CHAPTER 28
____________________________
Philip Payton
If, in the popular collective consciousness of twentieth-century Britain, there was a dominant imagining of Cornwall, then it was surely as a tourist destination. It was, moreover, an imagining which privileged the Cornish coast, reflecting powerful images of sun, sea and sand, of cliffs and caves and fishing coves and lurid tales of smugglers, wreckers and pirates. Inland Cornwall, in this imagining, was given over to the industrial dereliction of former copper and tin mining, or to the more recent depredations of the china-clay industry, the landscapes of the interior dreary and dull when compared to the stupendous seacapes to be encountered all around the coastline. Polperro, Looe, Mevagissey, Fowey, St Ives, Padstow, Port Isaac, Boscastle and numerous other locations around the coast became signifiers of all that typified modern Cornwall; they were also the principal Cornish tourist resorts.
One measure of the growth of maritime tourism in the twentieth century was the rapid expansion of holiday accommodation in these coastal sites – from hotels (such as the ‘Atlantic’ and the ‘Headland’ at Newquay) and boarding houses to caravan and camping sites – and attendant leisure facilities such as safe swimming areas, lidos, promenades, piers, boating and various beach activities. Cornwall’s mild climate was an early advantage, which served to counter the serious disadvantage of distance from the main population centres in Britain, a difficulty which persisted even after the link with the main rail network in 1859. As early as 1815 Penzance had developed as a resort, visited by the wealthier classes to whom the traditional venues of continental Europe had been closed by war. Likewise, Bude had become a ‘resort’ by 1824, as had Newquay by 1841, but in the context of the exclusivity that limited usage confers.1 By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the view that tourism might compensate for the decline in mining was being expressed, with the suggestion that visitor numbers might be expanded substantially by appealing to a broader range of classes.
‘Q’ – the Cornish writer, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch – was one of those who advocated the embrace of tourism, in 1898 encouraging debate on the subject in his Cornish Magazine, arguing that ‘Cornwall should turn her natural beauty to account, and by making it more widely known, at once benefit thousands and honestly enrich herself.’2 Q coined the phrase ‘Delectable Duchy’ to describe Cornwall, a clever alliteration which hinted at Cornwall’s distinctiveness but also lent itself as a marketing tool for deployment by the emerging tourist industry. ‘Distinctiveness’, indeed, was a key selling point, and here Cornwall’s tourist promoters found themselves in curious alliance with the enthusiasts of the Cornish–Celtic revival (Q among them).
Put simply, both groups looked to the creation of a post-industrial Cornwall, the former hoping that tourism would replace the increasingly defunct mining industry as Cornwall’s main economic activity, the latter planning to construct the Cornish identity anew by looking back over the debris of the mining era to a time when Cornwall was more ‘purely Celtic’. Then, it was argued, the Cornish language had been widely spoken and there was a multiplicity of links with the other Celtic countries, notably Brittany, Wales and Ireland. This, indeed, was the ‘age of saints’ and of ‘Celtic Christianity’ when, the revivalists thought, Cornwall was the centre of a Celtic world, the routine landfall for Celtic saints as they made their pilgrimages and missionary journeys to and fro across the Celtic Sea. It was a view of Cornish history that emphasised its Atlantic, maritime dimension, and it was an interpretation that lent itself to the new tourist imaginings of Cornwall that were fast developing.3
The eager tourists thus encouraged were overwhelmingly rail-borne and by the end of the nineteenth century the railways had penetrated most of the major coastal holiday destinations. The Great Western had routes to Penzance, St Ives, Falmouth, Perranporth, Newquay, Fowey and Looe, while the London and South Western (later the Southern Railway) had reached Bude and Padstow. The conversion of the Great Western to standard gauge in 1892, together with the opening of the ‘Westbury cut-off’ route in 1906, made journeying to Cornwall shorter and simpler. Portrayed now as an ‘exotic’, sub-tropical, quasi-Mediterranean destination, Cornwall became more accessible in its ‘remoteness’ as greater visitor numbers were indeed enticed to the ‘foreign’ land west of the Tamar.4
