DENNIS without MENACE
Touring through North West Devon in my role as pub finder general for my wife’s team of bell ringers, I had plenty of time to read village gravestones before testing the ales and ciders. At Heanton I saw lots of memorials to services personnel from nearby Chivenor air and marines base, but I also spotted several members of the Dennis family in the civilian graveyard. This jogged my memory of a little booklet I had (but now can’t find) about the origins of John and Raymond Dennis, better known as the Dennis Brothers.
The booklet would have come in useful for filling in the Barnstaple area origins of the clan before the bicycling brothers ventured to Guildford in Surrey to run the Universal Athletics Stores in the 1890s. Naturally they built bicycles followed, in 1899, by a deDion-powered tricycle which landed them with a speeding fine. A
