59 2020Marking Two Anniversaries in Dartmouth’s History BY GAIL HAM FROM DARTMOUTH HISTORY RESEARCH GROUP


This summer, had it not been for Covid-19, Dartmouth would have marked two significant anniversaries – 400 years since the visit in 1620 of the Mayflower and Speedwell, carrying the Pilgrim Fathers to America; and 75 years since the end of the Second World War.


R


esearching our forthcoming book on Dartmouth in the Second World War, I recently


came across an interesting connection between these two events, separated by over three hundred years. On July 7th


1945,


in a ceremony at Slapton Sands, Lieutenant General John C H Lee, US Army, unveiled the granite memorial which remains there today, in gratitude to the people of the South Hams “who generously left their homes and their lands” to enable preparations and training for the D-day landings. Addressing the “dear people of Devon”, General Lee linked together the Pilgrim Fathers, Devon, and the Normandy invasion, as the Western Morning News reported:


“The people of Devon and America had been together as long as there had been a nation on the other side of the Atlantic. The Pilgrim Fathers settled in the United States, and now Americans had come the long way back to this other God’s country … When the American soldiers landed on Utah beach on ‘D’ Day they found the coast so similar to the sands of Slapton that they had the feeling they were fighting for the Devon they had learned to love …”


Similar sentiments were evoked


by Mayflower II, built in Brixham ten or so years later. As some readers may remember, Mayflower II called into Dartmouth in April


1957 on her way to America and many people came to see her. The Sphere newspaper reported that she had been gifted “as a tangible symbol of the common heritage of the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race … all free men know that their future hangs on the continued friendship between this country and the United States of America”.


“WHEN THE AMERICAN


SOLDIERS LANDED ON UTAH BEACH ON ‘D’ DAY .... THEY


HAD THE FEELING THEY WERE FIGHTING FOR THE DEVON THEY HAD LEARNED TO LOVE “


When in 1620 the Mayflower and Speedwell interrupted their journey to America to repair the leaking Speedwell in Dartmouth, no-one in the town, it seems, considered the visit noteworthy; as far as we know, no local contemporary record of it has survived. Even in America the Mayflower’s arrival was not marked as an event of wider significance until an annual commemoration called Forefathers’ Day began in 1769. Plymouth Plantation took on a central role in the founding narrative of the United States after a speech at the bicentennial Forefathers’ Day in 1820 by a New England politician, Daniel Webster, who used the occasion for contemporary political purposes.


Webster attacked the southern states for maintaining the institution of slavery; he championed the Pilgrims as living “under a condition of comparative equality”, untouched by slavery’s terrible divisions. Further, he distinguished Plymouth from other settlements as inspired not by commercial or colonial motives, but by “the divine light of the Christian religion”. The Plymouth Plantation, he argued, was the true origin of the United States, an interpretation which quickly gained ground during what became known as the “Pilgrim Century”.


There is no sign that Dartmouth


noticed its connections with the Mayflower any more in 1820 than in 1620. Then things began to change. In 1855, the original


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