Category Archives: Heathercombe Brake School

Heathercombe Brake School Photographs

For the fainthearted . . .

There are 679 (or thereabouts) photographs here. Some of them are duplicates and some of them are in random order.

Paul Pope sent me a zip file in 2014 and I have been meaning to sort and upload them ever since. To have digitized these from prints to computer files must have taken many, many hours.

They are nearly all of Heatree boys, with a few from Heathlands, and I would guess that they stretch from the early-60s to the late-70s.

If you click on a photograph, it will enlarge. …

School friends

For the fainthearted . . .

A friend from school days shared a picture on Facebook, a van bearing the logo, “HBS Pharmacy.” He added a note that our school’s closure in 1989 must have been due to diversification. “HBS” for us meant “Heathercombe Brake School,” a strange educational institution that existed in Devon from the 1950s until the 1980s. It comprised two small boarding schools with satellite children’s homes. In the seaside town of Teignmouth there was a primary school for girls and boys, together with facilities for secondary aged girls. Boys of secondary school …

Delicate thoughts

For the fainthearted . . .

Suffering from severe asthma when fourteen years old, Somerset County Council’s education department deemed it appropriate that I be sent to a special school in Devon. Heathercombe Brake School was split into two sites, the junior and girls’ school occupied a lovely location above the town of Teignmouth; the boys’ school was in a forbidding grey building in the heart of Dartmoor. Neither school was large, there were just eighty pupils at the boys’ school when it was at is peak, but there were also a number of children’s homes …