As the winter storms hit Penzance, so does that great painter of storms, steam and whirling chaos, Joseph Mallord William Turner. Not the great English Romantic himself of course, whose late works are currently at the Tate Britain in London until January 25th next year, but as a film, Mr Turner, by Mike Leigh and in the form of an exhibition currently on view in Penzance Public Library, Turner and Me painted by Vaughan Warren R.A.S. Ancillary works by Vaughan are also on view on the first floor of The Arcade in Chapel Street.
Timothy Spall in Mr Turner
In a year of sombre reflection upon the futility of war, the appearance of original films like Loach’s Jimmy’s Hall and Mr Turner, are inspiring visually. The technique of Loach and Leigh, both of whom use improvisation as a means to authenticity, is inspiring and instructive. Mr Turner has renewed interest in a rumbustious, querulous figure and promises to be exciting viewing. Turner was a protean traveller and visited Cornwall and painted the local landscape including Mounts Bay and the Tamar Valley. Sketches at St Ives established him, according to some authorities, as the founder of the painting tradition there. http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-st-ives-from-porthminster-beach-d41327 Timothy Spall, an exceptional actor and a keen sailor brings his talent and determination to portraying Turner in both his vitality and in his melancholy moods.
Vaughan Warren http://vaughanwarren.weebly.com/ has a tremendous enthusiasm for Turner and has won the Turner Award himself, as well as the Reynolds Medal and Landseer Award. He also has a track record of interest in the history of art which informs his work at a deep level. He also has an interest in local history. He and his partner Melanie Camp share an enthusiasm for Daphne Du Maurier’s novels and in particular Rebecca and its associated film which was, of course a Hitchcock classic. This has provided the inspiration for an Acrylic, a medium which Vaughan assures us Turner would have loved, The Wreck of the Rebecca, which appears in the current show. Vaughan Warren has found much inspiration too in the work of Julius Olsson, whose contribution in St Ives is the subject of much intriguing study by David Tovey, as well as Whistler, Mondrian and Kandinsky. The latter was an acquaintance of Naum Gabo, who also worked locally, is famous for his writings on the spiritual in art. Warren declares too his intention to strive,” towards an abstract beauty through paint and the image”.
The Victorian restrained grandeur of the public library in Penzance makes for a suitable context for Vaughan’s Turner inspirations. However, because they have to be mounted so high up above the installed illumination, they are not as visible as they might be. It is a reminder that despite the town having many galleries there is limited space in which even experienced artists can display. Turner’s palette is of great interest to Vaughan Warren and more details can be found at http://www.winsornewton.com/uk/discover/articles-and-inspiration/palettes-of-the-masters-jmw-turner
Self-portrait by Vaughan WarrenMr Warren RAS
In the current display three works particularly appealed to me. The acrylic on canvas of St Michael’s Mount predominates because of its free use of colour. I also greatly liked small watercolour called Turneresque. It almost goes without saying that this painter shows great facility in all three mediums. The two pictures which are mounted in oval frames make a refreshing change here too. The small painting in the corner which appeals to me most however is Red Interior; Music Room whose contrasting colours remind me a little of Sickert and a little of Gwen John. Anyone who has the opportunity should see the film and Vaughan Warren’s work in Penzance.
In addition to the works displayed in the library there is an opportunity to view Vaughan’s drawing of Nelson’s death mask at the Redwing Gallery, Wood Street in Penzance. The display in Penzance Library may be viewed until mid-December.
On View at Penzance Library, Morrab Road, Penzance
This is a favourite stopping off place where in the midst of all the travel you might enjoy either quiet or a brief encounter; perhaps both. Perhaps, one of the few actual benefits of privatisation, it is filled with transport posters from the 1930s. You can so easily imagine the billowing steam from the last trains which ran on the St Ives Branch line up until the 1970s.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3O7uSD2qlk
Then the music begins, a gentle voice from the past:-
Ah, but when I hate you
Don’t you know it’s ’cause I love you
That’s how I am, so what can I do?
I’m happy when I’m with you
I never mind the rain from the skies,
As long as I see the sun shinging in your eyes
Don’t you know that
Sometimes I love you, sometimes I hate you
Ah, but when I hate you
That’s because I love you
That’s how I am, so what can I do?
