by Tom Fort
In 1908 Davidson moved to Penzance, where he sank into deeper and deeper despair. He wrote to his publisher ‘the time has come to make an end’, then waded out into Mount’s Bay and drowned himself.
27
A DIFFERENT PLACE
On the map Penzance runs seamlessly into Newlyn, but the two are very distinct. Because of its harbour and its fishing fleet and its particular history, Newlyn seems to have a stronger sense of itself and what it is for. Only Brixham among English ports lands more fish than Newlyn, and as at Brixham, the smell of fish is in the air. Newlyn fishermen have seen bad times and good, and these days the times are pretty good.
The fishermen have been there for ever and a day, as long as Newlyn has been Newlyn. The painters came much later. Yet the two – the painting and the fishing – combined to give the port a uniquely dual image: of a man in a boat with a net, and an artist with an easel, both braving whatever the south-west and its winds could throw at them.
The artistic migration from London was initiated at the end of the nineteenth century by Stanhope Forbes. He had studied in Paris and learned to paint from nature and real life in Brittany, and found its English equivalent by the sea at Newlyn. The living was cheap, the scenes were vibrant with drama, the models were there for the painting. ‘Unflinching realism’, as Forbes characterised it, was the creed. They placed their canvases and palettes among the fishing people, who thought it all very strange at the start but became accustomed to these bohemians in their midst.
A Newlyn school was born, made up of Forbes’ friends and pupils, among whose leading lights were Laura Knight and her husband Harold. One of Harold Knight’s many portraits is of a slim young man in a fawn suit and bow tie sitting at a table in dappled sunlight with a book in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The subject was Alfred Munnings, who came to Newlyn in 1911 and became a central figure in the artists’ colony. Munnings paid court to one of Stanhope Forbes’ most fetching students, Florence Carter Wood, and married her with tragic consequences. She attempted suicide on their wedding night and killed herself with cyanide two years later, an event which Laura Knight said ‘put an end to all our joy.’
Munnings erased her from the official version of his life, and went on after the 1914–18 war to become rich and famous as a painter of horses and paddock scenes, and notorious for his violent hostility to ‘modern art’, in particular that of Picasso. In 1949, as President of the Royal Academy, Sir Alfred Munnings shared his views on the subject with distinguished guests at the annual dinner. ‘I myself,’ he declared, ‘would rather have a damned bad failure, a bad, muddy old picture where somebody has tried to set down what they have seen than all this affected juggling.’
Around Penlee Point from Newlyn is Mousehole with its sweet, hemispherical harbour, steep twisting streets and granite cottages. Now chiefly a tourist hotspot with a handful of working fishing boats, Mousehole once rivalled Newlyn in importance. In 1595 it was put to fire and sword by a force of Spanish pikemen and musketeers who arrived unexpectedly from Britanny. Having torched Mousehole, they sailed round to Newlyn and Penzance and repeated the trick, and escaped across the Channel before ships sent from Plymouth could intervene.
The simple creed of Methodism expounded in the fields and by the roadsides and on the seashore by John Wesley found a ready audience in Mousehole, as elsewhere in Cornwall. A fine new chapel was built in 1784 and later enlarged to accommodate new converts. Among them was a group of Mousehole fishermen whose convictions were so strong that they were persuaded to turn from casting their nets in Mount’s Bay to trawling for souls on the other side of the world.
The man who did the persuading was Captain Allen Gardiner, a disappointed naval officer turned missionary zealot. He must have known what he was letting these simple Cornish lads in for when they sailed from Liverpool for Tierra del Fuego in September 1850. He had already been to that famously grim place twice before, declaring that he would turn the savages from their heathen ways to the light of Christ, and on neither occasion had received any encouragement of any kind. But Gardiner was one of those fanatics whose impregnable faith in his own righteousness made him both immune to reason and a danger to those around him.
The mission was doomed from the start. Apart from Gardiner and the three Mousehole men, it consisted of a surgeon, a carpenter and John Maidment, described as a ‘catechist’. There was no one who could speak a word of whatever language the natives spoke, or with a notion of how to survive in one of the most barren, storm-blasted wastelands on earth. They landed in two open boats on Picton Island, at the southern tip of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago, on 5 December 1850, with basic provisions sufficient for six months.
