Rise of the Miners: The Food Riots of 1847, Part Two

Reading time: 20 minutes

(If you missed Part One, click here.)

Cornish miners in California, on their croust break. From Cornwall Forever. Many emigrated as a consequence of the dearth of 1847. Standing, left, is Richard Harry, Captain of New Alamaden Quicksilver Mine, near San Francisco. With thanks to his great-granddaughter, Kitty Quayle

…Compell them to sell their corn…at a fair and reasonable Price…march one and all with determined Hearts and Hands to have redress – or vengeance…

Anonymous handbill advertising a march for food, Stratton, 1795. From John Rule, Cornish Cases, Clio, 2006, p50. No miners’ handbills from 1847 have survived

Cornwall, May-June 1847. Locations of unrest, relief, and organisation are marked

Hard Times

The potato blight, and subsequent famine, that decimated the population of Ireland, hit Cornwall (and England) in the winter of 1846-7. It was also a bitterly cold winter, and many other root crops froze in the earth. Relief in the form of an early, mild spring did not materialise. Animal fodder was scarce too, and beasts starved in icy fields. The price of beef, pork and mutton correspondingly skyrocketed, along with the cost – and availability – of wheat and flour. Wheat was £2/bushel; it hadn’t been that dear since the last famine year, 1817. Everywhere in Cornwall was a “pressure of scarcity”1. Breakfast for a miner was described as

…barley gruel…about three quarts of water and a halfpenny-worth of skimmed milk thickened with barley flour…

From Philip Payton, The Cornish Overseas, Cornwall Editions, 2005, p135

There was nothing for croust, and workers could barely crawl home after coming to grass.

Various solutions were presented. In March the Queen issued a Proclamation for a “General Fast”. The famine was a visitation by God upon the “iniquities of this land”. Her loyal subjects ought to send up “prayers and supplications” to the Almighty and “avoid his wrath” through their humility2. And, if prayer and fasting would not bring relief, what would? What would happen to the hungry poor and, perhaps equally importantly, to what lengths would they go to avoid death by starvation? Would they take food by force? Surely not:

We have no fear of any formidable strike among the Cornish miners. Superior to every other class of workmen in the Kingdom…they are beyond the influence of the political agitator.

Royal Cornwall Gazette, January 22, 1847, p2

This complacency was short-lived.

In their cottages, in the barren fields, and underground, people were getting organised.

Although in terms of weight of numbers the most impressive riots took place in Pool and Redruth, disturbances were reported in many Cornish towns through the spring and summer. Localised events, perhaps, but taken as a whole one begins to get a sense of the hardships and privations faced by entire communities across Cornwall, and the several attempts at aid made by the authorities and/or the philanthropically minded.

The Merry Month of May

Holmbush Mine, Callington3

At first, the merchants and authorities were caught off-guard. At Callington on May 12, around 200 miners from the Stoke Climsland, Holmbush and Silver Valley workings, marched in unopposed and gathered at the Town Hall. They knew what they were about, and went straight to the market. There they forced the unprotected, and no doubt intimidated, farmers to sell their wheat and barley at prices nominated by the miners. But that wasn’t all. Any merchant or trader sniffed out in Callington that day were “roughly handled”, and their goods were closely escorted to the market and then sold for the same knockdown prices. The town was “in an uproar”, and more genteel forms of trade brought to a standstill. After this particular horse had bolted, the local magistrates resolved to take steps against such “lawless proceedings” and swore in a hundred Special Constables. The local miners, for their part, pledged to drink in no Callington pub for the next three months; the first man to break this agreement would “be carried around the town on a pole”. Seven days later, in Liskeard market, the nervous merchants stayed away, and no corn or wheat could be bought4.

That very same day, May 12, Wadebridge experienced a similar disturbance. 400 men from Luxulyan and Roche, but later swelling to an estimated 700, entered the town, parading a pasty on a pole in their front ranks, and “using threats of violence”5. But the town fathers had heard of their coming from the north: the factors had removed their corn overnight, and the local coastguard was patrolling the town. But this didn’t stop the mob from breaking open and inspecting the stores. In a panic, the local magistrate, Edward Stephens, was called upon to pacify the would-be looters. This is the response he got:

…don’t hear what the old b____r has to say, he’s only going to delude us…

Royal Cornwall Gazette, August 6, 1847, p4

Then, with a cry of “beat his brains”6, Stephens was set upon by a group armed with cudgels, and was badly beaten: only when a local constable, Daniell William Lovell, drew his pistol and threatened to shoot the next man that came on, was a shaky peace restored. Prominent among the assailants was a miner called William Tellam, 27, from Carnsmerry, in Treverbyn7. He appears again in our story. By the time the military arrived from Plymouth, early the next morning, all was “perfectly tranquil”8. Tranquil, that is, until the 19th, when 400 men from Delabole Quarry invaded the town, resulting in the Redcoats being sent for again.

May 14th. “Hundreds” of men in a “starving state” came to Camelford for wheat, but were told there was none to be had in the town. Unperturbed, they went to a local farmer, and threatened to “thrash” him if he did not thrash out his corn in time for the next market. They then purloined all the bread from the Gayers, of Trethin, robbed their hens of eggs, and even took rooks from the trees. They then slaked their thirst in the Camelford taverns, “not paying for their drink”9.

Relief

The engine house and crusher supports, Polberro Consols, St Agnes. Image reproduced courtesy of Simon Jones, Cornish Mine Images (www.cornishmineimages.co.uk)

All that said, the authorities and the miners were not quite at daggers drawn – yet. When 1,500 tinners were put out of work at Polberro Consols near St Agnes, several of them came to Truro on May 17, requesting permission to beg. They were sent on their way with a loaf each. Relief committees for miners unable to afford bread were set up in St Austell and Gwennap. At Newquay and the East Wheal Rose Mine at Lappa Valley (whose inhabitants were still recovering from the disaster of 184610), corn and flour was arranged to be shipped from Liverpool and purchased by the miners. Ironically, days earlier men from Withiel parish had attempted to halt a shipment of grain from leaving Padstow. J. T. Austen Treffry, owner of both Fowey and Par Consols, established his own relief fund in conjunction with his mines’ adventurers: all his miners whose earnings were not enough to cover their, and their families’ needs, could purchase cheap flour, wheat and barley by means of a ticket system11. At Balleswidden Mine near St Just, tinners coming to grass were presented with a loaf and a bar of soap each12. Presumably, people starve with more dignity if they’re clean.

These efforts weren’t nearly enough. Indeed, “nothing could be looked for through our mining districts but want and riot”13.

The Men of Breage Get Organised

Underground at Wheal Vor, Breage14

God, keep us from rocks and shifting sands,

And save us from Breage and Germoe mens’ hands.

qtd. in Philip Payton, Cornwall – A History, Cornwall Editions, 1996, p171

As the old nautical prayer above makes clear, the inhabitants of Breage had long enjoyed a certain reputation for lawless derring-do, wrecking and smuggling being their primary interests. In 1847, they turned their attentions inland. Anonymous handbills were posted around the village, calling on local miners to assemble at a certain spot on Saturday, May 22. The reasons for this meeting were unstated and, alas, no copies of the handbill survive. But we do know where the men of Breage were headed for their gathering, and there was a lot of them.

They were going to Helston, on market day15.

Helston, May 22, 1847

If the handbills in Breage were anonymous, then so was was the tip-off to the authorities in Helston: the miners are coming, get ready. The Mayor, Thomas Rogers, a 55 year-old solicitor residing at Coinagehall Street16, got busy. Fifty soldiers of the 5th Fusiliers were called in from Pendennis Castle, Falmouth, thirty men of the local coastguard were mobilised, and sixty townspeople were deputised as Special Constables. The militia were stationed at the bottom of Sithney Common Hill, and the Constables were covering the Guildhall in Church Street.

The foot of Sithney Common Hill, Helston
The Guildhall, Church St, Helston

Rogers’ sources proved correct. By 11am, 300 miners entered the outskirts of Helston from the west – straight down Sithney Common Hill, where the Redcoats were waiting. Either they had peaceful intentions all along or, alternatively, once the miners caught sight of a well-drilled, musket-wielding platoon, they opted for diplomacy over threat. Flanked by the soldiers, Rogers and a gaggle of magistrates asked the burly incomers to state their business. The miners stated that they, and their families, were starving, many were out of work, and even those in gainful employment could not afford food, as prices were so high: they wanted to know if “something could not be done to help them”17.

The Mayor measured the sincerity of their words, and their appearance. Yes, the miners could enter the town and wait, whilst he and the magistrates discussed what relief could be provided – if any. Rogers assured them that everything possible “should be done to alleviate their distress”, with the proviso that any resolution to violence on the miners’ part to achieve their aims would be folly, as “ample means were at hand to repel any attack they might make”.

Rogers had the whip-hand, and everyone knew it. The miners trudged to Coinagehall Street to await a possible handout. The soldiers stayed where they were.

The Coinage Hall, in its modern incarnation

Hours passed. The men were probably bored, doubtless hungry, and still no word had been forthcoming about any relief. Even taking matters into their own hands, and fixing prices to suit their means at the market, was out of the question, what with the army in town. Frustrations must have boiled over, and a confrontation became inevitable. As if by a signal, at 5pm a huge “uproar” was heard in the street by the Coinage Hall, which brought the Special Constables running and resulted in a free-for-all ruck outside the Mayor’s place of residence. Whilst this was going on (and it lasted for thirty minutes of all-in streetfighting), Helston was rapidly put on lockdown. Shops closed and pubs were emptied. The market was rapidly cleared of stock. Unfounded rumours flew about that people had been shot and killed. Thomas Oliver, a boy in Helston at the time, recalled in 1914 that the miners, now thinned down to a total of around seventy, attacked with shovels and pickaxe handles, and that the soldiers actually refused the order to fire a volley over the rioters’ heads, and that the Mayor read the Riot Act18.

But no contemporary report mentions this, quite the contrary: “The soldiers did not quit the building in which they were stationed”, and blame for the scrap was put down to the “officiousness” of the constables. With both sides battered and bruised, it was the miners who retreated, empty-handed.

Did Rogers eventually provide bread for the miners? No; after all, he’d given them fair warning on the improprieties of rioting. He did, however, ensure the military remained in his town until the 25th, and bumped up his band of Special Constables to a round hundred. Eventually, the Great Work Mine at Breage decided to purchase corn for its workforce – to be sold on to them at a 30% discount.

As for the miners, they probably realised that, if the element of surprise was denied them, a town’s market well-defended, and they encountered a Mayor as wily as Thomas Rogers, there was little they could do. Especially with only three hundred men.

Penzance would be different.

The present season of commercial difficulty ought to unite all classes of the community more firmly together – teach property that it has duties to perform…and labour that it has rights to respect…

“The Anticipated Famine”, Penzance Gazette, June 2, 1847

The above lines may have been written more in hope than expectation. The season of “commercial” difficulty (note the inference here that the problems are linked to business and trade, and that, therefore, is where the readers’ concerns ought to lie), was in fact driving an even bigger wedge between all society’s classes. “Property” was increasingly looking to protect its own interests, and “labour” looking to assert, or perform, their long-held right of marching for food and price-fixing in times of dearth. And so it was to prove in Penzance.

Thomas Simon Bolitho, Mayor of Penzance. Photograph by Camille Silvy, 1862. National Portrait Gallery, NPG Ax5738020

The Mayor of Penzance at the time was Thomas Simon Bolitho (1808-1887), of a powerful family of West Cornwall land-owners, adventurers, and tin-smelters21. He would therefore have had ears in high places, and subterranean ones. Subsequently, rumours had reached him and the town’s authorities over a week previously that the miners of the Breage and Germoe region intended to come to Penzance with what he would have viewed as nefarious purposes on market day – the 27th. This may have given Bolitho little cause for concern; after all, their numbers in Helston had only been a few hundred, and the Mayor there, Rogers, had demonstrated what could be done with a decent show of strength. However, on the 26th he received word that Breage’s forces were to joined with that of the miners from the St Just area, and this represented a far more considerable strain on Bolitho’s resources.

(Also, in an anticipatory move, Penzance men with mining interests had rode out to the mining districts, not to dispense charity, but to attempt to convince the miners of the futility of coming to town on the 27th. The pleas fell on deaf – and hungry – ears.)

The soldiers of the 5th Fusiliers had barely dumped their kitbags on the barrackroom floor at Pendennis Castle when they received yet another order to mobilise against civilians. Captain Simmonds (or Simmons) was again in command, as he had been in Helston. By dawn on the 27th, 60 Redcoats were in Penzance. Bolitho then pressed the coastguard, and a number of sailors, into service. Besides this he also deputised a private army of 200 Special Constables. The shops were shut, taverns closed, and market trade suspended. Bolitho obviously feared the Breage and Germoe mens’ hands. The town of Penzance was now utterly “begloomed”.

From 9am, men “in bodies varying from 50 to 200 in number” began appearing at the town’s outskirts. Two local padres, Fathers Punnet and Graham, met many of these itinerant bands and “expostulated with them, but in vain”. By 11am, 3,000 miners, men, women and children, were at large in Penzance. This total later increased to 5,000, as the hungry of St Just joined forces with the hungry of Breage in the town centre.

Market Jew Street

These were now tense moments. As the crowd turned down Market Jew Street, it became apparent they were marching into a trap. The soldiers had been stationed “in a position to command from the windows the whole of the principal directions of the heart of the town”: the army was covering the marchers with their muskets from an elevated position. It may have been Capt. Simmonds force, but it was Bolitho’s town: he was the man issuing orders in cahoots with his fellow-magistrates, and managing the forces at his disposal, lest “evil ensue”. He hadn’t looked for this situation, but he can’t have wanted it to end in a bloodbath either. The miners yelled at the sight of the Redcoats grimly scrutinising them from above, the women screamed murder, and the mob’s overall appearance “bespoke fierceness”, but, mercifully, nothing happened.

Eastern Green

As at Helston, a rampage of looting was out of the question, if it had even been considered by the majority of the miners. Watched, probably from a safe distance, by fascinated townspeople, a halt was called at Eastern Green. Again, as at Helston, it was decided that a deputation of miners should address Bolitho et al, at the Market House on Market Jew Street. Their purpose was to

…lay their case before them, and to ascertain what they could engage to do to alleviate their condition…

Penzance Gazette, June 2, 1847
The old Market House, Penzance

And so the negotiations began. In a show of good faith, bread and victuals were distributed amongst the crowd by principal townsmen. Eventually, a deal was hit upon, with both sides apparently getting what they wanted. The miners would leave Penzance in a peaceful manner (and with the militia in town, this was something akin to gunboat diplomacy by the town authorities), and the town council would “use their utmost exertions” to secure a supply of barley, distributing said supply to the mining districts for sale at a reduced rate. With their stomachs full (or no longer empty), the crowd dispersed. Peacefully.

Well, not quite. A group of miners stole away from the main body, having heard that corn had been concealed in a nearby warehouse; they found nothing. This same shadowy group then attempted to force the doors of the prison, on Old Brewery Yard, suspecting corn to be hidden there too. However, lacking sufficient resolve (and doubtless mindful of the close proximity of the army), this attempt at breaking and entering was aborted.

Reports state, with some relief, that “no violence…was resorted to” that day in Penzance. Matters had been attended to without serious incident, and supplies would soon be winging their way to the mining districts, courtesy of the town’s authorities.

But such arrangements take time. The bushels would only begin to arrive in the inflicted areas from June 5. For many, this was simply not fast enough. For many strickened families, even buying food at reduced rates was frankly no longer an option. And many therefore decided that sitting tight in their squat cottages waiting for good news was no longer feasible. Talk, and plans, for a longer march, further east, must have been discussed. As would have been what the intentions were on reaching the proposed destination.

Part three of the Cornish Food Riots can be read via the link below :

Thanks for reading

References

  1. Royal Cornwall Gazette (hereafter RCG), May 14, 1847, p2.
  2. RCG, March 19, 1847, p4. More secular, hard-nosed and politically minded views of the causes of dearth laid much of the blame at the door of Government policy: RCG, 22 January, 1847, p2, and June 25, 1847, p2.
  3. From Plymouth Mineral and Mining Club.
  4. RCG, 21 May 1847, p2.
  5. RCG, 21 May 1847, p2.
  6. RCG, 6 August 1847, p4.
  7. 1851 census.
  8. RCG, 21 May 1847, p2.
  9. RCG, 21 May 1847, p2.
  10. See: https://www.lappavalley.co.uk/heritage/east-wheal-rose-mining-disaster/
  11. See The King of Mid Cornwall: Life of Joseph Thomas Treffry, 1782-1850, by John Keast, Truran, 1982, Chapter 9. I am grateful to Caroline Stephenson for showing me this. A copy of the handbill outlining the proposed relief scheme Treffry issued in his name can be seen in RCG, 21 May 1847, p2.
  12. RCG, 14 May 1847, p2, and 21 May 1847, p2.
  13. RCG, 14 May 1847, p2.
  14. From Helston Hub News.
  15. RCG, 14 May 1847, p2.
  16. 1851 census.
  17. The main narrative of this section and quotes are from RCG, 28 May 1847, p2.
  18. From Philip Payton, The Cornish Overseas, Cornwall Editions, 2005, p134.
  19. “Rise of the Miners” headed the article from which the main narrative and quotations are taken in this section: The Penzance Gazette, June 2, 1847.
  20. See: https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp148645/thomas-simon-bolitho
  21. See: https://www.bolithoestates.co.uk
  22. Taken from the title of Commotion Time: The Anglo-Cornish War of June-August 1549, by Craig Weatherhill, Penwith Press, 2021.

The Cornish Food Riots of 1847: Background and Context

Reading time: 15 minutes

The Famine Statues, Custom House Quay, Dublin. By Rowan Gillespie, 19971. The potato blight that caused the Irish Famine also hit Cornwall in the winter of 1846-7

In consequence, however, of the failure of the potato crop, prices had gone up beyond their expectation.

Report of the Annual Meeting of the Wadebridge Farmers’ Club, Royal Cornwall Gazette, 25 December 1846, p1

The history of Cornwall in the 18th and 19th centuries was punctuated by rioting, for various reasons. The Camborne Riots of 1873 were motivated by anti-police sentiment; the later riots of 1882 were motivated by prejudice towards Irish workers2. Most riots, however, were generated by hunger.

From the 1720s, to 1847, there were 21 recorded Cornish food riots. The miners, perhaps unsurprisingly, participated in any, and every, incidence of social unrest. So did the other men, women and children of the working class. Where recorded, the number of people prepared to march for grain can be as impressive as it is intimidating: 5,000 on the streets of Truro in 1796, or 2,000 in Manaccan in 18313.