I’m happy when I’m with
So happy when I’m with
I’m happy when I’m with you
Außerhalb Lilly Schönauer und Rosamunde Pilcher (1) Virginia Woolf
The Cornish Review Edited by Denys Val Baker
West Cornwall has many literary connections and famous writers have been attracted to its scenery and its people. In an idle moment I was thinking about how useful it might be to give an account of some of the significant figures that are associated with the Penwith peninsula. In her magical notes, “Moments of Being” Virginia Woolf writes of the evocative inspiration which waking in Talland House gave to her. Not only was it a source of inspiration for her great modernist novel,“To the Lighthouse” but to remember that once Henry James took tea on the lawn recalls once again the long Edwardian summer and the echoes of the conversations between him and Virginia’s father, the formidable Leslie Stephen. Links include http://www.woolfonline.com/timepasses/?q=node/271
Books about Virginia and her sister in St Ives include “Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and Remembering St Ives” by Marion Whybrow (currently unavailable on Amazon) and the novel “Virginia and Vanessa” said to be;”…a chronicle of love and revenge, madness, genius, and the compulsion to create beauty in the face of relentless difficulty and deep grief”. In addition there is Dell, Marion. Peering Through the Escallonia: Virginia Woolf, Talland House and St. Ives. No. 23. 1999. ISBN 1-897967-47-0. Price £7.00
It is interesting, though unsurprising, how Woolf keeps turning up as a factional character in novels. My personal favourite as I have mentioned on here before is “House of Exile” by Evelyn Juers –mostly about Thomas Mann-which contains an interesting and memorable incident where Virginia and Leonard visit a restaurant in the Funkturm in Berlin and loses her elegant scarf which is recovered by another leading character.” Some moments of exhilarating coincidence in these pages are reminiscent of Stoppard’s Travesties.” According to the reviewer, Robert McCrum at http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/may/22/house-of-exile-juers-review. Although not associated with St Ives, Virginia Woolf turns fictional in the film “The Hours” based on the novel by Michael Cunningham, which came out in 2002 directed by Stephen Daldry (who also filmed The Reader). Her bent-nosed appearance, which some critics found rather hilarious, won Nicole Kidman the best actress award that year. Recently I came across Alison Macleod at this year’s Jewish Book Week, where she was talking about her haunting and remarkable novel, “Unexploded”. She is Professor of Contemporary Fiction at the University of Chichester and a lively and engaging speaker who talked about her research into the background of the novel which is set in Brighton, where she herself lives, during the hazardous summer of 1940. The novel was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2013 and deals with, among other sensitive issues, anti-Semitism in wartime Britain. Virginia Woolf lectured in Brighton during this period and she and her novels turn up as one leitmotiv in this persuasively constructed story. Many of the issues are based on a thoroughgoing examination of the archives. http:/www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/10244729/Unexploded-by-Alison-MacLeod-review.html
Returning along the coast in a westerly direction to West Penwith, a glance at A Literary Atlas and Gazeteer reveals that many fascinating littérateurs lived or visited from Truro and to the west. Here are a list of just ten whose connections may not be very well known. At Zennor at Higher Tregarthen from 1916-1917, D.H.Lawrence, J.Middleton Murray and Katherine Mansfield. In Truro, Samuel Foote (1720-1777 became celebrated as much for his acting as his didactic diatribes)-his story has just been magnificently told by Ian Kelly see- http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/05/mr-footes-other-leg-review. Sir William Golding lived nearby at Perranaworthal from 1985 until his death in 1993-where he became a great friend of the controversial novelist and translator of Russian Poetry, D.M.Thomas. He has recently published a poetry collection, Light and Smoke.http://www.dmthomasonline.net/
Samuel Foote
In St Ives, Mrs Havelock Ellis wrote Cornish Idyll in 1898. Much later, after the War in 1945 Norman Levine found the town conducive to his stories, poetry and travel writing. At Madron, the inspirational poet’s poet, penned his charmed verses:-http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poems/listen-put-morning
Listen. Put on morning.
Waken into falling light.
A man's imagining
Suddenly may inherit
The handclapping centuries
Of his one minute on earth.
And hear the virgin juries
Talk with his own breath
To the corner boys of his street.
And hear the Black Maria
Searching the town at night.
