is going to sound so boring. You name three places from a county,

one of which you made up. The other two are real places. And you've got to try and guess, which is the... It was quite fun, yeah. So I did the West Country. She did Norfolk. You know, you've got to keep the fun alive somehow. One of them's not a county, but fair enough.

I've got three villages here, Josh, from... Devin. Tell me which is right, okay. Cloverly, Plompton, Appledore, which is fake. I don't think Apple Door's real. That's correct. Plompton was no, Apple Door is correct. Oh.

It is real, yeah. Plompton is the fake one. I'll tell you what, when you're working on the format crime, the problem you've got, you need to work out with correct refers to the answer or whether one of them is real. That's an ongoing issue with the format. It was fine because it was a long car drive. So I made the mistake every time, but we worked through it.

That answer is correct, by which I mean, you are incorrect. So you don't know. Because the answer was correct. You said it was incorrect. Okay. Here's one for you, Ellis. Bed galert. Well, it's that one, because you've just made it up on the hoop.

Because you're staring at your phone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Clearly. Bedgillard, Lafairn and Foops. Which town or country is this? These are all villages in Wales. Well, Beidgillard is real. Yeah, Laferan and Fwops.

What, Fwop's. There's no chance to Fwop's is a real place. The fact, you're laughing as you say it. You're correct, but this time correct does actually mean you're correct. Right, okay. Anyway, it works. So FWP's is incorrect, meaning you are correct. Clear?

You get 10 points. Or is it minus 10 points? I've forgotten. Well, Clear's not here. You're playing with us in Africa, but you played with Clear on Saturday. I think that run through went really well, to be honest. It's Claire Clear, the new confusing family game for Christmas. Picture is like three really stressed family members on the front of the box. Yeah, I don't know if I've won or not. Exactly.

Sorry, Alice, back to the history. So as most people know, Plymouth, one of the most heavily bombed cities in Britain doing the Second World War. terms of a level of destruction, secondary to London. Rightly so. Really? Did you feel any strange pride in that growing up, Josh? No, I think, no, I didn't. But it did lead to, I'd say it's architecturally quite,

I mean, people from Plymouth would, it will kick off on the Argyle message board if they ever hear me say this. But it's architecturally very dower. Similarly to Swansea. Yeah, Swansea's, Gus. Swansea and Coventry, similar because of this.

Well, two years ago, they found an unexploded World War II bomb in someone's garden in Plymouth. Bloody hell. Yes. I do remember that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My grandparents grew up about 20 miles from Swansea and they could see it burn from the top of their garden. Wow. Yeah, they hammered Swansea.

Yeah. And Coventry, though. There was a German verb to Coventrate which basically meant if you to flatten a place, yeah. So why was Swansea and Plymouth were obviously on the coast? Yeah, docks. Why was Coventry? I think Coventry, where there are an awful lot of factories in Coventry.

It was probably something to do with that. Could you take offence if Germany weren't going for your city? A bit like, you know, during COVID when it was considered that you didn't have a job that was necessary or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Come on, I mean. Come on. We're making plimsels here. They can't be a tone.

In Britain, that makes as many plimpsils as us. Why are they bombing us? They bombed highway. And then everyone had to stand up because they were the place where chairs were made. Bombing Luton and people are like, I can't get a hat for love nor money. Yeah, yeah. The Germans have absolutely done us here. Oh, God, they've killed the milliners.

Well, what people are perhaps less familiar with, at least on the outside of Plymouth, is that Plymouth has long been a target for overseas belligerence, part because of its relative proximity to the continent, mainly because of its importance. importance to Britain's Royal Navy. So Plymouth is present in the Duma's Day Book of 1086. It was then just a tiny village on the Devon coast known as Sutton. But by medieval times... That's not Plymouth. It's got a different name and it's a tiny village. Yeah, but it grew. By medieval times, Plymouth had become one of the best connected places in England. When did it rebrand? I don't know. Good question. There's anywhere else in Britain and Ireland. So ships arrived on the

coast from English ports, including Bristol and Newcastle, which was then the main source of coal, from Cork and Waterford and Ireland and then on to Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and even Gadsk on the Baltic coast of Pornum. Basically, if you were from Plymouth, it was a real melting pot. Yeah.