The moral economy of the Cornish crowd

Clay strikers, St Austell, 19134

In times of hunger, rioting was the last resort of the starving poor, an option turned to in desperation, yet the discipline and focus of a famished Cornish crowd is noteworthy. A food riot in Cornwall often featured little violence, and no wanton looting, vandalism, or anarchy – though it can be argued that the mere threat of such practices were enough for a large mob to realise its aims. These were not reckless hordes bullying their way into a town and laying waste to all they beheld, in an orgy of injustice and rage. On the contrary, large groups of malnourished outsiders elected spokespeople to negotiate with town officials to fix corn prices, or to ensure no grain was exported from the area by the corn merchants or corn-factors, as they were known. It was only when these more diplomatic efforts failed, that force was employed. The five stages of a food riot have been identified as follows:

  • Invasion of the agricultural districts by miners in search of farmers withholding grain from markets;
  • Mob action to force magistrates to fix maximum prices of grain;
  • Direct action by rioters to impose lower prices on market sellers;
  • Looting of grain warehouses;
  • Riots to prevent the export of grain in times of scarcity5.

Throughout the May and June of 1847, looting and riots were seen rather a lot.

The causes of the 1847 Riots

Free Trade protest, London, 1840s6

The fundamental conflict of a food riot was between builders of Britain’s Empire and commerce, who believed in operating a free inland trade in grain, and the lower orders who maintained that trade should be regulated in their interests, with corn to be sold at a ‘just’, or traditional price: the forces of modern economics meet the forces of folk traditions.

In Cornwall farmers preferred to sell their corn in bulk to factors, rather than piecemeal in local markets. These middlemen, of course, increased the price of corn and looked to export it from the county in an effort to maximise their profits. This is classic capitalism: buy in the cheapest market, and sell in the dearest; or, take your supply to where the demand is willing to pay top mark. Obviously, the Cornish labouring poor could ill afford what they took to be inflated prices, and took a dim view of merchants of any stripe. As the crowd at Redruth told one factor in no uncertain terms that year, they believed that

…all flour-merchants were rogues of the first order…

Royal Cornwall Gazette, July 9, 1847, p1

In years of poor harvests or dearth such as 1847 (the potato blight that resulted in the famine that decimated Ireland also hit Cornwall that winter), farmers would sell all their crops to factors rather than risk them turning bad. Why not? The prospect of a good harvest would lower prices, and their profits, over the summer. More corn was therefore exported from Cornwall in years of bad harvest, and, paradoxically, more was also imported by landlords and mine owners to keep their workers fed. Importing in this fashion of course cost more than simply buying locally. Conflict was perhaps inevitable, between those who sought to maximise their profits – farmers, factors – and those who saw wagons of grain leaving the county and little or none to buy in the local market7.

Why write about the 1847 Riots?

…food rioting [in the rest of England] was already a thing of the past. In Cornwall the riots of 1847 were the final fling of this traditional form of protest.

John Rule, Cornish Cases, Clio, 2006, p43

The Cornish Food Riots of 1847 have received little detailed academic attention over the years. In choosing to riot for food in 1847, it’s maybe perceived that the people of Cornwall persisted with outmoded beliefs and value systems, whilst the English have moved on8.

There’s more to the Cornish Food Riots of 1847 than the last-gasp attempt of the labouring classes to regulate the new market forces in their own interests. At the time, the people who rioted, the farmers, factors and dealers who they rioted against, the figures in authority who sought to pacify and/or patronise and punish the rioters, the soldiers sent in by the authorities to pacify and/or shoot the rioters, and the citizens caught somewhere in the middle, didn’t know that these were to be among the final uprisings motivated solely by dearth and the corresponding high prices of food in the county9.

The Cornish Food Riots of 1847 are worthy of study because, at the time, they had a geographical heft significant enough to be a real cause of concern to the authorities. There were outbreaks in Wadebridge, Callington, Delabole, Camelford, St Austell and Breage. These were not isolated or localised incidents of a few dozen village roughs, putting the frighteners on the farmers and officials, to secure grain at an advantageous price before melting away to their cottages. 300 miners took to the streets of Helston. 3,000 demanded corn in Penzance. 2,000 in Pool. 5,000 faced off against the militia in Redruth. This was a concerted fight for survival, virtually county-wide.

Study of the Riots also give us an insight into the attitudes and culture of the people who lived then, through the reports on the events and individuals involved. There’s emboldened miners, self-righteous women, high-handed magistrates, dutiful constables and victimised merchants. There’s patronising lectures and short, impassioned speeches. There’s cowardice, and bravery. There’s handbills, and tip-offs. There’s negotiation, and violence. There’s fugitives from the law, and harsh punishments. In short, there’s a lot worthy of historical interest.

I’ve broken my work on the Cornish Food Riots of 1847 into four more separate posts:

  1. Part two takes in the tumults of Wadebridge, Callington, Delabole, Camelford, and St Austell. As they’re all linked, particular attention is given to the uprisings in Breage, Helston and Penzance.
  2. Part three discusses the rioting in Pool.
  3. Part four analyses the uproar in Redruth.
  4. Part five looks at the disturbances in St Austell, and summarises the events as a whole.

Click here to read part two: Rise of the Miners

With special thanks to Deana Schultz Wade, who recommended I start using footnotes.

References

  1. https://www.visitdublin.com/see-do/details/famine-memorial
  2. See https://www.camborneriot1873.com, and Louise Miskell, “Irish Immigrants in Cornwall: the Camborne Experience, 1861-1882”, in Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley (eds.), The Irish in Victorian Britain: the Local Dimension, Four Courts Press, 1999, p31-51.
  3. See John Rule, Cornish Cases, Clio, 2006, p35-74.
  4. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-22294189
  5. See Rule, Cornish Cases, p35-74. His work draws heavily on what E.P. Thompson called “the moral economy of the English crowd”, in Customs in Common, Penguin, 1991, p259-351.
  6. https://fineartamerica.com/featured/london-protest-1840s-granger.html?product=greeting-card
  7. See Rule, p35-74. For more on the growth of free trade capitalism, see Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital 1848-1875, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962, p36-9. A good general text on Ireland’s suffering at this time is The Great Irish Potato Famine, by James S. Donnelly, Sutton, 2001.
  8. John Rule’s fascinating essay on Cornish food rioting in Cornish Cases sadly omits the events of 1847. Ashley Rowe produced an article for The Report of the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society, vol. 10, in 1942 (p56-67), and this is a worthy narrative. However it lacks any socio-historical analysis, which Rowe himself admits. This will be discussed in a later post. Kresen Kernow hold a research project by Kevin Thomas from 1996, Food Rioting in Cornwall (1727-1847): With Some Comparison to Contemporary Wales, but is relatively short, and employs the same timescale as Rule. Philip Payton discusses the Riots in The Cornish Overseas to develop his theme of the Cornish emigrating on account of the food shortages of the time (Cornwall Editions, 2005, p129-35). There is also an article online by the Penwith History Group, which is really more of a brief survey.
  9. Incidentally, the year 1847 didn’t mark the end of food rioting in England. The London Express of January 13, 1854 reports the trial of food rioters in Exeter (p2), and Reynolds’s Newspaper of November 17, 1867 reports a “desperate” food riot in Oxford (p4). For more information on the Exeter riot, it’s discussed on the Devon Radical History Facebook page, and an article is available here. Thanks to Dave Parks for sharing this.

The Notorious Beatrice Small, Fortune Teller

Reading time: 30 minutes

“Good Luck”, by Charles-Louis Baugniet, 1871

Costermongers, hawkers, and pedlars, a class of workers who live from hand to mouth more than those of any other class…

Jack London, The People of the Abyss, 1902, p265

…it is feared…any probable mischief in the increase of hawkers which may arise from the abolition of hawkers’ licenses…

Cornubian and Redruth Times, May 13 1870, p8

A gang of gypsies who for the last week have infested the neighbourhood…

Royal Cornwall Gazette, August 3 1822, p2

Liskeard Guildhall, October 12, 1898, was packed. There must have been a ripple of conversation and speculation – nothing would have been lost in the repetition. She had the power to read fortunes in peoples’ faces, they said. She could read your future in playing cards, they said. There could be unheard-of riches in your family, and property, they said. She had the power to cure the sick, they said. She bore the surname of the Gypsy King, they said.

And then the prisoner was led in. As if the nature of her alleged crimes weren’t extraordinary enough, the manner of her capture was equally singular. In an era when suspects were waylaid by the forces of law and order within a radius of a few miles of the offence, today’s centre of attention had been arrested in Jersey. Villagers craned their necks, journalists licked their pencils. Maybe amulets were clenched tightly; quite possibly one or two even crossed themselves.

Perhaps appreciating that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, Beatrice Small had, for the big occasion, decked herself out in her best finery. The married lady was, observed the Totnes Weekly Times of October 15, of “small stature”, with an intelligent look to her features. Her outfit included a “gigantic brilliant tartan shawl”, a “spotless” black and white check apron, and what must have been a rather gaudy feathered hat, “typical of the tribe” (p8).

Grand entrance or not, Small was sentenced to six months hard labour for obtaining money by false pretences from the parishioners of Lanreath, St Stephens-by-Saltash, and Longdown, near Exeter.

I dwell on this courtroom scene as it gives us some insight into the character of Beatrice Small. She was clearly a larger-than-life figure, who knew how to cut a dash and make herself the centre of attention. She also knew how to play a role, a role her audience that day obviously expected of her, that of the gypsy fortune-teller. Her not infrequent brushes with the law aside, it was a role she must have been rather adept at playing. Beatrice Small roamed the countryside of South West Devon and South East Cornwall for over twenty years, preying on the superstitions and gullibility of those she met, and made a passable living out of it.

In her day, Beatrice Small truly was “notorious” (Western Evening Herald, January 21 1902, p3), a “well-known character in the Western Counties” (Totnes Weekly Times, October 8 1898, p5), and not just for her dubious merits as a fortune-teller. On that day in Liskeard, it’s apparent Small wished to project an image of herself as a more-or-less respectable ‘healing woman’, thus masking the more unsavoury aspects of her character. She was also, at various times, a con-artist and a thief. She’d known more gaol-time than was perhaps good for her, was probably over-fond of a drink, used language that would make a stevedore blush, and had intimate knowledge of domestic violence, both for and against. Perhaps most shamefully, she also neglected her children.

In fact, from the 1880s to the early 1900s, Small’s offences, and the locations in which these offences took place, are so numerous as to border on the bewildering. Therefore I believe it’s beyond the main scope of this post to itemise every time she fell foul of the law. However, the more curious reader is directed to the map below. Each marker contains details of the date, nature and judgement passed on Small’s crimes, and the newspaper in which they were reported.

The various locations of Beatrice Small, 1871-1905. Census returns are included. Feel free to zoom in

My primary focus is on Small’s activities as a fortune-teller, and the light these activities shine on the fears and beliefs of the rural populations of Devon and Cornwall in this period. Where these activities were brought to the attention of the authorities – and the press – they also show the prejudices inherent in the authorities’ attitudes towards people of Small’s background, and their scorn for what was viewed as outmoded, false beliefs. Quite simply, the people of the countryside still adhered to what Stephen Mitchell calls a “magical world view”, where everything is “connected in a chain of causation”, yet is at odds with, and inferior to, the world views of both religion and science (Witchcraft Continued: Popular Magic in Modern Europe, Ed. Blecourt and Davis, Manchester University Press, 2004, p21).

Hawker, Gypsy

Beatrice Glide was born in 1864, in Totnes, though when imprisoned in Bodmin Gaol in 1898, she claimed to have been born on the Channel Islands (Reg #469, Vol. AD1676/3/3). Her father was a hawker, a class of worker categorised by Charles Booth in his survey of London of the 1890s as “very poor”, indeed merely one degree above criminal (Penguin, 1971, p54-5). In 1880 she married Robert Gully Small (1842-1911), eventually bearing eleven children. This Robert Small must have been connected in some way to the “King of the Gypsies”, Robert Gulley Small, who died in 1884, aged 69. His obituary in the Devon Evening Express of August 25, 1884, noted that Small was the eldest of his “tribe” in the Westcountry, and had travelled “ever since his childhood”, acquiring “sufficient property” in Jersey (p3). (One of Beatrice’s children was born in the Channel Islands.) The Smalls were a “notorious family of gypsies”, noted the Western Evening Herald, of January 21 1902, p3, perhaps being victims of “oppression, harassment, discrimination, and of persistent efforts to outlaw and destroy their way of life” (Deborah Nord, Gypsies and the British Imagination 1807-1930, Columbia University Press, 2008, p3).

The Vagrancy Act of 1824 certainly contributed to their persecution. Observes Deborah Nord again:

…Gypsies could be rounded up simply by virtue of their nomadic existence. For the offences of hawking, peddling, begging…telling fortunes or vagrancy (however defined), Gypsies could be prosecuted, fined, locked up or persistently harassed.

Gypsies and the British Imagination 1807-1930, p44

Yet society’s views on gypsies, or fortune-tellers and healers, were rather ambivalent. Such people could also be regarded as “remnants of a golden age, the human equivalents of village rituals and rural customs long forgotten” (Nord, p10). For example, in Helston in the 1850s lived Tammy Blee, or Thomasine Blight, a white witch, or pellar of considerable reputation who, it was said, “hundreds” went to consult with their ailments (Cornish Telegraph, April 7 1869, p4). But, whereas the afflicted went to Tammy Blee for advice and cures, Beatrice Small and her family, whose peripatetic lives may have been foisted upon them out of the necessity of having to avoid the hostility of the authorities, visited people in the hope of convincing them that they were in need of their help.

Thomasine Blight (1793–1856), the White Witch of Helston
Tammy Blee (1793-1856), the White Witch of Helston, by William Jones Chapman, Royal Cornwall Museum

Torquay, May-June 1883

Eliza Shepherd was a servant in a house on Woodend Road. Small had visited this residence several times, whether to tell fortunes, or hawk goods, or both, and perhaps sensed that Shepherd might be an easy mark to trim. One day she got Shepherd on her own and offered to tell her fortune, for sixpence. On being told she was the happy owner of a “lucky face”, Shepherd coughed up a shilling more. Then Beatrice turned the screw, telling Shepherd she had been

Ill-wished…

Beatrice Small, qtd. in the Torquay Times & South Devon Advertiser, June 9 1883, p6

Small said she would have to call back in a few days time, ostensibly to look into who had actually been ill-wishing the hapless housemaid, but presumably to also let Shepherd’s imagination get to work. Small left the girl one of her rings, suspended in a glass of water, the purpose of which, sadly, was unexplained.

To us, Eliza Shepherd may sound helplessly gullible, and Small’s charade a piece of risible hokum. However, in the Devon of the late 1800s and early 1900s, it was a firm rural belief that cancerous growths could be caused by ill-wishing and malevolence – Shepherd, therefore, had reasons for concern. Ill-wishing could only be reversed by a pellar, by means of obtaining a sheep’s heart, sticking it with pins whilst reciting a formula, and hanging the heart in the chimney of the victim’s cottage. The evil inherent in the wish would then be reversed back onto the person or persons who had wished it (from “Charming in Devon”, by Theo Brown, Folklore, 81:1 (1970), p40).

Small returned on the arranged day, claiming to have been to London to trace the people who had ill-wished Shepherd. She produced three envelopes, each containing a photo of the three ill-wishers. Placing a coin in the glass of water with the ring in it, she told Shepherd that, when the coin floated to the top, she was to retrieve it, place it on the envelopes, then place it under her pillow for two hours. Only then could she open the envelopes to reveal the images of those who ill-wished her. Small had been giving these instructions to Shepherd from a book of hers, and now she asked Shepherd for a dark garment “to cross the book with”, at which point the girl produced a pair of black stockings. Money changed hands, and Small left.

But Beatrice had misjudged her target. PC Hockeridge was concealed in the parlour, seeing all and hearing all, acting on instructions from Eliza to be present on the day in question as a “woman was going to call to tell her fortune”. The envelopes were discovered in court to contain nothing but blank pieces of card, and the mysterious book Small had been consulting, Hockeridge noted, was nothing more than a pedlar’s certificate – Small’s license to hawk. He arrested her a little way up the road, with 8s 6d on her.

Small turned ugly, saying

…she could lay the servant on a bed of sickness…

Beatrice Small, Torquay Times & South Devon Advertiser, June 9 1883, p6

But she did no such thing, of course. Small was sentenced to two weeks hard labour for vagrancy by telling fortunes. Tellingly, although Eliza Shepherd had hardly been taken in by Small’s mummery, the judge in summing up stated that

…those people who encouraged such things as these deserved an equal term of imprisonment…

Torquay Times & South Devon Advertiser, June 9 1883, p6

In Victorian England, the victims of fortune telling were as culpable as those attempting to extort money from them. Both were guilty of holding true to outdated belief systems and therefore rejecting the massive advances of society in “rationalist and scientific orientation towards human nature, behaviour, and belief” (Louise Henson, “Half-Believing, Half Incredulous”, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 24:3 (2002), p251).

Aveton Gifford, December 1890

Fore Street, Aveton Gifford, 1904. Online Parish Clerk

John Masters was toiling in the fields near Aveton Gifford when a hawker came up to him, requesting a moment’s shelter at a nearby cottage. Masters led the lady to his home where, unprompted, she told him he was a lucky man, who “had a fortune coming to him”: £250. Masters’ eyes must have shone. If Masters were to give the lady ten shillings, she could get the money for him. Masters had no such ready coin, but paid the lady with threepence and a brace of chickens.

The next day, Beatrice Small (for it is she) returned, extorting a further two shillings from Masters, and doubtless filling his head with more tales of promised bounty. The day after that, Small was back again, claiming £5 was needed to engage the services of a lawyer she knew, in order to obtain the fortune. Small was prepared to stump up some of this sum herself, and Masters’ wife, now also taken in, borrowed £1 from her father to give to Small. The day after that, Small received a bag of potatoes and half-a-crown from Masters. Small, with some officiousness one imagines, noted Masters’ personal details for her lawyer, and gave Mr and Mrs Masters a small cloth bag of salt each. John was to wear his inside “the seat of his trousers”, and tell no one about it because

…it was a very difficult and particular business.

Beatrice Small, qtd. in the Western Morning News, December 30 1890, p3

Mrs Masters’ bag had to be worn beneath her “petticoats”, in order for Small to work her “in luck”.

