Some of Cornwall's Greats.
Here is an extract from my Great Uncle J.C. Trewin's book "Up from the Lizard".
I found his book on my Gran's book shelf and after doing some research found out he's a very inspiring relation.
His father John (1858-1932) was a master Cornish fisherman from Gorran Haven and his mother Annie (1865-1942) was a Cornish woman from St-Anthony-in-Meneage. Born in Plymouth, Devon in 1908, he retreated back to his parent's Cornish roots, spending much of his childhood in a cottage near the Lizard head, known as Kynance Bay, "It's western windows look across the Lizard Coast to Kynance Cove (where the armada was sighted), and in the distance beyond Mount's Bay, to the line of the West Penwith Coast."
Educated at Plymouth College, Trewin joined the Western Independent as a cub reporter in 1926. In 1932, he moved to London and joined the Morning Post, transferring to The Observer in 1937, he served as drama critic on the paper for over sixty years. Among his fifty books are autobiographies of various actors from British theatre and cinema, after watching 1,500 Shakespearean plays he compiled a book, Going to Shakespeare, an introduction to this incredible world of theatre. On the 4th October 1938 he married the love of his life, Wendy Monk, they were "an inseparable couple, whose shared interests also bore fruit in literary collaboration" they had two sons. Since 2000, an award has been given by the Critics' Circle for the best Shakespearean performance of the Year: "The John And Wendy Trewin Award For Best Shakespearian Performance".
In 1981, he was awarded the O.B.E for services to Dramatic criticism and passed away in 1990, his son Ion Trewin followed his admired parents footsteps in theatre from an early age. Having been taken by his mum and dad to see Shakespeare from the age of five. He did not go to university, being drawn into the captivating clutch of journalism. At the age of 17 he was taken on by the Plymouth-based Independent and South Devon Times. There he learned the importance of contacts: “The more people you knew, the better stories you got.” Hard working and diligent, Ion Trewin's "network of contacts was to become unrivalled in the literary world."(Guardian) Among his admirable body of lifetime's work, was the responsibility of commissioning Schindler's Ark which sold more than a million copies, it also won the Man Booker prize in 1982. 9 years later it was filmed under Steven Spielberg’s direction as Schindler's List. As well as working for the Sunday Telegraph, The Times and becoming director of well known publishing company Hodder and Stoughton, Ion Trewin's own work as an author has been well received, with his autobiographies like his father before him, based on engaging and well known figures. He became the director of the Man Booker Prize in 2008, but passed on recently, in April 2015, aged 71.
I found his book on my Gran's book shelf and after doing some research found out he's a very inspiring relation.
His father John (1858-1932) was a master Cornish fisherman from Gorran Haven and his mother Annie (1865-1942) was a Cornish woman from St-Anthony-in-Meneage. Born in Plymouth, Devon in 1908, he retreated back to his parent's Cornish roots, spending much of his childhood in a cottage near the Lizard head, known as Kynance Bay, "It's western windows look across the Lizard Coast to Kynance Cove (where the armada was sighted), and in the distance beyond Mount's Bay, to the line of the West Penwith Coast."
Educated at Plymouth College, Trewin joined the Western Independent as a cub reporter in 1926. In 1932, he moved to London and joined the Morning Post, transferring to The Observer in 1937, he served as drama critic on the paper for over sixty years. Among his fifty books are autobiographies of various actors from British theatre and cinema, after watching 1,500 Shakespearean plays he compiled a book, Going to Shakespeare, an introduction to this incredible world of theatre. On the 4th October 1938 he married the love of his life, Wendy Monk, they were "an inseparable couple, whose shared interests also bore fruit in literary collaboration" they had two sons. Since 2000, an award has been given by the Critics' Circle for the best Shakespearean performance of the Year: "The John And Wendy Trewin Award For Best Shakespearian Performance".
