Plymouth-born composer Ron Goodwin is best remembered for his rousing film scores. Probably his best known work was his music for the movie, Battle of Britain.

Yet this work was surrounded in controversy. Initially the film's makers persuaded Sir William Walton to provide the score - but it wasn't what the producers were after.

So they belatedly asked Ron Goodwin to write a replacement score. In the end, most of the music to the film - including the Battle of Britain theme - was Goodwin's, and only a small section was Walton's.

Other Goodwin film scores include 633 Squadron, Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy, Where Eagles Dare, Village of the Damned, Monte Carlo or Bust, and Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines.

Goodwin - who was born in 1925 - entered the music industry during the war years, in 1943. He wrote arrangements for many leading orchestras, including Ted Heath and the BBC Dance Orchestra. In 1950 he joined EMI Records as musical director for record producer George Martin.

In the years which followed, he worked with some of the biggest stars of the day - including Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren. He also composed scores of concert pieces, among them the Drake 400 Suite, which was commissioned to mark Sir Francis Drake's return to Plymouth. His first film scores were in the late '50s, and in 1960, he started to produce scores for MGM's British studios.

Goodwin received gold discs for million selling albums, and he was presented with three Ivor Novello Awards - the last of which was a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994. During the '70s, '80s and '90s, Goodwin toured the world as a conductor performing a mixture of classic works and popular hits. He died in 2003 at his home in Berkshire at the age of 77.

John Lethbridge had a lot of mouths to feed. It's said he had 17 children - so he needed to stumble onto a good earner.

It was lucky for him that he was an inventor with real flare. In 1715, he came up trumps with the first underwater diving machine. Lethbridge lived in Newton Abbot and he conducted trial runs in his garden pond. The machine was an underwater oak cylinder that was surface-supplied with compressed air.

The diving barrel - which had a glass section so he could see out - was 6ft long, and he would lie in it on his stomach. There were two holes to stick his arms out, and oiled leather cuffs around the upper arms formed an almost water proof seal. During trials, he found he could stay 12 fathoms underwater for 30 minutes at a time. He would then come to the surface and have oxygen pumped into the barrel by two bellows - so he could go back down again.

Lethbridge came up with his invention because he worked as a salvor for the East India Company. During his first salvage operation using the machine, he recovered 25 chests of silver and 65 cannons! There is a section on Lethbridge's work in Newton Abbot museum.

What is it about Torbay and tennis players? Well, actually, it's not a co-incidence that the resort has created most of the few stars Britain has had in the past few decades.