The natives were antagonistic and missed no opportunity to steal from the provisions store. Whatever attempts may have been made to get them to pay attention to the Word of God were soon abandoned in favour of a hopeless struggle to stay alive. John Badcock of Mousehole was the first to die, after six months, of scurvy and starvation. His comrades survived a little longer by eating mice, a dead penguin, a dead fox and half a rotten fish washed up on the shore, but by the end of August 1851 only Gardiner himself was still alive.
His remains were found by a rescue team the following January beside one of the boats. He was dressed in three sets of clothes and had his hands thrust into woollen socks. His Bible was beside him, with many passages marked and underlined. The bodies were buried and the leader of the rescuers ordered a volley of musket fire – ‘the only tribute of respect I could pay to this lofty-minded man and his devoted companions.’
Mousehole will always be associated with the Penlee disaster of December 1981, when its lifeboat and eight crew were lost trying to rescue those on board a cargo vessel disabled by hurricane-force winds in Mount’s Bay. A less melancholy claim to distinction is that Dolly Pentreath – ‘the last speaker of Cornish’ – lived there. Her accomplishments were revealed by a well-known antiquarian, Daines Barrington, who visited Mousehole in 1768 and found her in a hut ‘maintained partly by the parish and partly by fortune-telling and gabbling Cornish.’ She was said to be eighty-seven years old, short and bent with age, but ‘so lusty however’ that she thought nothing of walking the three miles to Castle Horneck and back in a day.
In a report for the Society of Antiquaries, Barrington said she had told him that in her youth Cornish had been well understood by everyone, ‘even the gentry’, but that now ‘there is neither in Mousehole nor in any other part of the county any person who knows anything of it.’ On that basis Barrington declared Dolly to be the last Cornish speaker, and the label stuck. However, its factual basis was examined in formidable detail by the Celtic language scholar Peter Berresford Ellis, in his 1974 study The Cornish Language and its Literature, and was found – not surprisingly – to be wanting.
According to Ellis the language was in headlong retreat from the mid-sixteenth century onwards, for various reasons including the lack of a proper alphabet and a translation of the Bible, and its long-standing association with Catholicism, now outlawed. By 1650 it had retreated to the far west where it clung on in a handful of rural parishes and fishing villages, including Mousehole. Although various gentlemen enthusiasts endeavoured to keep the flame alive by collecting a meagre store of written records and sources and writing a vocabulary, by the end of the eighteenth century Sir William Borlase declared ‘this language is now altogether dead so as not to be spoken anywhere in conversation.’
Not spoken in conversation perhaps, but not quite dead either. Dolly Pentreath died in 1777, but Peter Berresford Ellis shows that she was survived by several Cornish speakers. One of them was a fisherman of Penzance, William Bodener, with whom Dolly was reported to have talked Cornish for hours on end. Neither of Bodener’s two sons spoke it, but another resident of Penzance, John Nancarrow, did; and he claimed there was ‘an inhabitant of Truro’ who had it as well.
As Ellis comments, ‘a language does not die suddenly, snuffed out with its last
remaining speaker . . . it lingers on for many years.’ And thanks to him and other scholars and linguistic activists, Cornish has been exhumed and resurrected to the extent that UNESCO has ruled that the label ‘extinct’ no longer applies to it. It lives on rather in the manner of a kidney patient on dialysis, taught in some schools, used on road signs and dutifully promoted by the county council.
As for Dolly Pentreath, she was buried in the churchyard at Paul, the village above and behind Mousehole. A century later a somewhat grandiose monument to her was fixed in the churchyard wall, paid for by Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte, a nephew of Napoleon and a great enthusiast for obscure and moribund European languages. The stone bears an epitaph from Exodus: ‘Gwra perthi de taz ha de mam: mal de dythiow bethenz hyr war an tyr neb an arleth de dew ryes dees – Honour thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long in the land the Lord thy God giveth thee.’
