Malcolm Batten, 94, is getting a day at the Devon County Show that he is unlikely to forget. The Saltash man, who has attended the event around 80 times in his life, will be introduced to Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Edinburgh on Thursday, May 21, then receive a bespoke cake made in the shape of his RAF jeep.
For Batten, the honour lands at a show he has known since childhood. He first remembers going as a boy living on a farm in Moretonhampstead, before the Devon County Show was halted during the Second World War and resumed in 1947. Even then, he was taken by the spectacle. He recalled being entranced by the towering shire horses, the lowing dairy cattle and the arrival in a Morris 10 with black and red leather seats, adding: “I can still smell them!”
His link to the show has lasted through the decades because it has always offered both memory and machinery. Batten has long enjoyed seeing vintage tractors and farm equipment alongside the latest agricultural technology, and his own RAF jeep sits at the centre of that story. He rebuilt it himself using skills he learned as a mechanic in the RAF, keeps it in his garage and still drives it around his yard.
That personal history is why his appearance this year matters beyond the ceremony. Organisers describe his attendance as part of the Devon County Show’s living history, a link between the event’s past and present that will be visible when he takes a celebratory lap of honour around the main ring in a vintage tractor. The show runs from Thursday to Sunday, May 21 to 23, but Batten’s visit on Thursday gives the opening day a distinctly human focus.
The wartime pause and 1947 restart are part of the backdrop, but Batten’s story shows how a county show can become something more durable than an annual fair. It can become a family marker, a working archive and, in his case, a place where a child’s first amazement has lasted nearly a century. On Thursday, that long memory meets the present in front of the Duchess, the crowd and the jeep he rebuilt with his own hands.