In 1981, he was awarded the O.B.E for services to Dramatic criticism and passed away in 1990, his son Ion Trewin followed his admired parents footsteps in theatre from an early age. Having been taken by his mum and dad to see Shakespeare from the age of five. He did not go to university, being drawn into the captivating clutch of journalism. At the age of 17 he was taken on by the Plymouth-based Independent and South Devon Times. There he learned the importance of contacts: “The more people you knew, the better stories you got.” Hard working and diligent, Ion Trewin's "network of contacts was to become unrivalled in the literary world."(Guardian) Among his admirable body of lifetime's work, was the responsibility of commissioning Schindler's Ark which sold more than a million copies, it also won the Man Booker prize in 1982. 9 years later it was filmed under Steven Spielberg’s direction as Schindler's List. As well as working for the Sunday Telegraph, The Times and becoming director of well known publishing company Hodder and Stoughton, Ion Trewin's own work as an author has been well received, with his autobiographies like his father before him, based on engaging and well known figures. He became the director of the Man Booker Prize in 2008, but passed on recently, in April 2015, aged 71.
Helston Railway Station, taken May 1961
As a West country maid myself, it is very compelling and inspiring to see how my distant family have had strong prominence in the literary world.
Below, is my Great Uncle's account of his journey from horse and cart to the Lizard, where I live! He has just left the old train station, this would have been around 1920's. The branch line used to run as far as Helston, but was closed in 1962 (shortly after this picture was taken).
"...We have jarred to a stop, it is time to go. Out then quickly, under the oil lamps -burning tonight a smoky primrose- through the station yard, warm with many voices, and into the jingle, the pony-trap where Jim waits to flick his whip and send us swinging into the furry dark. Helston, metropolis of Meneage, with its tilted cross of lights and the gurgle and lapse of water in the street runnels, dims behind us. We are heading towards the South, out by Culdrose along the last ribbon of the Cornish road that spans the peninsula of the Lizard. At its high end you must either return the same way or take a high dive to the foam, somewhere around the Stags. To be "stagged" is to be trapped, and in the past the Lizard reefs have bitterly earned their name.
There is a nip in the Spring night. At Cury Cross lanes a sneaping wind whistles from the east above the acres of Goonhilly, above Leech Pool and Dry Tree, furze and stone, heather and tumuli, the dark barrens of the south.
Presently we are under the boughs in the sudden vale of Bochym; then out again under the plateau and trotting mile by mile until a sparse twinkle of windows ahead of us speaks of Lizard Town. The lights draw us on; far more, a pulsing flash and glow in the southern sky. "What says the Lizard, Lifting high his shining spear...?"
On still, at a brisk pace, towards the village, we swish through the straggle of cottages and by Mitchell's serpentine shed ( a glow in it's window and the crisp churring of the wheel within); then up once more and sharp right, with the salt air lapping us, towards the red gates beyond Penmenner, the fuscias' sway, the pounded gravel, the soft feathering of the plumed tamarisk, and at last lamplight filling an open door. Eastward, the beam of the Lizard licks the sky like a glittering tongue; before us, almost dead south, the land - hidden to-night - falls to Old Lizard Head and to a vast arc of sea. Flashes of white and red that prick the far south-west are the eyes of the Wolf Rock off Land's End. About us we hear the tide's incessant wash and drag. Home again, this is way down South, eleven miles beyond Helston. Plymouth (and school) are in another planet, certainly an infinite distance up the Great Western rail, past the divide of the Tamar, and before this Brunel only knows how many viaducts and high-flung bridges along the stretched spine of Cornwall."
Below, is my Great Uncle's account of his journey from horse and cart to the Lizard, where I live! He has just left the old train station, this would have been around 1920's. The branch line used to run as far as Helston, but was closed in 1962 (shortly after this picture was taken).
"...We have jarred to a stop, it is time to go. Out then quickly, under the oil lamps -burning tonight a smoky primrose- through the station yard, warm with many voices, and into the jingle, the pony-trap where Jim waits to flick his whip and send us swinging into the furry dark. Helston, metropolis of Meneage, with its tilted cross of lights and the gurgle and lapse of water in the street runnels, dims behind us. We are heading towards the South, out by Culdrose along the last ribbon of the Cornish road that spans the peninsula of the Lizard. At its high end you must either return the same way or take a high dive to the foam, somewhere around the Stags. To be "stagged" is to be trapped, and in the past the Lizard reefs have bitterly earned their name.
