39. A memorial to the Uphams of Bicton

 

 

It’s widely known that the Mayflower’s passengers were not the first or the only Europeans to emigrate to America in 1620 in search of a new life, though they are the best known. Thanks to the efforts of institutions like the Virginia Company of London many English settlers had decided that their future lay in the New World. 

According to a Jamestown 350^th Anniversary booklet published at Williamsburg VA in 1957, by the summer of 1622 the Council for New England announced that over 3,500 people had migrated to Virginia since the spring of 1619. The so-called Great Migration between 1620 and 1640 saw roughly 80,000 people leave England for America.

For those who know East Budleigh it is pretty extraordinary that New World pioneers Raleigh and Conant came from the same village, though Raleigh, of course, never set foot in North America.   

But Roger Conant and his brother Christopher were not the only emigrants to the New World to be born in this little corner of East Devon. Back in March 2020 I mentioned the Upham family who lived in the neighbouring hamlet of Bicton.  You can read about them at https://conant400.blogspot.com/2020/03/weymouth-new-plymouth.html

 

 

So I was intrigued to see the above memorial plaque telling us of the family’s deep local roots. It’s on the churchyard wall next to the ancient and atmospheric ruin of St Mary’s Old Church at Bicton, pictured above. You can get to it only through Bicton Park Botanical Gardens, for which there is an admission charge. A visit to the Gardens, with their magnificent collection of trees and plants, makes a great day out.

But why no mention on the plaque of the illustrious Deacon John Upham who led his family across the Atlantic in 1635 and, like Roger Conant, founded a city in Massachusetts?   

 

 

The Upham name is still known in Bicton. Nearby, on Woodbury Common, is a woodland known as Upham’s Plantation. And in the pretty graveyard across the lane from St Mary’s Church – which you can visit free of charge – I came across this gravestone for ‘a loving wife and mother’, Doris Upham who died on 22 May 1999, aged only 73.  I searched for a meaning of TAMAM, the last word on the gravestone, but could find only that it means ‘complete’ in Turkish.