A day after this, and hearing nothing more from his mysterious benefactor, Masters went to where Small’s tent had been pitched, only to find she had gone. Maybe the lucky charm in his trousers started itching. Maybe, somewhere, a donkey was braying, but whatever it was, Masters finally realised he’d been played for a fool. He and his wife had also parted with £2 7s 6d. Masters swallowed his pride, extracted the charm, and sought out the nearest magistrate, but the case was later dismissed.

(At the hearing Small claimed to have actually been engaged by Mrs Masters to ascertain the identities of two women she suspected her husband of being in love with.)

Whilst conning the Masters’, Small was also engaged in a similar merry-go-round with Mrs Mortimer of Aveton Gifford. To her had been promised a fortune of £245, and a house. Over a period of days, Small extorted 6s 6d from the Mortimers, as well as several chickens. She received two months hard labour at the Devon Quarter Sessions January 6, 1891. (From the Western Morning News, December 30 1890, p3, and the Western Times, January 7, 1891, p2.)

The Torquay and Aveton Gifford cases show Small’s sheer persistence and tenacity when she believed she’d come across some truly pliable locals. She was clearly skilled at playing her quarry over a relatively long period, with a well-rehearsed patter. There was the initial flattery of the mark having a “lucky face”, followed by the hook of them either having a fortune lying in wait for them somewhere, or being “ill wished”. Of course, getting the wish lifted or the cash to hand was a complex task, with details and difficulties being embellished with each visit by Small. Each visit, of course, would be punctuated by her extracting some money or goods from her victim – never a large amount (for they could never afford it!), but, taken cumulatively, it was often pretty substantial by the time Small decided it was time for her to up sticks and leave.

Also part of her act was the mysteriousness: the spells, the charms, the lawyer in London, etc. All served to further flatter – and bewilder – the credulous country folk who were her prey. They would have identified Small as a white witch or pellar, and therefore a person to be treated with respect, if not caution. As we saw at Torquay, it was a fine line between white witchcraft – having an ill-wish lifted – and black witchcraft, when Small was heard to utter she could have Eliza Shepherd on a “bed of sickness”, if she so desired.

Small’s prison record, Exeter Jail. UK Calendar of Prisoners, 1868-1929

And this could be no hollow threat. For example, in 1857 Isaac Rushwood, a wizard from Leeds, was sentenced to eighteen months in a “most disgusting” case. His “dupe”, Ritty Littlewood, had been driven insane by his antics, and was removed to an asylum. Since his conviction, Rushwood had let it be known that Littlewood would be haunted by devils, and would die in prison. So afflicted was poor Littlewood that she was inclined to clawing the skin from her face, and had to be confined in a straitjacket. (From the Cornish Telegraph, July 25 1857, p3.)

As we shall see, Small’s technique altered little over the years, and from this we may deduce that it was a rather successful, if immoral, way of making a living. We must remember that the only incidents of her fortune telling we know of are the intermittent ones where she got caught, and are therefore documented. What is unknowable is the amount of people who were completely taken in by her patter, and parted with their hard-earned cash sincerely in the belief that they would, one day, be rich. Equally unknowable are the numbers of people who actually did realise, sooner or later, that they’d been conned, but were too embarrassed to report the crime. Masters must have blushed to his roots when he recounted in court the tale of the cloth bag down his trousers (which elicited much laughter), and this fear of public ridicule must have made many give pause before running to the authorities. Also, how many men and women in late 1800s Devon were walking around with bags of salt on their person, convinced that this minor discomfort was somehow ‘working luck’ in their favour?

St Marychurch, Torquay, 1894

Fore Street, St Marychurch, 1910. Babbacombe and St Marychurch History Society

Mary Jane Perring, servant, didn’t want to buy the lace she was being offered from the lady who appeared at the back door one day. She didn’t really want her fortune told either, with a pack of playing cards, but Beatrice Small was insistent. After a while, and perhaps realising that Perring wasn’t overly enamoured of this approach, Small asked her for half-a-crown, which of course Perring didn’t have. Why not give me something else, then, said Small, to

…weigh down the planet?

Beatrice Small, Torquay Times and South Devon Advertiser, August 3 1894, p3

Perring handed over a bodice and a nightdress, and sent her on her way. A few days later Small returned, without the clothes, still in search of money. Perring, evidently not overawed, still had no money, so Small asked for more clothing, with which to “weigh the planet down”, and produced her playing cards once more, but Perring was obviously something of a stubborn character and Small retreated, empty-handed.

Perring didn’t report the incident, but someone else did, and the Chairman of Torquay Police Court, recalling Small’s previous convictions, sentenced her to three months, with hard labour. (From the Torquay Times and South Devon Advertiser, August 3 1894, p3.)

Over the years, Small must have realised that some people were, quite simply, not easily taken. Mary Jane Perring is an example of one such. How many more must have listened to Small’s performances by the back doors of their cottages with an amused, detached air, and sent her quickly and quietly on her way with a small consideration?

The inciting of the “planets” and the heavens in these very uncelestial goings-on was a not uncommon trope amongst fortune tellers. In a 1905 case in West Cornwall two women were given three months hard labour each: they were said to have been “working on the planets” to find property for their mark whilst taking her money. The judge, in sentencing, called the lady prosecuting not just a superstitious woman, but an “absolutely wicked” woman: were it not for the likes of her, fortune-tellers and their ilk would cease to exist. (From Lake’s Falmouth Packet, 28 July 1905, p7.)

Basically, people putting their faith in fortune-tellers and healers of all stripes was little more than a rejection of the advances in education and science made during the nineteenth-century. It was also a rejection of faith in the power of God. (From Lake’s Falmouth Packet, August 25 1905, p8.)

Ware Cross, Kingsteington, 1896

Fore Street Kingsteington. From Fore Street Barbers

Elizabeth Veale of Ware Cross was terrified. She’d been ill, as Beatrice Small had correctly observed, but now the gypsy woman was telling her this illness had been caused by witchcraft, courtesy of one of her neighbours. Veale “would die”, Small callously told her, unless she worked two charms, on Elizabeth and her husband, to have the witchcraft removed. Small wasn’t about to practice her magic out of kindness, however: £3 was the sum required to save Elizabeth’s life. Small acquired fowls, and bag of potatoes, and over £1 in money: total value, £2 11s 6d. She was sentenced to two months, with hard labour. (From the Western Times, December 11 1896, p6.)

Into Cornwall and the Channel Islands, 1898

Main Street, Lanreath, 1800s. Lanreath Parish Council

We come here to the events which opened this post. It became known as the “Chancery Myths” case, and was covered in several newspapers: the Totnes Weekly Times (8 and 15 October), the Western Morning News, (October 10 and 19), and the Royal Cornwall Gazette (October 13). Small went on some kind of fortune telling spree in the spring of 1898, extorting around £21 from the parishioners of Lanreath and St Stephens-by-Saltash. (There was, at the time of her arrest, an outstanding warrant on her for telling fortunes in Longdown, near Exeter.) £21 in 1898 was the staggering sum of £2,700 in 2020, which tells us she must have hit a rich vein of untapped credulity in these areas.

This was fraud on a large scale.

Small’s modus operandi was a familiar one. People, lots of them, were told they had “lucky faces”, and that there was money (the usual sum was £600) waiting for them to be collected “in Chancery”: a fortune she foretold for them by “cutting the cards”. Of course, Small could get the money – for a fee. Not content with this, she also claimed to be able to cure a Lanreath man of his “delicate” health.

It took several months to hunt Small down, but, once the police were aware of who they were looking for, it can’t have been especially difficult. She was traced back into Devon where, acting on a tip, she was discovered to be in Jersey, lying low with her Small brethren.

There may have been many of her fraternity waiting to denounce her. Several times over the years she had been involved in fights in public houses with other members of the Small family. For example, in 1884, Small prosecuted two of her female relatives for beating her up in a Newton Abbot pub. It must have been a particularly brutal spectacle. One of these relatives had lost both her hands in a “railway accident”, and promised Beatrice she would

…give it to her with her stumps.

Sophie Small, East and South Devon Advertiser, September 27 1884, p7

This she did, smashing Beatrice up against a wall with a haymaker.

On returning from Jersey in handcuffs, Small pleaded guilty at the trial, and as her offence was a “very serious” one, she was handed six months in gaol, with hard labour. Tellingly, before she was led away, Small asked the judge if she was liable to be arrested again at the expiration of her sentence: clearly not all her recent activities had been uncovered by the case of the Chancery Myths. Indeed, she was only convicted for a total sum of just under £16 (Kresen Kernow ref. QS 1/21/399, 18 October, 1898).

Beatrice Small needed the countryside to operate. She needed remote villages, and detached households. There would be less witnesses, and hopefully more impressionable, less-worldly people to dupe. She would have no fixed abode, making a moonlight flit all the easier once she had exhausted all the possibilities – and the wallets – of a given area. For example, the 1891 census captures the Small family in a tent, on St Cleer Downs.

Detail, 1891 Census

Hence, even though she lived in Plymouth for a couple of years (including John Lane in the 1901 census, and the aptly-named Hawker’s Avenue), there is no record of her telling fortunes there. This doesn’t mean, of course, that she didn’t cut the cards during her sojourn in the city, but the chances of her making a sustained run at extortion by fortune-telling were greatly reduced. For a start, she had a regular address, and regular neighbours. There was also a regular police force. Locals might have been less readily taken in by her tales. In any case, it seems city life didn’t suit the Smalls: Beatrice was assaulted twice, was fined for being drunk and disorderly, and received a caution when attempting to throw herself off Plymouth Hoe whilst intoxicated. They were soon back on the road.

Final cases: Quethiock, 1902, Teignmouth, 1903

St Hugo's Church 1908, Quethiock
Quethiock, 1908, Francis Frith

The “Extraordinary Credulity” displayed in the Quethiock case bears all the trappings of a classic Beatrice Small manoeuvre. Mr and Mrs Adams, of Blunts, Quethiock, were first told that someone had put an ill-wish on them, and that she could halt the curse – for money. Next, they were told £110 was waiting for them, in Chancery. For a fee, Small could engage a lawyer to get it for them. This took place over a period of days, with Small saying, of course, she needed something to “go on the planet”.

Small was sentenced to three months, the judge remarking that

…he wished he could send such credulous people who were so easily gulled to half that period.

Western Evening Herald, August 18 1902, p2

The Teignmouth episode bears out my earlier observation, that the remoter the area, the easier it is to carry out a little clandestine card reading. Beatrice and her daughter, also Beatrice, were attempting to entice a barmaid in a pub, but the conversation was overheard by a local policemen, and the two women were picked up. The case was dismissed. (Teignmouth Post, March 6 1903, p5.)

Beatrice Small who married Belcher
Beatrice Beatie Small, 1886-1954. Courtesy of Debra Hughes

This was the last recorded instance of Beatrice Small telling fortunes, though of course she had several other convictions after this, and actually lived until 1947. After the early 1900s, however, it’s apparent that her daughter Beatrice starts appearing in newspaper reports, and separating mother from daughter has proven difficult.

One of the final, and worst, acts attributable to the elder Smalls occurred in 1904, when the NSPCC inspected the Small’s tents, then situated in fields near Edginswell. The details here are very upsetting, and as such I’ll refrain from outlining them. The Smalls’ five children were found to be wilfully neglected, in a “manner likely to cause injury to their health”. Both Beatrice and her husband were imprisoned for two months, and “arrangements” were made for their offspring. (Totnes Weekly Times, 11 December 1904, p8.)

It’s significant that, when the Central Register of England and Wales was undertaken in 1939, the Small offspring were living in Kiln Forehead Lane, near Kingsteington.

Beatrice was living in Taunton, on her own means. Maybe, every now and then, she gave card readings. She was once quoted in the East and South Devon Advertiser of May 9, 1905 as saying that you would have to be very wide awake to catch “old Mother Small” (p5). I suspect that remained so for many years.

Listen to me discuss Beatrice Small’s career with Keith Wallis on The Piskie Trap podcast here…

Many thanks

Sister Helen and Saint Barnabas

Reading time: 35 minutes

Sister Helen Phillipps-Treby, St Barnabas Hospital, 1925. Courtesy of Saltash Heritage

Would to God that every district in the land had its cottage hospital, where the suffering poor could receive the best medical skill and nursing.

Rev. Canon Bush, dedicatory service to St Barnabas Hospital, reported in the Western Morning News, 12 December 1888, p5.

St Barnabas (“Son of Consolation”) Cottage Hospital and Convalescent Home on Higher Port View, Saltash, opened on May 13, 1889. The Western Daily Mercury announced that its main purpose was to receive “persons suffering from accident, non-contagious or non-infectious diseases, especially those convalescing from illness, who are discharged from hospitals and not sufficiently strong to resume their work” (April 27, 1889, p2).

The building of the hospital had been proposed and funded by Mrs Caroline Ley, in remembrance of her late husband, the Rev. Richard Ley. Running to a cost of £4,500, St Barnabas was certainly a state-of-the-art institution. The rooms were “well lighted and cheerful”, with particular attention paid to “sanitary arrangements”: every ward had its own toilet. There was a heating chamber, a kitchen, a dining room, a scullery, an ice-house, a laundry and a mortuary. The whole building was heated by hot water pipes, there was a good source of water from a well on the site, and a lift communicated with “the upper landing”.

There were two male wards, two female wards, a childrens’ ward, and a day room – a capacity of ten adults and three children. The Sisters had their own room which opened on to a verandah, and a separate bedroom. These Sisters could also be alerted to any ward by a system of “pneumatic” bells, and indeed had windows through which they could keep an eye on their patients. The east side of the hospital was given over to an “exceedingly pretty little chapel”, and beside the in-house surgery and entrance lobby there was “a recess” in which an ambulance was stored, for use “at a moment’s notice”. The operating room was also located near the entrance lobby, enabling urgent procedures “to be taken there direct”. (From the Western Morning News, December 12, 1888, p5.)

At this time, nursing was to be provided by the Wantage Sisterhood, an order of the Church of England established in 1848, in Oxfordshire. Below is the hospital that would have greeted them.

St Barnabas Hospital | saltash.org
Early sketch of St Barnabas Hospital, with floor plans. Courtesy of Saltash Heritage

Of course, to be a patient at this new, voluntary hospital cost money. According to the League of Friends pamphlet on St Barnabas (1999), an annual subscription of one guinea allowed for admission for three weeks in any one year, at three shillings weekly. Patients were admitted on the payment of twelve shillings weekly – if recommended by a clergyman or medical man. In all cases, a Medical Certificate was necessary to show that the patient wasn’t suffering from any infectious or contagious disease. Although beds would have obviously been made available for emergencies, clearly prolonged treatment at St Barnabas was beyond the means of many people: a farm labourer in the 1880s was estimated to earn, on average, only 15 shillings a week.

In practice, of course, things were very different. A former patient of St Barnabas felt moved to write to his local newspaper in 1897, stating that the hospital is

Open to all creeds and no creeds, and all religious denominations without distinction…and, does such great work for the sick and suffering poor…

“A Grateful and Former Patient”, Western Morning News, June 10, 1897, p8

Of course, like any medical institution, the Sisters of St Barnabas were honour-bound to respond to an emergency, whether those in need had the requisite funds or not. One evening in 1903 Alfred Turpin, a drayman, whoa’d his horse and cart laden with barrels of ale to a stop at the top of the hill on Fore St, Saltash. He jumped off and knelt down to carry out some running maintenance to his vehicle, but the horse “went on”. Turpin was knocked under the cart, “and two wheels passed over his back”, fracturing his ribs. He was quickly conveyed to St Barnabas Hospital. The horse, in an absolute orgy of destruction, ran amok, careering into Silver St where it fell and knocked the cart flying, hitting over a lamp post, smashing a window shutter, and flooding the streets with ale. Alas, nothing could be done for Turpin. He died that night, in agony. (From Lake’s Falmouth Packet, 15 August 1903, p3.)

Fore Street, Saltash. Courtesy of Saltash Heritage

The 1891 census captures the early make-up of St Barnabas Hospital. Besides Margaret Powles, the Sister-in-Charge, there were five other Sisters of Charity present, one nurse, and a servant. Only these last two would have been earning earning anything like a wage. There were five patients and three visitors. As you can see below, the Sisters, and their guests, truly were daughters of Empire, hailing from all corners of the globe.

St Barnabas Hospital, 1891 Census

In 1894, the Wantage Sisterhood was replaced by the Order of St Margaret’s of East Grinstead, West Sussex. Among the Sisters of St Margaret who came to St Barnabas was Helen Phillipps-Treby: Sister Helen.

By 1896, Sister Helen was Head Nurse of St Barnabas Hospital. She soon took over the management.

She retired in 1951.

Though seldom recalled today, Sister Helen became the embodiment of St Barnabas Hospital. The span of her career covered some momentous changes in nursing and society, and the way nursing was viewed by this rapidly changing society. The story of Sister Helen is also the story of the early years of St Barnabas Hospital.

Like her fellow sisters from the Wantage Sisterhood, Helen Phillipps-Treby was also a daughter of Empire. She was born in 1866, in St Helier, Jersey. Her father, Major-General Paul Winsloe Phillipps-Treby, was born in Cornwall, at the family home of Landue House, near Launceston. The family had their own crest. His obituary in the Army and Navy Gazette of December 12, 1908 stated that, on his death at the age of 84, the Major-General had spent much of his 36 years of service abroad, docking in such exotic locations as Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Canada, Singapore, St Helena, and Hong Kong (p17). Until Helen entered her teens, the Major-General would have been on active duty overseas.

Landue House in 1990
Landue House, Launceston

It’s unclear as to what motivated Sister Helen to take the veil. When she was growing up in the 1870s, observes Monica Baly in Nursing and Social Change (Routledge, 1994), later marriages, a falling birth-rate, young men emigrating because of Empire, and economic depression produced a “pool” of middle-class spinsters who had nothing to look forward to but “idleness in the home” (p124). This context, allied to Florence Nightingale’s reforms of nursing and the medical advances including those of Pasteur and Lister (p100-24), created a “new image of the hospital nurse” who was “associated with doctors, science, and cure” (p124). In short, the Victorian era made nursing respectable, it opened a path to the fulfilment of Christian duty, and it didn’t involve competition with men.

