PART V

‘Inventing “The Cornish Riviera”’: From Twentieth to Twenty-first Century Cornwall

CHAPTER 24

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Introduction

Helen Doe, Alston Kennerley, Philip Payton

After almost one hundred years of ‘Pax Britannica’, the comparative peace which marked Britain’s hegemony in world affairs, the twentieth century ushered in a new era of turmoil and change. Two world wars of incomparable destructive force, a Great Depression that caused mass unemployment and a Cold War which threatened nuclear annihilation were all hallmarks of this period. Yet standards of living rose, especially in the developed West, and after 1945 new institutions – such as the United Nations, NATO and the European Union – emerged to play major roles in the direction of international affairs. The British Empire metamorphosed into the Commonwealth and Britain’s relative position as a world power declined accordingly, not least in maritime terms.¹ Indeed, by the turn of the twentieth century Britain’s world share of shipping was already showing signs of decline. But it was not until after the Second World War that her reduction as a maritime power would become fully apparent. This contraction was hastened by the container revolution and by the multiplicity of operational factors that by the end of the century had reduced massively the amount of British-flagged shipping.² Nonetheless, despite this decline, management of the maritime environment remained a strategic priority for successive United Kingdom governments, with new concerns such as the impact of pollution and the inexorable depletion of fishing stocks adding to traditional imperatives.

These global events affected Cornwall as they did the rest of the United Kingdom, but in many ways the Cornish experience remained distinctive when compared with many other parts of Britain. Most notably, Cornwall was economically depressed for much of the century and failed to participate fully in the post-1945 rise in employment and prosperity, especially when compared with south-east England.³ Mining, the great mainstay of the Cornish economy in the nineteenth century, had gone into swift decline and along with it went much of what had been only recently a thriving maritime trade associated with that industry. Likewise, no longer the mining centre of the world, Cornwall ceased to be regarded as a major source of skilled labour for the international mining economy. Even South Africa, the last great home of the Cornish emigrant, had all but disappeared as a destination by 1914. Emigration continued, but it was a pale shadow of the ‘Great Emigration’ that at its height in the nineteenth century had been such an important element of Cornwall’s maritime economy.⁴

Fishing and Fishing Communities

Fishing, the other great Cornish staple, was also in decline. The Cornish fisheries contracted gradually during the twentieth century, as catches were reduced and regulation increased. By the end of the nineteenth century competition from better-equipped east-coast fishermen operating in Cornish waters had already served to hasten this decline. At first, Cornish fishing had appeared to rally, rising to the challenge, and in the period before the Great War there were as many as thirteen first-class steam trawlers registered in the ports of Cornwall and Devon. Yet by 1938 the number had dropped to just two, one of which had been laid up since 1925. Of the motor fleets, the 150 first-class vessels of 1919 had reduced to 91 by 1938 and the number of sail craft had declined even more alarmingly. The total number of first-class vessels of varying types registered in Cornwall and Devon had fallen drastically from 306 in 1919 to only 99 by 1938.⁵

As the University College of the South West of England (the embryonic University of Exeter) explained in its Devon and Cornwall: A Preliminary Survey in 1947: ‘Even allowing for the fact that a ship does not necessarily fish from her port of registration, these figures tell a tale of decay in an industry on which many of our coastal towns and villages have depended for their livelihood.’⁶ Indeed, the Survey team worried that the Cornish inshore fisheries might collapse altogether, a prospect it found too horrifying to contemplate, for Cornwall, along with Devon, ‘has always been the chief recruiting ground for the Royal Navy and the Mercantile Marine’. It argued that the ‘almost inborn love of the sea and familiarity with its moods and changes has provided fertile ground on which to rear the personnel of our vast fleets’, a ‘long tradition of sea-faring . . . founded on our inshore fishermen’ which ‘has developed a quiet courage, independence and self-reliance’. Moreover, the Survey added, the fishing industry was critical in maintaining the viability and identity of coastal towns, ports and harbours: ‘They take their character from this, and the thoughts and habits of their people derive from it. If you take away the fishery, the town dies.’⁷

The Exeter Survey pointed to the various structural problems faced by the industry. There was the ‘biological aspect’, as it was termed, where over-fishing by the ‘sea-going trawler has had a harmful effect on the humbler inshore industries’, while the ‘economic effects of the development of the big sea-going fleets on inshore are, if anything, more disastrous than their biological repercussions’. Here, it was alleged, big vessels from elsewhere were ‘gaining an almost complete control of the markets’, while their operators enjoyed greater capital reserves, enabling them to weather temporary downturns more easily.⁸ The Survey also reported complaints by Cornish fishermen about the predatory activities of shags, cormorants and seals, which together were supposed to have plundered the inshore fisheries. In 1929 an investigation by the Marine Biological Laboratory in Plymouth found the shags innocent of all charges, although the larger cormorants were seen to be taking marketable flat fish such as flounders, plaice and dabs. Seals were thought to be such a problem that, despite the Grey Seals Protection Act of 1932, special permission was granted for a Cornish cull, it being reported that ‘the Fishery Officer for Cornwall destroyed them in considerable numbers’. However, another scientific investigation by the Laboratory in Plymouth found that the vast majority of the 500 or so seals in Cornish waters were on the north coast, away from the predominantly southern fisheries, with the Exeter Survey concluding solemnly that it would be ‘a pity to reduce it [the grey seal population] to the point of extermination without definite proof of the malpractices of which it is accused by the fishermen’.⁹ The Survey also tried to pin some of the blame for decline on the Cornish themselves, insisting that those ‘very characteristics of pride and independence’ that were so admirable in the sea-faring populace had served to retard the co-operative enterprise spirit necessary to take the industry forward.¹⁰

Despite its pessimistic assessment the Exeter Survey recommended structural improvements in the ports and harbours and argued that the economies of coastal communities should be diversified. Indeed, in the years after the Second World War there were improvements in facilities at ports such as Newlyn and Padstow, and later at Looe, where a new fish market was opened in the 1980s. Likewise, there were attempts at diversification, most in connection with the development of the tourist industry. Padstow, for example, was by the end of the century linked inextricably in the British public mind with the string of seafood restaurants owned by the successful celebrity chef and TV personality Rick Stein. The widespread collapse feared by the Survey had not come to pass, but the Cornish fishing industry struggled to cope with continually changing circumstances. One unforeseen challenge at Newlyn in 1937, for example, was the threat of ‘slum clearance’, when Penzance Corporation proposed to condemn and demolish the fishermen’s cottages on the harbour front, rehousing the occupants in new council houses at the top of a long steep hill. The fishermen collected a petition of more than a thousand Newlyn signatures arguing against the ‘wholesale destruction of our village’ and caught national attention when they sailed the fishing boat Rosebud to London, mooring at Westminster, where they presented their protest to Parliament. Subsequently, the Corporation’s plans were moderated and much altered.¹¹

