On this day in Wembury — 13 June 1947

The Western Morning News announced that an emergency meeting of Wembury Parish Council had been called for the following Tuesday. Top of the agenda was a meeting with Lieut.-Col. R. Bastard, representing the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE), to discuss naval developments at Wembury Point and their impact on public footpaths.

The background was the Royal Navy’s increasing use of Wembury Point in the 1940s. During the war the headland had been fortified, and by 1940 it became the site of HMS Cambridge, a naval gunnery training school. By 1947 the Admiralty was planning to formalise and expand the site for long-term training use. This raised immediate concerns locally:

• Long-established public rights of way across Wembury Point faced closure or diversion.

• The CPRE, newly founded in 1926, stepped in to argue that rural and coastal access should not be permanently sacrificed to military development.

• The Parish Council convened urgently to consider how to balance national defence with preserving Wembury’s open coast and footpath network.

This meeting foreshadowed decades of tension between the Navy’s use of the Point and the community’s desire to maintain access to the clifftop paths. The base eventually dominated the headland until its closure in 2001, after which the National Trust restored public access and removed the military buildings.

(Source: Western Morning News, 13 June 1947 — “Wembury Emergency” notice.)