The chief imports, wine, Baltic hemp, for rope. Fruit, sugar, hops, paper, wool and tin travelling in the opposite direction. So following the discovery of Newfoundland, Fish became another major source of trade. Pilgrims, similarly, were compelled by a law passed in 3090 to leave for Rome,

elsewhere on the continent or the Holy Land, either from Plymouth or Dover, which meant a lot of tourist traffic in both directions. So it was a very hip and happening place in medieval times. That's really interesting. Your experience must be so different if you were closer to a port at that time in terms of the things that were being brought in and things you were able to see. Well, the Beatles always talk about this. They had access to loads of R&B records because they lived in Liverpool

and they were imported, so they were getting pinched from the docks. So Catherine of Aragon arrived in Plymouth in 1501, on a way to eventually becoming Queen of England. And on the 12th of June 1616, you'll never guess who turned up, Pocahontas. What? Now Mrs John Rolfe arrived from the New World on her way to London when she was to be fated as a celebrity.

I don't really know much about Pocahontas. Well, she was accompanied by 11 other Native Americans, and then four years later in September 1620, Mayflower famously sailed from Plymouth to establish the Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts Bay. Limnithargar, one of the stands, I don't if it still is, but certainly was named the Mayflower.

Oh right, not the Pocahontas end. No. Pocahontas died in Gravesend. Did she? Yeah. Well, this all made the city very attractive target for would be invaders, pirates, other ne'er-duels. The most common raiders came from France, especially during the Hundred Years' War.

In 1339, neither start the conflict, and inspired by previously successful reasons Salampton and Portsmouth, the French fleet sailed into the Plymouth Sound to raid the town, so they caused some damage, but this wasn't the large-scale invasion some feared it might be. There were subsequent raids by the French on Plymouth in 1350, 1377 and 1400. So the French really fancied taking over Plymouth. Well, I suppose geographically, it's a very important point, isn't it?

Now, Plymouth's position was recognised as important for national security. So there's some investment in his defences, as well as a steady growth in the town size by the late 1370s. We know thanks the records compiled for the poll tax, the population had grown substantially. 7,256 inhabitants, which made it the fourth largest settlement in England. That's so few, isn't it? Yeah.

But there's only Bristol York in London that were bigger than it, and it was a head of Norwich. That's so insane. So when is that? What is that? That is in the 1370s. Wow. 7,000.

So what would that be today? Like what would be a place with 7,000 people in today? Well, it's half the size of Camarvan. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not a big place at all. I don't think you've got a supermarket if you've got 7,000 people. No, you've got a co-op that's open until 10.

Yeah. A Tesco extra, is that the phrase? Yes, you probably share a big Tesco with other small towns in the area. Petro station with a mini-mart? Yes, I would say so. And you've got a community centre where all the toy smell of spit. And a fish and chip shop that also does Chinese. food.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It sounds quite good, actually. Yeah, I love it. So this made Plymouth an Evergrade to target, none more so than on the 10th of August 1403.03. So this is when the Bretons came in a fleet of 30 ships and with an army of 1,200 men. So landing under fire, they march into Plymouth,

install themselves in and around Exeter Street, and from their repulsed a counter-attack. The next day, with a point proven, they set Plymouth are light, and they returned homes. Wow. 600 houses, said to being destroyed in the blaze. Oh, my gosh. so glad I do not live at a time where you look out to see and you see another fleet of

invaders coming. Here we go again. What a thing to have to deal with. I think it's better than what you've got, though, Tom. People just driving into your car and shouting through your letterbox at two in the morning asking for money. Yeah, what you want about? You basically live that now. At least, they get a nice view.

So, you know, the temporary invasion was to be commemorated by the designation of one of the Central Street in Plymouth. as Breton's sides, but this wasn't the end of the would-beak invasions, although it was the most successful. The Spanish Armada of 1588 in Plymouth in its sights, not least because the city was home to the English fleet, led by Francis Drake. And it might have happened that way, had the Spanish Admiral, the Duke of Medina, Sidonia, been allowed to attack by King Philip II, but he wasn't. Instead, he was ordered to sail onto the Isle of White and the English fleet, which had now, which had been trapped, was now free to engage. So almost a century late on the 16th of August,

1652 is the turn of the Dutch. He was going to best to it, was he? The Dutch had a go. They tried to take Plymouth. The Battle of Plymouth, only a short engagement between an English fleet and a Dutch one, but proved that the Dutch weren't to be messed with. So there was a fleet of 42 ships and four fireboats,

and they faced off against 22 ships and six fireboats. And from the English point of it, which should have been easy because the Dutch were outgunned and outmanned. But it wasn't to be the wind favoured the Dutch, The wind? Yeah, as did the tactic of bringing down masts and rigging rather than destroying the vessels outright. So in the end, it was the English fleet, which was the first to withdraw.