The Great Western Railway developed a sophisticated marketing strategy to draw tourists to its Cornish holiday destinations.5 In particular, its invention of the ‘Cornish Riviera’ was a masterstroke of public relations. In 1904 the company published The Cornish Riviera, a book by the popular topographical writer A.M. Broadley, which painted Cornwall as balmy and exotic. It sold a quarter of a million copies and subsequently ran to a further three editions. In the following year, 1905, the Great Western introduced ‘The Cornish Riviera Limited’, the prestigious express train which sped the company’s passengers westwards to its Cornish coastal destinations. A vigorous poster campaign compared Cornwall with other ‘exotic’ destinations, such as Italy and Brittany, imploring holidaymakers to ‘See Your Own Country First’ but promising in Cornwall something equally ‘different’. The intrepid Nolan sisters (Eileen and Peggy) were depicted braving the sea at St Agnes in February 1923, demonstrating how one might bathe in Cornwall all year round. The artist Louis Burleigh Bruhl was engaged in the 1920s to produce ‘The Cornish Riviera’, a poster depicting Cornwall as ‘the warmest place in Britain and also a land of legend, superstition and romance, the home of the wild and imaginative’.6 A decade later came Ronald Lampitt’s highly stylistic ‘mosaic’ poster portrayal of Newlyn, with its intimate harbour and picturesque streets.
The highpoint of this publicity was S.P.B. Mais’ classic guidebook, also entitled The Cornish Riviera, first published in 1928 and republished on several occasions during the 1920s and 1930s. In its pages Mais explained that Cornwall was ‘a Duchy which is in every respect un-English’ and that ‘Cornish people are not English people’.7 He insisted that ‘he who would know Cornwall at all must know the whole of her’, but in so doing lingered longest in the maritime districts. Where else in Britain, he demanded, were there beaches to compare with ‘those of Praa, Polzeath, Carbis, Perranporth, Watergate, Trebarwith, or Widemouth? Cornwall is simply surrounded with sands.’8 Even working ports such as Charlestown exuded an irresistible, romantic charm: ‘Here are grimy colliers from Cardiff, sailing ships of incredible beauty from Sweden filled with cargoes of barrel-staves, and boats setting forth to America and the Far East with the all-precious kaolin [china-clay].’ Mevagissey, meanwhile, was ‘a port of an even more delectable kind . . . the rough granite harbour with its white fishermen’s cottages huddled close together as the red-sailed fishing trawlers are’.9 On the north coast ‘Padstow is a place of crooked alleys, a forgotten port with a magnificent church’, while ‘Boscastle is, I suppose, easily the most curious harbour in the British Isles . . . I cannot imagine anyone leaving Cornwall without seeing Boscastle’.10 As Mais concluded: ‘The sea in Cornwall is ever-present. We cannot, if we would, withdraw ourselves from its restless song, that eerie melody at once so soothing and so tragic.’11
Such purple prose drew visitors to Cornwall in their hundreds of thousands, and after the Second World War maritime Cornwall was swiftly re-established as a principal holiday destination for people throughout Britain. Railway traffic to the Cornish resorts reached its apogee in the 1950s, when on summer Saturdays a veritable procession of holiday specials bound for Penzance or Newquay queued up to cross the Royal Albert Bridge into Cornwall at Saltash.12 Anticipating an ever increasing demand for rail holiday travel, the Great Western had before the war published plans for a new branch line to Looe that would avoid the complex junction arrangements at Liskeard by leaving the mainline further east at Trerulefoot, near St Germans, allowing through train workings from Plymouth and points east. There was also to be a magnificent new Great Western Hotel at Looe, transforming the resort. After the war the railway dusted off the plans, its public relations department reporting breathlessly on the ‘projected holiday hotel at Looe’, with its fifty to sixty bedrooms, situated ‘four hundred feet above the sea’ in extensive grounds where the ‘views over the sea are magnificent’.13 However, nationalisation intervened in 1948 and the scheme was finally abandoned. Thereafter, as roads were improved and cars became affordable for the average-wage earner, the annual tourist ‘invasion’ was increasingly by motor transport. But the idea of ‘the Cornish Riviera’ had become firmly implanted in the collective consciousness of the British public, and with it – for better or worse – was the prevailing belief that the prime purpose of modern maritime Cornwall was to provide a holiday destination for people from elsewhere.
