Place:St. Budeaux, Devon, England

this article is a condensation of one in Wikipedia St. Budeaux (#20 on map) is an area and ward in the northwest of Plymouth in the English county of Devon. [edit] Original settlement The name St. Budeaux comes from Saint Budoc, the Bishop of Dol in Brittany. Around 480, Budoc is said to have founded a settlement and built a small church at this location in Devon. The church eventually gave way to a permanent stone one, dedicated to Saint Budoc, which was erected shortly before the Norman conquest of England. The village is documented in the 1086 Domesday Book of William the Conqueror. Known as "Bucheside", it was valued at 30 shillings (around six times the amount of neighbouring manors). Over the course of the next few hundred years, Bucheside became "Bodekishide", "Budeokshed", and even "Bottockishide" and "Butshead", the latter form being recorded on the Trevill monuments in the church. The modern name, St Budeaux, is itself a Frenchified "elegant" form. [edit] 15th to 18th centuries [edit] The Parish Church of St Budeaux St. Budeaux became a separate parish in 1482 by the decision of the Bishop of Exeter. (It had previously been a chapelry in the parish of Plymouth St. Andrew.) During the early Tudor period, demand grew for a larger church, which was completed in 1563. The church was described in 1804 as "a simple edifice, and, though devoid of architectural embellishment, possesses much picturesque beauty." On 4 July 1569, Sir Francis Drake married local woman Mary Newman (Lady Drake was buried there in 1582).

During the English Civil War, Plymouth and its surrounding villages (including St Budeaux) swore an oath to die for the Parliamentarian cause. They were besieged by the Royalist Cornwall just across the water, which took control of St Budeaux and used the church as a garrison. The church was virtually destroyed by the war's end and was not restored until 1655.

19th century

In 1805, St. Budeaux's location to the north of Devonport led to the construction of a Gunpowder Works alongside Kinterbury Creek for the purpose of restoring damp or damaged gunpowder offloaded from ships. This hazardous process involved unpacking the powder from its barrels, assessing and sieving it, and then "restoving" it (i.e. drying the damp powder in specialized ovens) after which it would be stored in a magazine once more ready for use. At the time the main magazine complex for Plymouth was at Keyham, but when land there was required for development of the Dockyard a new location was needed; so in 1852, the Board of Ordnance opened a new depot alongside the Works at St. Budeaux; named Bull Point, it could accommodate up to 40,000 barrels of powder. RNAD Bull Point closed in 2009 but remains in Ministry of Defence ownership; the site includes some 48 listed buildings.

In 1860, the War Department purchased a sizable amount of land in the area due to Prime Minister Lord Palmerston's fear of the French, then ruled by Napoleon III. His fear was exaggerated, and the line of military forts encircling Plymouth later became known as "Palmerston's Follies." However, the upheaval contributed to an increase in the local population and a subsequent change in the area's character. Agaton Fort (see Wikipedia) was only 480 yards (440 m) to the north of St Budeaux and was completed in 1871.

In the 1890s, the parish became a self-contained village with significant development in Lower St Budeaux. Much of the development was incited by General John Trelawney, formerly John Jago, who inherited a great deal of St Budeaux's land from his uncle in 1883. In 1890, the village was already growing due to the construction of the Royal Albert Bridge and the improvement of area roads, as well as a new London and South Western Railway station, St Budeaux Victoria Road. There was also a Great Western Railway station at Ferry Road. In the following decade, Trelawney built houses and roads and sold to Joseph Stribling the land that would become the Trelawny Hotel in 1895. This was the first building in St. Budeaux to be lit by electricity. Many new shops also opened in the area during the same time period.

In 1899, the town of St. Budeaux merged with the town of Devonport, resulting in many improvements to local roads and communications availability. Improvements included the construction of a new railway bridge enabling the Devonport and District Tramway Company to provide efficient service from Devonport, through St Budeaux, to Saltash Passage, linking Plymouth to Cornwall.

20th century

In 1918, following World War I, St. Budeaux and the other local towns and villages were amalgamated into the city of Plymouth. Amid the heavy demolition and construction of this period, six more churches were built in the parish. Many homes in the region were bombed during World War II, and subsequent rebuilding resulted in a housing explosion.