Later, in the second half of the twentieth century, as Paul Willerton shows in his contribution, the industry was further constrained by decline in fish stocks, externally imposed regulation and the effects of climate change. British entry into the European Economic Community (European Union) posed particular problems for the Cornish industry, not least with regard to strictly enforced quotas for different types of catches, a strategy to try to conserve fish stocks. In the mid-1990s there was widespread anger in Cornwall at the UK government’s perceived inaction in the face of supposed Spanish incursions in Cornish waters, in supposed contravention of EU rules, an intriguing echo of similar disputes in earlier centuries. Similar incursions off the coast of Canada had received a robust response from the Canadian authorities, it was alleged, and prompted the defiant flying of a profusion of Canadian flags by fishing vessels at St Ives, Newlyn, Mevagissey, Looe and other Cornish ports and harbours.¹²

Boat-building and the End of Commercial Sail

Alongside diversification, other traditional maritime industries survived. China-clay quarrying had replaced copper and tin mining as the principal extractive industry in Cornwall. Concentrated in the area above St Austell, the industry made extensive use of the nearby ports of Par, Charlestown and Fowey for the export of china clay. There was a healthy expansion of the clay industry between 1900 and 1916, although during the Great War and subsequent Depression years there was a slump in production. After the Second World War the industry benefited from various economies of scale and changed international conditions and, by the 1960s, St Austell had become something of a boomtown as production expanded. By the end of the century, however, this prosperity was on the wane, although the deep-water port of Fowey remained an important outlet for clay exports, continuing to employ the extensive loading facilities first constructed by the Great Western Railway and comprehensively updated in 1968.¹³ Photogenic Charlestown, meanwhile, had metamorphosed into a popular location for the film industry, the harbour becoming the home to a fleet of historic sailing vessels, its wharfs transformed cosmetically into representations of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century quaysides.

Ship repair and boat building had also survived. In the early twentieth century there were many local firms, such as Roberts and Co. of Mevagissey, which built vessels such as the ubiquitous 32-foot cutters and 27-foot whalers for the Royal Navy. During the 1920s these small yards were busy building ‘Toshers’, modest 20-foot boats used for mackerel line-fishing in the spring and summer months, when larger boats were increasingly laid up. One notable yard was Percy Mitchell’s at Portmellon, just west of Mevagissey. Still going strong at Mitchell’s retirement in 1966, the yard had weathered hard times before the Second World War, responding to changing conditions as demand for working boats fell away and that for leisure craft increased. Indeed, there was a veritable post-war boom and, between the middle of 1945 and the end of 1946, Mitchell’s built no fewer than twelve new boats. Yachts, shark-fishing boats and launches were thus all added to Mitchell’s repertoire.¹⁴ Elsewhere in Cornwall boat building also survived, even flourished. At Cremyll, near Torpoint on the Cornish bank of the Tamar, for example, was Mashford’s Boat Yard, where vessels had been built since the late eighteenth century. Steam-boats for the Cremyll–Plymouth ferry were constructed there in the early twentieth century. But, as in other Cornish yards, this did not herald a rush to adopt modern propulsion and modern materials. Instead, like other Cornish yards, Mashford’s reputation (and enduring success) was based increasingly on its role as an important repository for traditional shipwright skills and boat-building methods. Likewise, at neighbouring Millbrook was Mill Quay Boatyard, another traditional yard, where in 2008 the adventurer Pete Goss would build his Spirit of Mystery, a replica of the lugger Mystery which had sailed from Newlyn to Melbourne (Australia) in 1854–5, a feat that Goss would replicate in 2009.

24.1 Jane Banks at Fowey c. 1931 (David Raddings)

Cornish boatyards owed their survival to flexibility, to their willingness and ability to react to new conditions, especially the growth of recreational sailing, while at the same time retaining traditional skills and techniques. But the increasing use of sail in the leisure sector – in Cornwall, and in Britain as a whole – was matched by the correspondingly swift decline in the commercial use of wind propulsion in the British merchant fleet. As Alston Kennerley demonstrates in his contribution, as early as the 1880s the tonnage of UK-registered steam ships exceeded that of sail. By 1919 only a handful of foreign-going British-flagged sailing vessels was still in operation, together with a number of smaller sailing vessels which continued to ply United Kingdom home waters into the 1930s, often penetrating minor ports less accessible to larger power-driven ships. Other countries, notably France, Finland, Germany and Norway, did not abandon ocean-going sail with the same haste as Britain. Their sailing ships, largely employed on oceanic passages lifting bulk commodities, remained a familiar if declining sight in Cornish waters, particularly off the Lizard, where orders could be signalled, and at Falmouth, where they also came for orders and to replenish stores and make repairs. Indeed, as Alston Kennerley shows, throughout much of this period Falmouth played a major role as a communication centre in international commodity distribution, a role it did not relinquish finally until shipping was universally equipped with wireless communication.

For the professional merchant seafarer, experience in sail became increasingly difficult to obtain. Shipowners were forced to drop the pre-war expectation that their officers would have trained in sail, and steam-ship certificates of competency as second mate, first mate and master became the normal state-awarded qualification instead of the ‘square rigged’ certificate, which was increasingly the exception. Sailing ships became a much less familiar sight in ports and rarity value stimulated public interest, with detailed reports and pictures in newspapers. There was a similar outpouring of nostalgic books on the ships and life in sail. But there was little discussion of their role in maritime commerce or their ability to compete with power-driven tramp ships, a level of success that was demonstrated by the late Martin Lee.¹⁵ The desire for sail experience among young British men and women in the inter-war years, led many, Cornish among them, to seek appointments in foreign-flag sailing ships.

Navigation and Maritime Safety

The twentieth century opened with Cornish waters well surveyed and charted and the principal dangers marked to the latest standards by structures, light and sound. Progress with electrical and electronic devices during the century would see a variety of radio navigation aids introduced, operated and withdrawn, each with its limitations that would have to be understood by navigators. An early device was the electric submarine bell or oscillator, which was suspended in the sea and issued sound (which travels better in water than in air). Wolf Rock was supplied with one for an experimental period and, later, the Seven Stones light vessel was so equipped. Ships were fitted with hydrophones in their bows, but needed to be manoeuvred to establish the bearing when right ahead. These devices were outdated by the 1930s with the spread of wireless (radio) telegraphy and radio direction finding (WT/DF or simply DF systems). This at first developed as a request service, with the station at the Lizard (where Marconi conducted his famous trans-Atlantic wireless experiment in 1901) transmitting a continuous wireless signal while a ship took a wireless bearing. To fix its position the ship needed a bearing from another transmitter, perhaps at Start Point in south Devon. In 1913 the station at the Lizard (transferred to Post Office ownership in 1908) was moved to St Just-in-Penwith where, as Lands End Radio, it became famous as the transmitter called by all ships sending WT messages when within range in the Western Approaches. The development of dedicated WT/DF stations transmitting coded signals in the 1920s and the requirement that ships carry DF receivers did away with the need for formal contact.¹⁶ The installation of a transmitter at Round Island (Isles of Scilly), made that location as important in wireless navigation as the Lizard had long been in visual navigation. Later Bishop Rock, Seven Stones, the Lizard and Penzance were also provided with DF transmitters. During both world wars scientific warfare made great progress and navigation was a science in which innovations originally for military purposes developed into civilian uses.

