We often get enquiries in the Exmoor Society Archive from people conducting their own research into local history. One such enquiry recently was for any information we might have on the Exmoor Mounted Home Guard. The enquirer had a relative who had served in the Exmoor Mounties.
Our archive has only limited material from before the establishment of the Exmoor Society in the 1950s. Still, we managed to find some correspondence between former Exmoor Society President Victor Bonham-Carter and Antony Dent, the author of the Society microstudy ‘The Pure Bred Exmoor Pony’. Bonham-Carter was proposing an appendix to be added about the horse mounted Exmoor Home Guard squadron. Although they did not use Exmoor ponies, Bonham-Carter thought this would still be of interest to readers.
From there we found a section on the Exmoor Mounties in Jack Hurley’s Exmoor Society microstudy ‘Exmoor In War Time, 1939-1945’ and a few pages in Paddy King-Frett’s biography ‘Staghunter, The Remarkable Story of Ernest Bawden’.
All these books and pamphlets are available in the Archive and Library.
Exmoor may possibly have had two sets of mounted home guards, one based around Dulverton and another around Minehead and the Holnicote estate.
Our sources have a few interesting stories about the mounties, but we will leave those to our original enquirer to tell.
If anyone reading this has any information about or memories of the Exmoor Mounties, we would be very interested to hear from them.