The perceived ‘otherness’ of Cornwall evinced by its language has long been a key element of its appeal to outsiders. Laura Knight wrote that it was no use comparing it with anywhere else – ‘an atmosphere prevails which takes away any sense or belief you have ever had, and you don’t know why but you aren’t in England any more.’
The further west, the more distinctive the landscape seemed. W. H. Hudson compared it with Connemara in the west of Ireland: ‘This coast country is the most desert-like and desolate . . . the black, frowning, wave-beaten cliffs on the one hand, the hills and moors on the other, strewn abundantly with granite boulders, rough with heath and furze and bracken, the summits crowned with great masses of rock resembling ancient ruined castles.’
A painter of a later generation than Laura Knight, Ithell Colquhoun, felt a sacredness in west Cornwall. She saw human and animal forms in the rocks, likened trees to limbs and stacks of rock to phalluses, and considered stone circles and holy crosses to be ‘geysers of energy’. She settled for a time in the Lamorna valley beyond Mousehole, living in a tin hut with a corrugated roof and no power or plumbing. Lamorna was then and still is a place as lovely as its name, a long dale shaded by sycamores and ash, its green banks luxuriant with bluebells and wild garlic; and through it a bright, lively stream that races over miniature waterfalls and slows through clear, gravelly pools before charging over a final barrier of boulders into the cove itself.
No wonder the painters loved it, and love it still. It was ‘discovered’ in the 1890s by John Birch, who was dubbed ‘Lamorna’ Birch by Stanhope Forbes to distinguish him from the Newlyn painter, Lionel Birch. Lamorna Birch had a house perched above the cove where his grandson still lives. Another migrant, much influenced by Birch, was Stanley Gardiner, who lived beside the stream at Lily Cottage. When I stopped there I met an elderly man who turned out to be Gardiner’s son Keith – another painter and author of a memoir of Lamorna and its artists, A Painter’s Paradise. I asked him about painting the sea. ‘Easier than landscape, at least it is to me,’ he said. ‘You have to be quick to catch it.’
The cove is rough and rocky, clasped by cliffs of granite. Before the painters arrived, Lamorna was known for its granite, used in buildings as various as New Scotland Yard and the Café Monico in Piccadilly, as well as for piers and breakwaters and lighthouses – anything where extreme strength and durability were wanted. The cove had its own pier where the barges were loaded, and horse-drawn carts piled with stone clattered up the road to Penzance.
The quarry on the east side of the valley was owned by the St Aubyns of St Michael’s Mount, and that on the west by the Paynters of Boskenna. The Paynters also owned most of the houses in Lamorna as well as much land and many farms inland. They lived in style at Boskenna, a seventeenth-century manor house a couple of miles west of Lamorna. Colonel Camborne Paynter liked having artists around, and encouraged Laura Knight and her husband as well as Alfred Munnings to come and live in Lamorna.
The Colonel’s daughter, Betty Paynter, was a lively girl who was much admired at a tender age by the Italian pioneer of radio and enthusiastic fascist, Guglielmo Marconi. He used to bring his yacht around from Poldhu on the Lizard – from where he transmitted his first transatlantic radio message – to Paynter’s Cove to pay court to her. Newspaper reports that they had become engaged despite a thirty-seven-year age gap roused the Colonel to brandish his whip at a squad of reporters who turned up for a meet of the local hunt.
Other visitors were made more welcome – T. E. Lawrence, D. H. Lawrence, Augustus John, any number of painters from Lamorna and Newlyn. A friend of Betty Paynter, Mary Wesley, came to live at Boskenna during the 1939–45 war and later placed ‘the great house in the west’ in several of her novels, including The Camomile Lawn. Colonel Paynter died in 1948, leaving the estate to Betty, who by then was married to a solicitor called Paul Hill. Patrick Marnham, in his biography of Mary Wesley, refers to allegations that the will naming Betty as the heir rather than the Colonel’s granddaughter was forged by Hill. True or not, Betty and her husband worked their way through the inheritance at speed, and in 1957 the estate and Boskenna were sold, ending three centuries of family connection.
It is the granite that gives this stretch of coastline its adamantine character. The cliffs are not high compared with elsewhere on the Channel shore, but they are unyielding. The assaults of the sea have battered and scarred them, but never broken them. They are fissured and holed and their feet are strewn with the casualties of war, but they do not surrender.
