Roger Conant 400: January 2026

Monday, January 5, 2026

AN INVITATION FROM THE MAYOR OF SALEM

Pictured above are Salem resident Karen Scalia and Cllr Tresidder with Mayor Pangallo’s letter. Photo: Anthea Downes

An article in the August/September 2025 edition of East Budleigh with Bicton Parish News revealed that the Mayor of Salem, Dominick Pangallo, would like to forge ‘an official connection in some way’ with East Budleigh.

This follows the visit of a delegation from the American city, organised by East Budleigh’s Roger Conant Club.

On Wednesday 25 June, 2025, a letter from Salem's Mayor was delivered to Cllr John Tresidder, Chairman of East Budleigh and Bicton Parish Council in the light of Salem’s forthcoming 400+ celebrations.

It was, wrote Mayor Pangallo, ‘an invitation for our two communities to become “Sister Cities”, united by the story of Roger Conant, who was born in your historic village in 1592 and became a pivotal figure in the founding of Salem in 1626’.

For the Mayor, the link between Salem and East Budleigh was ‘a connection that transcends centuries and continents’. He added: ‘The timing – again coinciding with our 400th anniversary – makes this opportunity particularly meaningful and poignant.’

The motto on Salem’s seal ‘Divitis Indiae, vsque ad vltimvm sinvm’ has been translated as ‘To the farthest port of the rich East’.

It reflects Salem's historical connection to maritime trade and its ambition to reach distant markets. You could say that Sir Walter Raleigh, also born in East Budleigh—with his quest for Eldorado—had similar ambitions.

Are you a descendant of Roger Conant or interested in his life and times. Join the Roger Conant Club! It's based in his birthplace of East Budleigh, Devon, UK. Membership is totally free. Just email: conantcourier@gmail.com with your name. You will receive regular copies of The Conant Courier. It's an online, seasonal newsletter of 30+ pages. Along with local history content the newsletter includes features and news from Salem and Beverly, the cities founded by Roger Conant in 1626.

CONANT AWARD FOR EAST BUDLEIGH SCHOOL

Drake's Church of England Primary School in East Budleigh, birthplace pf Sir Walter Raleigh and Roger Conant

On 22 July 2025, the Vicar of Budleigh, the Reverend Martin Jacques, presented book tokens to five children from Drake’s School in East Budleigh, chosen by their teachers as the first recipients of the annual Roger Conant award at their end of term leavers’ service.

A gift of £500 from the village’s Roger Conant Club to enable the awards was made earlier in the year to the Parent, Teacher and Friends Association (PTFA) of Drake’s School, pictured above, and the money will be awarded as prizes over the next few years to pupils who best represent the School’s values.

Drake’s Church of England Primary School, pictured here, is named not after the Tudor explorer Sir Francis Drake but after Joan Drake. She was the first wife of the father of Sir Walter Raleigh, Queen Elizabeth I’s favourite courtier who, like Roger Conant, was born in East Budleigh.

Sunday, January 4, 2026

A WW2 CLAIM FOR ROGER CONANT’S ‘DESCENDANTS’

While researching in university archives, Salem historian Benjamin Shallop came across this 1943 issue of the Sylvania Beam, a newsletter published by the Sylvania lighting business which opened factories in Salem in 1916 and 1936. The cover photo showing the famous statue of ‘SALEM’S FOUNDER’, with the caption ‘HIS DESCENDANTS WORK AND FIGHT’, suggested that some of Roger Conant’s descendants may have indeed worked for the company during World War Two.

Fifty employees of Sylvania lost their lives during the war according to official records. No actual Conant descendant has come forward to back up the claim of working for the company, but as a figure of speech it was an effective wartime message.

The company’s Massachusetts origins go back to 1901, when its founder Frank Augustus Poor, born in Salem in 1879, joined an electrical manufacturer in Middleton MA. He later bought out his partner and started the Bay State Lamp Company in Danvers MA. Recycling proved to be a profitable business: burned-out carbon filament lamps were cut open, refilled with new filaments and then resold.

The company grew as its founder was joined by more family members and switched to making new light bulbs as the Hygrade Lamp Company, expanding into the manufacturing of radio and television tubes. After several mergers, the Sylvania name has become one of the best known in today’s lighting business.

In 1942, as Sylvania Electric Products Inc., the company adopted the wartime slogan ‘Victory Is Our Business’. Some 13,700 men and women were employed in its twelve plants, including in Salem at Loring Street, to manufacture very special tubes in top secret conditions. These were used in what was known as the proximity or variable time (V-T) fuze, a sophisticated device which vastly increased the lethality of anti-aircraft guns and field artillery.

Research into the possibility of such a device had been carried out since the 1930s by Germany and Japan as well as Britain and the U.S., but only with the latter’s entry into the war did effective collaboration between British and American scientists begin to yield results.

The new technology was based on a radar-like electronic mechanism fitted into an artillery shell moving at an initial speed of 2,600 feet per second. The mechanism needed to be capable of detonating seven pounds of high explosive at the moment the shell came near an enemy aircraft travelling at 300 miles per hour.

The device proved its worth on 5 January 1943 when used in shells fired by the USS Helena’s 5-inch guns against Japanese dive bombers off Guadalcanal in the South Pacific. According to the U.S. Navy, as reported in a 1951 issue of the Sylvania Beam, the V-T fuze was the second most effective weapon of World War Two.