Ted Dixon
 | Ted Birkett Dixon has lived in Elburton near Plymouth all his life and has always had a passion for Dartmoor, walking and cycling there and exploring its archaeology. He has vivid memories of the china clay industry on the moor before the Second World War: |
Listen
to Ted Dixon's memories of the Counting
House 
(42Kb - Media Help)
"I can remember when that was the accounts office of a mine that was working. The opposite side of the road there was a field and the china clay used to come down a pipe into that field, fill it up to about three foot depth, then the sun dried it off, no steam heating then, dried off until it was pretty firm then the men would come along and pick it up like peat, they would do this into wheelbarrows, came up on a slope up to the top of the hedge, onto a flat piece which is still there today and deposit it in the horse and carts". |  |
Listen
to Ted Dixon's memories of the China
Clay Railway (39Kb - Media Help)
As a young man Ted often rode his father’s motorbike up to the moors, but as a boy his main mode of transport was his bicycle, here he recalls one of his earliest memories:
 | "Must be ’36 ’37, something like that, cycling to school, everybody cycled those days, and I used to stop and look at the trains on the way, steam trains you know, ‘Must see the Cornish Rivera dinner time’ and things like that. That was the days when the china clay railway used to run, with the horses pulling trucks of china clay down from Lee Moor, they had to cross the main Exeter road; a man with a red flag stopped the traffic. There was about a dozen or so trains a day of these horses". |
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Page updated 20 October 2005