There is a nip in the Spring night. At Cury Cross lanes a sneaping wind whistles from the east above the acres of Goonhilly, above Leech Pool and Dry Tree, furze and stone, heather and tumuli, the dark barrens of the south.
Presently we are under the boughs in the sudden vale of Bochym; then out again under the plateau and trotting mile by mile until a sparse twinkle of windows ahead of us speaks of Lizard Town. The lights draw us on; far more, a pulsing flash and glow in the southern sky. "What says the Lizard, Lifting high his shining spear...?"
On still, at a brisk pace, towards the village, we swish through the straggle of cottages and by Mitchell's serpentine shed ( a glow in it's window and the crisp churring of the wheel within); then up once more and sharp right, with the salt air lapping us, towards the red gates beyond Penmenner, the fuscias' sway, the pounded gravel, the soft feathering of the plumed tamarisk, and at last lamplight filling an open door. Eastward, the beam of the Lizard licks the sky like a glittering tongue; before us, almost dead south, the land - hidden to-night - falls to Old Lizard Head and to a vast arc of sea. Flashes of white and red that prick the far south-west are the eyes of the Wolf Rock off Land's End. About us we hear the tide's incessant wash and drag. Home again, this is way down South, eleven miles beyond Helston. Plymouth (and school) are in another planet, certainly an infinite distance up the Great Western rail, past the divide of the Tamar, and before this Brunel only knows how many viaducts and high-flung bridges along the stretched spine of Cornwall."
A colour postcard of Meneage street, Helston dated 1908. The railway would have connected this town to the rest of the nation.
Helston Railway has many funny stories, as told by an old Cornish boy, William Frederick, (1903-2000). A school boy when the railway was built he used it daily to get to and from Wesleyan school in Helston after his family moved to Nancegollan in 1914. He recalls "At Praze-an-Beeble, Mr Lawry was stationmaster. He had a very high-pitched voice and would appear from the station office announcing “Praze! Praze! Praze!” It has been recorded that, during troop movements in the last war, Mr Lawry met the incoming train with his usual greeting – “Praze! Praze! Praze! – when a coloured GI pushed his head out of train window and shouted “Hellejuhah brother!”" On His journeys he recollects "It was always interesting to note the harvest seasons in progress, and that Farmer So-and-So was cutting his corn crop. There would be three horses pulling a self-binder – tractors were yet to come. The binder or corn-cutting machine was, in itself, a comparatively new introduction into the agricultural world." The train would weave its way through the many farms on the track, the train was pulled by one of two locomotives (steam trains) which puffed their way between the stations en route, Gwinear Road, Praze, Nancegollan and Truthall Halt, which was built for the convenience of the Prideaux family, who were shareholders in the company. Frederick says "In those days, train carriages were divided into first, second and third class, presumably to represent the social divisions of the day. I hardly dare look at the first-class folk! Later, second-class was abolished."
The station finally ran it's course though and was closed. The introduction of the motor car meant more people were driving and the railway could not afford to keep on chugging. In 1963 the last steam train left the station with locals waving goodbye. Frederick goes on to say "Finally, one amusing story I recall about the line was the time a chap got into a first-class carriage. The stationmaster shouted “Are you first-class, my man?” to which the passenger replied “Yes thanks – I never felt better in my life!”"
The station finally ran it's course though and was closed. The introduction of the motor car meant more people were driving and the railway could not afford to keep on chugging. In 1963 the last steam train left the station with locals waving goodbye. Frederick goes on to say "Finally, one amusing story I recall about the line was the time a chap got into a first-class carriage. The stationmaster shouted “Are you first-class, my man?” to which the passenger replied “Yes thanks – I never felt better in my life!”"
The last steam passenger train out of Helston in 1963. Credit: helstonhistory.co.uk
Change in Cornwall has always been feared, J.C Trewin would have been reminiscing on his fond memories of The lizard as a young boy, around 1920, as "Up from the Lizard" was originally published in 1948. Now, he goes on to explain how Cornwall had changed. However, you can see how his creative mind was emboldened by the enchanting coasts of the craggy landscape and the unique and dramatic magic of this "kingdom" weaves through his poetic work.
