Reading Trelawny’s Cornwall

A personal response to BBC Radio 3 presenter Petroc Trelawny’s exploration of his home county

Like many people, I often wake up to the sound of Petroc Trelawny’s voice as he presents the Breakfast programme on weekday mornings on BBC Radio 3. In the past my husband worked with him from time to time when Petroc was presenting televised concerts that David was directing, and as a result of that and my own work as a music journalist I’ve met him briefly a few times, but our acquaintanceship has primarily been through social media, not so very different from the relationships that he and several of his colleagues have built with their most enthusiastic listeners.

When I heard that he was writing his first book I pre-ordered it immediately, out of a mixture of curiosity and my usual desire to support anyone I know who has been through the hard slog of writing a book and seeing it through to publication, rather than because I feel any personal connection to Cornwall. My copy of Trelawny’s Cornwall arrived ten days before its official publication date, and a lull in deadlines allowed me to devote much of the next few days to reading it from cover to cover. My response to the book turned out to be much more personal than I expected. It has reminded me that actually I do have a few strong connections to or memories of England’s most western county. Some of Petroc’s research trips covered similar territory to a couple of my own recent expeditions, and I enjoyed comparing his impressions with mine; and some of his childhood memories resonated vividly – and surprisingly, given the differences of place and generation – with my own.

Trelawny’s Cornwall is a mixture of memoir, travelogue and social history, researched over quite a lengthy period alongside Petroc’s busy schedule of broadcasting and other commitments; in the acknowledgments he pays tribute to the colleagues, from station controllers to producers and engineers, who accommodated his project by enabling him to present many editions of Breakfast from the BBC’s Truro Studios. The book is described in its blurb as a ‘very personal pilgrimage’ in search of his identity as a Cornishman whose surname indicates a distinguished lineage, but the narrative line is not particularly strong, either in relation to that genealogical strand nor in terms of a geographical journey. Chapters tend to be thematic, and coverage of the county’s landscape and seascape is representative rather than comprehensive.

An important element in Petroc’s skill as a broadcaster is his ability to project an engaging personality, ensuring that communication with his listeners is two-way, while maintaining a considerable amount of professional reserve and objectivity. He’s happy to share occasional photos and anecdotes from his dawn commutes across London and in particular from his often windblown, rainsoaked or less often sunbaked outside broadcasts from the Severn, the rivers of Northern Ireland, or this summer from the north east of England in Breakfast’s very popular weeks on location. But when he’s off air, he’s off air, and his social media followers don’t see much of his home life. His book reveals a similar caution about oversharing … reading it is a bit like sitting beside a friend who shows you selected photos from a family album but flicks through most of the pages so quickly that you can’t see them … and then puts the album firmly back on the shelf. In Chapter One Petroc explains that his mother died of cancer when he was 12, and there are many snapshots in the following pages of teenage years spent mainly living alone with his somewhat irascible, ex-army father and one of his four much older brothers, but it is only towards the end of the book that he completes the picture of his immediate family structure.

Having said that, his love for his parents, extended family and close friends shines through the narrative, and his many vivid recollections of time spent with his mother are deeply touching … they include drives to his piano teacher’s cliff-top house on the extremity of the Lizard peninsula for extra lessons prior to exams, and as many classical concerts as they could get to in an area not well served by professional music-making. What the family’s musical diet may have lacked in quantity, however, it made up for in quality, as Petroc was able to attend the International Musicians Seminar at Prussia Cove from an early age, experiencing masterclasses, workshops and concerts in local churches given by performers of the quality he would be featuring or interviewing on radio and television decades later.

Music is only one among many themes in the book, however … Petroc’s primary interest as a boy was in communication, with a particular focus on radio technology, and his ambition to be a journalist was so strong that it led him to dismiss the idea of university and go straight from the sixth form of his comprehensive school in Helston across the River Tamar into work at BBC Radio Devon. He brings a journalist’s ability to research and tell a story as well as his own broad interests to his portrait of Cornwall.