A postcard of The Cornish Arms Hotel in New York-frequently advertised in The Cornishman
Up until August 1914, The Cornishman and the St Ives Weekly Report contain many detailed reports from abroad. These include the Cornish in America, Canada, South Africa. Many Cornish people travelling to the States will have responded to the large adverts in the Cornishman for the famous hotel in New York https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/tag/hotel-cornish-arms/
Without doubt, however, the greatest concern appears to be about Nationalist Rebellions in Ireland.http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/britain_wwone/ireland_wwone_01.shtml The only reference to the possibility of an outbreak of war- reading between the lines- concerns the speeches in support of building more dreadnoughts. Money appeared to be of no real concern to the advocates of building more battleships.
The effect on the Fishermen and Families
When war broke out many fishermen in St Ives were immediately affected and the effect on many of them, their families and the price of fish was very soon to follow. Many were called up within hours and summoned as members of the Royal Naval Reserve to Davenport and had to leave by train for that destination. A newspaper report states that when addressed by Mr Stephen Reynolds, Inspector for the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, he was told that some 160 fisherman were on active service with about the same numbers of families affected. Two-thirds of the summer Herring Fleet were laid up and the price of fish and particularly Crayfish that would otherwise have fetched a fine price in Paris were catastrophically affected.
The details of this call=up are very moving since we only have to turn to the next couple of weeks to learn how many will have been aboard ships which sank or been caught in the first defeat later at Mons. The accounts of farewells said above the peaceful beaches and the brass bands playing can still be imagined by anyone walking out of the town. There is a strange mixture of fear and jingoism apparent in the newspapers. There were worries about the supply of wheat which caused fears about starvation; there were food riots in Camborne. Other articles show a concern about possibilities of aerial attack from Zeppelins and tables showing their limited range were the subject of articles in the press.
Frank Ernest Halliday was a very enthusiastic walker. Tall with a mane of beautiful white hair and reserved, his elegant stride cut a figure, like a distinguished prophet or poet. He was when, first I became aware of his reputation as a historian and a Shakespearian scholar, hurrying down Back Road West in the general direction of Clodgy where he frequently seemed inclined to walk, frequently at this formidable pace. At about this time, he had already retired from school mastering at Cheltenham College where he had become a friend of Cecil Day-Lewis years before. That was in the early Thirties and the time to which I am referring was somewhere around 1960.
F.E.Halliday
In 1953, Halliday wrote in History Today of the famous Cornish Historian, Richard Carew, a Member of Parliament and a friend of Philip Sydney,” The importance of Richard Carew has never been appreciated. Few, indeed, are even aware of the writer who, while Shakespeare was writing for the London stage, was quietly at work in his Cornish country house. This neglect is the result of his own modesty, the remoteness of his dwelling, and the multitude of his great contemporaries in and about the capital, and not of any lack of merit…..” Much of what Halliday wrote here about Carew is now equally true about himself and the extensive range of his own work. It is time to remember Halliday’s work, much of it written in his house next to the sea, downalong in St Ives. (Those interested in Carew will find a brief entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Carew_(antiquary))
Back Road West, St Ives
When Halliday’s Shakespeare appeared in an American edition in 1961, it was reviewed in the Renaissance News a little later;-
“Mr F.E.Halliday’s life of Shakespeare is the product of a widely read, fully informed, and prolific mind. After twenty years as head of the English Department at Cheltenham College he retired in 1948 to devote himself solely to writing. He is one of the few scholars today who have taken all Shakespearean knowledge as their province. For a period of over fifteen years he has been turning out studies which give an ever broadening view of the great dramatist. In 1946 he published Shakespeare in his Age. Then came Shakespeare and his Critics which although completed in 1947, first appeared in 1949.”
Halliday was educated in North Yorkshire at Giggleswick School where he learnt to cherish Latin poetry, including Horace and his reflections on the seasons, mutability and loss grew up in its unique atmosphere. He was growing up in the dark and difficult days of World War 1 which deeply affected both staff and boys. There is a useful short biography of him included in Cornwall’s People – A Biographical Dictionary by Carolyn Martinand Paul White (Tamar Books). He then went on to King’s College, Cambridge and later entered teaching himself. It was at Cheltenham College that he met and became a supportive friend to Cecil Day-Lewis, the famous thirties poet. Indeed, Halliday, who was an English master and became Head of Department, painted Day-Lewis’s portrait which is in the National Portrait Gallery and may be seen at http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitLarge/mw07276/Cecil-Day-Lewis?LinkID=mp01220&search=sas&sText=Day-Lewis&role=sit&rNo=0
This portrait captures the refined appearance of the poet in a contemplative mood in profile but whether marking an essay or composing a splendid poem is not clear. Day-Lewis’s meeting and friendship in 1931 with Frank Halliday is recorded in some detail in Sean Day-Lewis’s biography of his father C. Day-Lewis, An English Literary Life. It appears that the dress code at Cheltenham was somewhat severe. Also Day-Lewis’s poetry was considered risqué when discovered by the self-appointed proctors of moral rectitude among the other masters. He was accused in a letter from the Headmaster of Bohemian tendencies!