24.2 The sailing ship Adolf Vinnen ashore on the Lizard (University of Exeter Clutterbuck collection)

Hyperbolic radio navigation systems were developed during the Second World War and contributed significantly to the war effort, including the D-Day landings.¹⁷ After the war the Decca Navigator system for civilian use spread around the world and also became an important navigation aid in merchant ships and in connection with commercial fishing. The Decca South West British Chain operated from 1952 until 2000, by which date inertial satellite navigation had made it redundant. Its green slave transmitter was installed at St Mary’s (Isles of Scilly), the master being at Bolberry Down (Devon), the purple slave at Llancarfan (south Wales) and the red slave at St Helier (Channel Islands). Developments connected with that other wartime system, radar, led to prominent coastal locations, typically lighthouses, being fitted with radar responder beacons, racons, which in response to a ship’s radar signal transmit a coded signal back showing as a mark on the radar screen giving both bearing and range.¹⁸ Examples in Cornish waters are found at the Eddystone, Bishop Rock and the Seven Stones.¹⁹

More generally, automation and the application of electronic navigation aids made a significant impact on coastal navigation around Cornwall.²⁰ By the close of the twentieth century almost all the coastal navigation lights had been automated, being remotely monitored and operated where suitable using electricity and solar panels. Lighthouses situated on isolated rocks, such as Longships or Wolf Rock, had been ‘capped’ with helicopter platforms and were no longer manned. Controversially, given that small vessels were not all fitted with the latest navigation aids, a Trinity House review led to some lights and fog signals being discontinued. For example, Bishop Rock was automated in 1991, its light keepers left in 1992 and its fog signal was discontinued in 2007. But protest at the proposal to discontinue Godrevy Light achieved a stay for that facility. Whether the removal of coastal lights has had a deleterious effect on the numbers of shipping casualties has yet to become apparent, but one positive innovation was the introduction in the 1970s of a group of marine traffic separation schemes (sections of ‘dual carriage ways’ in the sea) surrounding the Scilly Isles, which has contributed to ship safety in Cornish waters.²¹

However, although far fewer than hitherto, shipping casualties have continued to occur – and not necessarily in bad weather, the range of causes being much as they always have been. Fishing vessels remain particularly vulnerable, while the increasing size of merchant ships has brought a few disasters of international notoriety. Perhaps the most infamous and significant was the grounding and subsequent breakup on Seven Stones Reef of the tanker Torrey Canyon in March 1967.²² The stranding occurred in fine weather and was due to navigational error. In an attempt to burn off some of the 100,000 tons of cargo oil, the ship was bombed by the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force. Nevertheless, serious pollution occurred, with large swathes of beach contaminated by discharged oil (and the detergent deployed to deal with it), while wildlife – especially seabirds – suffered disastrously. The incident prompted the realisation, locally and nationally, that comprehensive pollution prevention and response measures needed to be put in place. It also had a significant impact on protection and indemnity (P&I) insurance, as owners were now held liable for oil pollution and the new principle of ‘the polluter pays’ came home to the international mutual insurance clubs. Internationally, it led to new conventions relating to pollution prevention, control of shipping in territorial waters, and the construction and operation of ships. By 1969 TOVALUP (Tanker Owners’ Voluntary Agreement concerning Liability for Oil Pollution) had come into being.²³ After the Torrey Canyon, another much publicised casualty was the Kodima in 2002. The ship’s deck cargo of timber had shifted and, in danger of foundering, the vessel ran aground. Subsequently, stretches of coastline in south-east Cornwall, especially along Whitsand Bay, were strewn with sawn timber, to which scavenging ‘Cornish wreckers’ (as the press inevitably dubbed them) gladly helped themselves.

Shipping casualties have continued to call on the rescue services, including the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, whose members maintain the tradition of exceptional deeds of heroism in saving life. As in the past, some of these life-savers have paid the ultimate penalty. In recent memory the Penlee lifeboat disaster of December 1981, in which all eight lifeboatmen died, stands out for its scale. The boat, the Solomon Browne from Penlee, Mousehole, had been called out in appalling weather to the coaster Union Star, which had experienced engine trouble and (having refused the assistance of a salvage tug) now found itself driven by huge seas towards the rocks in Boscawen Cove, near Lamorna. Quite what happened is unclear. The Solomon Browne managed to pick up some of the crew from the Union Star but, in returning for the remainder, was apparently overwhelmed by the giant waves. There were no survivors from either vessel to tell the tale; wreckage from the Solomon Browne was later found scattered along the coast, while the Union Star came to rest upside down on rocks west of Tater Du lighthouse.²⁴

RNLI lifeboats, stationed strategically around the coast, are but one part of the service provided to mariners.²⁵ In the first half of the twentieth century the Cornish coasts were especially well provided for, with a range of rescue and warning services, as shown in Table 24.1. Yet developments in modern technology have led to contraction in much of what that table represents. The storm signal stations have given way to the radio weather forecasts for shipping and gale warnings. The rocket apparatus and the volunteer rocket brigades and coastguard rescue provision have largely been superceded by naval sea/air rescue helicopters based at RNAS Culdrose. As late as 1974 the Coastguard maintained a presence around the Cornish coast at thirty-five different locations.²⁶ Since then this extensive government-funded presence has been disbanded (in 1988), despite considerable opposition. In 1994, when two fishermen lost their lives off the Cornish coast immediately below a recently closed Coastguard lookout, local people decided to open and restore the visual watch. In their view, high technology and sophisticated systems such as radar and telecommunications had vastly improved safety at sea, but there was still no substitute for a watchful pair of eyes. When the first station was opened at Bass Point on the Lizard, the National Coastwatch Institute was born. During the next ten years other stations followed and, by 2009, there were thirty-nine operational stations keeping visual watch around the coastline of England and Wales. In Cornwall during that year the initiative employed 1,784 volunteer watchkeepers, logged 1,200 incidents and initiated 49 RNLI lifeboat rescues.²⁷ Meanwhile, the principal Coastguard presence in Cornwall had been consolidated at Pendennis Point, Falmouth, where today the internationally important Maritime Rescue Co-ordination Centre, opened in 1981, maintains a continuous listening watch.