Yet maritime recreation is not, and never has been, exclusively an activity of or for visitors. Residents swam and used the beaches, owned boats and participated in competitive events long before the advent of mass tourism. As Geoffrey Swallow has shown, there was an explosion of interest in swimming matches in Cornwall during the 1860s, which by the end of the nineteenth century had become great civic as well as sporting and social events, attracting many thousands of spectators to locations such as the Esplanade at Penzance or Porthminster beach at St Ives.14 As the Pall Mall Gazette observed in 1899, only ‘those who have ever taken part in or visited the annual West of England matches can realise what a great hold swimming has over the people of Devon and Cornwall. To them a great swimmer is a kind of hero.’15 The Cornish Telegraph, moreover, opined that swimming ‘appears, after the decline and fall of wrestling, to be the only form of sport in which the Cornish people take more than a lukewarm interest’.16 As Swallow has observed, this sudden upsurge occurred against the background of swift industrial decline in Cornwall, and he interprets this new maritime medium of expressing ‘prowess’ – in swimming competitions which drew vast crowds and widespread comment – as a means of asserting Cornwall’s continued place in the pantheon of British imperial and commercial might at a time when it appeared threatened. Moreover, adds Swallow, ‘in direct opposition to the lawlessness and degenerate smugglers and wreckers with which the imaginations of English writers were populating the Cornish coast, the swimming matches facilitated the representation of its inhabitants as heroic humanitarian lifesavers’.17
Port regattas were also well-established events in the nineteenth century, providing entertainment for locals and visitors alike, and in which visiting owners of craft might participate. In the early nineteenth century cruising yachtsmen from elsewhere had not yet discovered Cornish locations, and local clubs were comparatively late in formation. Only the Royal Cornwall Yacht Club (1871) at Falmouth, the Royal Fowey Yacht Club (1894) and Saltash Sailing Club (1898) were, it seems, formed before the twentieth century. As late as 1947 only four further clubs were listed in Lloyd’s Register of Yachts: St Mawes Sailing Club (1920), Flushing Sailing Club (1921) Looe Sailing Club (1934) and Carrick Sailing Club (1946).18 In that year, of yacht-owners registered with Lloyd’s and giving addresses in Cornwall, 96 (1.5 per cent), out of a world-wide total listed of about 6,620, were mostly clustered at or within reach of the rivers Fal and Fowey. Today, Cornwall has over twenty yacht and sailing clubs around its coastline. Harbours are filled with recreational craft – in harbour authority moorings and in that late twentieth-century development, the yachting marina – all providing work for many local businesses, from boat maintenance and chandlery to sail training and yachting qualification.