Sister Helen wasn’t, however, a nurse of Nightingale’s new model army. As Sioban Nelson argues in Say Little, Do Much: Nurses, Nuns and Hospitals in the Nineteenth Century (Pennysylvania University Press, 2001), the “triumphant” story of Nightingale’s reforms “obscures” the dedication of nursing nuns to hospital care. It was, states Nelson, the “vowed labor” of the nuns that “built so much of the health care system that we take for granted today” (p2-3). Furthermore, according to Nelson, in the nineteenth century “nursing innovators were all religious women”, yet the work of vowed nurses came to be “ignored or trivialized, always depicted as a preparatory stage to real nursing” (p5). Secularisation, therefore, equalled “proper” nursing; the nursing nuns, of which Sister Helen was such a one, were pre-professional. Nelson’s book seeks to rebut this stance, illustrating how nursing nuns were also in the vanguard of nineteenth century advances in hospital care, becoming not just nurses but managers, administrators, and negotiators in the public domain. Sister Helen was one of these nurses.

The Victorian age, with its social dislocation, poverty, immigration, and epidemics, “welcomed” nursing nuns (Nelson, p12). Thanks to the Catholic Emancipation Bill of 1829, Roman Catholics were again permitted a public life in England (Nelson, p56-7). By 1838, the first convent in England since the Reformation had opened, The Order of The Sisters of Mercy, in Bermondsey. Many more followed, including in 1855 the Sisters of Saint Margaret, in East Grinstead, Sussex. (The convent closed in 1970 and was given over to private homes.) Besides providing training for domestic service, the convent also gave tuition in nursing – to become a Sister of Charity. These disciplines helped to provide a “means for the church to integrate itself into a society that had formerly excluded Catholics” (Nelson, p153). And the Sisters of East Grinstead rapidly made themselves vital in battling the scourges of the day: in 1870 the Order provided staff for the stretched London hospitals to combat the smallpox epidemic. It was to this convent, for whatever reasons, Sister Helen came before 1891.

Photo of East Grinstead, St Margaret's Convent 1909
St Margaret’s Convent, East Grinstead, 1891. From Francis Frith

Maybe it had been an easy decision for her to make; maybe it was out of desperation. Either way, she was turning her back on a leisurely, middle-class life as the daughter of a well-off, decorated, and rather eminent, soldier. She would never marry, bear children, or earn a wage. She would have no independent or individual life of her own: all decisions regarding where she worked, with whom, and for whom, were dictated by the Superior at East Grinstead. Sister Helen’s life, her religious life, would be formed by a pragmatic attention to the needs of those around her. It was to be a life of hardship, but this hardship would be turned, through her spiritual training, into “exercises in obedience and humility”. Sister Helen was now on “God’s mission” (Nelson, p1).

And she must have shown early promise. By 1891, aged 24, she was a Sister of Charity, along with several other student nurses, at Guy’s Hospital in Southwark. Dating from the 1720s and recently expanded in the 1850s, this was a prestigious post for a young Sister. It was also something of a baptism of fire. Sister Helen would have been involved in treating victims of Russian Flu, which went on to kill over 125,000 people in the 1890s. Seeing as medical knowledge about the transmission and cure of such diseases was still in its infancy, remedies included Turkish baths and the inhalation of carbolic smoke balls.

Guy’s Hospital, 1891 Census
Engraving of Guy's Hospital.
Guy’s Hospital, how it probably looked in Sister Helen’s day. From King’s College London

Sister Helen must have come to St Barnabas Hospital in 1894 as no green recruit. She was already an experienced nurse from a busy, sprawling metropolitan institution, who had seen and dealt with first-hand the ravages of an epidemic. Little surprise, then, that by 1901 at least, she was Head Nurse. By 1911, if not before, she was in charge of the overall operation of St Barnabas Hospital.

Census records, St Barnabas, 1901 and 1911

As Head Nurse, Sister Helen not only had to manage the entire nursing side of St Barnabas, but also its finances. Before the advent of the NHS, hospitals were provided by local governments and the administrators – or enforcers – of the Poor Law. The third variety of hospital in this era, of which St Barnabas was one, were the so-called “voluntary” hospitals, which relied on philanthropy and fund-raising for their upkeep and were generally located in more rural areas – generally speaking, medical care was better in a voluntary hospital and more medical training was practised in them. In the 1890s, voluntary hospitals provided 26% of hospital beds in England. Sister Helen had to report to the Board of Subscribers annually, on all matters financial as well as medical. For example, at the Annual Meeting of St Barnabas Hospital in 1931, Helen, recorded as the Sister-in-Charge and Honorary Secretary, presented detail on that financial year’s intake of patients (for the record, a total of 129, mainly from the Saltash area), the number of major operations (seventeen), and be involved in the announcing of the accounts: St Barnabas had a credit balance of £186, but more subscribers and donations were “pleaded for”. Obviously as a result of the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression, donations had decreased from £80 to £31 (from the Cornish Guardian, April 2, 1931, p4).

Sister Helen’s concerns were therefore fiscal, as well as spiritual.

Before 1914, the hospital witnessed several improvements, and the odd setback. The pamphlet compiled by the League of Friends on St Barnabas (1999) tells us that in 1896 and 1897 St Barnabas was forced to close for five weeks, owing to a water shortage: clearly the old well on the grounds was beginning to prove inadequate. The solution was provided by Saltash Town Council, who laid a permanent supply in November 1897. Though in its infancy, Sister Helen’s Hospital was already gaining a reputation for two things that seemed to be a constant during her long tenure: excellent care, and shortage of funds. One patient wrote that the sisters’

…spare neither time nor trouble to make their patients’ happy…by careful nursing endeavour…it is above all praise…this Hospital may receive a larger share of sympathy and support from the charitable and generous public…

“A Grateful and Former Patient”, Western Morning News, June 10, 1897, p8

The above letter-writer stated that all donations should be sent to the Sister-in-Charge: Sister Helen. And perhaps this person’s appeal reached the right ears. By 1912, notes the League of Friends pamphlet, building improvements had been made and a new operating theatre installed. In 1913, 94 patients were treated, nine operations were successfully carried out, and there were no deaths.

Operating theatre, St Barnabas Hospital. Courtesy of Saltash Heritage

The installation of the new operating theatre at St Barnabas reflected the increasing demands on hospitals that people were beginning to make of them. Due to the rapidly improved techniques and amenities at the beginning of the twentieth century, societies were “less frightened of hospitals” than in previous eras. This new image, however, only gave rise to another issue: in the early 1900s, hospitals were already “complaining about the abuse of beds”, and that the “problem of medicine being able to do more than it had resources for had begun” (Baly, Nursing and Social Change, p137). There were some patients the Sisters of St Barnabas could simply do little for, other than provide comfort. In 1902 an inmate of Bodmin Workhouse was sent there; he was described as being “consumptive”. The effective treatment and cure of tuberculosis only became a reality after World War II, the causes of its transmission only previously vaguely understood. We can only conjecture if this patient was kept in isolation, and whether those caring for him took any preventive measures against infection (from the Cornwall and Devon Post, September 20, 1902, p5.)

The true revolution in nursing practice, and the role of hospitals and women in society, came about as a direct result of World War I, argues Monica Baly in Nursing and Social Change (p140-3). For the first time, women took on male occupations en masse, nurses (and nursing nuns) saw action on the front line, and the British Government took the first tentative steps toward bringing the country’s several hospital systems under state control. The reasons behind this was a direct need for care of the wounded: the

…War Office tried to persuade individual hospitals to give up beds for war casualties, persuasion that had to be backed by considerable subsidy.

Monica Baly, Nursing and Social Change, p141

In short, the Government pumped money into hospitals in return for beds and treatment of wounded Tommies. Naturally, the traditionally cash-strapped hospitals feared the consequences of this sudden influx of riches drying up; the net result was the embryonic beginnings of a government-sponsored health service. As Head Sister of St Barnabas and holder of the hospital’s purse strings, Sister Helen’s institution would have benefited greatly from the new state of affairs.

But the money was hard-earned. As early as August 12, 1914, it was announced that the doors of St Barnabas would be “thrown open” to receive the wounded (Western Morning News, p3). The League of Friends pamphlet tells us that 646 soldiers were received at St Barnabas Hospital in the war years, plus civilian admissions. (It was also a Section Military Hospital for over a year.) Admissions before the outbreak of war, was, as we have seen, 94 patients in 1913. If these figures are accurate, then St Barnabas’s average annual intake of patients between 1914 and 1918 was around 255. That’s an increase of approximately 36%.

The numbers don’t quantify the nature of the treatment required by the British soldiers, nor the unwanted and unlooked-for nature of the horrifying mental and physical injuries this unprecedented level of warfare wrought on those involved. Sister Helen and her staff may have had to treat relatively simple “Blighty Wounds”, her surgeons could have performed amputations (the Sisters would have rehabilitated the amputees), and the Sisters would have had to comfort and sooth those blinded in gas attacks, or fathom how best to manage those diagnosed with what was then known as “battle fatigue” or “shell shock“. The following images – none from St Barnabas – are harrowing, and are meant to portray the possible challenges faced by the mainly unpaid, voluntary team at the hospital.

Shocking: British Pathe footage filmed during World War One shows traumatised soldiers displaying terrible symptoms such as tics and uncontrollable shakes
Shell shock victim suffering a fit, Seale Hayne military hospital, Newton Abbott
Hospital ward, Antwerp, Belgium
Amputees at the military hospital
Amputees, Royal Victoria Hospital, Netley, Hampshire

This massive increase in patients as a result of war, and the emancipation of women with the Representation of the People Act of 1918, led to a new infusion of women entering careers in nursing. Estimates from the 1901 census showed that, of the 67,000 women stating their occupations as a nurse or a midwife, only 25-30,000 of these were actually formally trained. By 1917, there was now 45,000 trained nurses in Britain. And the demographic was changing too. In 1901, 45% of these women were either married or widowed; by 1931, this figure is put at 12%. Reform and war made nursing almost the sole preserve of the young, single woman. (From Baly, Nursing and Social Change, p125, 140-2.)

But theory and training is one thing, practice is another. And who would have been better to provide all three than the experienced Sisters of St Barnabas? Sister Helen had seen Russian Flu first hand; one of her patients (possibly more than one) had TB. In 1904, there was an outbreak of typhoid in the St Germans district – sufferers were moved to St Barnabas (Royal Cornwall Gazette, 18 August 1904, p7). Soldiers from the Western Front would have presented a whole new chapter of learning on the job. And Sister Helen ensured St Barnabas had the means with which to move with the times. We do not have the original letters she must have written, the communications to local businesses and townspeople, the levels of organisation and commitment, the dialogues with ordinary townspeople, or the simple goodhearted donations the hospital received anon. But we do know they happened.

In 1893, as told in the League of Friends pamphlet, St Barnabas regularly received gifts of rabbits (though no mention is made of whose land they were snared on), and what must have been the prized present of a washing machine (manually operated, of course). In 1898, the Mayor of Saltash arranged a carnival for the town, the proceeds of which were to be donated to the hospital (Royal Cornwall Gazette, December 1, p7).

After 1918, the voluntary hospitals found themselves in financial difficulty. A fall in donations, coupled with increasing costs, resulted in a government grant of £1 million being proposed. Only half was ever delivered (Baly, Nursing and Social Change, p161). St Barnabas, and Sister Helen, had to find other ways to fill the coffers. In 1926, the vegetables presented at St Stephens District Show were all donated to St Barnabas (Cornish Guardian, September 24). A year later, the Board of St Germans Guardians granted the sum of £3 3s for the hospital’s upkeep (Cornish Guardian, January 7, 1927, p14; the same ‘paper reported the same amount granted in 1930 – January 30, p3).

“Oyez! Oyez!”, advertised the Cornish Guardian of September 27, 1928. A jumble sale in aid of the hospital was to be held in Saltash, under the patronage of the Mayor and Mayoress, Mr and Mrs Venn (p8). In February 1930 Saltash Guildhall held a Valentine Dance, to raise money for more hospital beds. We get a flavour here of the fag end of the Roaring Twenties and the era of Big Band jazz. For the night, the Guildhall was decorated with fairy lights, Chinese lanterns, and flowers. Music was provided by the brilliantly named Miami Band. One imagines none of the members were from Miami. Another ball aimed at improving the finances of the hospital was held in 1931; this time, however, the tunes were courtesy of Fullbrook’s Royal Hotel Dance Band. (Cornish Guardian, February 20, 1930, p4, and February 2, 1931, p8.)

Burraton Vegetable Show donated all its produce in 1930, as did the show at St Stephens in 1931 (Cornish Guardian, August 28, 1930, p10, and September 3, 1931, p5). At the St Barnabas AGM of 1931 Sister Helen “expressed gratitude” for all the voluntary help received – but as always more was required (Cornish Guardian, April 2, p4). And the help kept coming. In October 1939 a lady of Saltash left £100 in her will to St Barnabas; that same year x-ray equipment was anonymously donated (Cornish Guardian, October 5, p9, Western Morning News, April 21, p4).

Sister Helen was the indefatigable epicentre of all this philanthropic activity. She, and her Sisters, went from house to house in Saltash, begging, in between regular hospital duties. She developed, and of course worked in, the hospital garden, wielding hoe and spade, in order to put vegetables on the table. Patients’ meals were personally attended to by her in the kitchen. Whatever spare time she might have had was dedicated “to making cakes and preserves for the benefit of the hospital funds” (Western Morning News, August 19, 1939, p10). Lest we forget, Sister Helen ran a hospital too. A hospital that, under her management, was forever modernising and expanding.

In 1923, writes the League of Friends, electricity was installed, at a cost of £450. In 1927 an adjoining house was purchased – this annex, the Claremont Wing, was used as a maternity ward, with a separate ward for the chronically sick. In 1931, a new luxury was added: the wireless. Each bed at St Barnabas Hospital now came equipped with its own earphones (Cornish Guardian, April 2, p4).

Listening to the platters that matter, Cardiff Hospital, c1935. (Photo by Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

On the eve of World War II, Sister Helen reported a total number of patient admissions of 361, testament to the expansions, reforms, and new equipment (Western Morning News, April 21, 1939, p4).

There were setbacks, of course. Marion Crooke had been a patient at St Barnabas in 1922. After her recovery, she continued to live at the hospital, mainly digging and weeding alongside Sister Helen in the garden, where she gained a reputation as a “hard worker”. One morning in December 1931, Sister Helen asked Crooke to reduce the number of flowers she was growing – there had been complaints in Saltash that the hospital had been producing “too many”. Crooke flew into a rage, threatened to leave St Barnabas, and stormed off. The next morning, Crooke was discovered by a Saltash resident, lying in a field, with a service revolver close by. She had shot herself. The coroner returned a verdict of “Suicide by shooting whilst of an unsound mind.” “Much sympathy” was extended to Sister Helen and her staff (Cornish Guardian, December 10, 1931, p5). Sister Helen’s reaction to the violent death of a lady she had known, treated, and looked after for the best part of ten years is unknown.

On July 18, 1938, Christine Petherick, a “young hospital maid” of 26, began her first shift at St Barnabas Hospital. She had, commented Sister Helen, unpacked all her clothes and arranged her room as though she had intended to settle down and stay. Sister Helen had also been impressed by the girl’s personal appearance, but had heard that Petherick “suffered from a slight nervous affliction”, and was prone to losing her memory. On July 19, Petherick disappeared, launching a search for her that extended over Cornwall and into Devon. On August 1, she was found, safe but malnourished, in a chicken shed in Looe, where she had been for “two or three days”. Where her wanderings had taken her in the meantime are a mystery. (From the Western Morning News, 1 August 1938, p5, and August 2, p6).

The nature of the institution of which Sister Helen was a member – The Order of East Grinstead – and her financial management occasionally fell under scrutiny as well. At the hospital’s 1926 AGM, in front of the Mayor of Saltash, she rebutted the beliefs amongst some that St Margaret’s of East Grinstead reaped “pecuniary advantage” from St Barnabas. People were accusing the nuns of siphoning off the hospital’s funds, and that the books were being cooked. You can almost hear the sharp, emphatic tone of Sister Helen’s voice when she said that

This is not so.

Sister Helen, in the Western Morning News, February 18, 1926, p3

She went on to demonstrate the hospital’s financial state and that, far from beliefs to the contrary, the Mother Superintendent of East Grinstead actually sent £25 annually to the parish Church fund, in recognition of the local vicar’s work at St Barnabas. Sister Helen, in this instance, is truly a public figure, defending her hospital, her order, the people she works for, and the people who work for her. She was also defending her religion, which may have been more of a battle than is perhaps realised now. It was noted in 1939 that the hospital had been “fighting against an undercurrent of prejudice” during its earlier years – prejudice against the Catholic religion. How many doors had been slammed in the Sisters’ faces on one of their countless begging excursions, how many insults? How many letters ignored? (From the Western Morning News, 19 August, 1939, p10.)

1939 was the year of the greatest setback for St Barnabas, and for the town of Saltash in general. And it wasn’t the beginning of the war.

Saltash residents are faced with a grave situation concerning St Barnabas Hospital…

Sisterhood “Bombshell” for Saltash, Western Morning News, August 19, 1939, p7

They certainly were. The Mother Superior of the Order of East Grinstead had taken the decision to “withdraw the Matron, Sister Helen, and her three assistants”. They were to leave on New Year’s Day, 1940. Three weeks before the news was made public, a letter arrived from the Mother Superior which was read by the three medics concerned with the hospital, stating that the Sisters would be withdrawn and that, in effect, the trusteeship of St Barnabas would pass into new hands. The medics wrote at once to the Mother Superior, protesting her decision, but the reply was non-negotiable: East Grinstead, and Sister Helen, were pulling out. This, commented one medic, was nothing short of a “bombshell”.

At a public meeting presided over by the Mayor, it was decided that he should deal with the matter in conference with representatives of the Saltash community, in order to address the problem of the transfer of the trusteeship. The Sisterhood of Epiphany in Truro had been approached as possible replacements, but this had been “declined”. There was even talk of a compromise, with St Barnabas being run by a board of Saltash residents and a member of the Sisterhood of Epiphany; if this were to happen, the Sisters of Truro would be on board. Suddenly, this began to look like an attractive option, until a member of the public spoke from the floor: Col. W. P. Drury reminded all present “of what we are losing”.

Reading the ‘papers, it easy to see that Drury must have given a hell of a speech. If Sister Helen and her colleagues were to leave, they were losing forty-five out of the fifty years of the hospital’s life. They were losing Sister Helen, a lady from a family “whose name is well-known in the West of England”, who was therefore able to command “a certain amount of influential interest”. Drury sketched the arduous labours of the Sisters, such as the begging, the fundraising, the gardening, and, above all, the nursing, all of which was “unpaid, of course”.