War and Defence

In the past keeping a watch on the Cornish coast was as much of military significance as it was a matter of maritime safety, reflecting Cornwall’s historic ‘front line’ location. In the First World War this would cause some consternation to the Fox family, who were major shipping agents but also Quakers.²⁸ As Harry and Roy Bennett explain in their contribution, Cornwall was much involved with naval events and operations in the first half of the twentieth century. They discuss both the losses to shipowning and fishing vessels and the human cost to fishermen and seafarers and remind us of the maritime and air/sea operations around the coast, in the Western Approaches and on the littoral of continental Europe, in which Cornwall and the Cornish played a significant part. In the build-up to D-Day in June 1944 the south coast of Cornwall was host to a vast array of military units and vessels.

At Falmouth, for example, was the United States Navy Advanced Amphibious Base, local headquarters for the Normandy invasion preparations centred on the Fal and Helford rivers. All across Cornwall, from Jupiter Point on the Antony estate, near Torpoint, to Trebah, near Mawnan Smith, the Americans were much in evidence as they organised and trained for D-Day. As the appointed hour drew near Cornwall increasingly assumed the appearance – and role – of an armed camp. One Mawnan Smith resident recalled that ‘For days and nights an endless stream of vehicles seemed to be rolling through on a much larger scale than ever before . . . Troops seemed everywhere . . . A mighty army on the move.’ Another remembered that ‘When the vehicles moved along the roads to get down to Trebah Beach all civilians were suddenly ordered off them.’²⁹ At Mabe locals were astonished to find that the huge column of jeeps and lorries stretched back as far as Helston. At Falmouth the Carrick Roads appeared clogged with landing craft of all sizes, while at Fowey it was said that one could have walked from one side of the harbour to the other, so closely packed were the invasion vessels. Mount’s Bay was also full of Allied shipping. When, suddenly, the order to sail was given, the invasion force disappeared with what seemed extraordinary rapidity. ‘One minute the whole place was packed’, wrote one observer of the Fal and Helford estuaries, ‘the next they had all gone.’ As another put it, an ‘eerie silence’ descended over Cornwall.³⁰

The D-Day invasion caught the Germans off their guard. But the Nazis had long been aware of the strategic importance of Cornwall and in 1938 and 1939 the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein had paid courtesy visits to Falmouth. As Viv Acton and Derek Carter have noted, on both occasions German sailors ‘made good use of the expensive-looking cameras with which they were armed’, recording in detail the dockyard infrastructure, information that proved highly useful in subsequent air-raids once hostilities had commenced.³¹ The bishop of Truro, Joseph Hunkin, in a display of Christian good feeling, went aboard and blessed the warship, much to the astonishment and outrage of the Cornish historian A.L. Rowse (then an aspiring Labour parliamentary candidate and critic of Appeasement), who exclaimed: ‘what was it for but to sink British sailors’.³² In July 1940 there was a series of raids on Falmouth, that on the 10 July hitting the tankers Tascalusa and British Chancellor. A.L. Rowse, fuming with his ‘ulcerated resentment’, as he put it, happened to observe the raid from the Roseland peninsula: ‘I watched from the high road by St Just[-in-Roseland] the bombing of ships in the same harbour [Falmouth] by a German plane. They made excellent targets, and we had no defence.’³³ Thereafter, Falmouth and environs remained a strategic target, the last raid occurring a week before D-Day, when thirty enemy aircraft attacked in the early hours of 30 May 1944. The petrol storage tanks near Swanpool received a direct hit and buildings along the seafront were destroyed. Luckily, none of the Nazi raiders spotted the D-Day build-up and the invasion secret was safe.

One outcome of the Second World War was that Cornwall acquired naval air bases (such as RNAS St Merryn, near Padstow) and became more closely involved with naval training. The Royal Naval Air Station at Culdrose, near Helston, was constructed during 1944–6 and commissioned in 1947 as HMS Seahawk. Intended initially as a naval fighter school and a home base for carrier aircraft, Culdrose’s role continued to expand and diversify. A search and rescue squadron was soon added, vital in responding to the range of maritime crises and disasters with which Cornwall was faced routinely, from the foundering of vessels in winter storms to summer holidaymakers trapped by incoming tides.³⁴ By the late twentieth century Culdrose had become the largest helicopter base in western Europe, home to the highly successful Sea King aircraft and, in the early twenty-first, to the new Merlin helicopter, as well as to the Royal Navy’s new degree-level Fleet Air Arm Academy.

Similarly, changes in the Navy’s training organisation saw HMS Fisgard at Torpoint established in 1939 (initially as the Royal Naval Artificer Training Establishment and then formally commissioned in 1946) as its base for artificer training. Artificers – specialist craft and technical ratings – had been trained in Cornwall since 1903, when Admiral Jacky Fisher’s newly introduced Boy Artificer scheme led to the establishment of HMS Indus, a series of ancient hulks moored at Wilcove, near Torpoint. Indus proved equal to the training demands of the Great War but fell victim, like much of the Navy, to the ‘Geddes Axe’ cutbacks of 1921, when artificer training was concentrated first at Portsmouth and then at Chatham and Rosyth (Scotland), before returning to Cornwall in 1939 on the eve of war. Situated so close to Plymouth, Fisgard became an early target for enemy action, with raids in December 1940 and January 1941 doing considerable damage. Thereafter, during the first five months of 1941 – the ‘great Plymouth blitz’ – there were numerous raids. In April the nearby Thankes fuel tanks were bombed, with Fisgard artificer apprentices lending a hand to fight the fires, and a week later a direct hit on an air-raid shelter at neighbouring HMS Raleigh killed forty-one naval ratings and twenty-five Royal Engineers. After the war and formal commissioning, Fisgard settled into its role as new entry training establishment for artificers, a position it held until 1983 when the apprentices were transferred across the road to HMS Raleigh.³⁵

HMS Raleigh, at Torpoint, had been commissioned in 1940 for training ordinary seamen. After the war Raleigh developed as the Royal Navy’s principal (and eventually sole) new entry training establishment.³⁶ It also acquired a wide range of other specialist naval training roles, with successive transfers from other locations of Women’s Royal Naval Service new entry training (1981), artificer apprentices (1983), seamanship (1990), cookery (1994) and submarine training (2000). Firefighting and damage control added further to the range of training facilities and by the end of the twentieth century HMS Raleigh, now a vast, sprawling edifice, had emerged as one of a handful of key Royal Navy shore establishments in the UK.

Commercial Maritime Infrastructure

Compared to the consolidation of naval infrastructure in twentieth-century – particularly post-Second World War – Cornwall, the commercial maritime infrastructure has fared less well. Although at the end of the nineteenth century the decline in aspects of Cornwall’s maritime activity was evident already, the observer in 1900 could hardly have predicted the closure of so many ports and the changing nature of maritime activity that was to survive. But already by mid-century, as explained by Terry Chapman, when Roland Roddis made his tour of Cornish ports, evidence of decay seemed to be all around. The cause was not all industrial decline. Other factors included the continued improvement in land transportation and the national networking of the utilities such as gas and electricity, hitherto generated locally through coal imports. Improved communications and higher standards at sea drew away passing shipping which previously might have used Cornish ports and Cornish businesses were not immune from the national decline in shipbuilding and ship repair. In the depressed periods between the two wars and later in the century, especially after the Suez debacle in 1956, the rias (sunken tidal estuaries) of the Fal and the Fowey filled with laid-up merchant ships, their rusting hulls and air of desolation adding to the general maritime gloom. Initiatives such as the false dawn of Falmouth Container Port came to nothing. Likewise, the prospect (in the early 1970s) that there might be abundant oil reserves in the Celtic Sea, leading to Falmouth’s development as an oil terminal, proved hugely over-optimistic. Nonetheless, Falmouth’s role as a leading ship repair centre, in the past periodically in question as order books ran dangerously short, did seem assured by the end of the century. A variety of vessels, from ferries and cruise liners to naval ships of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, were routinely maintained or refitted in the extensive and well-equipped yards.