Several chapters touch on different forms of communication, an obvious preoccupation perhaps for a young man growing up at the end of peninsula where long into the nineteenth century the easiest route to London was to sail over to Ireland, take another from boat from Dublin to Liverpool, and complete the journey by train. Where even now an efficient use of time is to finish a day’s work in London and take the night sleeper to Penzance … how I wish I could do that from the Welsh Marches! Poldhu in Cornwall was one of the locations for Marconi’s early experiments in wireless telegraphy, initially to Ireland and then to Canada; Petroc’s childhood home was 15 minutes’ drive from Poldhu and just a few miles from Goonhilly Downs, site of the UK Post Office’s first satellite station, established in 1962 and for many years the largest in the world. There are stories of older forms of communication too, the undersea cables that provided telegraph links between Britain and the rest of the world, and the Falmouth Packet Ships that carried letters and parcels to the furthest reaches of the British Empire from the middle of the seventeenth century. As a result, the eponymous town was not only a centre for shipbuilding, fishing and related trades, but a diplomatic centre, with representatives of the local Fox family providing consular services for thirty-six countries for two centuries.

Seafaring, fishing and the ever-present threat of running aground on rocky reefs such as The Manacles near Coverack are discussed, of course, but on the whole Petroc does not dwell on these aspects of Cornish life … smugglers don’t loom large and he isn’t really describing the romantic other-land of Daphne Du Maurier and Winston Graham. A chapter on tin mining makes the case for Cornwall’s lack of recognition in the history of the industrial revolution – not only was the landscape itself scoured for tin, copper, slate and china clay, but once decline set in towards the end of the nineteenth century, skilled mining engineers and their families dispersed to set up ‘Little Cornwalls’ from South Africa to Canada, Brazil and Mexico to New Zealand. One of the book’s many intriguing genealogical threads is slotted in here, as we are introduced to Petroc’s great-grandfather, William Blackwood, a doctor from Moffat in the Scottish borders who served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in WW1, married an Irish actress/dancer and became a distinguished GP and obstetrician, living in a villa in Camborne built for a prosperous Victorian mining family. One of his many important roles in the South Cornwall community was as factory medical officer for Holman Brothers, an engineering company that was Edwardian Cambourne’s biggest employer and was still, as a subsidiary of global parent companies, providing potential careers for Petroc’s school contemporaries.

It comes as no surprise, however, to learn that Holman Brothers closed in 2003. Trelawny’s Cornwall is a ghost county for much of the year, with locals struggling to earn enough money during the holiday season to carry them through the winter when the brightly painted second homes of prosperous Londoners are locked up and ignored. To some extent the book is an elegy to another world, still in existence as recently as Petroc’s 1970s childhood, when specialist shops thrived in every town, not just as foodie attractions in the most chic hipster destinations, and a visit to a city department store with its highly-trained, formally dressed staff, spectacular window displays and old-fashioned restaurant was a treat to be savoured rather than a chore. St Martin, the hamlet south of Helston where Petroc grew up, had a church, a chapel, a post office and a primary school attended by around 30 pupils taught in just two classes. Now only the church survives.

Petroc’s mother played the harmonium in the Anglican church and took her turn on vestry duty, preparing the sanctuary for services, but even in those days, when nearly half his classmates went to church most Sundays, Petroc would be the only child at St Martin’s – everyone else attended the Methodist chapel. Eventually Petroc pleaded to be allowed to change churches and join in the much livelier social and religious life down the road, which included music festivals, ‘tea treats’ – annual outings to the seaside – and weeknight youth club as well as Sunday School. It may seem rather strange to describe Methodists as clearly having more fun than their C of E counterparts, but I can relate wholeheartedly to this chapter in Petroc’s narrative, having similarly petitioned my parents to be allowed to attend our local Methodist church in Belfast, because the congregation was so much friendlier than the Presbyterian community I grew up in.

Petroc’s experience leads him into an exploration of Cornwall’s Methodist tradition and visits to several chapels … some still functioning as intended though with much smaller congregations, many now turned into dwelling houses or abandoned … and one now a mosque serving the Islamic community (this part of his journey also appears as a Radio 4 radio programme which is still available on BBC Sounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b06s871d .) This was one of my favourite chapters in the book.

