We have to thank Roy Hewitt again this
month for another of his memorials - this time to Ernest Edmund
Stentiford. It is impossible to read the story of how Ernest lost his life
without remembering Reg Norton's account in the last Issue of how this
man's son died. When you see history repeating itself, it is very difficult for a lay-person to
understand why the Admiralty was so slow to learn lessons and make constructional and
tactical changes which could have saved lives in the Second World War.
Mary and Harriet Stentiford were the daughters of William
Stentiford, a boot and shoe maker in Newton Abbot whose ancestry can be traced back to
the Coleridge days. We wrote about William's father, Richard Stentiford
of Dawlish, in Issue 17. Like so many women in the past, Mary and
Harriet lived hard lives in obscurity but for them, working in their
luxury hotel in Torquay, perhaps there was a chance to enjoy better living
conditions than many of their contemporaries experienced.