By their wonderful serenity, patience and devoted lives, the Sisters have won the admiration and gratitude of the community, and Saltash has at last realized that it has in its midst a hospital unique, because of a certain atmosphere it possesses…

Col. Drury, Western Morning News, August 19, 1939, p10

Drury attributed this atmosphere, indefinable but appreciated by all who were a patient at St Barnabas, to Sister Helen. Such was her selflessness, noted Drury, that even so she had been informed by her Superior of her departure eleven months before the announcement was made public, she had been sworn to secrecy, and had obviously kept this promise. Drury stated that the proposed, compromised, and what looks like, in hindsight, cobbled-together trusteeship, would mean losing that “loving personal touch for something far more formal”. Just as, in Drury’s opinion, St Barnabas was reaching the peak of its “efficiency and prosperity”, the whole situation was to be arbitrarily “uprooted”.

Drury went on to pan the decision of the East Grinstead Superior. No member of an Order “questions” a decision made by the head of that Order, yet, Drury added, “it is a cruel” rule, reminiscent “of the Middle Ages”, carried out in a “high-handed manner”. (From the Western Morning News, August 19, 1939, p7, 10.)

What Sister Helen made of all this is anyone’s guess. How she was expected to react is blithely set out in the writings of an Abbott from Dublin in 1967:

…if, at the request of her religious superior, a Sister is sent from one area of the country to another, she can do so immediately. There is no house to sell, no family members to consider, and no concerns about whether it is the right place for her to be. This, in turn, leaves her free to undertake the work or activity for which she was sent, without guilt feelings for those left behind and for what might have been.

Quoted in “Daughter of Charity”, by Celeste Bowe, International History of Nursing Journal, 2001, 6(2): 75-9

Now, that’s an easy thing to read; it’s pretty easy for me to type. But it would take the stoniest of hearts to turn your back on a place where you have lived and worked, ceaselessly, for nearly fifty years, without a twinge of regret. Through no choice of your own, the hospital you took over, extended, modernised, and ran in your own image, you would never see again. Her fellow Sisters of Charity, with whom she had toiled for forty years, would be leaving too, but not with her. That would have been one of the hardest goodbyes. Sister Helen must have known that, sooner or later, she would have to retire, and leave St Barnabas. But not this way. The news, I feel certain, must have hurt. Perhaps Col. Drury was right to describe the Grinstead Superior’s decision as a hangover from the Middle Ages.

Or maybe I’m being unfair. The quote above says the Sister was expected to leave her post immediately. At least Sister Helen’s Superior gave her eleven months to come to terms with the prospect, a prospect she couldn’t – and didn’t – share with anyone.

But, nothing happened. “No Developments Yet at Saltash” stated the Western Morning News of August 26, 1939. The reasons given were simply this: “Owing to the crisis…” (p13). There certainly was a crisis. News of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had broke on the 25th, and Germany was to invade Poland seven days later. Britain’s government, whether they liked it or not, had known war was coming for some time. In 1938, around the time of the Anschluss, the Committee for Civil Defence estimated 67,000 nurses were needed for First Aid posts; the military estimated they needed 5,000 alone. They only had a thousand. The resulting mass recruitment programme, that continued throughout the war, diluted the service with untrained staff and cut nursing levels in civilian hospitals. Allied to this, hospitals were encouraged to discharge non-military patients in anticipation of the numbers of wounded and evacuate them to rural areas (Baly, Nursing and Social Change, p169-70). Somewhere, in this organised chaos, a decision was taken, or deferred: Sister Helen and her colleagues had better stay at St Barnabas.

St Barnabas Hospital, 1939 England and Wales Register. Carried out in September of that year, with the purpose of producing National Identity Cards, it was updated over time and formed the basis for the National Health Service Register of 1948. The records that are blanked out are for patients who are possibly still alive.

As a result of the war, the Government finally had a “new role as an employer of nurses” (Baly, Nursing and Social Change, p172): all nurses’ wages were reimbursed to the hospitals by the Government. By 1941, there was 80,000 nursing staff in England and Wales, all under the remit of the Division of Nursing, which had been created at the Ministry of Health in that year. The Nurses’ Act of 1943 inaugurated a professional code of conduct, a pay scale, a regulation of working hours, holidays and sick pay (Baly, Nursing and Social Change, p168-73). The more “formal” approach of how hospitals were run, and how their employees were treated, an approach Col. Drury cautioned against regarding St Barnabas in 1939, was rapidly becoming a reality. World War II heralded the birth of the NHS.

All this didn’t make work at St Barnabas any easier. Throughout the war, the Western Morning News is littered with job advertisements for the hospital, most of them required “immediately” (December 5, 1940, p4). As before 1939, volunteers helped take up the slack, such as Elizabeth Pearce, from Forder, who went to St Barnabas to help because

…they were short staffed…the camp at Wearde was full of military wounded…When Plymouth was bombed it was full. One day we hadn’t slept for nights because of the bombs so my father took the lorry with blankets and pillows to find somewhere quiet. We drove out to a wood a few miles away and slept out under the trees…

Elizabeth May Pearce, Kresen Kernow, ref. AV1/252

Even then, Elizabeth’s slumbers were interrupted by yet another raid. The Plymouth Blitz has been well documented, but nearby Saltash suffered as well (see the Western Morning News, May 22, 1941, p1). Mrs E. Halford, one of many residents bombed out of their homes, showed some bulldog spirit for the newspapers. With her eye bandaged and fist “upheld in an attitude of fiery defiance”, she expressed a firm desire to “get hold of Hitler for five minutes” (Western Morning News, May 9, 1941, p2). Fire crews were so desperate for help at night that even groups of Boy Scouts were drafted in to help – the lads of the 2nd Saltash receiving a King’s Award for their bravery. A man previously placarded by the military as a conscientious objector was on duty with the brigades as well; the officer who had actually placarded him, on discovering this, was moved write to the man, begging forgiveness. (From the Cornish Guardian, August 28, 1941, p6.)

Not everyone contributed positively to Saltash’s Home Front, however. One evacuee from London stole money from the house at which he had been billeted, and attempted to return home, saying he would “rather be bombed” than live in the country (Western Morning News, June 26, 1941, p4).

The night of 28-29 April 1941 was the worst night for Saltash. High explosives and incendiaries, targeting the Royal Albert Bridge and surrounding areas, were dropped on the town, killing six firefighters and nine civilians. Fire brigades from all over Cornwall – even as far west as Penzance – were called in to assist. Fore Street was completely ablaze. Half the town was without water. Forty houses were destroyed, and many shops and businesses. In some areas the fires were still burning a day later.

(Earlier that month, six firefighters from Saltash had also been killed in Plymouth.)

And through it all, St Barnabas Hospital provided care, with bomb victims, civilians, and military wounded receiving treatment (Western Morning News, May 2, 1941, p5, and July 20, 1942, p4). Yet still the problems of funding and staff remained. In January 1947 the first dance since 1939 was held to raise money for the hospital (Western Morning News, January 25, p2). In 1948, probationer nurses were desperately needed, with the threat of wards having to close. Of course, now, a definite salary could be offered to applicants: £50/annum (Cornish Guardian, August 26, p2).

In 1949, the 55 years continuous service of Sister Helen was formally acknowledged in a presentation ceremony at the hospital. One of the dignitaries was amazed to note that, in the 60 or so years of St Barnabas’ existence, it had been run in practically all that time by one woman.

The advent of the NHS had done little to change the nature of the regime at the hospital:

But it is certain that unless the spirit of voluntary service, well represented by Sister Helen, is continued, the Service will not do what we want it to do.

Mr H. W. Woollcombe, Chair, Plymouth, South Devon, and East Cornwall General Hospital Management Committee, Western Morning News, November 2, 1949, p3

In effect, the embryonic NHS needed people like Sister Helen, which is ironic, considering how the Vatican of the period had been hardening its stance over women in active roles. The Sisters of Charity were about to move “out of the professional limelight” (Nelson, Say Little, Do Much, p162). The Sisters of St Barnabas’ days were numbered.

And even Sister Helen could not go on forever. On her retirement in 1951, at the age of 85, she had seen the role of nursing evolve into a government-sponsored career with a regular, fixed wage, for young women. When she had begun, women weren’t even allowed to vote and the nursing vocation was in its infancy. St Barnabas Hospital was now funded by a local authority and not reliant on handouts, volunteers, and begging missions. Medical care, thanks to the NHS, was now free for all, and not just mainly for people with a decent income. The building itself, once without electricity or running water, had been modernised and extended to include a maternity ward and operating theatre. It grew its own produce. Sister Helen’s hospital had received over 8,000 patients, according to her obituary, through two epoch-making world wars, a Depression, and the formation of the modern welfare state. The hospital she had helped create was renowned throughout the community for its level of care and professionalism.

And Sister Helen never received a penny.

Sister Helen died on October 22, 1958. She was 91. Her obituary in the Cornish Guardian of October 30 was three short paragraphs, on page two.

St Barnabas Hospital stopped receiving patients in 2017, though outpatient clinics and District Nurses still operate from the site.

With special thanks to Hayley Hillman, Bruce Hunt of Saltash Heritage, and Mary Shears of the League of Friends

In Search of An Gof, Conclusion: An Gof Today?

Reading time: 15 minutes

“Emmets go home”, Pedn Vounder beach, August 2021. From Cornwall Live

Before summarising, some perspective is needed. I realise that I might have made Mebyon Kernow, the Cornish Nationalist Party and other pro-Cornish organisations out to be little more than defenders of a long-dead rebel, which of course is not the case. Both are popular political parties, with very definite aims and objectives, who have done much in furthering the cause of Cornish self-determination over the years. From the 1970s, when St Piran’s flag wasn’t even permitted to be flown in Truro (West Briton, December 11, 1978, p2), to the ubiquity of Cornish pressure groups on social media (Yes Kernow!, @kernow_matters, @YesCornwall, @CornwallFriends, to name a few), shows us how far awareness of Cornish culture, traditions, and issues has come. The Cornish language is now taught in some schools, the Cornish people were formally recognised as a minority group in 2014, and the campaign for a Cornish Assembly shows no signs of abating. All this is for the good.

Returning to An Gof, the matter of the alleged attacks needs a little context, that context being Cornwall in the 1980s. An industry – mining – was on its last legs. There was economic recession, and unemployment was on the rise – the figures were “appalling”, said the West Briton of February 5, 1981 (p8). This of course bred discontent, and not just in Cornwall: think of Brixton, Toxteth, or Orgreave. The “currency at the time seemed to be violence and outrage”, Kirsty reckoned, and it’s hard to disagree. This was an era when, in Wales, a group calling themselves Meibion Glyndwr (Welsh: “Sons of Glendower”) took to burning English-owned holiday homes. Is it any surprise that Cornwall should create its own symbol of the era: An Gof? Can An Gof, then, be safely consigned to history? Surely no one needs their brand of anti-English xenophobia-masquerading-as-nationalism anymore?

Not so. An Gof emerged briefly again in 2007, when the Cornish National Liberation Army claimed some of its members were originally from An Gof. The activities of the CNLA, and its adjunct, the Cornish Republican Army, have been documented elsewhere, in the Guardian, Times, Falmouth Packet, a piece by Dr Rebecca Tidy, and are also the subject of a blog post. I’m not going to survey their activities here, other than that the rhetoric was much the same as that of An Gof. An alleged speaker for the CRA claimed that:

Democracy has failed in Kernow. Many Cornish organisations have campaigned for years to achieve home rule for Kernow and have failed. Anything like home rule is unlikely in Kernow as the Celtic population is diminishing. We believe that direct action is the only way.

Yet since then, An Gof and the activities attributable to the movement, if movement it was, have fallen into obscurity. As my contact Geoff observed, few people “supported the methods used” at the time, and nowadays they are “mostly forgotten”. (Apart from, perhaps, a Cornish drug gang who, in the late 2010s, took the name An Gof in reference to the extremist attacks.) It would seem that the An Gof of St Keverne has become the dominant myth, and many would argue the “other” An Gof never seriously challenged it. Surely things can’t get as desperate in Cornwall as they were in the early 1980s?

Or can they? Due to Covid restrictions, the summer of 2021 saw an extra 30,000 more visitors come to Cornwall than in previous years. Also due to these restrictions, people working in hospitality were either on furlough, isolating, or ill with the disease itself. (Seasonal staff were ineligible for the furlough scheme.) Allied to this, there was also a recruitment crisis. Instead of being prepared to weather this “perfect storm” as it was described on Cornwall Live, the county saw food shortages, a lack of qualified chefs, shortened opening times for pubs and eateries, and reduced restaurant covers. In August, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly had the highest rate of Covid-19 cases in England. Is it any wonder gestures like the one below are made to tourists?

The A30, near Bodmin, summer 2021. Understandably, Cornwall’s tourism chiefs were appalled

Tourism is, according to Cornwall Live, the biggest employment sector in Cornwall, accounting for 24% of its GDP, with a turnover of £1.9 billion. However Malcolm Bell, head of Visit Cornwall, puts the figure at 12%, yet with a turnover of £2 billion, and accounts for a fifth of all jobs. Whichever source you believe (and both are contentious: Cornwall Council’s economic report of July 2021 puts Cornwall’s GDP at £12.3 billion – 12% of that is £1.4 billion), it’s easy to conclude that tourism in Cornwall is big business. Yet some in the county view the tourists in a negative light, which is easier to understand if you realise that St Ives, a traditional visitor hot spot, has the county’s highest number of children living in poverty – in some areas, as many as one in three, with many families reliant on foodbanks. Move away from the beaches, to, say, Camborne and Redruth, and the picture is worse: Camborne suffered more crime than any other Cornish town between October 2020 and September 2021, and Redruth fared little better. Allied to the current housing crisis, and the sense that, notes Neil Kennedy in Cornish Solidarity (Evertype, 2016), the “Cornish were being confined to less attractive areas” of their own county (p17), you have a recipe for what he terms 

Anglophobia…reduced morale as a result of low status and marginalization linked to economic and social circumstances (p28, 36).

“Anglophobia” conjures the spectre, once more, of An Gof. Is the below graffiti – which graced key tourist areas in Cornwall this summer – really any different to what was around in the 1980s? All that’s missing is the name, though the use of “emmets”, that catch-all pejorative term for any person from England who strays over the Tamar, has a certain resonance:

The graffiti cropped up overnight
From Cornwall Live, August 2021

I’m not about to wave my magic wand, and present the solution to Cornwall’s problems. Kennedy’s book makes some persuasive arguments, as does the new work by Joanie Willett, Affective Assemblages and Local Economies. Rebecca Tidy’s article on Cornish nationalism makes valid suggestions also. What must be remembered is that all the people who live in Cornwall, even the marginalized and frustrated, who believe the only way to give voice to their frustration is through vandalism and xenophobic threats, face these difficulties on a daily basis. If they cannot find another outlet, if their problems are not solved, how long before somebody like An Gof comes along again? As my contact Geoff said, back in the 1980s, “Cornish society and culture was being eroded by exploitative outside forces and influences which were increasingly exerting an unwanted influence in Cornwall and its affairs”, but that nowadays,

This erosion of Cornish autonomy has now accelerated and become entrenched beyond anything An Gof might have imagined would happen back then, sadly.

Geoff, worryingly, was not talking about Michael Joseph An Gof.

Thanks for reading

In Search of An Gof, part three: The Two An Gofs

Reading time: 25 minutes

Statues of Michael Joseph An Gof and Thomas Flamank, St Keverne, by Terry Coventry. Unveiled 1997

Michael Joseph An Gof, beetle-browed, muscled, intent, one leg flexed defiantly upon the symbol of his profession. His left arm raised aloft, either in a form of greeting, salute, or of beckoning: gather here. Beside him, with his hand upon Michael Joseph’s shoulder in a gesture of camaraderie, is Thomas Flamank. Less developed physically than his vigorous companion, Flamank nevertheless carries an air of authority in his clothing and the scroll he carries: he is a lawyer, a literate man, an individual of substance.

All this is evident to us, as viewers. What we are also supposed to see, or sense, is the myth of An Gof and Flamank in their statues. As Roland Barthes wrote in Mythologies: “the reader lives the myth as a story at once true and unreal”, myths correspond to “the interests of a definite society” (Vintage, 2009, p153). What are we, as readers/viewers, supposed to make of the myth inherent in the statues of Michael Joseph and Thomas Flamank, and , furthermore, in whose interest has this myth been created?

In short, we are meant to appreciate that, in Michael Joseph and Thomas Flamank, are the first flowerings of Cornish nationalism and independence, a nationalism and independence that continues to this day. This Cornish self-determination is defined against a government that cares little or nothing for the people of Cornwall: in 1497, it was opposition to the taxes of Henry VII to fund war with Scotland; nowadays it is defined, by one commentator at least, as an objection to the Tory administration seeing Cornwall as little more than a “playground” for the wealthy. This sense of nationalism and independence, however, is presented to us in a peaceful, democratic form. Joseph, the blacksmith, and Flamank, the lawyer, cross boundaries of class in a stand of equality, united against English interests. Neither are armed; indeed, Joseph isn’t even brandishing that other symbol of his trade – a hammer. The only “weapon” on view is the scroll in Flamank’s hand, representing the petition objecting to the taxes that he and An Gof, at the head of the force who marched to London in 1497, were to present to the King.

We are supposed to recall their desire to “right a lot of wrongs” for the Cornish people, not just in 1497, but for all time, as is made clear when a speaker at the An Gof Ceremony of 2020 invokes Michael Joseph’s supposed last words, made shortly before his and Flamank’s execution. He

…should have a name perpetual, and a fame permanent and immortal. (From Cornwall – A History, by Philip Payton, Cornwall Editions 2004, p110.)

The keepers of this myth of An Gof and Flamank are, obviously, Cornwall’s various nationalist groups. For example, the plaque at Blackheath Common remembering the Cornish army’s billeting there in 1497 prior to the battle of Deptford Bridge, is sponsored by the Cornish Gorsedd. 

An Gof plaque, Blackheath Common. From Wikimedia

Another plaque, erected for Flamank and Joseph in 1966 at St Keverne church, was endorsed by Mebyon Kernow. Referencing this recently unveiled plaque and taking the theme of Cornish self-help, the Chairman of Cornwall Council, Alderman K. G. Foster, said in a speech that the Cornish

…needed a smith in Cornwall today, an An Gof to deal with the problems in Cornwall of its railways, its roads, and its mines. (From The Cornish Guardian, October 27, 1966, p1.)

The An Gof and Flamank plaque, St Keverne church. Erected by Mebyon Kernow, 1966. 1966 was the inaugural year of the annual An Gof memorial ceremony

The spirit of An Gof was, as we saw in my previous post, also invoked in 1990 by the Celtic League. To object to paying the unpopular Poll Tax of the time was something that Michael Joseph would have favoured, and, therefore, something for the Cornish to unite themselves behind.