In recent decades Cornish commercial fishermen, under pressure to reduce fish catches, have diversified by hiring out their boats for leisure activities. But this trend is hardly new. Simple sight-seeing trips in calm weather by individuals or organised parties have always been popular, as have the more adventurous forays out to sea by those willing to pay for the excitement of a day’s recreational fishing. Likewise, there has also always been a niche for the specialist sea angler, whether fishing from boats or from beaches or rocks, bringing to bear his (or her) specialist knowledge and experience of Cornish conditions. The variety of the Cornish coastline allowed particular species to be targeted in particular places, and information about these numerous locations was made readily available by fishing associations and from tourist information offices.19 Looe, for example, developed a considerable reputation as a shark-fishing centre in the years after the Second World War. Under the determined leadership of Brigadier F. Lyde Caunter, a local solicitor, it became the centre of the Shark Fishing Club of Great Britain and was in 1961 the venue for the first British and International Shark and Deep Sea Fishing Angling Festival.20
The post-war era also saw a dramatic rise in the popularity of gig racing in Cornwall. Originally an economic activity, with roots going back to the eighteenth century or earlier, gig racing had by the end of the century become what Keith Harris, its chronicler, described as a ‘particularly Cornish sport with its feet in history and head looking toward the future’.21 Cornish pilot gigs had first emerged to provide pilotage for vessels entering Cornish waters. Numerous pilots made their livings in locations such as Falmouth and the Isles of Scilly by deploying their local knowledge, gained as fishermen or mariners, to guide ships into port or safely around the coast. It was a highly competitive business. Pilots needed fast, seaworthy rowing and sailing craft to be first to reach a vessel and thus earn the pilotage fee. Cornish pilot gigs had evolved for this purpose, earning their reputation as reliable all-weather sea boats. Not surprisingly, these gigs had also found their ways into local regattas, such as that reported by the Graphic in 1887, the year of Victoria’s Jubilee, when there was a commemorative race at St Mawes between two crews – the Young Boys (combined ages, 79) and the Old Boys (totalled ages, 580) – each team manning one of ‘the sea-going six-oared pilot gigs of the port’. In an impressive display of the superiority of experience over youthfulness, the Old Boys won convincingly and were invited to take tea aboard the yacht of local dignitary, Mr J.C. Kennerley, JP, where they impressed all with their ‘lively wit and robust health’.22
Yet the transition from pilot to sporting boat was gradual, with gigs performing their traditional role well into the twentieth century. Jack Hicks, from St Agnes in the Isles of Scilly, was in 1938 reputedly the last pilot to board a ship from a gig for piloting duties. Pilot gigs also played an important role in attending shipwrecks off west Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly during the first half of the century, at least until January 1955, when the Bryher gig Sussex participated in the rescue of personnel from the stricken Panamanian steamship Mando. By the 1960s there was growing sporting interest in competitive gig racing, an enthusiasm that mushroomed in subsequent decades as seemingly every Cornish cove and harbour clamoured to have its own boat and crew. Old boats were recommissioned and a new generation of Cornish pilot gigs emerged in the 1970s and thereafter, built by a new generation of craftsmen such as Ralph Bird, Tom Chudleigh and Gerald Pearn. Gigs such as Newquay’s Good Intent, built in 1975, and Mount’s Bay’s Lyonnesse, built in 1988, found themselves competing alongside the St Agnes gig Shah of 1873 and St Mary’s Golden Eagle of 1870. By the end of the century there were some thirty pilot gig clubs across Cornwall and the sport had been exported worldwide.23
28.1 Surfing at Perranporth, around June 1922 Photographer: A.W. Jordan (With permission of the Royal Institution of Cornwall)
