Blimey! UK visitors to give talk Friday on sister-city ties to Barnstable
Mike and Gail Kemp from Barnstaple, England, are visiting their sister city, Barnstable, or twin towns as they say in Europe, looking for ways to forge even stronger historical bonds.
On July 4, 1991, Gail Kemp came to Barnstable in her role as mayoress (the female consort of a mayor) of Barnstaple with her father, who was mayor at the time, for the unveiling of the James Otis statue. Otis’s family lived in their English town in the County of Devon for 10 years before coming to America in 1624. She and her husband visited in 2018.
That’s when Mike Kemp made some strong connections with David Martin of the Marstons Mills Historical Society and Nancy Shoemaker of West Barnstable. The Marstons Mills and Barnstable historical societies invited the Kemps for this visit. An email correspondence between the “pond straddlers,” as Kemp calls them, began to share information about their towns’ histories, he said during an interview this week.
Mike Kemp has been doing intensive research since 2017 on the connections and has come up with some interesting facts he has shared in articles for historical books. Now he would like to expand the connections by getting teachers involved from both towns and turn his findings into ready-made history lesson plans for the local schools.
“This is a local level of sharing,” he said. Despite the fact that America broke its ties with England several hundred years ago, he said, “We’re not competing. We’re just sharing.”
The Kemps will relate more of their findings in “a lighthearted introduction to the naming of the two towns” on Friday night at the 1717 Meetinghouse in West Barnstable.
Mike Kemp also shared some emotional experiences he had when he came to New York City during Thanksgiving week just after 9/11 as a U.K. business development manager for a large travel agency. He and his colleagues came at the request of New York City tourism officials who were concerned about the large drop-off in tourism after that catastrophic day. The U.K. was experiencing the same reduction in tourists.
When Kemp attended the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, he described how he was moved by the warm welcome he got from Americans. He still choked up as he recalls that moment and also visiting Ground Zero.
Before the couple headed to a Marstons Mills Historical Society meeting, he shared a few fun facts from his research about the twin towns, ranging from the 1300s to the 20th century.
On their last visit during a Barnstable Harbor tour, the Kemps noticed the strong similarity of the Sandy Neck barrier beach to their region's barrier beach called Braunton Burrows, with sand dunes and marshlands.
“It looks exactly the same,” Mike Kemp said.
He added another largely unknown fact about his town’s barrier beach. It was there that 14,000 American G.I.s trained for the Omaha Beach landing on D-Day 1944, he said.
Then he skipped back to the 1620s when he said North Devon, Barnstaple’s district, was “a real hotbed of separatists,” where the vicar paid to have lecturers come to his church to talk about that movement.
“Not everyone in England was against the Revolution,” he said.
For one, it affected the merchant trade with America.
On a visit to Plimoth Patuxet Museums this week, the Kemps noticed a type of pottery that is the same kind Barnstaple had in the 1600s. Then he referred to another link from one of the several books he brought with him about the movement for women's suffrage in North Devon. Annie Kenney, one of the leaders of that movement, used the same phrase James Otis had used in the 1700s, “taxation without representation is tyranny.”
The Kemps are making the rounds on the Cape to learn all they can. They have visited Barnstable Town Hall where they saw photos of a visit by Barnstable officials and residents to their town during Barnstable’s 375th anniversary in 2014. He presented a book about Barnstaple, England, from 1640 to1670 to Town Councilor Matthew Levesque from the mayor of Barnstaple, and one to Sturgis Library. The Kemps attended a Nickerson family reunion in Chatham and a genealogical forum led by Martin.
Mike Kemp is writing a chapter for a book coming out about Cape Cod’s contribution to the American Revolution. He writes about what the common people in England thought about the Revolution, using satirical cartoons of the time since many people were illiterate.
The free talk on Friday is at 7 p.m. at 2049 Meetinghouse Way (Route 149), West Barnstable.
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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: An ocean apart, two towns share name and history
