On This Day in Wembury — 12 October 1937
Wembury Musicians Go Nationwide
Three young men who had been amusing themselves by playing dance music at Wembury Point found themselves performing to hundreds of thousands of listeners when they appeared on the Carroll Levis Amateur Hour on the BBC Regional Programme.
The group, calling themselves the Hill-Billy Trio, consisted of Zeke Winter (leader and violinist), Bert Bennett (accordion), both from Wembury, and Don Pearsall (saxophone and clarinet), from Plymouth. They had been playing for fun when the manager of a Wembury holiday camp invited them to join the dance band. Carroll Levis heard them during a visit to Plymouth and quickly signed them up.
Their broadcast included "One, Two, Buckle My Shoe" and their own arrangement of "Tiger Rag." Though nervous at first, they said the warmth of the studio audience helped them perform with confidence.
The trio were soon contracted for a nationwide tour, with appearances in Portsmouth, Brighton, Newcastle, Scotland, and London, before returning home for Christmas.
This moment illustrates how Wembury’s social life in the interwar years was tied not only to its farms and fishing but also to its holiday camps and growing leisure industry. For Bennett and Winter, village evenings spent making music by the sea suddenly led to national attention—a reminder that even small, rural communities could be touched by the new power of radio and popular entertainment.
Source: Western Morning News, 12 October 1937