"That was more than 25 years ago. In those days, we seemed lost to the world.
Not so now when airfields are scarring and slicing cliff and down, and Goonhilly and it's fringes can be no more a remote heath at the world's end, a savage place most holy and enchanted. Outside Helston sprawls the monster of Culdrose (near a house where my mother had lived) stood for the untroubled environs, the "calm serene" of a Cornish market-town, for such names as Eglosderry, Content, Rose-in-the-Hill. Now the dragons were in the land, peace had fled.
No matter. There are still qualities of the farthest south that neither change nor decay. On the morning after the drive from Helston, I should have hastened to the sea, not for once over the double hedge towards Kynance, or on the narrow tight-rope weaving around the back of Parc-an-Castle down towards Polpeor, but, according to first-day ritual, along the road beside Maenheere where a Tricolor (the French flag) had waved on the first Armistice morning. ("See, boy - Madame's flag! There's Peace, sure 'nough!") Down farther yet to Rocky Lane, sunk between bramble and boulder - and in June royal with foxgloves - and forward to Pistol Meadow, hummocked burial-field of the drowned, heavy as always with the tang of camomile and seaweed. Over, up, across, a short scramble, and the citadel is won. Here stands Old Lizard Head. Someone long ago, (O devilish good, sir!) christened this Lord Brougham's* Nose
(*a Scottish political figure from the 19th Century with a large nose). Anyone who cares can peer for a likeness in the weathered profile - the nose is a Cyrano* monster." (*Cyrano was a 17th Century exaggerative playwright)."
"That was more than 25 years ago. In those days, we seemed lost to the world.
Not so now when airfields are scarring and slicing cliff and down, and Goonhilly and it's fringes can be no more a remote heath at the world's end, a savage place most holy and enchanted. Outside Helston sprawls the monster of Culdrose (near a house where my mother had lived) stood for the untroubled environs, the "calm serene" of a Cornish market-town, for such names as Eglosderry, Content, Rose-in-the-Hill. Now the dragons were in the land, peace had fled.
No matter. There are still qualities of the farthest south that neither change nor decay. On the morning after the drive from Helston, I should have hastened to the sea, not for once over the double hedge towards Kynance, or on the narrow tight-rope weaving around the back of Parc-an-Castle down towards Polpeor, but, according to first-day ritual, along the road beside Maenheere where a Tricolor (the French flag) had waved on the first Armistice morning. ("See, boy - Madame's flag! There's Peace, sure 'nough!") Down farther yet to Rocky Lane, sunk between bramble and boulder - and in June royal with foxgloves - and forward to Pistol Meadow, hummocked burial-field of the drowned, heavy as always with the tang of camomile and seaweed. Over, up, across, a short scramble, and the citadel is won. Here stands Old Lizard Head. Someone long ago, (O devilish good, sir!) christened this Lord Brougham's* Nose
(*a Scottish political figure from the 19th Century with a large nose). Anyone who cares can peer for a likeness in the weathered profile - the nose is a Cyrano* monster." (*Cyrano was a 17th Century exaggerative playwright)."
A Postcard of Old Lizard Head, you can just about make out the nose
Lizard Lighthouse, as seen from Housel Bay 1910
"...South, that is, for me: the Ordnance Survey hastens to honour the more suavely - sliding Lizard Point, between Polpeor and Housel, where the lighthouse rises in a dazzle of limewash. (In my day no floor for hopscotch -neglected art- could match a slab of slate near the Chief engineer's lodging.) Polpeor and Housel, each a loved cove by the marbled water, have nothing quite so dramatic as the thrusting height of Old Lizard. From it's salt-turfed platform there is a gull's eye view of the last of England. You look over the black cliffs to the serpentine of Kynance and, on the horizon down "the long savannahs of the blue," to the dark and rival peninsula of Penwith, a sinister coast, Land's End.
Old Lizard is unchanged.