“An Assistant Master at the school had seen him wearing a green shirt, while whitewashing the
walls of his flat, and another observer had reported the poet attending a concert with a stock about his neck under his dinner jacket: this was intolerable conduct, the staff must be properly dressed at all times.
Before replying he took the advice of a college master who, unlike the colleagues who had reported all departures from convention, was a friend. Frank Halliday was a sensitive Yorkshireman who loved literature and eventually became a writer himself. His autobiography tells how he first heard of Cecil as ‘a young married man who liked Beethoven and César Frank’ and was ‘said to write poetry’. He met the newcomers during their second term and registered Mary ‘with ballet dancer’s hair and figure and a dairy maid’s complexion’ and Cecil ‘reserved and almost severe with the trace of an Irish brogue’. Halliday was also a shy man and his mask was an offhand manner, at first discouraging. The discouragement had been overcome and by this March, Cecil and Mary had become friends with Frank and his wife Nancie, and they spent a long time discussing the best response to the headmaster’s outburst.” (Sean Day-Lewis on his father- Halliday’s own biography is called Indifferent Honest, Duckworth 1960)
Halliday’s friendship with Day-Lewis was to last over forty years and much of it conducted by letters from St Ives where he seems to have lived first at Five Fields, Dynas Ia and later when they were completed in Barnaloft Flats, overlooking Porthmeor Beach. Day-Lewis was deeply interested in Marxism and wrote, somewhat ironically to Halliday about the class war and the colourful inhabitants of his local pub at Brinclose, near Axminster, of the News Chronicle, Liberalism and of course in 1938 of Chamberlin and the approach of the Second World War. Day-Lewis moved in an interesting circle of thirties poets and writers and it seems likely that Halliday too might have met such figures as Rex Warner and W.H.Auden. F.E.Halliday seems to have continued as an amateur artist and painted Brinclose in 1939. By 1942 Day-Lewis is working some sixty hours a week at the Ministry of Information and became a close associate of Charles Fenby, journalist and assistant editor of The Picture Post. Day-Lewis records an encounter at this time with another somewhat severe character, Arthur Koestler whom he mentions in his correspondence with Halliday. Day-Lewis’s letters have recently, in 2012, been donated to the Bodleian Library http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/30/cecil-day-lewis-letters-oxford.
The Wreck of The Firebrand
By the 1960s after the suppression of the Hungarian uprising, which had incidentally also prompted Halliday to sign a letter to the Times, Day-Lewis vigorously renounced his earlier communist views. By 1968, Day-Lewis, who also wrote detective novels as Nicholas Blake, became Poet Laureate. However, in 1971 Day-Lewis mentions to Halliday, a searing review he received from another Cornish poet in the TLS. He correctly identifies the critic as Geoffrey Grigson who having been born in Pelynt was a Cornishman, and held somewhat negative views on Cecil Day-Lewis’s poetry although unlike his earlier Headmaster, regarded him on the single occasion they met at the BBC, as elegantly dressed!
In addition to his Shakespearian Studies, Halliday was active with regard to social and political concerns. In 1963, he signs a letter to the Times along with John Betjeman, A.L.Rowse, Brian Wynter and more than thirty other prominent citizens against the Admiralty’s proposal to take some 355 acres for troop and helicopter training on the lovely Zennor moors. This was a major concern in Penwith at the time. This upset many local people and not least as the land had been placed under a special covenant by the National Trust. In 1975, just over 67% of voters supported the Labour government’s campaign to stay in the EEC, or Common Market and Halliday was writing to the Times again to advocate full political union; not just an economic agreement. Halliday was advocating a Yes vote because he strongly believed in the idealism needed to bring about an effective World government.