A small portion of the original civil parish of St. Budeaux stayed outside Devonport in the 19th century and out of Plymouth in the mergers of the early 20th century and retained the name of St. Budeaux. This area was finally merged into Plymouth in 1951.

Registration Districts

• Plympton St. Mary Registration District (1837-1914)

• Plympton Registration District (1936-1951)

and then became part of Plymouth

Research Tips

(revised Jul 2021)

• Ordnance Survey Map of Devonshire North and Devonshire South are large-scale maps covering the whole of Devon between them. They show the parish boundaries when Rural Districts were still in existence and before the mergers of parishes that took place in 1935 and 1974. When expanded the maps can show many of the small villages and hamlets inside the parishes. These maps are now downloadable for personal use but they can take up a lot of computer memory.
• GENUKI has a selection of maps showing the boundaries of parishes in the 19th century. The contribution from "Know Your Place" on Devon is a huge website yet to be discovered in detail by this contributor.

• Devon has three repositories for hands-on investigation of county records. Each has a website which holds their catalog of registers and other documents.

• the Devon Heritage Centre at Exeter
• the Northern Record Office at Barnstaple
• the Plymouth and West Devon Record Office at Plymouth which is independent of the other two.

• There is, however, a proviso regarding early records for Devon. Exeter was badly hit in a "blitz" during World War II and the City Library, which then held the county archives, was burnt out. About a million books and historic documents went up in smoke. While equivalent records--particularly wills--are quite easy to come by for other English counties, some records for Devon and surrounding counties do not exist.

• Devon Family History Society Mailing address: PO Box 9, Exeter, EX2 6YP, United Kingdom. The society has branches in various parts of the county. It is the largest Family History Society in the United Kingdom. The website has a handy guide to each of the parishes in the county and publishes the registers for each of the Devon dioceses on CDs.

• This is the home page to the GENUKI Devon website. It has been updated since 2015 and includes a lot of useful information on each parish.
• Devon has a Online Parish Clerk (OPC) Project which can be reached through GENUKI. Only about half of the parishes have a volunteer contributing local data. For more information, consult the website, especially the list at the bottom of the homepage.

• The FamilySearch Wiki provides a similar information service to GENUKI. An index of parishes leads to notes and references for each parish.

• Brett Langston's list of Devon Registration Districts and parishes within each registration district from 1837 to the present can indicate where to find details of civil registration entries since the process began in England.

• Magna Britannia, Volume 6 by Daniel Lysons and Samuel Lysons. A general and parochial history of the county. Originally published by T Cadell and W Davies, London, 1822, and placed online by British History Online. This is a volume of more than 500 pages of the history of Devon, parish by parish. It is 100 years older than the Victoria County Histories available for some other counties, but equally thorough in its coverage. Contains information that may have been swept under the carpet in more modern works.

• There is a cornucopia of county resources at Devon Heritage. Topics are: Architecture, Census, Devon County, the Devonshire Regiment, Directory Listings, Education, Genealogy, History, Industry, Parish Records, People, Places, Transportation, War Memorials. There are fascinating resources you would never guess that existed from those topic titles. (NOTE: There may be problems reaching this site. One popular browser provider has put a block on it. This may be temporary, or it may be its similarity in name to the Devon Heritage Centre at Exeter.)
• Users studying the Plymouth area are recommended to check the GENUKI page for Plymouth which is lengthy but recently updated (summer 2015). Two entries under the heading "Genealogy" are:

• Donald Curkeet's Plymouth Devonshire and Surrounding Parishes for Family Genealogy website provides church and churhyard photographs, and information, in some cases including parish register name indexes, for a number of Plymouth area parishes. He provided a very useful sketchmap.
• Plymouth is one of the growing number of places for which the Devon Heritage website provides census or parish register transcriptions, articles, and/or illustrations, etc. (For Plymouth they supply lists on specific events or groups of people at varying dates.)

• The Plymouth Museums Art Galleries website describes the 'Of the Parish' headstone and memorial indexing and photography project with explanations of how to search for names in various indexes provided by a number of local groups. The remains in many of the early cemeteries within Plymouth were transferred to the cemetery in Egg Buckland or Eggbuckland after World War II. Other sections of this website might also be of interest to genealogists searching for ancestors in the Plymouth area.

• Plymouth Data (now archived on the WayBack Machine) gives a detailed account of St. Budeaux from 1800 through its amalagamation into Plymouth.