The rioters finally meet their match in St Austell. Bayonets at the ready…
Category Archives: Cornwall in the 1800s
The Fugitive: James Jewell: A Prologue to Part Five of the Food Riots of 1847
A rioter on the run…who did he see? Who did he speak to? Did he escape?
Hellfire Corner: Redruth: The Cornish Food Riots, Part Four
Violence, looting, and arrests in Redruth as the miners and militia face off…continuing The Cornish Food Riots of 1847…
Commotion Time: Pool, June 4, 1847: The Cornish Food Riots, Part Three
No relief in Helston. Little in Penzance. Matters get ugly when 3,000 starving people arrive in Pool. Part three of The Cornish Food Riots of 1847…
Rise of the Miners: The Food Riots of 1847, Part Two
Things are getting worse. The miners get organised. The miners march for food – and the authorities react…
The Cornish Food Riots of 1847: Background and Context
The people are hungry! The miners are rising! A series of five posts on the food riots that erupted in Cornwall throughout the spring and summer of 1847. No town was safe from the starving thousands, and violence regularly broke out…
The Notorious Beatrice Small, Fortune Teller
Beatrice Small made her living telling the fortunes of the gullible folk living in the border country of North Cornwall. Her fanciful tales of spells and hidden fortunes found many willing ears, and she regularly ran foul of the law…
Sister Helen and Saint Barnabas
Sister Helen Phillipps-Treby was Head Nurse and General Manager of St Barnabas Hospital, Saltash, from 1896 to 1951. 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…
War and Emigration: The Family Tree
My own early forays into genealogical research…legends are debunked, myths shattered, and tragedy is uncovered…
A Cornish Wife Sale
That’s right, a wife sale. Over two hundred years ago, a man walked into Redruth market, offering his wife for sale. Who were they? What happened to them? How could such a thing happen?
Francis Edwards ~ The Cornish Historian 