2025 03Nympton News Autumn final with bleed - Flipbook - Page 4
Roland Sanders’ Service of Thanksgiving at St James
Church on 21st July was - as one might have expected packed to the rafters, and very much a celebration of his
contribution to village life over many years. The eulogy was
delivered by his son Sam.
He’ll be very sorry to have missed this.
He was always a big fan of both funerals and any larger social gathering
that afforded him the opportunity to take centre stage. So, this would
have ticked both of those boxes very nicely.
He preferred a funeral to a christening or
a wedding, orstly because there was no
obligation to buy a gift, secondly,
because of the likelihood of half-pasties
in the village hall afterwards and thirdly
because there was always an outside
chance of getting a new pair of shoes
into the bargain. My father had the very
rare talent of being able to nex his shoe
size from anywhere between an 8 to a 12
depending on who it was who9d just
passed away.
All joking aside however, the strangest
part of Dad9s passing is that this will probably be the orst major
social event in Kingsnympton in nearly half a century where he hasn9t had
a prominent speaking part 3 a reality that will leave us all a little poorer.
With the passing of his brother, Bryant (also late of
this parish) in 2022, Dad became one of a
vanishingly small cast of post-war Kingsnymptonians
who provided a living connection and oral link to a
world gone by. An age when indoor sanitation was
by no means a given, when the bar of the Grove Inn
was t9other way round, and the Grove wasn9t even
called the Grove. When the village boasted as many
as eight shops and small businesses including the
obligatory smithy, when charabancs would be hired
for the annual bellringers9 outing, and when Exeter
felt about as distant and exotic as London would today. And it was this
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