1997 saw a great deal of An Gof and perhaps his apogee as a Cornish martyr. The statue of Michael Joseph and Flamank was unveiled, to mark the 500th anniversary of the rebellion, in St Keverne. There was also a much publicised march from St Keverne to Blackheath, with 30-40 people completing the 360-mile retracing of the Cornish rebels’ steps. This time, though, there was no hurdle to drag these “rebels” to Tyburn, but a genuine sense, or hope, that something had been achieved for Cornish self-determination:

…if as a result of all the publicity and the political will of the county’s MPs Cornwall does have a brighter future, then the efforts of An Gof, Flamank and their followers all those centuries ago will have been worthwhile. (From the West Briton, June 26, 1997, p23.)

Another reporter commented that 

As An Gof, Flamank and their colleagues showed in 1497, a powerful – but peaceful – voice or gesture is sometimes needed to get the people who matter to sit up and take notice. (From the West Briton, May 29, 1997, p23.)

It was even argued that “another An Gof march” was needed regarding the travails of the Cornwall Development Agency (West Briton, July 31, 1997, p32).

It might be argued that An Gof has become less an historical figure than a symbol, a figure of hope to be conjured up in times of hardship, by Cornish nationalists and those with a vested interest in the independence of Cornwall, to return from a kind of Cornish Valhalla and free his people from the English yoke.

The difficulty inherent with myths, however, is that they are unstable. Remarks Barthes in Mythologies again: every object can be “open to appropriation”, for “there is no law…which forbids talking about things” (p132-3). One of the difficulties with the myth of An Gof is that, although the 1497 rebellion originated in St Keverne and acquired legal polish when Flamank joined its ranks in Bodmin, the man the rebels eventually named as their commander (or at the very least, military commander) was James Tuchet, 7th Baron of Audley, a noble “malcontent” from Somerset, writes Philip Payton in Cornwall – A History (p108). Like Michael Joseph and Flamank, he was executed after the Battle of Deptford Bridge, but is seldom if ever recalled as the leader. An Gof, on the other hand, is recalled by Cornwall Forever! as the man who “led an army to London”; he, along with Flamank, “emerged as leaders”, so much so that the rebellion of 1497 is “usually known as” the An Gof rebellion, according to Penwith Local History.

As Payton makes clear, though, even before the rebels left Cornwall, many other leaders had emerged (Cornwall – A History, p107). And, outside of Cornwall, the rebellion is interpreted very differently by historians. Writes Mark Stoyle:

The rebel force lost its exclusively Cornish nature once it had moved into England…for the Cornishmen were quickly joined by a rag-tag band of followers whose motives were as disparate as their geographical origins (“Cornish Rebellions, 1497-1648”, History Today, May 1997, p25).

Not once in Stoyle’s article does he mention Cornwall’s most famous rebel. In fact the above quote leads us to ask another question: just how democratic and peaceful was the nature of the original march on London? After all, it ended up with a pitched battle being fought, the rebels were definitely armed with cannon, and a detachment of Cornish archers initially put the Royal army to flight. Polydore Vergil, Henry VII’s official historian (so hardly neutral), has it that the 

…men of Cornwall…began to get completely out of hand, threatening the authors of this great oppression with death, and daring to seek them out for punishment (from Payton, Cornwall – A History, p108-9).

More recently, and closer to home, the issue of the suitability of An Gof as a proto-democratic symbol and martyr has been raised. In 1966, commenting on the Mebyon Kernow-endorsed plaque to Joseph and Flamank recently erected in St Keverne, the West Briton remarked that, as the rebellions of 1497 (yes, there were two) were largely “abortive”,

…they are not historically the best of inspirations for present-day challenge to the English Government…(October 27, 1966, p13).

Even the proposed erecting of the statues of Michael Joseph and Flamank in the 1990s generated controversy. “An Gof statue divides village” screamed page 6 of the West Briton of May 30, 1996. After a stormy public meeting, Cornwall Council announced it would be objecting to proposed plans to erect the statues in St Keverne village square, outside the church. Due to “public opinion”, an alternative site would be sought. Although An Gof supporters stated that he was “a man who has been revered in Cornwall for 500 years”, a man “who laid down his life for St Keverne”, who “attempted to do something for the suffering of his people”, the naysayers held sway. They claimed the idea of the statue was “politically motivated”, with its possible proximity to St Keverne’s war memorial “offensive to those who served the crown”. An Gof was a rebel, and executed as a traitor, after all:

This whole project…glorifies rebellion and all that goes with it. It smacks of self-gratification and is an act of vandalism to our village square. It is sacrilegious to the church and all it represents.

The nimbys’ victory was pyrrhic, of course. The statue of Michael Joseph and Flamank was finally erected on the side of the main road into St Keverne. A spokesman for the Trust that had commissioned the work was pleased with the result, and stressed that the villagers were “enthusiastic”, even those originally against it. He also took pains to point out that his organisation was “non-political”. Even so, at the traditional An Gof and Flamank remembrance service that year, a wreath was laid at the foot of the statue, with the proceedings being conducted by a member of Mebyon Kernow. An Gof and his myth were being appropriated once more. (From the West Briton, June 19, 1997, p6.)

The other An Gof

Giew Mine, Cripplesease, nr Ludgvan, 1986. By John Luxton

The instability inherent in myth, and particularly here the unifying/democratic/peaceful/martyr myth of An Gof, has of course led to his name and reputation being hijacked by those who further destabilise the An Gof beloved of many Cornish nationalists.

Take a look at the above image, a crude piece of graffiti. This is the An Gof which rejects everything the other An Gof is supposed to represent. You might say that, yes, it’s a piece of vandalism – exactly the same charge levelled at the proposed location of the An Gof statue back in 1996.

The An Gof of the graffiti represents extremism, rebellion, violence, destruction and, in the faceless, random manner in which it operates, anarchy. In fact, this myth of An Gof springs from those aspects of the historical Michael Joseph that his eulogisers would rather have us forget – the “traitor”, rather than the “martyr”. It presents an extreme version of Cornish nationalism totally at odds with those of the democratic political parties in Cornwall. And if, as we have seen, An Gof is the champion of many democratic Cornish nationalists, any stain on his reputation, and therefore on the cause of Cornish nationalism, must be rebutted.

It happened in 1980: the alleged bombing of St Austell courthouse by a man using his name was a “slur on An Gof”, said the Mebyon Kernow chairman (West Briton, December 11, 1980, p1).

It happened in 1981, when the same party condemned An Gof’s claim that it had burned down a hair salon: they “are anti-Cornish vandals, not nationalists” (West Briton, January 15, 1981, p2).

And again in 1984: Mebyon Kernow and the Cornish Nationalist Party both stated they were helping the police in their efforts to stamp out the “idiot” An Gof movement (West Briton, February 23, 1984, p1).

Maybe it even happened on a much lesser scale in 2021, when my Facebook post asking for any information on An Gof with a view to writing about it was called a “deliberate” smear on pro-Cornish interests.

Another response to my request was from a prominent member of Mebyon Kernow: “only the first was a real event”. I took this to mean that only the 1980 bombing actually happened, and was the only event undeniably the work of An Gof. The other events on my list either didn’t happen (and weren’t worth bothering with), or were the work of copycat hoaxers using the An Gof name as cover. But this is precisely the point: of course all the other events covered in this study were imitations. In 1980, a person or persons unknown decided that one symbol of Cornish independence – Stannary Parliament – had failed to gain recognition for Cornish rights. They decided to commandeer for themselves another, more hostile symbol – An Gof – and resort to open violence and lawbreaking to achieve their ends. Quite simply, this An Gof concluded that democracy, or government, had failed. The next step for them was to attempt to overthrow the government, or at least make the gesture.

What happened was a complete inversion of the concept of Holyer An Gof, or Follower of The Smith, which was of course the bardic name of Len Truran, a key figure in democratic Cornish nationalism. (The Cornish Gorsedd honour Holyer An Gof as the title of one of their awards.) All the An Gofs that followed “An Gof 1980” took the first’s lead, for better or worse: the communication to local newspapers, the scare tactics, the arson and vandalism (or claims to such), the vague but emphatic statements of intent (which, my contact Kirsty said, amounted to little more than “English – out”), but above all, the name. To associate the name An Gof with such activities was to denigrate the cause of democratic Cornish nationalism, to equate, in some eyes, as Kirsty observed, Cornish nationalists with such groups as the IRA or the ETA. For example the Guardian in 2007 reported that Mebyon Kernow had spurned “bingo-hall arson for the ballot box”, a clear collation of an An Gof-related event (they falsely claimed to have burnt down a Redruth bingo-hall) with a democratic political party, which is as unfair as it is misleading. Kirsty reckoned a “credible political party” is needed for Cornwall, but how can any pro-Cornish democratic movement be taken seriously when there’s the danger of it being tarnished by a spurious association with An Gof?

Read the final post in this series here: Conclusion: An Gof Today?

Thanks for reading

In Search of An Gof, part two: Person or Persons Unknown

Reading time: 30 minutes

1. The St Austell bombing

Number 2 Court, Carlyon Road, St Austell, 8 December 1980. The courthouses closed in 1996. From the West Briton, December 11, 1980, p1

(Unless otherwise stated, the main text here is from the West Briton Argus, December 8, 1980, p1, and the West Briton, December 11, 1980, p1.)

An Gof or, more precisely, The An Gof 1980 Movement, made its appearance at around 9:35pm on Sunday, December 7, 1980. A telephone rang in the offices of The West Briton newspaper, and a journalist answered. A man was at the other end, “quietly spoken and unhurried”. In his unflustered manner this man claimed to be a spokesman for his group, The An Gof 1980 Movement, and that said group was responsible for the explosion in the St. Austell courthouse, on Carlyon Road, that had taken place in the early hours of Sunday morning. Making sure the reporter would talk to the police after his call, The An Gof 1980 Movement then described how the bomb had been detonated by hand, and contained “conventional” high explosive with a safety fuse ignition. In conversation with the investigating officers, The West Briton concluded that the caller had “some knowledge which only the perpetrator or an accomplice would know”: a window had indeed been smashed and the bomb dropped through it. An Gof also made the following statements:

i) the movement had been in existence for over a year;

ii) there would be other attacks against “English councillors and Communist infiltrators in the Cornish nationalist movement”, that they will “really need to sweat”;

iii) more attacks should be expected; and, just before An Gof’s change ran out on his payphone, 

iv) “St Austell has been instrumental in purging the Stannary…”, and the line went dead.

If, in the digital age, anonymous phonecallers issuing threats yet forgetting to have enough change to deliver their message seems rather quaint, The An Gof 1980 Movement were taken seriously enough at the time. After all, a call from a payphone to a local newsroom was the method of claiming responsibility for a terror bombing by the IRA on at least one occasion (as reported in the Belfast Telegraph, July 28, 1970, p3). And the bombing of St Austell courthouse was a serious act. “Considerable” structural damage was caused by the blast in Number 2 court and the magistrates’ retiring room, with cracked walls, broken windows and skylights, and doors busted off their hinges.

Serious enough for an incident room to be set up in St Austell. Serious enough for an investigation involving over forty policemen to be mounted, run by Devon and Cornwall CID. Serious enough for the Special Branch to be kept informed. Serious enough for analysis of the device and explosive used to be carried out by Chepstow police forensic laboratory, with assistance by Home Office scientists. Serious enough for the search for the perpetrators to be conducted county-wide. In St Austell itself, the police were reported to be seeking a man seen standing near the courthouse in a carpark at 1am Sunday morning, the owners of any vehicle parked in the carpark that night, and two cars seen speeding down Carlyon Road within minutes of the explosion.

They also took An Gof’s call seriously, as did the various, more mainstream and democratically-minded Cornish nationalist groups, whom the police questioned about An Gof 1980. The police had never heard of this group, and nor had the Cornish nationalists they spoke to – understandably, they sought to distance themselves from the bombing and the suggestion it was the work of a nationalist terror cell, or more likely (or hopefully), “some crank”.

Mebyon Kernow stated that, yes, their secretariat had been called “An Gof” at one time, but this department was disbanded. It had been headed by Len Truran, one of the people heavily influential in turning Mebyon Kernow into a fully fledged political party in the early 1970s. Truran himself stated that he was “horrified” that violence should be happening in Cornwall, and “felt sure” none of the nationalist groups were responsible for what was hopefully an isolated incident.

(According to Truran’s biography, Following An Gof by Derek Williams (2014), in September 1980 Truran had been made a bard of Gorsedh Kernow and took the name Holyer An Gof, or Follower of An Gof (p1). Truran must have found it deeply uncomfortable to have the name of a man he so obviously revered, and adopted, presented in such a lurid light. The biography doesn’t mention the bombing, An Gof 1980, or Truran’s reaction.)

And the condemnations continued. The use of the name “An Gof” was “deplored”, a “slur” on the memory of a Cornish patriot, as was the use of violence. The Mebyon Kernow secretary at the time, Peter Prior, said the explosion was 

…in no way the reflection of a vast national feeling in Cornwall…it is not our way at all. In An Gof’s day, you used the musket. Now we use the ballot box.

(Incidentally, the musket as a weapon was not developed until the 1520s.)

A spokesman for the Cornish Nationalist Party thought the anonymous caller to be a man with a “private grudge” and was trying to link the attack with the nationalist movement for some reason.

Brian Hambley, Lord Protector of the Revived Cornish Stannary Parliament, said the people of his organisation were strongly against the use of violence. Such activities were liable to alienate support for his cause, especially when we recall that the man purportedly speaking for An Gof 1980 stated that St Austell was “responsible” for “purging” the Stannary cause. The implication here was that anyone connected with the Stannary revival (a movement begun in the 1970s to resurrect the ancient rights and independence of Cornish miners and tinners) would perhaps have good reason to attack St Austell’s symbol of loyalty to the English government: its courthouse.

Hambley, who was a St Austell man, omitted to mention his own recent visit to the courthouse. The ‘papers noted that the court, as it had dealt with a “number of nationalists” over the years in cases of non-payment of road taxes, may have been a target for extremists. In 1978 Hambley had been in the dock for refusing to pay his road tax, claiming in defence that as a “privileged tinner” he was exempt from duties owed to the crown and, furthermore, could only be tried in a Stannary court. To cut a rather complex tale of ancient documents and Latin language short, St Austell court first found in his favour, with the prosecution ordered to pay his costs. Hambley was quoted in the West Briton of June 22, 1978 as his victory being “the dawning of a day when Cornwall comes into its own”. More sceptically, as the West Briton noted the implications of thousands of Cornish people observing the precedent set by Hambley’s case and refusing to pay taxes themselves, it commented that “the fabric of local law enforcement could be in tatters”, and that the case “is no longer a comedy” (p11).

Perhaps inevitably, the verdict on Hambley’s case was overturned on appeal, and he was fined and had to pay costs. The tale can be followed in the West Briton of 19 June, 1978 (p9), 22 June, 1978 (p11), 14 December, 1978 (p4), and 8 March, 1979 (p9). 

Hambley wasn’t the only Stannary man to be fined by St Austell court. Frederick Trull, the original reviver of Stannary Parliament after a two-hundred year lapse, was caught speeding in 1975, flooring his motor down Stannary Road in Stenalees, St Austell. (You get the impression this may have been an ill-advised publicity stunt.) Trull was suspended from the Stannary and, at his hearing, attempted to arrest the magistrates, clerk, and prosecuting solicitor, it being his belief that, in trying a member of Stannary Parliament, they were breaking the law. He was found guilty and fined whilst being held in custody. Trull’s conscience, he was quoted as saying, was “quite clear”. (From the West Briton, March 6, 1975, p11.)

One person I interviewed, let’s call them Geoff, remembers the bombing in St Austell, the connection with An Gof, and the reactions of people at the time. They had sympathy for what An Gof were trying to achieve, which was an assertion of Cornishness in the face of outside interests and agendas exploiting the county and its people. The Cornish, Geoff told me, “were seen by An Gof as an oppressed people, who had no representation”. Hence An Gof 1980’s criticism of the Cornish nationalist movement at the time. However, Geoff recalled that, at the time, few people in Cornwall – and elsewhere – supported their methods. Another person I spoke to, we’ll name them Kirsty, recollects that most “mature Cornish people thought they were a bunch of cranks and didn’t support their methods.” It seems that, even at the inception of An Gof’s activities, Cornish politicians and the majority of Cornish people alike were dimissive of their acts. 

But the caller from An Gof 1980 said more attacks should be expected…

2. Season’s greetings

On December 29, 1980, Peter Prior of Mebyon Kernow received a phonecall “purporting to be from An Gof”, calling for him to resign. Prior’s response in the West Briton of January 15, 1981, was emphatic:

I am not resigning, certainly not. I don’t believe in giving in to this sort of intimidation (p2).

Why an alleged extreme nationalist group would want a fellow Cornish nationalist to throw in the towel is unclear.

3. The Penzance arson

The early hours of New Year’s Day 1981 was a busy one for 25 firefighters from Penzance, St Keverne, St Ives, and Camborne. The Victoria and Albert hair salon, on Causewayhead, Penzance, was ablaze, the inferno eventually causing a reported £15,000 of damage, or around £58,000 today. Obviously a “considerable” amount of wreckage was caused by the fire, and not just to the Victoria and Albert. The fire caused smoke damage to the offices of the Bristol and West Building Society, whose building it was. The police, reported the West Briton of January 8, 1981, were “treating the outbreak as one of arson”, that the fire was started intentionally (p3).

In the week after the above article was published, the police incident room at Truro dealing with the St Austell bombing had to extend their inquiries to include the arson in Penzance. The An Gof 1980 Movement had made two phonecalls to separate newspaper offices, claiming responsbility for the fire. Det. Sup. Geoffrey Warren, commander of the incident squad, stated

We have a strong belief the calls could be coming from one source. There is a similarity between them.

The An Gof on the line this time, besides admitting to the arson, said in a call to the West Briton that his movement were seeking national status for Cornwall, and that “more attacks will follow” if this was not achieved. On the same day (January 8), the offices of the Cornishman newspaper in Penzance received a call from an An Gof, who stated that the next attack would also be of an incendiary nature, but not in Penzance. He said that

We are a guerilla movement and we take as much terrorist action as we need. (From the West Briton, January 15, 1981, p2.)