And they limped back to Plymouth, and the Dutch celebrated a tactical draw. But it was a moral victory against the odds. A tactical draw. Oh, I hate seafaring. It's just so bleak. Yeah. Just it's such a shit way to live your life. Also, being injured on a, like, a ship in 1650.

But you've got to compare it to life in otherwise 1,500s in England, which even in London is grim, probably quite boring as well. I reckon it was worse in London. Worse than Crane's life in London at the moment? You haven't even got a door for someone to knock on and ask for money in the 1500s. It's worse. People are just walking into your house and asking for money. Just come in and take it.

It's a manning a groat at 2am, exactly. But there is a bit of a stereotype about people. from Plymouth, which it's quite a tough city. Yeah, it is. It does seem that these relentless attempts to overtake the city have failed. Maybe they are. It's a tough breed of people. Maybe that's, maybe it's, you know, this history is suggested that that stereotype is there for a reason.

You don't get that with Bath, do you? No. Yeah, exactly. Which, incidentally, that was not bombed in World War II. Bath, it's completely untouched. The Germans weren't going, should we bomb the most beautiful? The Germans said, let's hit Chester. York and Bath first.

Let's not worry about military infrastructure or anything that might actually affect the nation. And then we'll do Oxford and Cambridge and then. We'll get the really pretty places. Drop something on the design museum as well while we're here. Let's really... If we were trying to screw the tourist trade, maybe you'd hit Bar.

Edinburgh. You want to really get under the... Exactly. Amazing. It's just that image of people approaching on boats. I just find so scary. We talked about it, and I think it was our first air episode, about the idea of the Vikings coming on their long boats. It just scenes from history that rattled me. It's that, the idea of looking out and seeing whatever.

You're afraid of waking up with a cat on you. I'm not afraid. I'm just not desperate for it to happen. To wrap up, Josh, what's the most interesting thing you've learned? I didn't realize there was going to be a competition element. What are you taking away from this discussion of Devon? Do you know what? The thing I'll use most in all honesty will be Dartington Hall

because I do go past it and I will be able to drop that into conversation. conversation. Yeah. Whereas there's very few conversations where I'm going to go, the thing about Francis Drake is he was actually a slave trait. Like, how often am I going to bring that when I'm driving my family through Plymouth? May I suggest when you're driving to Dartington Hall that you also play my place name game? Oh yeah, of course.

Because that is hours of fun. The correct, incorrect game. Yeah, it's a great icebreaker at any party. Completely once you've explained the rules. Just remember, there isn't a village in wheels. called fwum. That is incorrect. So you're correct.

Congratulations. By which I mean commiseration. So thank you, Josh, for joining us. Thank you so much. I hope that was of some use to you. Do I now pass on the baton, like that Radio 2 show where they... Who do you think might like coming on here?

Chris Rock. Perfect. Good news for us. Chris Rock also has a podcast out about the history of Noel Edmonds and Mr. Blancet. so we can get him on to plug that. Thank you for joining us, Josh. Did you always say Chris?

You are incorrect, which means you're correct. Which means you're correct. Thank you for joining us, Josh. Our dear listeners, if you have anyone you'd like to see on the show, be it Chris Rock, well, just insert someone else. Do email us let us know and also suggest. Question for subjects you'd like us to touch upon once a month. We're going to do a subject suggested by a listener.

So do send them in. Anything you'd like to learn about, send them our way. Thank you, Josh. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. I think also the thing I'll take away is Chris Skull's bigotry towards the southwess. I'd say more suspicion. If this episode was on India and you had offered such a sweeping view of the people,

I'd like to see you recover your career from that. Are you saying Chris should be cancelled at this point? Is that what you're pushing is your final note? I don't believe anyone should be cancelled. But if they are, I think there's an obvious place to start. I'm happy to have been corrected about what a vibrant, interesting place there is. Yes, of course. And I look forward to driving through it and not laughing at the place names very soon.

Thank you very much for listening and thank you very much to Josh for coming on. Do download his podcast, The Museum of Pop Culture with Josh Woodacom because it's an absolute belter. and we'll be back with you very soon. Goodbye. Bye-bye. Oh, what a time is now on Patreon. You can get main feed episodes before everyone else. Add free. Plus access to our full archive of bonus content, two bonus episodes every month, early access to live show tickets, and access to the Oh, What a Time group chat.

Plus, if you become an Oh, Water Time, All-Timer, myself, Tom and Ellis will riff on your name to postulate where else in history you might have popped up. For all your options, you can go to Patreon.com, forward slash oh what a time