Another icon of contemporary Cornish culture to have achieved international visibility by the end of the century was surfing. Reputedly introduced into Cornwall by South African (or Australian) soldiers on leave during the First World War,24 surfing developed steadily during the inter-war period at places such as Perranporth (where in 1917 bodysurfing had been recommended to those who could not swim!)25 and Newquay, and grew rapidly from the 1950s. As Nicholas Ford has observed, ‘the essential prerequisite for a surfing locale is surfbreaks, and these Cornwall has in abundance, primarily all along the north coast, but some (less consistent) breaks on the south coast . . . notably at Porthleven’.26 However, Newquay, with its eight or so beaches and consistent waves, has always predominated as the principal surfing location in Cornwall, especially Fistral beach where, off Towan Head, surfers have on occasion encountered the monstrous ‘Cribbar’, a thirty-foot wave that few have been able to ride.27 Early enthusiasts, such as Papino ‘Pip’ Staffieri – who is hailed by Ford as ‘probably Cornish surfing’s true pioneer’28 – adopted the well-tried Hawaiian board for use on Cornwall’s beaches, and in 1935 F.S. Funnell published his The Art of Surf-Riding on the Cornish Coast.29 As Geoffrey Swallow has observed, this was a key volume – not only the first known guide to surfing anywhere in Britain but also a ‘crossover’ (as he describes it) between guidebook and instructional manual in which a whole new imagining of the Cornish coast was presented to the British public – Cornwall as an international centre for surfing.30
In the 1920s The Times had carried advertisements for South Africa and Australia, extolling the joys of surfing, and Cornish entrepreneurs and authorities were not slow to grasp the implications of Funnell’s book.31 In 1938 Bude Urban and District Council listed (in order) the town’s main holiday attractions – ‘Surfing, bathing in a tidal swimming pool, golf, tennis, bowls, fishing and boating’32 – and four years earlier a house advertised for let between Padstow and Newquay was said to be ‘close to the best surfing bay in Cornwall’.33 During the Second World War, although tourism suffered and there was a theoretical restriction on the use of Cornish beaches, surfing received an unexpected boost when Australian servicemen based in Cornwall held their own ‘Australian Surf Carnival’ at Newquay’s Tolcarne beach in September 1944.34 Star participants were Flying Officer Bob Newbiggen of the Royal Australian Air Force, who had won New South Wales surfing championships in 1937–8 and 1939–40, and his colleague Flight Sergeant Arthur Beard, who was a New South Wales champion in 1943.35 Canadian servicemen took a similar interest (they rescued a woman from drowning during the Tolcarne Carnival) and local Newquay enthusiasts such as George Williams and Albert Ferris helped pioneer beach lifeguarding during the war years.36 Later, in 1953, Australians helped to launch the British Surf Life Saving Association, modelled closely on Australian practice. By 1958, when the ‘National Surf Life Saving Championships’ was held at Perranporth, Cornish surfing had metamorphosed from the gentle art of bodyboarding to the more athletically demanding Australian version of the sport.37 A key figure in this development was Bill Bailey, who was a lifeguard at Newquay in the late 1950s and who in the early 1960s began the manufacture of Australian-style surfing boards.38 When the Beatles toured Cornwall in 1967, staying at the ‘Atlantic Hotel’ in Newquay and visiting the surfing mecca of Watergate Bay, the reputation of the Cornish coast as ‘cool’ had emphatically come of age.39
Part of its attraction thereafter was to marine-environmentalist groups such as Surfers Against Sewage (based at St Agnes), which gathered some 7,500 members and spearheaded demands for greater action to tackle pollution around the coast.40 By the 1990s (when there were said to be 50,000 surfers in the UK)41 surfing had been accommodated within ‘Celtic’ imaginings of Cornwall – so much so that it was featured prominently during 1998 when the Inter-Celtic Watersports festival was held at Bude – and was now also seen as an important component of Cornish youth culture. This, in turn, was reflected in the 1995 film Blue Juice, which starred Ewan McGregor and Catherine Zeta Jones and was set and filmed in Cornwall. As Alan M. Kent has observed, Blue Juice was a genuine attempt by the filmmakers to present ‘the Cornish surfing community’ through the prism of ‘Cornish social realism’. It merged elements ‘of mid-1990’s rave culture’, he said, with ‘New Age-ism in the form of Heathcote Williams (playing a neo-Pagan Celtic surfing shaman) and biker/outlaw culture’ to offer viewers new insights ‘into the immediacy of late twentieth-century youth culture in Cornwall’.42 In similar vein, Philip Hayward in his study of ‘North Cornish techno music’ detected links between contemporary surfing youth culture and the distinctive style of electronic pop music developed in Newquay and environs in the late twentieth century.43