There was also a wryly amusing letter written at the end of December 1964(Shakespeare’s quatercentenary) with regard to a production by Lindsey Anderson of Julius Caesar. Anderson was a pupil of Halliday at Cheltenham, where the former also met the future novelist, Gavin Lambert. Halliday gently chides his former pupil for trying to ‘improve Shakespeare’, essentially by excising nine revealing lines of a speech by Brutus. These lines reveal much about the republican’s character. He compares this with how in the Restoration, much was made of Caesar’s ghost who was made to appear at Phillipi. Halliday proceeds to regret the trend towards displaying gratuitous violence in the History plays, whilst making it clear that he is not referring thus to Anderson and expressing his sorrow that Falstaff is being reduced to a sinister figure. He remarks that although he had tickets at Stratford for seven plays he could actually only stomach attending five and a half! The previous year, in another letter to the Times he had taken on the subject of the identity of W.H. of the Dark Lady Sonnets, an unknown William, he surmises, and disagrees somewhat daringly with the inimitable A.L.Rowse.
The walk past Man’Head to Clodgy, St Ives
Recently, while reading my own copy of A History of Cornwall, published by Gerald Duckworth in 1959, I became intrigued by a fine chapter on the Eighteenth Century; a generally neglected period but here there was a rich variety of detail. I was particularly interested in the earlier part of the Century, essentially before the mineral wealth of the Duchy had been much exploited. This was an unsettled period of rebellions and Halliday points out, “ Impoverished by the Civil War, the Cornish people took little interest in the events that followed the death of Charles II- the Monmouth Rebellion, the Revolution of 1688, the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715-…” In St Ives, which had had a Parliamentary army garrisoned there, the inhabitants might keenly have felt ravages of occupation. There are also records showing that Monmouth was blown off course there on his way to Weymouth and his future defeat at the Battle of Sedgemoor. The Treaty of Utrecht which interestingly, has recently escaped much notice upon its 300th Anniversary provided a temporary peace to the Wars of the Spanish Succession and its signature was celebrated in St Ives at the time. Travel then was most easily carried out by sea although as the experience of Sir Cloudesley Shovell wrecked on the Scillies suggests, navigation was a hazardous affair particularly in determining longitude. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scilly_naval_disaster_of_1707
Halliday remarks that this period around 1700 was characterized by a change in land ownership. Lawyers, merchants and businessmen started to invest in land that might be valuable more for the materials beneath the surface than as a source of food that gave it value to the gentry. This is a period where speculation starts to become important and clashes between the older aristocracy and the emerging entrepreneurs. This was particularly true in the western part of the Duchy where the known lodes existed. Halliday points to Celia Fiennes travel diary. He quotes her references to the shortage of timber for mine construction and the shortage of fuel. She writes, “They burn mostly turffs, which is an unpleasant smell; it makes one smell as if smoaked by bacon.” Fiennes, as Halliday points out, had to travel by horse because the roads were in such a poor condition. Copper was mined alongside tin but because of the shortage of fuel it was shipped to Bristol and South Wales for smelting. Little Cornish horses, she tells us were used to carry fish and the corn which was being cut.
The early C18, which Halliday covers in about thirty pages, sees the introduction of the first steam engine in about 1710. It was the very inefficient Newcomen engine, although state of the art at the time, and was used at the Godolphin mine at Wheal Vor. It used vast quantities of fuel. Even by 1740 there were just three steam pumps at work. It was not until the early Nineteenth Century that Cornish engineers greatly improved the efficiency of those engines that had be designed by Watt, Trevithick and others http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornish_engine. Thus in effect this would henceforth reduce the cost of coal which had to be imported from South Wales, a trade in the hands of merchants and businessmen. Incidentally, it was a German Chemist, a proponent of the celebrated but misguided Phlogiston theory, Johann Joachim Becker (1635-1682) from Speyer near Heidelburg, who visiting Cornwall in the 1680s made an important discovery. At Treloweth, St.Erth, that Becher was said to have built a furnace for the smelting of tin using pit coal as opposed to charcoal. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Joachim_Becher
The celebrated Tory politician who rose to become Marlborough’s confrere and the First Lord of the Treasury, Sidney Godolphin, 1st Earl of Godolphin, KG, PC (15 June 1645 – 15 September 1712) might well be remembered for the work he did in passing the Act of Union with Scotland which created the united kingdom of Great Britain. He also established sound finances for Queen Anne and made possible the founding of the Bank of England. The Cornish might, however, have other reasons for remembering him as Halliday points out:-
…..”some of the old charcoal-using blowing houses were retained for smelting stream tin, which was of a finer quality than that from the mines. The use of coal probably saved Cornwall from being completely denuded of timber, the demand for which for shoring up the workings was enormous, and one of the last services that Godolphin did for his native county was to cheapen the price of coal by securing a drawback of the duty on that used for smelting. A few years before, in 1703, he had been responsible for the favourable terms of pre-emption granted to the Cornish tinners.” This unfortunately ended when Walpole came to power.
