Christopher Mayers

Christopher Mayers (“Kit”) lived in Instow from 1991 to 2010, and was part of the team which authored the millennium book Instow—A History.

He spent his early life in Birmingham, the child of a drainage engineer and Cambridge educated mother, who both were descended from entrepreneurial business families. During the war they were initially evacuated but returned to Solihull and the garden air raid shelter, which rattled with the bombs falling on Birmingham. Kit was brought up to be self sufficient and self propelled—his mother thought the Nazis could invade at any time.

When peace arrived he was sent away to boarding school in Dorset, tolerating the new regime by building shelters in the woods and shooting rabbits for the local butchers, to earn money to pay for his Woodbines. He became a sculptor, a carpenter, a proficient sportsman, and a good student in the sciences and arts.

In 1951 he did his national service in the Royal Army Service Corps as a lieutenant in charge of a fleet of trucks. They helped with the floods on the east coast, but he spent most of his time rescuing and repairing when various trucks ended in crashes.

He took various holidays on sailing boats on …