The “similarities” between the caller, or the An Gof, from St Austell and the Penzance An Gof were superficial: a man from an extreme nationalist group claiming responsibility for an attack in the name of Cornish independence and promising further outrages. In St Austell, the call was made before the bombing was public knowledge, by a man with definite inside knowledge of how the device was made and detonated. There was also a clear reason or motive for the attack, in the connection with the court and the Stannary trials. In contrast, the Penzance An Gof made his calls on precisely the same day as details of the alleged arson were made public: the West Briton of January 8. They provided no information as to how the fire was started, or why a hair salon in a property owned by a building society would be a genuine target for a group of Cornish terrorists.

Maybe the An Gof of St Austell and Penzance were one and the same man, and were behind both attacks, whether or on their own or as part of an organisation. Or the St Austell An Gof, when reading of the Penzance arson in the ‘paper, thought it might be just the kind of event he, or they, could embellish with some nationalist statements. Or yet again, there may have been two An Gof cells, one in St Austell and one in Penzance. Or a Cornish nationalist may have taken it upon themselves to put on the An Gof cloak and stake a claim on the Penzance arson in the cause of independence. Or the calls in Penzance were simply the work of a mischevious hoaxer, or hoaxers. More cynically, my contact Kirsty thinks of the arson “as an insurance job”, and unlikely to be the work of a genuine An Gof.

It’s largely forgotten, now, that 1981 was a bad year for cases of suspected arson in Penzance. A health food store and a warehouse on Old Brewery Yard were completely gutted in October, causing £200,000 of damage – or £784,000 today. £50,000 (£196,000 in 2021) of fire-damage was caused in December to another shop on Causewayhead. In these instances, no An Gof stepped forward to claim this handiwork as their own. We might conclude, then, that anonymous arson was the most likely cause of the salon fire. (From the West Briton, October 22, p11, and December 17, p11.)

The police could make no inroads into the identity of An Gof, and over the weeks the dual investigation ran down. No arrests were made, and in the West Briton of February 12, 1981, Det. Sup. Warren was quoted as saying that

…whether there was a nationalist movement called An Gof or whether the explosion had been the work of an individual with a grudge had not been established (p27).

The main similarities between the St Austell bombing and the Penzance arson was the condemnation of the alleged An Gof involvement by the democratic Cornish nationalists. Richard Jenkins, chair of Mebyon Kernow, declared in the West Briton of January 15, 1981 that

The bombers are a hindrance to the cause of Cornwall’s nationality and are anti-Cornish vandals, not nationalists. We do not believe they care for Cornwall and we condemn them utterly (p2).

It is with some irony, then, that the alleged desire of these “anti-Cornish” vandals – independence for Cornwall – were the same hopes and dreams of the members of Mebyon Kernow. Obviously it was the method, not the message, that the politicians didn’t care for.

Nothing much was heard from An Gof for the next few years.

4. 1984. The “glass on the beach” legend, a councillor silenced, other stunts, and, finally, an arrest

Portreath Beach, November 2021. Scene of An Gof‘s most notorious outrage in 1984?

Enraged by the fact that “outsiders” were smarter than them…An Gof decided to act. They met in a telephone box to discuss tactics…Their average age was 17…Having hatched a deadly plan they drove to the popular beach at Portreath and lined the sands with hundreds of broken bottles…They went home…and drank copious amounts of cider in celebration…Many a Cornish foot needed treatment and many of those feet belonged to local children…a display of incredible ineptitude.

The above is taken from the entry for Camborne on the ilivehere.co.uk website. I don’t know who wrote it, and I could care less. Most of it, for want of a better phrase, is bullshit. However, the urban legend of An Gof putting glass on the beaches to deter tourists is a somewhat persistent one. It’s treated as fact in a blog of 2012, and this blog is one of the sources for the Wikipedia entry for An Gof when it mentions the group placing broken glass on the beach. The other Wikipedia source is from the Falmouth Packet of 2007: An Gof “claimed reponsibility…for placing broken glass in the sand at Portreath…”.

Most legends, or myths, have some basis in historical fact, however. So what’s actually the truth behind this one?

Wednesday, January 11, 1984. A phone rings in the offices of the West Briton, Redruth. Coincidentally, the journalist picking up was the same reporter who had taken the call from An Gof 1980 in connection with the St Austell bombing, but the caller was someone else. This time the reporter had to ask the man at the other end whom he represented. The answer he got was: An Gof. And the warnings and statements of this An Gof were as follows:

i) They had “the intention to take the Cornish nationalist cause to the beaches”;

ii) An Gof would be “planting anti-personnel devices” on the beaches over the summer;

iii) these devices would consist of nails driven through timber, tool knives, and broken bottles. “Horrific injuries could be caused”, warned An Gof;

iv) this was An Gof’s way of hitting at “English” administration and Cornwall’s Tourist Board, and it was up to them, the press and media to warn holidaymakers that these devices were being “indiscriminately placed…throughout the summer”.

As a demonstration of their sincerity, An Gof instructed the reporter to go to Portreath beach, where a sample of a “non-explosive device” had been placed. The reporter did as he was told, and found, in front of a yellow drum placed as a marker, two broken bottles with their “jagged ends” facing up out of the sand. Police were said to be treating it as an isolated incident. (From the West Briton, January 12, 1984, p1.)

This is the only recorded factual instance of glass or broken bottles being deliberately placed on any Cornish beach, by An Gof or anybody else. So, yes, technically speaking, An Gof did place glass on the beach to deter tourists. But only with two bottles, on one beach, once, in January (Portreath beach in January is as barren as it looks in November, if not more so – see the above photos), and they marked the spot with a drum so that, presumably, people would walk around the area anyway. And who knows how long it was there, before the reporter discovered it? Hours, at best? If An Gof had wanted to cause some real damage, would it not have been better – or worse – for this to have been carried out in, say, July? Perhaps An Gof’s timing is as bad as mine supposedly is.

But the myth took on a life of its own, almost immediately. One person I spoke to, “Dave”, was a lifeguard back in 1984. Dave remembered “plenty of people” being concerned and asking about the glass, though Dave believes the attacks never “took place”. Dave would have reassured these people  – locals, visitors – but how many were put off holidaymaking on the Cornish coast back in 1984? All I know is, I was almost definitely running round on Portreath beach that summer, and all I got on my feet was tar off the rocks.

(On Thursday January 19, a piece of card was found in the post room of the West Briton’s Redruth office, stating there was a booby trap on Falmouth beach, near the cafe. Nothing was found. It’s unclear if An Gof sent the message. From the West Briton, January 26, p1.)

The Zodiac Bingo Hall, Redruth, 1984. From the West Briton, January 26, p6

1984 was perhaps An Gof’s most prolific year, at least in terms of telephone calls, claiming to be the unseen hand behind various unsavoury activities. On Sunday, January 22, 1984, the Zodiac Bingo Hall on Penryn Street, Redruth, burnt to the ground, causing £250,000 of damage – that’s £821,000 today. The phonecall from An Gof went to a local newspaper on the Monday, stating that “One of our active service units caused the fire at Redruth last night”. The cause, in fact, was a defect in the heating system. (From the West Briton, January 26, p1&6.)

Beacon Village Hall, Tolcarne Rd, 2021. Formerly the village school. Not blown to smithereens in 1984

An Gof also claimed, in one of their calls on Monday January 23, to be responsible for the attempt to blow up the village hall in Beacon. This amateurish attempt at arson (a lit candle placed under a cut gas main) had been foiled by the caretaker of the hall opening the main door, and all the gas rushing out. This happened on January 15;  An Gof made their claim eight days later. Why, asked a police officer, “didn’t they make their claim before?” Why, we might add, would the arson of the Zodiac and a village hall further the cause of Cornish independence? Like a “Monty Python sketch”, thought Kirsty, when asked about these events.

If not before, we begin to get the impression at this point that the activities of An Gof were beginning to verge on the juvenile. However, the police thought the threat serious enough to set up an incident room in Truro, and collate all known information about the group – if group it was. (From the West Briton, January 26, p1.)

They soon had some more paperwork for their burgeoning file, with another call from An Gof to a newspaper in February. This was another warning, which resulted in the police visiting Wendron Forge (which of course later became the Poldark Mine attraction), to examine a suspicious package. They discovered a biscuit tin from which protruded a short length of singed rope. Exercising caution, they summoned the Navy bomb disposal unit from Plymouth, who discovered a substance inside which “may or may not have been inflammable”. Treating the incident as a “malicious hoax”, nevertheless the public were warned by the police not to handle suspicious letters or packages. After all, it was not known how malevolent the An Gof movement was. Their inflammatory rhetoric in a press release to the West Briton which threatened a “new wave of military action” against “the self-styled tourist industry – the few who make profits out of Cornish people”, with anti-personnel devices targeting “non-Cornish owned holiday concerns of all kinds”, certainly sounded ominous enough. More suspicious – yet harmless – packages arrived at the offices of The South West Water Board. (From the West Briton, February 23, p1.)

Again, condemnation by Cornwall’s nationalist politicians was immediate. Mebyon Kernow’s deputy chairman, Richard Jenkin, said that An Gof had no real policies, that their actions were

…completely ridiculous, the action of idiots. I do not think there are more than two or three of them and I do not expect there is any sort of organisation at all. They spur one another on to do these stupid things.

His comments were echoed by the MK’s chairman, who bluntly dismissed the activities of An Gof  as “completely mad”. The Cornish Nationalist Party described the unknown perpetrators and their tactics as a “bit sad and worrying”. (West Briton, February 23, 1984, p1.)

One person found An Gof worrying enough, however, and he was Peter Young, the founder of the Wendron Forge holiday attraction (though I always remember it as Ha’penny Park). Young came to Cornwall in the 1960s, and his “holiday concern”, to paraphrase the extremists’ press release quoted in the West Briton (see above), had obviously been singled out by An Gof. As a Kerrier Councillor, Young was due to speak in a council meeting regarding whether Kerrier should support Mebyon Kernow’s petition and campaign for a separate European MP for Cornwall. The petition was to be forwarded to the European Parliament, in which it questioned the legality of the Boundary Commission’s recent decision to maintain the Euro-constituency of Cornwall and Plymouth. Would Kerrier back it? 

It’s unclear what tone Young’s speech on the matter was to take: he never delivered it. The report continues:

Mr Young was about to speak…when he decided it would be against his interests to do so, in the light of a recent hoax bomb device which was found on his property at Wendron, for which the An Gof movement claimed responsibility…He also claimed his home was being watched.

In what was described as an “emotive” address, Young announced it was now impossible for him to speak openly about Cornish nationalism, that he “cannot take the risk” of anything he says on the subject being reported. His “personal well-being” had been threatened.

Kerrier Council, at the conclusion of the meeting, opted to support Mebyon Kernow’s petition. What Mebyon Kernow thought of all this is unknown; after all, An Gof was nothing to do with them. (From the West Briton, March 29, 1984, p7.)

Later that year, however, Mebyon Kernow claimed a “minor victory” when they were informed that they had “won the right” to take their campaign for a Cornwall-only Euro-constituency to the European Parliament. (From the West Briton, February 23, p1, March 29, p7, and June 21, p6.)

The incident regarding Peter Young perhaps represents An Gof at its most sinister. There was no explosion, no random publicity stunt, no false claims, no denunciations by Mebyon Kernow or the Cornish Nationalist Party. Young was targeted, or at the very least, he certainly thought so. Wikipedia and the few other sources I mention above that tend to “print the legend” of An Gof make no allusion to it. They give reference to the more noisy events, such as the bombing at St Austell, or the downright mindless and bungled, such as the glass on the beach or the “attempt” at arson in Beacon. This is, as far as I can ascertain, the only instance of where An Gof’s scare-tactics (I hesitate to use the word terror) possibly succeeded in furthering an extreme version of Cornish nationalism. Of course, we do not know what Peter Young was supposed to say in that meeting. He might have fully endorsed the petition, or he might have rejected it out of hand. But, if An Gof’s aims were indeed to target and intimidate those who made profit from the Cornish tourist industry, here, sadly, they achieved it.

You could, of course, turn the above argument on its head: An Gof, or whoever planted the hoax device, had chosen Wendron Forge at random and it was sheer coincidence that a councillor was the owner. His believing his property, and himself, to be under surveillance was the result of an overactive imagination. However, it was reported in the West Briton of February 23, 1984, that Peter Young was in fact in the process of moving to Wendron Forge (p8). Following this, An Gof, given their inclinations, would certainly not agree with Young’s enthusiasm, reported in the West Briton of January 12, 1984, for a Kerrier scheme to give American firms and businesses a toehold in the area (p3). If one thing can be certain about An Gof, it was this: they definitely made regular use of the West Briton.

Two more An Gof-related events from 1984. First, in April, there was a senseless attack of arson on a burger van in Park Bottom, Illogan. No one was hurt, but two children were asleep inside the van when the fire was started. Hours after this, An Gof phoned the West Briton to claim responsibility, but apologised for involving “innocent people”: they’d hit the wrong target. The caller said the members of their “commando unit” who’d fouled-up the attack would be punished. Who, or what, the actual target was meant to be is unclear, or indeed why they were to be targeted in the first place. A policeman stated that

This group…may or may not exist…I do not know of anyone who has admitted to being in such an organisation (the West Briton, April 19, p4.)

There was only one arrest, in August, and this person admitted to being a member of An Gof. However, he was an alcoholic schoolteacher from Mounts Bay, who had been caught making a hoax call to Devon and Cornwall Police Headquarters in Exeter, threatening to blow the place up. On his arrest, he was said to have confessed to being involved with the group. It was later satisfactorily proven that he wasn’t. He was fined £100, with costs. (From the West Briton, August 30, p1.) 

5. 1990. Another public figure is threatened

After a seeming lapse in activities of six years, An Gof gave the Cornwall branch secretary of the democratic Celtic League, Ian Williams, of Redruth, an alleged “death threat” made by phone in March 1990.

Williams brushed it off. He didn’t even bother reporting it to the police, so far had An Gof’s credibility fallen (and it was probably never especially high) since the early to mid-80s. He told the press:

I have not done anything that would justify the threat…I don’t know of any instance where this threat has been carried out in Cornwall…if there is such an organisation as An Gof I don’t believe they would attack another Cornish man or woman in this way.

The Celtic League unsurprisingly condemned the issuer of the threat made against one of their members. They also took umbrage at the caller’s use of the pseudonym An Gof. They were

…bringing the name of the 1497 martyred St Keverne blacksmith into disrepute. An Gof, they [the League] say, “united the Cornish people at a time when unfair taxes, much like the present Poll Tax, were being imposed on Cornwall’s people.” (The West Briton, March 15, 1990, p3.)

And this seems like a good moment to draw this post to a close. So far, we have been discussing one version, or representation, of An Gof. There are, in fact, two.

Follow this link, The Two An Gofs, to read part three. Thanks!

In Search of An Gof: Cornish Extremism, 1980-1990, and Beyond

Introductory Post

Reading time: 10 minutes

From The Falmouth Packet, 2007

An Gof was seemingly everywhere in 1980s Camborne, when I was growing up. I’m not, obviously, referring to the historical figure of Michael Joseph An Gof – who we shall touch on later – or local historical societies holding public meetings devoted to the events of his life, or even memorable school lessons on the subject of An Gof and the Cornish Rebellion of 1497. (Cornish history wasn’t taught in any of my schools.) No, I’m here referring to the graffiti that was somewhat ubiquitous in the town and elsewhere during those years. No crumbling piece of masonry, road sign, or long-closed mine building was complete without something like the following legend crudely sprayed over it:

Giew Mine, Cripplesease, nr Ludgvan, 1986. By John Luxton

I remember, at the time, giving some thought to what this slogan was supposed to mean, or signify. Free Cornwall: from what, or whom? Is Cornwall, and by extension the Cornish, imprisoned, or enslaved? And, more ambiguously, who the hell is “An Gof”? Are they the person to free Cornwall? Are they an organisation, more than one person? And, seeing as I’m Cornish, isn’t therefore An Gof’s incitement – to free Cornwall, thus freeing myself – something I ought to be endorsing too?

Problem was, Camborne’s elusive, shadowy An Gof never did manage to free Cornwall. All he, or she, or they, seemed to do, was daub brickwork with their emancipating mantra, and my interest waned. A few years later, when I was working (seasonally, of course) in a factory, a colleague confessed in the smokers’ room to knowing one of the An Gof graffiti artists. This workmate then proceeded to fill me in on the details of the genuine Michael Joseph An Gof (Cornish: “the smith”) and his rebellion. An Gof, he told me, had been a Cornish freedom fighter, and his pals had taken the name to represent their own, rather less mature, desires. Occasionally turning the “A” of An Gof into the symbol for anarchy had, they reckoned, given their calling card an extra dimension of revolutionary fervour. (I remember drawing on my fag and nodding sagely.)

But how serious was all this? I also recalled being warned, as a child, about glass in the sand when playing on Portreath beach, and that the same people doing the graffiti were probably responsible for that stunt as well. But was this the act of some bona fide revolutionaries? How is a gashed foot going to “free” anyone? A friend from Camborne described the glass on the beach as “f**king stupid”, and I’m inclined to agree.

Idiotic or not, the question about sincerity remained. What other acts have been attributed to, or claimed by, this An Gof over the years? Wanting a quick answer, I sought out the Wikipedia entry for the supposed An Gof movement and made a list. I then thought it might be a good idea to see if other people could recall the events on this list, to get a personal angle on my research. On October 12, 2021 I put the following post, with a request to email me with any information, on the Cornish History Facebook page:

I’m currently looking into the “An Gof” attacks of the 1980s. If anyone has recollection of, or connection with, the below events, please get in touch. Many thanks

  1. The bombing of St Austell courthouse, 1980
  2. The bombing of a Penzance hairdresser, 1981
  3. Beacon Village Hall fire, 1984
  4. Zodiac Bingo Hall fire, Redruth, 1984
  5. Glass on Portreath Beach, 1984

Some of the comments I received were less than favourable:

I can tell you now that most of this is urban myth. And how strange that at a time when so many of us are working so hard to protect Cornwall, someone finds it necessary to drag up this utter rubbish again. Is there an agenda here?

Or:

It is interesting that the minute the Cornish movement starts becoming visible…there is this rake up of an anglo-myth of Cornish terrorism. If it isn’t an agenda, then it is at best poor timing.

And again, the alleged An Gof attacks were dismissed as:

…fantasy. The myth of Cornish terrorism rises every time the Cornish get up off our knees. It is tiring at best, and deliberate smears at worst.

So, before I’d written my blog or aired an opinion, my work was being tarred and feathered as propagating a supposed anti-Cornish myth that all Cornish nationalists are extremist cranks. And, as all this An Gof stuff was utter nonsense anyway, it didn’t deserve to be written about. Furthermore, my request was then linked in with another recent essay on Cornish nationalism that touched on the An Gof attacks. The person writing this comment on Facebook alleged that the publisher of this piece has decidedly left-wing, even Communist, sympathies. I took the inference to be that my outlook might be similar.