Frank Halliday was not only an author with broad interests, having written books on Chaucer, Dr Johnson, Wordsworth, Hardy and Browning besides Shakespeare; he was also a committed intellectual who was active as a School Governor, interested in social action and helped to set up with Bernard Leach and Barbara Hepworth in 1967, the St Ives Trust http://www.stivestrust.org/ which has been instrumental in developing conservation projects and working in alongside the St Ives Archive Centre. http://www.stivesarchive.co.uk/resource/
F.E.Halliday was an experienced lecturer and I can still recall a historical talk which he gave when I was a young lad in The Labour Party Rooms upstairs behind the back of the Union Hotel at the bottom of Ayr Lane. This is currently a rather chic restaurant but in the Sixties, a quite barely furnished room at the top of a steep winding wooden staircase. The subject concerned the early history of Cornwall and was concerned the Early Bronze Age and I particular recall much mention of the Beaker Folk (Glockenbecherkultur). Halliday’s tall figure loomed over slides showing the migrations of these people over Southern England at a time when Britain’s only significant export material was in fact Cornish tin. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaker_culture. He mentions in a chapter on the Bronze Age in “A History of Cornwall” that, “Beakers are rare, but two have been found as far west as Land’s End, both of them in cists, and one, now in St Buryan church, accompanied by a flint knife.” It would be interesting to know if it is still located there.
Spread of the Beaker Culture
Speaking about Cornwall he says,” And I loved it for its character: for its strength, although an outcast among counties; for its appearance of having known and suffered so much, yet without any trace of disillusionment, but having rather an air of expectancy; for its human virtues of patience and endurance; for its mystery…”
In the fifties, there were no flowers in hanging baskets or even in window boxes and the main smell downlong was of fish and tarred nets, On the other hand there were houses built upon greenstone masses where you might well find a profusion of sea pinks in clumps. Heading along Back Road West towards the Digey, there were many village shops, including general grocers like Georgie Wedge’s at the top of Bethesda Hill, where everything from sweets to biscuits were sold out of glass topped tin boxes and placed in small neat paper bags. There was another grocers, Roucefield’s which did a smart trade in St Eia street, where many folk in downlong had celebrated the Coronation, beneath festoons of flags in red , white and blue. The fare on this occasion consisted of saffron buns and bottles of corona served on long trestle tables. There was also a wool shop, at the end of Island Road where women discussed knitting patterns for winter jerseys or Fair Isle jumpers.
At the top of Fish Street the gentle and well spoken, Mrs Laposta ran a busy and popular fruit and vegetable stores just opposite Couch’s works which at this time employed more than 50 workers making parts like buoyancy trimmers for amphibious vehicles for the British Army on the Rhine. Two further venues in Back Road West were particularly intriguing. Further along before the Mariner’s Church, the house where pilchards were marinated in fish spice, vinegar and bay leaves which was accessed at the top of a steep staircase. It cost just a few shillings and a suitably large dish for a dozen had to be left, a few days before. Even more interesting for youngsters on a Saturday morning visit was the Laity Museum. This was crammed with models of tea clippers and Chinese junks, scrimshaw, and intricate furniture and dark sea chests inlaid with mother of pearl. Redolent in atmosphere of the clipper trade with the Far East, from jute to silk, spices and calico, there were contemplative jade Buddhas and several examples of fierce black Japanese armour. Further information, histories of the sea and tales of the Orient were liberally supplied by the ancient mariner who was the proud curator at this period of time.