24.3 Ipswich Trader in Charlestown in late 1930s, an increasingly rare sight (David Raddings)

Maritime Tourism and Recreation

This often depressing story of maritime decay has been offset to a considerable degree by economic development across the broad spectrum of maritime leisure activities. Although critics have claimed that tourism, broadly defined, has turned picturesque fishing ports such as Polperro, Mevagissey and Mousehole into ‘quaint’ parodies of themselves, with many of their houses now reduced to ‘holiday homes’ for use by occasional up-country visitors, Cornwall’s maritime assets have proved significant in constructing a post-industrial Cornish economy.³⁷ As early as the Napoleonic Wars the coasts of Cornwall had been identified as a reasonable substitute for the continental watering places now denied well-to-do British tourists, and from this early substitution emerged Cornwall’s enduring reputation as exotic, sub-tropical, quasi-Mediterranean and ‘different’. Penzance, Newquay and Bude had all become firmly established as ‘resorts’ before the coming of the railway in 1859. But, as Philip Payton shows in Chapter 28, it was the marketing strategy of the Great Western Railway, commenced before the turn of the century and perpetuated into the 1950s by the post-Nationalisation Western Region of British Railways,³⁸ that reinvented Cornwall’s coastline as ‘The Cornish Riviera’. Palm trees, an equable and balmy climate and miles of golden sands appealed not only to the well-off but to growing numbers of working people who could afford a third-class rail ticket to one of the Cornish resorts. Sub-tropical gardens along the southern estuaries – such as Trelissick, Trebah and Glendurgan – with their multiplicity of Asian and Antipodean rarities, also hinted at a mysterious and alluring exoticism that existed in hidden Cornwall. Surfing at Newquay and other spots similarly enhanced the sense of the exotic – with echoes of Hawaii and Australia – and the entwinement of maritime Cornwall with tales of saintly visitations from Brittany and Ireland reminded observers that this was also a ‘Celtic’ country. St Piran, or so it was said, had arrived on the beach at Perranporth tied to a mill-stone, having floated across from Ireland, and St Ia likewise arrived at St Ives sitting on a leaf. As the Great Western Railway’s guidebook Through the Window, published in 1924, explained:

Cornwall is so distinct from the rest of England as to seem almost another country. This holds true even if one judges only by such superficial characteristics as the names of railway stations and things seen from the carriage windows. Its truth is emphasized as one probes into history, legend and folk-lore, into the dead Cornish language and stories of the Cornish saints. Here, indeed, is a part of Britain with a culture and character peculiarly its own.³⁹

Moreover, the guidebook added:

The real charm of the Duchy . . . is a matter of landscape and climate. Seascape would perhaps be a better term, since the grand scenery of Cornwall lies along her coasts, north and south. Seascapes framed in rugged rocks make up her panorama. One sees them at intervals as the train nears the sea at many points on its journey through the whole length of Cornwall. Now the north coast, now the south breaks into view, and when at last St Michael’s Mount rears its astonishing shape out of the sea, the picture seems to be good to be true.⁴⁰

By the close of the century there were those who did indeed complain that it was all too good to be true. The annual tourist ‘invasion’ was thought by some to have become too intrusive, placing too many demands on Cornwall’s sometimes fragile infrastructure, with house prices in coastal districts rising beyond the reach of local pockets as outsiders sought second homes or retirement properties. Some critics called for a ‘sustainable tourism’ policy for maritime Cornwall and the ‘Porthemmet’ website phenomenon – with its heavy satire on Cornwall’s surfing culture – hinted at a degree of tension between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. Nonetheless, the growth of tourism had indeed helped create a ‘post-industrial’ economy in Cornwall, filling the gap left by hard-rock mining. It had also played a major role in shaping how twentieth-century Cornwall was now imagined – by both locals and visitors alike.

Maritime Literature and Art

Associated with the growth of tourism and maritime recreation and the marketing of a ‘post-industrial’ Cornwall was the flowering of literary and artistic endeavour. Before the close of the nineteenth century painters and writers – many from ‘up-country’ – had begun to settle in maritime locations around Cornwall, drawing their inspiration from the sea and from Cornish coastal communities. They were responsible for popularising new images of maritime Cornwall and for bringing these to a wider world eager for books and paintings on Cornish themes. Among the many newcomers thus engaged was a sprinkling of locals, some of whom were Cornish–Celtic revivalists attracted to the new images of maritime Cornwall. Together, newcomers and locals contributed a rich new strand to the life of Cornwall’s coastal communities, imagining them afresh and helping them to diversify to meet the demands of the twentieth century.

One of the leading Cornish–Celtic revivalists in the early twentieth century was Robert Morton Nance, or ‘Mordon’ (his bardic name), as he was often known. A polymath with a wide range of specialist interests, he made a significant contribution to Cornish cultural and artistic life. Architect of the ‘Unified Cornish’ version of revived Cornish, based largely on the language of the medieval period, he produced English– Cornish and Cornish–English dictionaries and became Deputy Grand Bard of the Cornish Gorsedd at its inception in 1928, and later Grand Bard in succession to Henry Jenner in 1934. Integral to Morton Nance’s Cornish interests was his enthusiasm for maritime history. He made models of sailing vessels, several of which found their ways into museums (including the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro), and in 1910 was a founder member of the Society for Nautical Research. Subsequently he contributed more than forty articles to its learned journal, The Mariner’s Mirror, several with Cornish themes, such as ‘West Cornwall Fishing Luggers Before 1850’ and ‘Sea-stones and Killicks in West Cornwall’.⁴¹