So, east of Kynance, is the broad scarf of Pentreath, the beach where at low evening tide in the summer before the first world war one could go launcing in the moonlight. This is not what it sounds, some amiable country dance. A launce is a minute, silver streaking sand-eel that must be harpooned with a special spike - by no means an easy business, for an agile launce is only a flicker on the glistening, moon-blanched sand. Pentreath has always been, in my memory, a tranquil beach. It is plain and ungarnished, an uncomplicated sand sweep below the cliff's fierce wall. You can drowse there, or search for fluted, lemon shells, but most people go on to the manifold elaborations of Kynance around the corner. Kynance, Steeple-pierced, Lion-guarded, never varies. This is the show-place of the Lizard, a cove of fantastic contours, its rock colour-washed, its sand like the palest floss-silk."
Old Lizard is unchanged.
So, east of Kynance, is the broad scarf of Pentreath, the beach where at low evening tide in the summer before the first world war one could go launcing in the moonlight. This is not what it sounds, some amiable country dance. A launce is a minute, silver streaking sand-eel that must be harpooned with a special spike - by no means an easy business, for an agile launce is only a flicker on the glistening, moon-blanched sand. Pentreath has always been, in my memory, a tranquil beach. It is plain and ungarnished, an uncomplicated sand sweep below the cliff's fierce wall. You can drowse there, or search for fluted, lemon shells, but most people go on to the manifold elaborations of Kynance around the corner. Kynance, Steeple-pierced, Lion-guarded, never varies. This is the show-place of the Lizard, a cove of fantastic contours, its rock colour-washed, its sand like the palest floss-silk."
Kynance Cove by Gilly Johns, www.gillyjohns.co.uk
"Beyond, the war-stained downs of Predannick (which you can either pronounce as spelt or shorten to Prad'nack) have shed their solitude. Farther yet, Mullion is the golfer's own. We were, at The Lizard, perhaps a shade jealous of Mullion, it was an up-and-coming place, and we turned our faces to the east, to the swollen cheek of the peninsula that bulges towards Black Head. You can begin in it's southern corner by rounding the cliff-path to from the Signal Station to Church Cove, a path strung sinuously among the densely-brushing fern-brakes above a sea of molten green. Or you can strike through Lizard Town itself (faded, but dear in memory) by the doors at which Lizard children knocked on Shrove Tuesday - do they still? - for the strange Col'para dole of buns or biscuits, and by the Reading Room in which Uncle Tom's Cabin was projected on a crinkled sheet and Little Eva died upside-down in bliss. So down to the thatch, the palms, the fuschia, the honeysuckle, the purple veronica, the scarlet climbing geraniums of Church Cove, the tower of Landewednack Church, chequered in serpentine and granite, tapestried in ivy, the Norman doorway, three of the oldest bells in Cornwall, and the font of Richard Bolham from the year before Agincourt (A battle begun by Henry V in 1415). Here on a Sunday in 1678, villagers in the deep retirement of Landewednack heard the last sermon in the Cornish tongue. It was preached by the vicar of St.Keverne. From Church Cove, which today seems half-asleep, you wind across the cliffs above the sad sea caves - Drowned men by Ruan Shore, Dolor Oogo, Dolor Oogo. To Cadgwith, shrugged into its cleft, with it’s wall of mesembryanthemum (more properly “sally-me-’ansome”) or, inland, to the Churchtown of Ruan Minor, with a rectory lawn where Forbes-Robertson* (*an English actor considered the finest Hamlet of the 19th Century) and Helena Modjeska* (*a renowned Polish actress specialising in Shakespearean and tragic roles) once acted the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet under a Summer moon. Or onto Kennack beach, where Lizard children jogged by waggonette to their picnics on the white, June-burning sand. Kennack is still as Arthur Symons* (* a British poet, critic and magazine editor with Cornish parents) describes it “a broad and cheerful face, open to the light and to the sweep of sea” - open also to the distant stable splendour of Black Head and to the cliff castle of Carrick Luz.