So, not only am I anti-Cornish in writing this post, I might be a raving Marxist too. Oh – and I’ve bad timing as well. At best, this is laughable; at worst, it’s insulting.

Thankfully, the above were the worst comments. Others responded to my request in a positive, even defensive, light. One or two others, outside of Facebook, have even agreed to speak to me as regards An Gof in the 1980s, and for that I am thankful. I’ve also been in touch with the Penzance Old Cornwall Society, asking if any of their members recall the events in early 1981. To date, no response. The St Austell Old Cornwall Society told me that none of their members were able to help, and their former chairman informed me by email that he was “not aware” of any bombing in St Austell in 1980. 

All this served to tell me that, myth or not, genuine movement or not (the Wikipedia entry for “Cornish Nationalism” states that it’s “far from clear” if there ever was a movement), the subject of the events attributed to, or claimed by, An Gof, still upsets Cornish nationalists, even forty years on. Why get so worked up about something that’s mere myth, or fantasy? Finding the answer to this question might be worth writing about.

If I must have an agenda for this post, then let it simply be this: as someone who experienced, albeit somewhat remotely, An Gof in my youth, I have a desire to discover more about the subject, and report my findings. I also want to find out why my subject is, in some circles, taboo. As I have written rather a lot, I’ve broken my work down into four separate posts, the first of which is this introduction. The second post, Person or Persons Unknown, is a survey of all the alleged An Gof activities, from 1980-1990, and an analysis of the public’s reactions to them, as well as the reactions of Cornish nationalists. The third post, The Two An Gofs, discusses why many Cornish nationalists have such cultural cache in a version of An Gof totally at odds with the activities of those outlined in Person or Persons Unknown, and the problems inherent in their version. In the final post, An Gof Today?, I’m going to look briefly at An Gof’s activities in more recent times, and what can be learnt from their history as a whole, as regards Cornish nationalism and the challenges facing Cornwall today.

Click on Person or Persons Unknown to view part two . Thanks for reading!

War and Emigration: The Family Tree

Australia, America…Wales??

Reading time: 20 minutes

Service papers, Pte. William George Edwards, Australian Imperial Forces

See boy, you know my Father ‘ad two brothers that were killed in First World War, didn’t ee..?

No, I didn’t know that. In fact, I knew very little about my Family Tree until my uncle told me I had two great-uncles (brothers of my paternal grandfather), that had died in the 1914-18 war. That was the catalyst for my investigations, investigations that dredged up many unknown facts and comprehensively debunked several accepted family truths.

I was also aware that a great many of my relatives were renowned storytellers. That’s been the main method of recording history in the family, as I imagine it is for many others. Some of the tales they told were so irresistible I had to get sleuthing.

What follows is not an extended outline or discussion of all facets and branches of my Family Tree. Although every closet (the Andrews, Williams, Coles etc) has the odd skeleton, I’ve plumped for the edited highlights of the Edwards line.

Of course, I knew the basics about my family. My mother was one of eight children, who grew up in Illogan – Paynters Lane End. My father, one of twelve, grew up in Laity Road, Troon. I have approximately thirty cousins, and God knows how many second ones. This often bewildering number of relatives always discouraged any familial research as just that – bewildering – until I realised that, nowadays, as genealogy is big business, you can unearth a lot sat at home.

Practically any historical document relating to genealogical research – census returns, prison records, army service papers – are available online, for a fee. (Some are mercifully buckshee too.) You no longer have to spend hours in libraries or archives, or go to evening classes, or take grave rubbings, to discover your ancestors. All you need is a laptop and a little expendable income.

That’s not to say finding out where you came from is any easier, it’s just that the approach has changed. Scrolling through page after page of countless hits on your browser is just as arduous and, yes, boring as squinting at a microfilm reader or leafing through those massive leather-bound indexes at the General Register Office. Online research has its own frustrations: clicking to view the record you’re convinced is the one only to be told you’ll have to get your wallet out first and gamble on your convictions, can make you sign out in parsimonious disgust. Plus, the deeper, or further back, you dig, you’re liable to discover records simply aren’t available online. For example, if you want birth, marriage or death records before 1837, you’ll have to check parish records. And that normally means visiting county archives. And that might mean the records simply don’t exist period.

Not again…

If you do need to go further back, or dig deeper, contact me…

Australia

Let’s go back to my two great-uncles, as that’s where it all started. The family story went something like this:

See boy, George an’ John, they were two buggers, they ran ‘way from home, sailed t’bleddy Australia, an’ when war broke out they joined the ANZACS an’ got killed at Gallipoli…

Although it sounded a bit like that Mel Gibson film, I was hooked: two possible n’er-do-wells, redeeming themselves in service to the Empire, paying the ultimate price, romance and tragedy, irresistibly combined. I had to find out more – I had to prove the story true.

I didn’t. But what I discovered was no less fascinating. George first.

He was in fact William George. William George Edwards was born in 1885 in Sithney. In 1901 he was a farm labourer, living at home in Crowan. In 1911 he was a miner, again living at home, in College St, Camborne. In 1912, presumably in search of work, he sailed to Australia. His town address on one document was “Cobar Mine, Sydney”. In fact Cobar is 500 miles north of Sydney, in the Outback. George had swapped a rock for a hard place. Although Cobar had a suburb called “Cornish Town”, it was one of the toughest places on earth, a true frontier settlement. He would probably have lived in a tent and engaged in fistfights with his fellow miners over the best ore pitches. Philip Payton‘s book The Cornish Overseas (Cornwall Editions, 2005) describes Cobar as an “appalling environment”, with blazing heat, water shortages, and dust storms that could cause temporary blindness (p302).

Cobar is, in fact, nowhere near Sydney

Small wonder, then, that he signed up, joining the Australian Imperial Force in 1915. He was 5ft 6, with a broad chest, and dark-skinned. Not all the soldiers slaughtered in World War I can claim a resonant battle (The Somme, or even Gallipoli) in which to lose their life. George disembarked at Marseilles in mid-June 1916. On July 11, his battalion were in the front line, somewhere near Armentieres on the Western Front. On the 15th, the Germans shelled the line with high explosives all day. One of the soldiers killed was George. The battalion’s war diary notes that one soldier died of their wounds. I hope it wasn’t George. That said, I doubt there’s much of him buried in the cemetery at Rue-du-Bois.

From George’s service papers
War Diary, 57th Battalion, Australian Imperial Forces: “9 other ranks killed, 1 died of wounds…”
From George’s service papers, a copy of the letter sent to Cornwall

These brief paragraphs took weeks of research. I discovered George’s enlistment and service records online at the National Archives of Australia, and it was truly eerie seeing his own handwriting, or the neat copperplate of his mother (my great-grandmother), or that there was practically nothing on his corpse save a pipe and a handkerchief.

George’s personal effects
My great-grandmother’s hand

What struck me most was the “KILLED IN ACTION” stamp hammered onto the cover-sheet of George’s documents: see the image that opened this post. In World War I death became mechanised, and so did the means of recording it.

John Edwards

John Edwards’ existence on paper is nebulous. I discovered he was a younger brother of George, that his full name was Edward John, and that he was born in 1891. He worked as a miner too. I had believed that, the more I uncovered about George in Australia, sooner or later his kid brother would also materialise. He didn’t.

John never went to Australia, and I went down several dead ends to assert this. I realised that John’s fate – whatever it was – had somehow become conflated with the romanticised version of George’s. I reasoned that maybe he joined the British forces, and then discovered that thousands of WWI service records for the British Army were destroyed by a German bomb in the 1940s. However, the list of soldiers killed are more or less intact. John signed up with the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, and died fighting in what was then Mesopotamia in January 1916. His name is on a memorial in Basra listing those whose bodies were never recovered. There’s over 40,000 names on the memorial.

All that remains of John’s service records

George is commemorated on the Australian War Memorial, and both his and John’s names are on the Memorial at Tuckingmill church. On August 3rd 1916, The West Briton ran the following brief note on page 5:

And there was another brother. He went to…

America

That’s Thomas Edwards (1889-1963), circa 1920. He’s just become a Master Mason. I got in touch with his son, Ed, in the States. Apparently, Thomas Edwards lived quite a life.

He left Cornwall in around 1906-7, sailing on the Lusitania, and alighted in Canada. For a time he lived in Cobalt. He hunted, trapped, and fished his way into North America, becoming a guard at Yuma State Prison, and then Sheriff of Bisbee, Arizona. He then joined the U.S. Army, and fought with General “Black Jack” Pershing against the Mexican bandit Pancho Villa. When discharged, he was awarded American citizenship and settled in Pennysylvania.

Now that’s one hell of a story; all that’s missing is a wagon of stolen gold. I’ve never discovered exactly when Thomas left Cornwall, but it has to have been between 1911 – he’s living in Camborne, College St – and June-July 1918, when he joined the Infantry and gained citizenship. Ed was kind enough to send me images of Thomas’s papers.

Thomas’s enlistment papers, June 20, 1918
Thomas’s discharge papers, November-December 1918
Thomas’s citizenship papers, July 1918

He can’t have sailed to Canada on the Lusitania: the ship only ever docked in New York. And, alas, he never fought as a soldier in the Mexican Revolution: Pershing’s expedition against Villa took place in 1916. Thomas joined the Army in June 1918, and was discharged in December of that year. I doubt he even fired a rifle. I can neither prove, nor disprove, Thomas’s sojourns in Cobalt, Yuma or Bisbee however – the records that exist are incomplete, though he was definitely not Sheriff of Bisbee. Something tells me to err on the side of caution.

It’s curious, though, that the settlements of Cobalt, Yuma and Bisbee are part of Thomas’s story. Apart from Yuma, which has some popular notoriety as the location of a tough prison, Cobalt and Bisbee are relatively unremarkable and unromantic. The ship, Lusitania, was famously torpedoed in 1915. What I’m trying to say is, in the same way Gallipoli became the mythical resting place of George and John, Thomas’s story acquired a veneer of romance and resonance when becoming associated with Yuma and the Lusitania.

Cobalt, Yuma and Bisbee are all located in heavy mining regions, however, and Thomas Edwards was, 100%, a miner. Maybe, just maybe, he worked in these areas for a time. It’s equally likely however that he only left Cornwall in 1918. Who knows. When I contacted the library in Cobalt asking for assistance, the librarian all the way over in Canada told me her grandfather came from…Redruth. It is, truly, a small world.

I was interested to note, though, that Thomas had the same height, hair and eyes as his big brother, George, though with a paler, less tanned complexion. I have no photo of George, but the two brothers must have looked very similar. And, like George, and John, the realities of their lives bear little or no resemblance to the oral traditions.

How Thomas looked when leaving the army

I had one more myth to shatter.

The Welsh Connection

See boy, your great-grandfather was from Wales, either Pontypool or Pontypridd, I ferget which…an’ the bugger walked to Cornwall to find work! Bleddy hell…

For a long, long time I believed this one, and thought myself to possess a deal of – diluted – Welsh blood. I followed their national rugby team. I went to a Welsh university. I picked up a smattering of the language, more than I ever did of Cornish. I told a few mates about it. And then I read the 1901 census.

1901 Census. Edward J. Edwards, 41, miner…
Where born? Wendron…

My great-grandad, Edward John “Ned” Edwards (1858-1932), was born in Wendron! Honestly! By all accounts a violent, unpleasant, mean individual (and here I actually spoke to relatives who knew the man), he lived his entire life on the right side of the Tamar. Here he is:

That’s him, at the back, menacing the photographer. I’ve no idea who the lad with the dog is. The younger Edward John? Thomas? Likewise the girl on the right. To the left is my great-grandma, Sarah. Her maiden name was spelt on various censuses as Cowls, or Cowles, before finally becoming Coles. The house was called Wheal Top, where my grandad, Frank, was born in 1904, and where the family lived in 1901, so presumably the photo is from the same period. Wheal Top is located in a field, between Carvolth and Treslothan – so between Praze and Troon. All that’s left of it now is a wall.

Maybe, then, Ned’s father, a George Edwards, was Welsh? He wasn’t.

1861 Census. George Edwards is listed as being born in Mawnan. Ned is 3, his older brothers are already earning their wages. Source: Free UK Census Records

George Edwards was, I discovered in the 1861 census, from Mawnan. Okay, what about his dad? It was becoming a minor obsession. I traced George Edwards right back to the 1841 census. All this told me is how poor the family were: Ned’s brothers were working at the mines from the age of 10! I got hold of his marriage certificate, from 1851, when he was living at Carlidnack, Mawnan. His father, my great-great-great grandfather, was John Edwards, a farmer. But where the hell had he been born?

(It may or may not surprise you, but George Edwards signed this certificate with a mark. Ned Edwards made the same moniker on his own wedding day.)

“The mark of George Rogers Edwards”
“The mark of (Edward) John Edwards”

Parish Records

I realised that now was the time to shoot in the dark. The information I wanted – where this John Edwards came from – would not be available online. To discover anything relating to genealogy before 1837 (the year a central register of births, marriages and deaths became a reality), takes dedication. I took a punt on the parish of Mawnan, and volunteered to transcribe all their parish records for the Cornwall Parish Clerks Online database, in the desperate hope that, sooner or later, I would hit an Edwards.

This was a worthy, but onerous, task. The first year I transcribed was for 1678. I didn’t get an Edwards until 1729. George Edwards was born in 1819. His dad, John Edwards, was born in 1776, yes, in Mawnan. He married a Sarah Tranick in the early 1800s. John Edwards’ dad, another John, was born in 1744, and his dad, a William Edwards, died in 1753. All in Mawnan.

The burial record for William Edwards, 1753, from the COPC database. Transcribed by his great-great-great-great-great grandson, yours truly…

At this point I abandoned the project, concluding that, in all likelihood, my family is Cornish back to the Flood.

Reading back this post, I fear it makes me appear that I set out on some kind of zealous mission to shoot down my family’s fireside tales. But this really wasn’t my intention! All I wanted to do was ground these stories in fact, but, sadly, most of them turned out to be just that – stories. True history is always based on evidence, on facts. What kind of historian would I be if I didn’t adhere to this fundamental rule?

Thanks for reading, and, if you’d like help with your own Family Tree research, please get in touch!

Regards

Chapter Reading & Synopsis: The Camborne Riots of 1873

For those wanting to read and hear more…

Reading time: 5 minutes; listening time: 9 minutes

The Man Engine, Dolcoath Mine, by J.C. Burrow, 1890s. Source: Kresen Kernow, ref. AD460/1/1

Okay, first off, I’m going to give you the synopsis, or brief outline, of my novel. It’s what I’ve been hawking around various publishers these past few months! Enjoy!

The police force in Camborne are hated, a bunch of stave-wielding authoritarians managed by a cowardly, non-Cornish despot. They imprison and allegedly abuse innocent women, cheat at cricket, and believe themselves lord and master of all they survey. The people of Camborne, and the town’s miners in particular, have had a gutsful. 

One Saturday night, two policemen bite off more than they can chew with the Bawden brothers. Result? They get a hammering, the Bawdens get arrested later that night (after beating off five more officers), and their trial for assault is set for Tuesday. But not if their mine boss, Captain Josiah Thomas (manager of Cornwall’s largest mine), can rig the hearing. He enlists the help of a cocky young pitboy, a compromised philanderer, a hideously injured mine boss, hellfire Methodists and various thugs, and also gets most of Camborne’s population to take to the streets in a show of mass support for the brothers.

But, on Tuesday, it goes badly wrong. The brothers get sent down, and the miners, in the main, take a terrible revenge on those they hold responsible. The forces of law and order are routed in a bloody streetfight. Camborne is subjected to mob rule, and no policeman, or anyone suspected of sympathy towards the police, is safe from the fury of the crowd. Order is only restored when the militia enters the town, and the situation is serious enough for the Home Secretary to get involved. The superintendent is replaced, and the Camborne force is either dismissed or moved to different boroughs. Notwithstanding the fate of the Bawdens, the miners are triumphant. The only figure of authority to emerge with any credit is a local magistrate (and grandson of the safety-fuse inventor), William Bickford-Smith, and even he is powerless.

But then the manhunt for the riot’s ringleaders hots up. The powers that be swear in Special Constables (ironically, key rioters themselves), who are forced to identify suspects whilst, with the silent collaboration of Camborne’s populace, conceal their own involvement. Three men are brought to trial, but there are no convictions, no sentencing: one was a patsy, a simpleton set up by the Specials, and the other two provide witnesses who perjure themselves in order to get their compatriots off. It helps that the counsel for the defence is a smooth-talking crook. In a raucous, dramatic hearing, the authorities are made a fool of. Bickford-Smith is embarrassed. No one, until now, knows who the real rioters were, who commanded them, or what really happened. This, finally, is the true story…

The narrator, in broad Cornish dialect, is Ned, a fictionalised version of my great-grandfather, who was a teenager at the time. (I present myself as merely the posthumous editor of his tale, which was given to me by a relative – I elaborate on this in my introduction.) He claims to have been present at every significant point of the riot: its origins, main flashpoints, and aftermath. His version provides a coarse and ribald counterpoint to the newspaper coverage of the tumult; said coverage actually provided me with the main inspiration for the story. My novella also includes extensive explanatory notes and biographical details, a glossary of the more arcane Cornish phraseology, and appendices.

Sample, Chapter 23: James Bryant is arrested

In this chapter Ned narrates how he and Joseph Vivian go underground at Dolcoath Mine to arrest James Bryant, who’s been identified as a suspected rioter. It’s Ned’s first time underground and he’s understandably nervous. The Man Engine, or “Captain’s Rod” Ned describes is meant to resemble the one seen in the photograph above, which operated at Dolcoath for fifty years before being replaced in the late 1890s.

James Bryant was actually arrested by Special Constables whilst working underground on 230 fathom at Dolcoath (he was later acquitted for lack of evidence). The reasons behind his arrest were unclear in the contemporary newspaper reports – here I present him as a simple stooge set up by the actual rioters to pacify the authorities and hopefully call off the manhunt. Who arrested Bryant at the mine is also unclear (the ‘papers just say “Special Constables”); in my version I have Ned, and Joseph Vivian make the pinch. Vivian was genuinely made a Constable in the riot’s aftermath, though clearly with much reluctance. In my tale he was actually a key rioter too.

The recording contains some “robust” language. Don’t say you weren’t warned. Happy listening!

Sample, Chapter 23, The Camborne Riots of 1873: An Eyewitness Account

Like to hear more? Contact me to discuss!

Many thanks