Morton Nance also collected material for his A Glossary of Cornish Sea-Words, published posthumously in 1963, that ‘happy combination of Mordon’s Cornish and Nautical studies’, as P.A.S. Pool (the volume’s editor) put it so aptly.⁴² Within its pages, for example, the reader learned that ‘calamajeenah’ was the Cornish word for the cuckoo ray, a type of fish caught in muddy ground around Perranporth, and that a ‘pezzack’ was a rotten pilchard. ‘Skubmaw’, a word heard in the vicinities of Newlyn, Mousehole and Sennen, referred to the mangled splinters of a shipwreck – as in the phrase ‘scat to skubmaw’, akin to smashed to smithereens – while ‘zoggol’ was bait cut from mackerel.⁴³ As Morton Nance explained, he had been drawn to the subject by an obscure reference in the English Dialect Dictionary: ‘Gijoalter, sb.Cor. Part of the rigging of a ship’. His ‘life-long passion had been ships’, he said, and ‘this could hardly fail to be a bait. Was it possible that part of a sailing ship’s rigging could still bear its distinctive Cornish name?’ The answer, as he soon discovered, was that it was indeed possible, and that many other Cornish words – some derived from the Celtic language of Cornwall – had also survived in modern maritime terminology. Some were in general use but most were restricted now to specific localities, so that, for example, ‘any West Cornwall man going as far east as Polperro would have to learn most of his fishing terms afresh’.⁴⁴

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (‘Q’) – made a bard of the Cornish Gorsedd at its inauguration in 1928 – shared Morton Nance’s enthusiasm for ships and the sea. Early novels had included Dead Man’s Rock, published in 1887, which owed much to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and in 1888 he completed Stevenson’s unfinished novel St Ives. Later novels, such as The Ship of Stars, published in 1899 and set on the wild north Cornwall coast, also had a strong maritime theme, as did his collections of short stories, such as The Delectable Duchy and I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales. Books such as The Mayor of Troy, Troy Town, Hocken and Hunkin and The Shining Star drew on local stories, such as a dispute in 1860 over the right to run a passenger ferry between Polruan and Fowey and a mayor who was arrested for smuggling. Q’s tales of local maritime communities drew heavily on his knowledge of the misunderstandings and events that could occur and become magnified in small towns.

24.4 Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, keen yachtsman and Commodore of the Royal Fowey Yacht Club. Here involved in the local Regatta, an event he relished. (Jim Matthews collection)

Professor of English at Cambridge, Q made his home at Fowey, where he threw himself into public life. He was Commodore of the Royal Fowey Yacht Club from 1911 until his death in 1944. He was also Chairman of the Harbour Commissioners for twenty-one years, pressure of work at Cambridge causing him to resign in 1925, but not before he had secured assistance from a reluctant government to make good wartime damage to Fowey harbour. As Q explained, during the First World War cargo vessels had been instructed to bring home fuel-oil as ballast, and inevitably quantities had escaped into the harbour waters. He complained that, in consequence, Fowey ‘suffered from stench, slime and pollution for miles of foreshore. Concurrently, the fish deserted the Fowey estuary, at a time when food was scarce.’ Exasperated by ‘official blunder, dilatoriness and evasion’, he eventually wrote a long letter to The Times in January 1920, at last prompting action to deal with ‘the flood of filth into our poor little harbour’.⁴⁵ Q lived until May 1944. He died at his house, ‘The Haven’, overlooking the harbour, as American troops prepared to embark for the D-Day invasion.

Charles Causley was, like Q, a native Cornishman. He was born in Launceston, some miles from the sea, where he spent most of his life. Unlike Q (or Morton Nance), Causley had no natural affinity with the maritime environment. But, like many a Cornishman, he served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War. As he admitted, ‘I disliked life in the Royal Navy, and my sole ambition was, if possible, to emerge in one piece’ – which he did, after six years in ‘its salt and hairy grasp’, as he put it.⁴⁶ However, Causley’s experiences of naval training and of the war at sea had a major impact on his career as poet and as a writer, exemplified in his collection of short stories Hands to Dance and Skylark (first published in 1951), where several of the maritime stories are set in Cornwall. Yet, with characteristic modesty, he insisted that ‘if the truth be told, I sometimes think that the only great and unassailable verity I discovered during my life in the Navy is contained in some lines of a poem in Figgie Hobbin, a book of verse I wrote . . . for adults as well as children’:⁴⁷

A sailor sat on the watery shore

By the side of the shiny sea,

And as the billows railed and roared

These words he said to me.

‘I’ve sailed to the Rock from Plymouth Dock

And from Sydney to Simonstown,

And oh but it’s true that a life on the blue

Ain’t the same as the life on the brown.’⁴⁸

For writers who were not Cornish the attraction of Cornwall was so often the sea. This was especially true of Daphne du Maurier, who spent the greater part of her life on the south Cornish coast, near Fowey, and who in a string of novels drew extensively upon Cornwall’s maritime history. Her first book, The Loving Spirit, published in 1931, was based on the real-life experience of a local (Polruan) shipbuilding family, commencing with Jane Slade – the novel’s heroine, suitably renamed Janet Coombe. Similarly, Jamaica Inn, although set in the remote moorland hostelry of that name, drew upon the late Victorian stereotypes of smugglers and wreckers, such as those described by Simon Trezise. In Rebecca, meanwhile, it was the sea that held the awful key to the story’s final denouement. Frenchman’s Creek, set in one of the silent creeks of the Helford River, deployed that other Cornish stereotype, the pirate, in a thrilling tale of adventure and romance.⁴⁹ Du Maurier’s unerring ability to evoke atmosphere was apparent everywhere in her description of Cornish land and seascapes. Although she does not say so, her short story ‘The Birds’ is so obviously set on a south Cornish headland – it might be the Dodman, or the Gribbin, or possibly Pencarrow Head – a ‘peninsula, where the sea surrounded the farm on either side’, and where in ‘autumn great flocks of [birds] came to the peninsula, restless, uneasy, spending themselves in motion; now wheeling, circling in the sky; now settled to feed on the rich, new-turned soil’.⁵⁰ And, as she insisted in her Vanishing Cornwall, her non-fictional study of the ‘Spirit and History of Cornwall’, published in 1967, as far as she was concerned the ‘right way to approach Cornwall is from the sea’.⁵¹

Daphne du Maurier, like Q, was linked inextricably with the south coast of Cornwall. So too were the writers Crosbie Garstin and Charles Lee, who both wrote in the Q tradition and used local stories to generate fictional tales of Cornish fishing villages full of quaint characters, and, in Garstin’s case, to craft seabourne adventure stories that included religiously inclined smugglers.⁵² Leo Walmsley, by contrast, writing in the interwar period, drew upon his own experience of an escape to south Cornwall to produce his largely autobiographical Love in the Sun, in which he described the strong impact on the maritime community of the collapse of shipping during the Depression years; later, in a non-fictional account, Paradise Creek, he returned to the same area after the Second World War.⁵³

The north coast, altogether more rugged and forbidding than south Cornwall, facing the Atlantic, also had its share of literary devotees. Thomas Hardy, novelist and poet, had visited St Juliot in 1870, falling in love with and later marrying the rector’s daughter, Emma Gifford. But the marriage was not a happy one. Emma died in 1912, plunging Hardy into a despair of guilt and loss. He revisited north Cornwall shortly after, seeking again the places of their early courtship and producing a series of finely crafted expiatory poems:

O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea, And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free – The woman whom I loved so, and who loyally loved me.⁵⁴

D.H. Lawrence was likewise attracted to the north Cornwall coast, first to Porthcothan, near Padstow, and then to Zennor in the far west. He arrived in December 1915, escaping, as he saw it, war-torn England, and seeking to create his Rananim – his utopian community of likeminded writers and artists – in Cornwall. ‘I like Cornwall very much’, he wrote: ‘It is not England.’ It was the land of ‘King Arthur and Tristan’, he said, and had ‘never taken the Anglo-Saxon civilization’. It was ‘old, Celtic, pre-Christian’, and he loved ‘looking down the cove where the waves come white under a low, black headland . . . Tristan and his boat, and his horn’. Alas, Lawrence’s Cornish dream soon turned sour. Locals were suspicious of his German wife, Frieda – cousin of the notorious ‘Red Baron’ air-ace, Manfred von Richthofen – and there were rumours that the Lawrences and their strange friends had been signalling to German submarines off the Cornish coast. In any event, Lawrence was formally evicted from Cornwall by the authorities, a traumatic experience that he recorded as ‘The Nightmare’ in his semi-autobiographical novel Kangaroo.⁵⁵

John Betjeman, Poet Laureate from 1972 until his death in 1984, had a longer, altogether more fruitful engagement with the coast of north Cornwall. Childhood holidays introduced him to beaches and cliffs around Polzeath and Trebetherick, and he remembered those early experiences in his autobiographical poem Summoned by Bells, first published in 1960:

On Wadebridge station what a breath of sea

Scented the Camel valley! Cornish air,

Soft Cornish rains, and silence after steam . . .

As out of Derry’s stable came the brake

To take us up those long familiar hills,

Past haunted woods and oil-lit farms and on

To far Trebetherick by the sounding sea.⁵⁶

By the time Betjeman was writing, maritime Cornwall had been long established as a major destination for the literary and the artistic. In the world of fine art, for example, as Betjeman acknowledged, there were those drawn to St Ives, Looe, Polperro and Boscastle, artists ‘who sketched, etched and painted the scenes we know so well, finding in Cornwall and North Devon a second Brittany’.⁵⁷ In particular, painters had begun to settle in Newlyn and environs in the 1880s, producing what was then Britain’s most energetic art colony. By 1911 Newlyn had become the ‘most painted spot in the British isles’, according to one observer, as artists were attracted by the clarity of the Penwith light but also the ‘picturesqueness’ of people and place.⁵⁸ Drawing upon maritime themes – catching pilchards, fish sales on the shore, children playing on the beach, sailing boats in the harbour – these ‘Newlyn school’ paintings became enormously popular throughout Britain. They were highly influential in moulding popular perceptions of maritime Cornwall in the twentieth century, complementing the marketing efforts of the Great Western Railway and the writings of Q, du Maurier, Garstin, Lee and others, with their fictional images of a Cornwall steeped in fishing, smuggling and wrecking.

Across the Penwith peninsula at St Ives, another art colony was also in the making. By the late 1880s sail lofts along Porthmeor beach were being converted into artists’ studios, and by the turn of the twentieth century a distinct St Ives style had emerged, with its emphasis on landscape and the abstract, in contrast to the ‘realism’ of the Newlyn school. In 1926 the St Ives Society of Artists was formed to give further expression to this style, while sculptors such as Barbara Hepworth and Maum Gabo lent the St Ives school, quite literally, a new dimension. Today, the best of the St Ives work can be seen displayed in the Tate St Ives gallery, on the town’s waterfront.

Conclusion

By the turn of twenty-first century maritime Cornwall had become increasingly reliant on tourism and attendant activities. Ship repair at Falmouth and the continuing importance of fishing at Newlyn, Looe and elsewhere, as well as china-clay export from Fowey and the significance of Royal Navy training and operations, could not detract from the essential truth that – from scuba-diving and surfing to yachting and gig racing, and from gallery and museum visiting to walking on the cliffs and making sand castles on the beach – the Cornish coast had become host to a wide variety of leisure pursuits. Yet, as the twentieth century had made abundantly clear, Cornwall had retained its strategic maritime significance, with all the opportunities and threats associated with its geographical position at the head of the Western Approaches. Moreover, as the Torrey Canyon and Solomon Browne disasters had shown, Cornish waters had lost none of their inherent volatility and danger, with the timely adoption of navigational innovations as important now as it had ever been in maintaining maritime safety around Cornwall’s coast.

A century of skilful marketing, aided and abetted by a plethora of writers and artists who portrayed Cornwall as ‘exotic’ and ‘different’, had popularised maritime Cornwall as the ‘Cornish Riviera’. Sometimes the Cornish had colluded in the process, welcoming the economic benefits brought by the expansion of tourism and leisure and enthusiastically embracing the idea of a ‘Celtic Cornwall’ separate from England. Gig-racers and surfers, especially, welcomed the new leisure culture, their sporting activities accommodated neatly in contemporary estimations of ‘Cornish identity’. But sometimes local opinion was hostile to mass tourism, the ‘Porthemmet’ phenomenon pointing to the deleterious effects of the annual tourist ‘invasion’, a sense that the Cornish economy had now become dangerously over-reliant on the tourist industry.

Similar fears had been voiced back in 1988 in Cornwall at the Crossroads, a study by Bernard Deacon, Andrew George and Ronald Perry produced for the Cornish Social and Economic Research Group. Arguing for greater economic diversification, they were among the first to call for a new maritime strategy for Cornwall. Reminding observers of Cornwall’s strategic maritime position and of the importance of seaways to Cornwall in the past, they insisted that Cornwall’s maritime potential was today often overlooked. It was a potential, they argued, that those planners and policymakers entrusted with Cornwall’s future in the twenty-first century should seek to unlock, by building new maritime links to neighbouring places in Europe and beyond and by placing greater emphasis on the inherent versatility of Cornwall’s maritime assets: ‘just look at Cornwall on a world map, study international trade routes’, they demanded, ‘and see that it is in a position of geographical strength’.⁵⁹ A quarter of a century later theirs is a challenge that has lost none of its urgency and relevance, and, as the new millennium unfolds, we may yet see the fashioning of a new maritime strategy for Cornwall.

Notes and References

1 See W.N. Medlicott, Contemporary England, 1814–1964 (London: Longmans, 1967), ‘Introduction’.

2 Ronald Hope, A New History of British Shipping (London: John Murray, 1990), chapters 18 and 24.

3 Ronald Perry, ‘The Making of Modern Cornwall, 1800–2000: A Geo-economic Perspective’, in Philip Payton (ed), Cornish Studies: Ten (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002), pp. 166–89.

4 Philip Payton, The Cornish Overseas: A History of Cornwall’s Great Emigration (Fowey: Cornwall Editions, 2005), pp. 378–416.

5 The University of the South West of England Survey Committee, Devon and Cornwall: A Preliminary Survey (Exeter: Wheaton, 1947), pp. 113–19.