A hint of the surreal was introduced into this cultural scene when, in the early twenty-first century, a spoof website featuring a fictional ‘Porthemmet Beach’ gained widespread media attention. Satirising Cornwall’s surf culture in general, the website was especially aimed at gullible but intrusive visitors (‘emmet’, a Cornish dialect word meaning ‘ant’, was also pejorative slang for ‘tourist’, something the website did not explain). Said to be named after Saint Emmet, ‘a famous Cornish saint’, and situated on the north Cornwall coast, Porthemmet was the ‘largest beach in the county . . . more like a tropical paradise than a beach in the UK’, its lifeguards the ‘original cast from Bay Watch’. The northern end of the beach was maintained as a wildlife reserve, home to the Cornish chough (the ‘rarest bird in Europe’), while the southern section was for ‘younger visitors’, with its ‘many beach bars, pubs and clubs, as well as . . . topless bathing’. Police officers never patrolled the beach, because ‘the local council decided they distress elderly locals’. However, techno musicians Richard James and Luke Vibert were frequent visitors, it was reported, while, of course, the ‘surf is always crankin’’. Indeed, ‘Porthemmet has great surf all year round and attracts surfers from across the globe’, enticed by ‘a host of (very attractive) surf instructors’.44
A bizarre spin-off from Cornish surf culture, the ‘Porthemmet’ website served to air local anxieties about the way in which (it was alleged) ‘ownership’ of ‘their’ culture was routinely contested or even co-opted by the tourists. With heavy irony it was explained that ‘there is a private joke in Cornwall whereby locals will pretend not to know where Porthemmet beach is. Don’t be fooled, every Cornish person knows this beach, they are just having some fun.’ Thus the advice to tourists was: ‘Tell them that you are an “emmet” (someone that loves Cornwall) and that “there’ll be ell-up” (nothing to do) if they don’t tell . . . Just remember that everyone in Cornwall is very friendly and are often thrilled to talk to tourists.’
‘Porthemmet’ revealed some of the tensions inherent in modern Cornish tourism as well as its paradoxes – the ‘Celtic’ identity that Cornish surfers asserted so fiercely was, of course, in part fashioned by the twentieth-century tourist industry, courtesy of the pen of S.P.B. Mais and the publicity department of the Great Western Railway. Yet there was also an engaging and ‘authentic’ attention to detail, such as the insistence that there ‘are regular diving expeditions to Emmet’s Reef which has many species unique to this part of Cornwall’. Less self-consciously ‘Cornish’ than surfing, scuba-diving had indeed become a leading feature of the Cornish maritime leisure scene by the late twentieth century, a popular water sport supported by variety of clubs and commercial centres. It was given a considerable boost when, in March 2004, the redundant frigate HMS Scylla was sunk in Whitsand Bay as an artificial reef, providing a major new focus for Cornish diving.
Other maritime recreational activities had also proliferated by the end of the century. Kite surfing and sand (or land) yachting were enormously popular and Cornwall had emerged as a venue for the UK National Windsurfing Championships. Meanwhile, coastal walking had maintained its position as an activity with a ready appeal to outdoor enthusiasts of all ages and capabilities. In the years after the Second World War the combined efforts of the National Trust’s ‘Enterprise Neptune’ programme (1965), the South West Coast Path Association (1973) and the Countryside Commission’s ‘Heritage Coast’ initiative (1972) had established coastal walking as a major activity in Cornwall.45 The National Trust aimed to purchase and protect sections of coastline, while the South West Coast Path Association sought to achieve a continuous long-distance coastal footpath around the whole of the south-west peninsula, similar, for example, to the Pennine Way. The Countryside Commission (and its several statutory successors), meanwhile, identified coastal areas to be protected from development and maintained for public access. By the beginning of the twenty-first century ten sections of Cornish coastline had been designated as Heritage Coasts, while many outstanding problems of access had been overcome, in effect restoring the old pedestrian coastguard watch dating back two centuries.
As James Whetter observed, reflecting on his two-and-a-half year project to walk the entire Cornish coastal footpath – an undertaking he commenced on 12 September 1991 and completed on 20 March 1994 – the route was by then ‘one of Cornwall’s main attractions’.46 Some walkers came for the exercise, others for fresh air and magnificent views and still others to observe the abundant seabird life – including the rare Cornish chough, only recently reintroduced to the coast, near the Lizard. There was also the attraction of Cornwall’s several maritime museums, including those at Charlestown (shipwrecks), Porthcurno (submarine telegraph) and Penzance (Trinity House lighthouse museum, now closed). The newest and most significant was the National Maritime Museum Cornwall, opened on the Falmouth waterfront as recently as December 2002, which housed the national collection of boats together with static and interactive displays of many aspects of maritime history and the Bartlett Library, Cornwall’s finest collection of maritime history reference books.