Farther back are the downs, the Wisht Land, the “boggy, naked barren moors” of an urban mind of the eighteenth century (Charles Lyttelton could never have smelt the almond of the May furze-blossom) and the scatter of small farms, the
Cornish Hedge,
The broken herring-bone pattern of stone,
The gorse, the ragged rick
(How A.L Rowse’s* (*a Cornish 20th Century poet) poem evokes the Cornish Landscape!)”
Farther back are the downs, the Wisht Land, the “boggy, naked barren moors” of an urban mind of the eighteenth century (Charles Lyttelton could never have smelt the almond of the May furze-blossom) and the scatter of small farms, the
Cornish Hedge,
The broken herring-bone pattern of stone,
The gorse, the ragged rick
(How A.L Rowse’s* (*a Cornish 20th Century poet) poem evokes the Cornish Landscape!)”
Dolly Pentreath, last known native Cornish speaker, 1692-1777, Her death was seen as marking the death of Cornish as a community language. According to legend, her last words were "Me ne vidn cewsel Sawznek!" ("I don't want to speak English!")
As you can see, J.C. Trewin was passionate about the history of the peninsula, and all of the defining landmarks remain. I still often sit on the tip of the Lord’s nose on The Old Lizard Head when I want to cast my thoughts to the Atlantic, just as my Great Uncle had done, almost a century before. The Church at Landewednack, is a grade listed building because of the some 4th Century artifacts it holds and Dolly Pentreath the last existing Cornish speaker, wrote in her book that the last known place to hold a Cornish spoken service was indeed St.Wynwallow Church (Landewednack) in 1678.
It's fascinating to hear him speak of places I know so well, growing up around Kynance and living not far from where he lived in the village. Often when walking up through Pistil Meadow, my mum and my sisters and I run up the steps, especially when foggy, saying it feels haunted. In his book he speaks of a similar chilly sensation, due to it being a mass burial site of some 200 sailors after the sinking of a Royal Navy warship, local legend, based on mainly 19th century sources, suggests that the victims’ bodies were buried in large grave pits in the valley at Pistil Meadow, and that it is haunted by their ghosts. A renowned treacherous passage, there have been 200 recorded wrecks in the area pillaged by the Cornish wreckers, bodies strewn apart by dogs.
When he speaks of Kennack sands, I think of my dad and his four brothers and one sister who were brought up in a large house on the cliff above the beach. They worked the cafe there in the 70’s, and took children for donkey rides along the beach, it has also been a magical place for many a camping night with friends and family, gathering around a fire on the grassy marsh.
It's fascinating to hear him speak of places I know so well, growing up around Kynance and living not far from where he lived in the village. Often when walking up through Pistil Meadow, my mum and my sisters and I run up the steps, especially when foggy, saying it feels haunted. In his book he speaks of a similar chilly sensation, due to it being a mass burial site of some 200 sailors after the sinking of a Royal Navy warship, local legend, based on mainly 19th century sources, suggests that the victims’ bodies were buried in large grave pits in the valley at Pistil Meadow, and that it is haunted by their ghosts. A renowned treacherous passage, there have been 200 recorded wrecks in the area pillaged by the Cornish wreckers, bodies strewn apart by dogs.
When he speaks of Kennack sands, I think of my dad and his four brothers and one sister who were brought up in a large house on the cliff above the beach. They worked the cafe there in the 70’s, and took children for donkey rides along the beach, it has also been a magical place for many a camping night with friends and family, gathering around a fire on the grassy marsh.
A family enjoy a picnic on Kennack Sands, taken between 1896-1920
Nutty Noah's version of kennack Sands, the white house at the far back was where my dad was bought up and they ran the cafe centre left! www.nuttynoah.co.uk
Many of the poets he mentions, Arthur Symons and A.L. Rowe's all have Cornish connections and are enthused too, by the area. Arthur Symons was born in Wales, but his parents were both from Cornwall. Here is a poem I liked by him, whenever I miss home, I often notice that I miss the wind, working in London as a journalist in the late 19th Century, the Victorian era, the difference from the freedom of the countryside to the crawling industrial city must have been stark. He also spent a lot of time in France and Italy but his last line shows that there is no wind like the "Cornish wind".