The granite ramparts are broken by coves aplenty, but most of them are very steep and inaccessible and not that much more comfortable than the headlands beside them. Penberth is an exception, with its clump of cottages and a beach which once accommodated twenty fishing boats. But for sand and somewhere to stretch out a deckchair you must go to Porthcurno, beyond the famous Logan Rock which the foolish Lieutenant Goldsmith caused to be tumbled down from its age-old perch, thereby inflicting on himself disgrace and a hefty bill to have it put back (£130 in all, a very considerable sum in 1824).
Charles Harper came here expecting seclusion but found, to his dismay, that the sands of Porthcurno displayed the imprints of many feet. These belonged to the ‘young barbarians’ employed by the Eastern Telegraph Company (later Cable and Wireless), which had chosen Porthcurno as the hub of its burgeoning global network of undersea cabling. By the time Harper got there, this extended to North America, Australia and India – it was said, quite truthfully, that it was far easier for someone in Porthcurno to communicate with someone in Bombay than with someone in Penzance. In 1940 the telegraph station was considered at high risk of being targeted by German bombers, and a platoon of tin miners was brought in to blast tunnels into the cliffs where the vital equipment could be hidden from sight. The station finally closed in 1970, although engineers continued to be trained there for another twenty years.
Up the road, standing out very visibly, is a white house originally built by Cable and Wireless for the widow of one of its operatives who had been drowned laying cable at sea. It was acquired in the 1920s by Dora and Bertrand Russell, who changed its name from Sunny Bank to Carn Voel and fitted on the front a porch with pillars and a curved roof suggestive of the Orient. They were intent upon a simple, outdoor life for their infant son and daughter – ‘we talked much that summer about bringing up children,’ Dora Russell wrote in her memoir The Tamarisk Tree. The words are poignant because domestic peace with Russell was inevitably short-lived, and he proved to be an appalling father to poor John Russell (there is a chilling account in Ray Monk’s biography of the philosopher taking the boy kicking and screaming into the sea to teach him to swim, and holding his head under to ‘cure’ his fear of water).
Russell was famously short on humour, but there is a droll and revealing anecdote about him asking his wife to tie a parcel for him. She, busy with chores, suggested he do it himself. ‘I have never tied a parcel in my life and I am not going to start now,’ the great thinker declared.
After Russell left her for the children’s governess, Dora kept the h
ouse and continued to live there, on and off, until her death in 1986. In the later years she looked after John Russell, by then diagnosed with schizophrenia. Towards the end her daughter Katharine came to live there as well, and she remains there with her son. Although she is in her nineties, she still works two days a week in the Oxfam bookshop in Penzance. I called at Carn Voel one morning; when she answered the door I was taken aback by her resemblance to the photographs of her father. I explained my business and she said she saw no reason why she should talk to me about him. As I couldn’t either, I went on my way.
Penwith did not make much impression on Bertrand Russell, but – like many others – Dora Russell identified something exceptional in this wild place. ‘Nowhere better than down here,’ she wrote, ‘can one feel the mysterious link between man and the whole of his planet down to the very substance of its rocky foundations. Here I have my share in eternity.’
And beyond is the Land’s End.
In the 1970s a man called Charles Neave-Hill became the owner of the 115 acres of rock and heathland that included the south-west extremity of the British mainland, Land’s End. He had inherited it from his father, William Neave-Hill, who had inherited it from his mother, born Minnie Vingoe Toman Trahair. How it came to her is a very tangled tale – suffice to say that it had been the property of one Vingoe or Toman or Trahair or other (they were all cousins) since the mid-1600s.
After the railway reached Penzance in 1859, the Tomans began, somewhat hesitantly, to exploit the tourist potential of their patrimony. There was already an inn, the First and Last, which was expanded. A teahouse was opened, followed by what became the Penwith Temperance Hotel. Refreshments and postcards were dispensed from a little shop on the cliff edge. So it went on until the outbreak of war in 1939, when the area was requisitioned. Post-1945 the facilities remained in a deplorably run-down condition for years.