By the end of the twentieth century yet another aspect of maritime tourism and leisure had become apparent. This was the ‘seafood’ phenomenon, associated with the rise of Rick Stein’s restaurant empire at Padstow but manifested too in a wide range of upmarket eateries and smart hotels (such as the ‘Tresanton’ at St Mawes) around the Cornish coast. Throughout the twentieth century, and especially after the Second World War, as British taste became more accustomed to continental and Mediterranean cuisine, fish and other seafood had gradually become more widely accepted as more than mere staple. By the 1970s seafood had begun to occupy a more secure position in the gourmet menu, especially as the health benefits of eating fish became ever more apparent. In 1975 Rick Stein opened his first restaurant at Padstow. Twenty years later he reflected how tastes had developed still further since those early days. Now, he explained, he regularly served dragonets, a small fish caught locally and not unlike monkfish in taste and texture. But, he added, ‘If I’d put dragonets on the menu 20 years ago I’d have thrown them away’, such would have been the popular suspicion of new species. Now, however, ‘I can sell any fish . . . gurnard, weever fish, conger eel, trigger fish’.47 Part of the explanation, he conceded, was the ‘growing understanding played by fish and shellfish in our diet’. Yet, as the enormously popular series of related Rick Stein television programmes and publications attested, he had also been successful in wedding this new enthusiasm for the many and varied fish types caught off the Cornish coast to the wider, enduring imagining of Cornwall as exotic, sub-tropical, quasi-Mediterranean, Celtic, ‘different’. As he explained, capturing a magical image of tourist Cornwall that was as strong at the close of the century as it had been at its opening:
Imagine it is early spring and you have just arrived in Padstow. You have passed through the narrow lanes and slate walls of Cornwall, seeing the odd tree, bent over to one side by the Atlantic gales, and the village churches across open fields. You have taken more time to get there than you planned having stopped at St Issey and caught sight of the estuary for the first time. Then finally, here you are; the sky is pale blue, the sand spreads all the way across the estuary with the Camel river to one side. Can you really still be in England?48
Notes and References
1 Paul Thornton, ‘Coastal Tourism in Cornwall since 1900’, in Stephen Fisher (ed.), Recreation and the Sea (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997), pp. 57–83.
2 Cornish Magazine 1 (1895), p. 236.
3 Philip Payton and Paul Thornton, ‘The Great Western Railway and the Cornish-Celtic Revival’, in Philip Payton (ed.), Cornish Studies: Three (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1995), pp. 83–103.
4 Keith Robbins, Nineteenth-century Britain: England, Scotland and Wales – The Making of a Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 25.
5 R.B. Wilson, Go Great Western: A History of GWR Publicity (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1987).
6 Beverly Cole and Richard Durak, Railway Posters 1923–1947 (London: Lawrence King, 1992), p. 31.
7 S.P.B. Mais, The Cornish Riviera (London: Great Western Railway, 1928), p. 9.
8 Mais, The Cornish Riviera, pp. 3, 5.
9 Ibid., pp. 39, 41.
10 Ibid., pp. 122, 150–51.
11 Ibid., p. 5.
12 David St Thomas and Simon Rocksborough Smith, Summer Saturdays in the West (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973).
13 Christian Barman, Next Station (London: Great Western Railway, 1947), republished as The Great Western Railway’s last Look Forward (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973), p. 105; see also J.M. Tolson, G. Roose, and C.F.D. Whetmath, Railways of Looe and Caradon (Bracknell: Forge Books, 1974), pp. 44–46.
14 Geoffrey Swallow, ‘Imagining the Swimming: Discourses of Modernity, Identity and Nationhood in the Annual Swimming Matches in late Victorian Cornwall’, in Philip Payton (ed.), Cornish Studies: Eighteen (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2010), pp. 101–20.