Cornish Wind
There is a wind in Cornwall that I know
From any other wind, because it smells
Of the warm honey breath of heather-bells
And of the sea's salt; and these meet and flow
With such sweet savour in such sharpness met
That the astonished sense in ecstasy
Tastes the ripe earth and the unvintaged sea.
Wind out of Cornwall, wind, if I forget :
Not in the tunnelled Streets where scarce men breathe
The air they live by, but wherever seas
Blossom in foam, wherever merchant bees
Volubly traffic upon any heath:
If I forget, shame me! or if I find
A wind in England like my Cornish wind.
When I am on the bus, I often form poems or small verses and scribble them down on a napkin or if I'm lucky a book. In his novel, "Up from the Lizard" My great uncle talks about the journey by bus into the Lizard village, the route I take everyday to get to college but perhaps not as romanticized as when he did it, lit by lamplight on precarious roads; "When I think of the Green, I think of it in the winter darkness when the bus from Helston used to labour to journey's end, with it's jolted passangers - in the lamp's oily flicker- bunched togteher beside the baskets and panniers of their days shopping in Meneage and Coinage Hall streets."
It seems other Cornish poets were also inspired on their bus journeys. A.L Rowse, a famously arrogant but intellectual poet who grew up near St Austell in the early 20th Century wrote his account. He would have seen a slightly different view, having lived in 'The Clay Country' the part of Cornwall where the quarrying took place.
He described the Clay Country in a short story, ‘The Curse Upon the Clavertons’, as having ‘an extraordinary landscape… empty shells of ruined engine-houses... pits gradually filling with malevolent green water’. From 1953 to his death he lived in the grand house on the point at Trenarren and wrote several poems about his garden and cliff walks nearby.
'Bus ride' (extract)
The bus goes up the valley road
With mounds of gorse on either hand
That burn and blaze amid the brake
And clothe with fire the hills of sand.
Sunlight on a grey stone house,
The ivies glitter and catch the light;
The sparse and scattered Cornish trees
Announce Carthew, and now the white
Claypits on the pock-marked moor;
We pass the granite cottages,
The gardens with a shrub in flower,
The rude and honest villages.
As you can see, by "The rude and honest villages" Rowse had a complex relationship with Cornwall.
He was inspired by the strong Cornish patriarchy inhibited by a Vicar called Robert Stephen Hawker from North Cornwall, Morwenstow. Rowes admired him as 'the patron saint of the endearing community of eccentric Cornish clerics, with their good lives and their good deeds'. And felt that he also wanted to preserve old Cornwall. Hawker was actually the writer of the famous song we all sing now, Trelawney.
A good sword and a trusty hand!
A merry heart and true!
King James's men shall understand
What Cornish lads can do!
And have they fixed the where and when?
And shall Trelawny die?
Here's twenty thousand Cornish men
Will know the reason why!
Out spake their Captain brave and bold:
A merry wight was he:
'If London Tower were Michael's hold,
We'd set Trelawny free!
'We'll cross the Tamar, land to land:
The Severn is no stay:
With "one and all," and hand in hand;
And who shall bid us nay?
'And when we come to London Wall,
A pleasant sight to view,
Come forth! come forth! ye cowards all:
Here's men as good as you.
Trelawny he's in keep and hold;
Trelawny he may die:
But here's twenty thousand Cornish bold
Will know the reason why!'
But poor old Hawker was never noticed for his accolades. "All these years the Song has been bought and sold, set to music and applauded, while I have lived on among these far away rocks unprofited, unpraised and unknown. This is an epitome of my whole life. Others have drawn profit from my brain while I have been coolly relinquished to obscurity and unrequital and neglect" Poor old Hawker, Trelawney lives on but his name doesn't!
So, it is easy to see how A.L Rowse was driven by this same resentment at Cornish ways dying out or being unsheathed, insistent that unlike old Hawker left on the North Cornish Cliffs unknown, he would 'not be forgotten on this land'. Just as Hawker held suspicion toward the other Bible Christians and Wesleyans who labored around him on the Morwenstowe land, Rowse held particular frustration at the holiday makers and new-comers to St. Austell, "Bugger them!" he would often explode. Sounds a little like my Granddad! An extract from Rowse's poem 'Home' wrote in later life, and read at his funeral in Truro exemplifies his deep set fervent hope, that when he was gone from this world, Cornwall would endure...