6 Murray et al, Devon and Cornwall, pp. 113–14.

7 Ibid., pp. 140–41.

8 Ibid., p. 136.

9 Ibid., pp. 134–35.

10 Ibid., p. 142.

11 P.A.S. Pool, The History of the Town and Borough of Penzance (Penzance: Corporation of Penzance, 1974), pp. 172–73; see also Joanna Mattingly, Cornwall and the Coast: Mousehole and Newlyn (Chichester: Phillimore/Victoria County History, 2009), pp. 160–62.

12 Philip Payton, Cornwall (Fowey: Alexander Associates, 1996), p. 277.

13 John Vaughan, An Illustrated History of West Country China Clay Trains (Yeovil: OPC, 1987), pp. 7–8.

14 Percy Mitchell, A Boatbuilder’s Story (Mevagissey: Kingston, 1968).

15 Martin Lee, ‘Square-rigged Ocean going Sailing Ships and their Operation, in the Post 1919 Period’, an unpublished, incomplete doctoral thesis draft, Alston Kennerley private collection.

16 B.E. Druce, Modern Navigational Appliances (London: Royal Society of Arts, 1935).

17 www.g4fts.ac.uk/decca/home.htm [accessed 18 November 2007].

18 John Naish, Seamarks: Their History and Development (London: Stanford Maritime,1985), pp. 164–65.

19 Admiralty Chart 2675, English Channel.

20 Naish, Seamarks, pp. 154–67.

21 Naish, Seamarks, pp. 169–73.

22 Richard Petrow, The Black Tide in the Wake of the Torrey Canyon (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1968); L. Oudet, In the Wake of the Torrey Canyon: Reflections on a Disaster (London: Royal Institute of Navigation, 1972).

23 Helen Doe, From Coastal Sail to Global Shipping (London: Steamship Insurance Management Services Ltd, 2009), p. 71.

24 Michael Sagar-Fenton, Penlee – The Loss of a Lifeboat (Truro: Truran, 2000 2nd edn).

25 For histories of the stations see Sheila Bird, Mayday: Preserving Life from Shipwreck off Cornwall (Bradford on Avon: Ex Libris, 1991).

26 William Webb, Coastguard! An Official History of HM Coastguard (London, HMSO, 1976), inserted map.

27 www.nci.org.uk [accessed 18 March 2010].

28 Pamela Richardson, ‘A Quaker Record of Maritime Falmouth in World War One’, Troze, 1:1 (December 2008) www.nmmc.co.uk, online journal of the National Maritime Museum Cornwall.

29 Viv Acton and Derek Carter, Operation Cornwall, 1940–1944 – The Fal, the Helford and D-Day (Truro: Landfall, 1994), p. 139.

30 Acton and Carter, Operation Cornwall, p. 143.

31 Acton and Carter, Operation Cornwall, p. 22.

32 A.L. Rowse, Friends and Contemporaries (London: Methuen, 1989), p. 177.

33 Exeter University Library [hereafter EUL]: Rowse Collection MS113/2 Journals and notebooks/5/2, 22 June 1934; later gloss. See also Philip Payton, A.L. Rowse and Cornwall: A Paradoxical Patriot (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2005), p. 125.

34 Geoff Wakenham, Royal Naval Air Station Culdrose, 1947–1997 (Helston: RNAS Culdrose, 1997).

35 Philip Payton, The Story of HMS Fisgard (Redruth: Dyllansow Truran, 1983).

36 Philip Payton, ‘Naval Education and Training’, in Michael Duffy, Stephen Fisher, Basil Greenhill, David Starkey, Joyce Youings (eds), The New Maritime History of Devon, Vol. II: From the Late Eighteenth Century to the Present Day (London: Conway, 1994), p. 199.

37 Joanna Mattingly in her Cornwall and the Coast, p. 172 complains that Mousehole is ‘preserved in aspic’ and concludes sadly that ‘market forces will decide the fate’ of neighbouring Newlyn.

38 See, for example, film ‘West Country Journey’ (1953), reproduced in 1991 in a video collection Western Lands: Yesterday’s Britain No.9 (London: Fame, 1991).

39 Anon, Through the Window: The Great Western Railway from Paddington to Penzance (London: Great Western Railway, 1924), p. 97.

40 Anon, Through the Window, p. 97.

41 Peter W. Thomas and Derek R. Williams (eds), Setting Cornwall on its Feet: Robert Morton Nance, 1873–1959 (London: Francis Boutle, 2007), pp. 41, 238–47.

42 R. Morton Nance, A Glossary of Cornish Sea-Words, ed. P.A.S. Pool (Truro: Federation of Old Cornwall Societies, 1963), p. 7.

43 Morton Nance, Cornish Sea-Words, pp. 53, 125, 176.

44 Morton Nance, Cornish Sea-Words, p. 24.

45 A.L. Rowse, Quiller Couch: A Portrait of ‘Q’ (London: Methuen, 1988), p. 152; The Times, 16 January 1920.

46 Charles Causley, Hands to Dance and Skylark (London: Anthony Mott, 1983 new edn), p. 164.

47 Causley, Hands to Dance and Skylark, p. 11.

48 Charles Causley, Figgie Hobbin: Poems for Children (London: Macmillan, 1970), p. 56.

49 Helen Doe, “‘I too would find my ship’: Daphne du Maurier’s Passion for the Sea’, in Women: A Cultural Review 20:1 (April 2009), pp. 74–88.

50 Daphne du Maurier, ‘The Birds’, in R. Chetwynd Hayes, Cornish tales of Terror (Glasgow: Fontana, 1970), p. 143.

51 Daphne du Maurier, Vanishing Cornwall: The Spirit and History of Cornwall (London: Victor Gollancz, 1967), p. 15.

52 See, for example, Crosbie Garstin, The Owl’s House (London: 1923, repub. London: Cornish Library, 1982); Charles Lee, The Widow Woman (London: Dent, 1896).

53 Leo Walmsley, Love in the Sun (London: Collins, 1939); Leo Walmsley, Paradise Creek (London: Collins, 1963).

54 Kenneth Phelps, The Wormwood Cup: Thomas Hardy in Cornwall (Padstow: Lodenek Press, 1975), p. 70.

55 Philip Payton, D.H. Lawrence and Cornwall (St Agnes: Truran, 2009), esp. pp. 9–12, 40–42.

56 John Betjeman, Summoned by Bells (London: John Murray, 1960), p. 33.

57 John Betjeman, ‘Victorian Provincial Life’, BBC West of England Home Service, 24 May 1934; see also Stephen Games (ed.), Trains and Buttered Toast (London: John Murray, 2006), p. 37.

58 Mattingly, Cornwall and the Coast, p. 133.

59 Bernard Deacon, Andrew George and Ronald Perry, Cornwall at the Crossroads (Redruth: Cornish Social and Economic Research Group, 1988), p. 83.