15 Pall Mall Gazette, 3 February 1899.
16 Cornish Telegraph, 16 August 1888.
17 Swallow, ‘Imagining the Swimming’, p. 108.
18 Lloyd’s Register of Yachts, 1947 (London: Lloyd’s Register of Shipping, 1947).
19 J.M. Hussey, Sea Fishing Round Cornwall (Truro: Tor Mark Press, 1970); see also Stella M. Turk, Seashore Life in Cornwall (Truro: Bradford Barton, 1971).
20 John Keast, A History of East and West Looe (Chichester: Phillimore, 1987), p. 124.
21 Keith Harris, Azooks! The Story and History of the Pilot Gigs of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, 1666–1993 (Redruth: Dyllansow Truran, 1994), p. 194.
22 Cited in Harris, Azooks!, p. 195.
23 Harris, Azooks!, pp. 133–85.
24 See, for example, Alan M. Kent, Surfing Tommies: A Cornish Tragedy (London: Francis Boutle, 2009), p. xix.
25 ‘Song of the Surf’, in Cornish Magazine 1:4 (August 1958), pp. 14–15.
26 Nicholas J. Ford, ‘Surfing in Cornwall and the Romantic Sea’, unpublished paper, 2002, p. 1, Philip Payton, private collection.
27 Daily Mail, 9 January 2008.
28 Ford, ‘Surfing in Cornwall’, p. 1.
29 F.S. Funnell, The Art of Surf Riding on the Cornish Coast (Streatham: published privately, 1935).
30 Geoffrey Swallow, ‘“A Foot in the Surf or a Body in the Waves?”: Surfing’s Early Formation in the Cultural Construction of Place in Cornwall 1906–1966’, unpublished MA dissertation, Institute of Cornish Studies, University of Exeter, 2008, p. 58.
31 The Times, 24 October 1924.
32 The Times, 27 May 1938.
33 The Times, 25 April 1934.
34 Newquay Express, 7 September 1944.
35 Swallow, ‘“A Foot in the Surf”’, p. 68.
36 Compass, RNLI magazine, Winter 2009–10.
37 Cornish Magazine 1:4 (August 1958), pp. 14–15; see also The Times, 16 August 1964.
38 The Times, 29 May 2009.
39 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/engalnd/cornwall/743826.stm 25 June 2008 [accessed 1 June 2010].
40 Ford, ‘Surfing in Cornwall’, p. 2.
41 R. Swann, ‘The Participation in Surfing in Britain’, unpublished MSc dissertation, Loughborough University of Technology, 1993, cited in Ford, ‘Surfing in Cornwall’, p. 2.
42 Alan M. Kent, ‘Screening Kernow: Authenticity, Heritage and the Representation of Cornwall in Film and Television, 1913–2003’, in Philip Payton (ed.), Cornish Studies: Eleven (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2003), pp. 121–22; see also Alan M. Kent, ‘Celtic Nirvanas: Constructions of Celtic in Contemporary British Youth Culture’, in David C. Harvey, Rhys Jones, Neil McInroy and Christine Milligan (eds), Celtic Geographies: Old Culture, New Times (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 208–26.
43 Philip Hayward, ‘Jynwethek Ylow Kernewek: The Significance of Cornish Techno Music’, in Philip Payton (ed.), Cornish Studies: Seventeen (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009), pp. 173–86.
44 http://www.losethegame.net/porthemmet/ The Official Website of Porthemmet Beach, and http://www.cornwall-beaches.co.uk/Porthemmet-beach.htm. See also Hayward, ‘Cornish Techno Music’, pp. 181–82.
45 Philip Carter, The South West Coast Path: An Illustrated History (Tiverton: Halsgrove, 2005), pp. 11–14; see also the web sites of the organisations named.
46 James Whetter, Walking Cornwall in the 1990s (St Austell: Lyfrow Trelyspen, 2004), p. v.
47 Rick Stein, Rick Stein’s Taste of the Sea (London: BBC, 1995), p. 7.
48 Ibid., p. 7.