Christ keep the cliffs and coves,
The land that gave me birth
And let no harm come to them,
When I am gone from Earth.
Rowse felt anger and erraticism toward the decline of Cornwall, a modern day genocide of it's culture, many branded him as an 'eccentric'. He explains in the poem how he had to turn his back on his homeland, but finally found peace in the end.
This was the land of my content,
Blue sea and feathered sky,
Where, after years away, at last,
I came home to die.
Arthur T Quiller Couch, was a well recognized author living around a similar time to my Great Uncle, and he is mentioned many times in this book. Born in Bodmin, in Cornwall to the union of two ancient local families, the Quiller family and the Couch family, hence the long name -as important families would keep both the line of surnames! An ancestral connection to literature; his family were writers and folklorists. Here is an extract from Arthur T Quiller Couch's book 'From a Cornish Window' published in 1906:
BEATUS POSSIDENS
(This means Blessed Possession in Latin)
I can't afford a mile of sward,
Parterres and peacocks gay;
For velvet lawns and marble fauns
Mere authors cannot pay.
And so I went and pitched my tent
Above a harbour fair,
Where vessels picturesquely rigg'd
Obligingly repair.
The harbour is not mine at all:
I make it so--what odds?
And gulls unwitting on my wall
Serve me for garden-gods.
By ships that ride below kaleid-
oscopically changed,
Unto my mind each day I find
My garden rearranged.
These, madam, are my daffodils,
My pinks, my hollyhocks,
My herds upon a hundred hills,
My phloxes and my flocks.
And when some day you deign to pay
The call that's overdue,
I'll wave a landlord's easy hand
And say, "Admire my view!"
Here Arthur, known as 'Q' refers to thinking "it were pleasant to fancy myself owner of a vast estate, champaign and woodland; able to ride from sea to sea without stepping off my own acres, with villeins and bondmen, privileges of sak and soke... rents, tolls, dues, royalties, and a private gallows for autograph-hunters. These things, however, did not come to me by inheritance, and for a number of sufficient reasons I have not amassed them." He see's himself as ruler of the Kingdom, rich in the wealth of the land but not by a pitiful "authors" wage. Residing in his later life as a harbour Commissioner for Fowey, Cornwall he says; "My window... looks out from a small library upon a small harbour frequented by ships of all nations--British, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Russian, French, German, Italian, with now and then an American or a Greek--and upon a shore which I love because it is my native country. Of all views I reckon that of a harbour the most fascinating and the most easeful, for it combines perpetual change with perpetual repose. It amuses like a panorama and soothes like an opiate, and when you have realised this you will understand why so many thousands of men around this island appear to spend all their time in watching tidal water."
Fowey Harbour, 1900, Arthur lived here 1891-1912
It is this sense of being part of something bigger and having an intrinsic purpose that amazes me with the bygone Cornish authors and poets and really evokes that sense of magic. Perhaps you have to have a resentment towards it, like Rowse, hold gripes amongst it like Hawker and feel ownership of it like Q, because it is intangible, and personified by poets; the kingdom owns itself.
Here Q, mentions this also by quoting a poor clergyman of the seventeenth century (Thomas Traherne). "He proclaimed in verse and prose that he was heir of all the world, and properties, hedges, boundaries, landmarks meant nothing to him, since all was his that his soul enjoyed; yes, and even what inspired him to pen this golden sentence--
Here Q, mentions this also by quoting a poor clergyman of the seventeenth century (Thomas Traherne). "He proclaimed in verse and prose that he was heir of all the world, and properties, hedges, boundaries, landmarks meant nothing to him, since all was his that his soul enjoyed; yes, and even what inspired him to pen this golden sentence--
"You will never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars."
Me looking out over Housel Bay to the Lizard Lighthouse. (2014)