The days leading up to Christmas are associated in my memory with a series of various festivals and events from Guise Dancing to Fair Mo and then Christmas itself. This too was soon followed by the scarlet coated and spectacular grandeur of the Western Hunt during St Ives Feast. The Guise Dancing was ominous and noisy; it seemed to myself-perhaps a timid child, with masked figures, lanterns and loudly beating drums. It was still commonly performed until the mid fifties but seemed then to have died out with the corresponding popularity of television. However, by Fair Mo, a Church based fair situated in the Guildhall and taking place at the end of November it was by then always clear that the Christmas season would soon be upon us. It is described now on the History of St Ives website, as,”… a less rowdy tradition, celebrated just before Christmas. This ancient ‘pig fair’ reflects the long-standing custom of keeping pigs in virtually every Downlong yard. Today local ladies dress in traditional costumes and hold their fair, or market, in the Guildhall.”
Around Christmas Eve, or a day or two before, everyone in downlong had been serenaded by the agreeable euphony of perambulating choirs from the Primitive and the other MethodistChurches. These were accompanied by a clarinet or two and everyone emerged to the truly blissful sounds of Thomas Merritt’s Carols, before each the verses were briefly intoned and led by the choirmaster. “Hark the glad sound” resonated and reverberated against the cottages and along the cobbled streets with such utterly superb harmony that Christmas, together with its peaceful promise, seemed as imminent as the arrival of “the Saviour promised long.” The effect was utterly magical and glorious; recalling it again makes the hairs on my neck stand up on end. So that neighbours emerging from their doorways were thoroughly receptive to the “Tidings of great joy” that Gabriel brought “to you and all mankind.” After the melodic repetitions of Cornish and other carols people returned to their houses prepared by such benedictions to enjoy Christmas Day itself.
Hepworth
Most pubs and inns similarly resounded with affirmative renditions of the “Old Time Religion.” The Cock Robin choirs provided youngsters with the opportunity for mild horseplay- as evidenced the next day by seeing a punt or skiff hoisted on to the roof of the fisherman’s lodge. Few would have ventured as far afield as Mousehole, for either Tom Bowcock’s Eve or even Starry Gazey Pie. There was absolutely no rowdy celebration on New Year’s Eve but grand and elegant Scottish or Hogmanay dances, attended largely by the professional classes at such grand venues as the Portminster Hotel or Kenegie Manor in Gulval.
Preparations for Christmas in the home were concerned with food, presents and decorations. There was an early ecological arrangement whereby potato skins were placed in a special bin and collected each week by the ‘pig man’. The result at Christmas was that every house received a good sized pork joint. The turkey-some in the family might have had goose -was paid for on a card signed for, again on a weekly basis, at the butchers over the autumn months leading up to Christmas. Pickled onions were prepared over a longer period and stored with peppercorns and tiny red chillies on a shelf above the stairway on the ground floor. Military pickle and piccalilli were purchased to go with the tongue, pulled together with skilvin (quality string from the Fisherman’s Co-op) and pressed in a saucepan, with a weighted lid-usually a smoothing iron. Salt beef was also prepared with other cold meats for suppers over the Christmas period.
Patrick Heron
The house was extra warm from the heat generated from the kitchen and if it was windy in the wrong direction, especially before a cowl was fitted, smoke from the coal fire would fill the sitting room. The resulting “smeech” would deposit smoke particles of varying sizes spoiling some of the coloured paper decorations in the sitting room. After saffron stamens had been floated in a small bowl to extract the lovely liquid yellow concoction, bowls both of dough and cake mixture were placed by the fireside, covered by tea towels and left to rise. Cakes purchased especially at Christmas included batten burg, chocolate log and walnut. Macaroons, coconut pyramids were prepared on rice paper as well as congress tarts. The one cookery book –the one which probably came with the oven- were referred to on an annual basis. Reference was made to on one or other well thumbed pages.
The Christmas tree was always a holly tree and the large fairy light bulbs were checked and replacements inserted into and the holders, some of which were in small copper lanterns my father had made and into which rice paper was inserted to diffuse the light. Embroidery thread was cut into lengths and tied on to the baubles or shiny things. The extra demand meant that the electricity meter ‘went’ more frequently and had to be fed and wound with two shilling pieces that were of course known as florins. This process was often accompanied by the question, “Where was Moses when the lights went out?” There seemed to be much to do in those days leading up to Christmas Day and my father might describe how in the 1920s he and my uncle would mostly just have oranges, some wrapped in silver paper and walnuts and brazil nuts as the main fillers in their Christmas stockings.
