"Peter Wilkinson very kindly added further information about Ide House stating "My family were fortunate enough to be able to live in Ide House from 1952 to 1963 and then, thanks to the Lucas family, to move across the road to Holmbush for two years, a thatched cottage that was sadly destroyed by fire a few years ago. So as a boy I knew Ide House intimately and also our regular Sunday morning walk past the Bridge Inn and the Memorial Hall to St Ida’s Church. Our GP, Dr Stumbles, lived opposite the church and held his surgery in Mr Westcott’s house in The College, near the Huntsman Inn. Our local butcher, Mr Burnett, had a shop in Fore Street and his twin sons, Donald and Harold, went to Exeter School and subsequently had distinguished academic careers, commemorated in their obituaries on the Exonian (Exeter School) website. One, Dr Donald Burnett, published ‘A History of the People and Parish of Ide’ in 1992, a copy of which I have. I particularly remember the vicar of Ide in the 1950s , the Revd Richard Gregory, and his sons David and Adrian, who were about my age.I was interested to discover recently that Edward Lucas, a regular columnist for The Times, is son of the Oxford philosopher Arthur Lucas, who lived in Holmbush until the early 1960s when he moved to Oxford, enabling my family to move there temporarily when we left Ide House. Arthur Lucas campaigned tirelessly to prevent the building of the A30 link road through Ide but to no avail. The result, as you describe, has been like a Berlin Wall across a community that I loved to grow up in."
