A WARTIME Quonset hut, used as a temporary home for American soldiers before becoming a Devon village hall, is returning to Dunkeswell.

Umborne Hall is a green painted Quonset hut, a larger version of the Nissen Hut, invented in 1919 by Lt Col Peter Norman Nissen of the British Royal Engineers.

In 1941 the Americans built Quonsets, as housing for troops and their families at Dunkeswell aerodrome.

For more than 60 years, the building has stood on a junction of narrow country lanes in the hamlet of Umborne, in east Devon, providing the scattered community with its only meeting place.

It was the WI, later to disaffiliate itself from the national body and become the Umborne Ladies Social Club, which bought the corrugated hut and turned it into a community meeting place.

For many years the Umborne Institute trustees have been trying to raise the funds to replace the hall with something more suited to 21st century peacetime.

They have raised £41,000, most of it from community events in the hall, and attracted £27,000 in grants, which means a timber-framed building can be constructed on the hut site.

On Friday, February 26, the last event will be held in the hall, a soup and pudding evening for its supporters.

Then on Monday, March 8, subject to final approval from building regulation officials, the Nissen hut will come down and be transported back to Dunkeswell, where it will become a museum of wartime artefacts.

A fortnight later, building work will start on the site. It is expected that the new hall will be built and fitted out in 12 weeks.

But, the trustees still have to raise about £20,000, the difference between what they have now and the total cost of the new hall.

Chairman Rob Summers said the trustees had two choices: to accept the grants being offered through the Community Council of Devon, knowing that more money had to be found, or reject the offers that would probably never be made again.

He said: "We chose to go ahead. We felt we had to do something for local people even if we had to go to them again for more money."

So next month the trustees will call and visit all local families, asking them to buy Umborne bonds. They will be loans, to be repaid on demand or as soon as the trustees have raised enough money to clear them. Or people can make Gift Aid donations that will then be worth a further 25 per cent to the hall's rebuilding.

The trust continues to make grant applications to fund different parts of the project. For further details, visit www.umborne.org.