After Christmas dinner, the turkey which was taken upstairs afterwards into the preservative cool of the so-called small bedroom, borne on the large appointed Victorian ornate and crazed platter. It was carved for suppers and other dinners over the next few days. Nobody could quite get through all the cakes or biscuits, so my father took it, as a snack, with his thermos flask of tea to the factory where he worked until about the middle of March. Apart from Sherry and usually Port – there might be a bottle of each- there was little in the way of drink until white wine, in the form of Blue Nun became a favourite with my mother in the seventies. On reflection much of the fun in the celebration of Christmas was probably also a recovery from the tough period during the war when my parents had travelled around air stations. From Filton in Bristol, where they both worked and had been bombed, they journeyed to Hull and Girvan in Scotland and other places. Housing shortages, especially in Cornwall had to be endured and the severe economic pressures of the Cripps austerity period had also just ended.
Ben Batten and Mary Quick have both referred to various home remedies used when calling the doctor might have been expensive. For many purposes a kaolin poultice was a frequent resort, as was various sorts of herbal tea or for sore throats honey and lemon was a simple palliative. Looking through copies of The Cornishman from the late 1920s an impressive number of remedies were advertised as being on offer:-
1) Women who are tired out
-How to regain lost vitality for women who feel tired out, nervy and overwrought, and suffers from headaches and backaches.
Try Dr Williams’ pink pills –of all chemists 3/- a box
2) Clarke’s Blood Mixture
“Just as good for abscesses, ulcers, bad legs, inflamed wounds, swollen glands, haemorrhoids, also rheumatism and gout- all of which are signs of blood impurities.
3) Swan’s Oxygen Therapy, Alperton, Penzance
Inhalation therapy for asthma, tuberculosis and pneumonia
Each copy of the newspaper would carry around five of such adverts, some large but few efficacious.
Had medical science a great deal to offer? As the CountyMOH report of 1933 shows the Women’s Hospital in Redruth was busy-some due to unsanitary home conditions- and some areas of the county, like Sennen, had no midwife coverage of any kind. Puerperal fever as it was termed had not been eradicated although the work of Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Boston Physician with literary leanings, as far back as 1843 had shown the risk of physicians carrying infections from one infected patient to others. Whilst this was recognised, effective treatment for the condition depended upon the development of antibiotics. It was only in 1936 that Colebrook’s research was reported in the Lancet about the effectiveness of sulfa drug on a condition that was more lethal than pneumonia. They also worked on meningococcal meningitis so that the death rates for such conditions started to fall after 1940.
Eric Kemp mentions in ‘We want to speak of Schooldays’, that because his mother lost a sister, who died soon after she was born in St Ives, he comments, “…they decided that when I came along, they’d go up to London, and be born in a proper hospital.”
In this panoramic view of two Cornish families spanning two centuries all sorts of characters make an appearance. Not only are we educated in the ambience of English Merchants in Portugal but people as diverse as Southey, William M.Thackery, John Lemon and Canning, to mention but a few, all make an appearance. It begins by relating the making of a fortune by William Stephens, grandson of the Vicar of Menheniott and an enterprising genius. Her is the story of a merchant who becomes a manufacturer of glass.
William was educated at Exeter Free Grammar School, having left the area near Saltash, where he grew up. He went on to serve on the Lisbon packets upon arrival in Portugal became involved with the intrigues of Carvahlo, the Marquis of Pombal. He was next to witness the destruction of Lisbon by the great earthquake in 1755. As Jenifer Roberts interestingly points out, high waves from the latter were still above 8 foot when they made boats in St Ives rise more than eight feet. Then William opened a glass factory in Marinha Grande and securing exemption from taxes, charmed princes and queens so as to build a fabulous fortune.
The profits from the Stephens fortune passed also into the hands of their Lyne relations also living in both Portugal and Cornwall. The author outlines the family history, which involves wars and rebellions and diverting interludes. Eventually some of the fortune ends up in the hands of a feisty French ballerina and into the hands of various lawyers settling claims upon it. This is a splendid tale, well written and for those who find truth stranger than fiction, a great historical and biographical account.
Glass- The Strange History of the Lyne Stephens Fortune
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