I also particularly enjoyed ‘Three Poets, Four Churches’. The churches are St Morwenna’s in Morwenstow and St Enedoc near Rock, on the north coast; and St Thomas’s and St Mary Magdalene in Launceston. The first featured poet is the eccentric Victorian priest R S Hawker of Morwenstow, who apparently hated clerical black and grey and instead wore brown vestments with red buttons, a long purple coat, a fez, scarlet gloves and a blue fisherman’s jersey. He invited a menagerie of cats and dogs to join him in church long before ‘pet services’ became fashionable, and as a young man one moonlit night he sat on an offshore rock near Bude and impersonated a mermaid, clad only in an oilskin wrap and a wig made of long seaweed. The chapter concludes with a tribute to John Betjeman, an adopted son of Cornwall who is buried at St Enedoc. Both the Launceston churches are associated with Charles Causley, a potential candidate for poet laureate himself and definitely, according to the novelist Patrick Gale, whose wonderful recent novel Mother’s Boy is a fictionalisation of Causley’s life, ‘the locals’ laureate’, who offered the county its true poetic voice. Causley and his mother are buried in the churchyard of St Thomas, yards from the tiny cottage where he was born; and he wrote about the reclining statue of Mary Magdalene under the east window of the town’s main parish church, closer to their home in his adult years, Cyprus Well, now a base for the Causley Trust and its literary activities.

I don’t remember finding out about the more colourful aspects of Hawker’s personality when I visited Morwenstow on one of my first long trips with my husband after we met, to stay in a former Romany caravan shared by his extended family just over the border at Welcombe in Devon.

I do remember Charles Causley’s house being pointed out to me several years before that, on my first ever visit to Cornwall. I had travelled down from London on a National Express coach to Launceston, where I was met by the love of my university life and taken down the street to the local taxi cab office to complete the last couple of miles of the journey to his family home in a hamlet just north of the town. Like Petroc, my friend Jonathan had grown up in the county and discovered Causley’s poetry at primary school. At some point during our exploration of Launceston over the next couple of days he drew my attention to a small terraced house on the top of the hill and told me proudly who lived there.

Memories of that visit returned even more vividly as I read Petroc’s account of exploring the eastern boundary of the county and the curious westward loop it used to take off the course of the River Tamar and along the River Ottery to Canworthy Water, before returning to the Tamar at Boyton. Until the Boundary Commissioners stepped in to rationalise the situation in 1966, two parishes west of the Tamar, North Petherwin and Werrington, were administratively part of Devon instead of Cornwall. One of Petroc’s hosts is a member of the Williams family, owners of the Werrington estate for around 150 years. Back in 1977, on a beautiful sunny spring evening, the manor house at Werrington was another of the landmarks pointed out to me at a distance of several fields, as Jonathan showed me round his home in the next-door village of Yeolmbridge. I remember him speaking with great respect of ‘Mr Williams’, but I don’t think he realised quite how rich the Williams family had been in their heyday in the mid nineteenth century. They also own Caerhays Castle, described by Pevsner, as I have now learned from Trelawny’s Cornwall, as the Regency architect John Nash’s ‘largest surviving essay in castellated Gothick, a breathtaking composition of square and round towers and battlemented walls’.

Pictures on the internet reveal Caerhays to be very similar in style to Shane’s Castle, another Nash mansion on the shore of Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland, which was one of my favourite places to visit as a child. The Williams family had made their money from copper and tin mining, and later generations developed the gardens at Caerhays with rhododendrons, camellias and magnolias, raising seeds in the glasshouses at Werrington and planting the estate with shrubs and trees gathered from around the world.  I don’t remember being told back in 1977 that Werrington had originally belonged to the medieval abbots of Tavistock nor that the estate later became a deer park owned by Sir Francis Drake, nephew of the famous admiral. I was fascinated to read Petroc’s account of his visit and discover more about it.

A chapter entitled ‘Educating Cornwall’ is also full of intriguing nuggets, culminating in a guided tour for Petroc of the modern university campus shared by Falmouth and Exeter at Penryn, ten miles from Helston. For him the availability of degree-level education so close to where he spent his teenage years is remarkable. For me the stand-out thread in this chapter is the story of John Passmore Edwards, son of a carpenter/nurseryman/brewer in the village of Blackwater near Redruth, who after an initial false start leading to bankruptcy made a fortune from publishing newspapers and trade journals, which he put back into the community, investing in libraries and technical and literary institutes. Living in East Dulwich for 16 years, we had a Passmore Edwards Library close to the end of our road, his name carved prominently into a frieze around the outside of the red brick and cream stone building, just as Petroc describes, and I knew of several others in the area. It wasn’t until I read this book that I realised that Passmore Edwards didn’t establish libraries all over the UK like Andrew Carnegie, but concentrated his philanthropy in deprived parts of London such as the East End and Southwark, and in Cornwall.

Eighteen months ago a work trip took me to Truro to research an article about the cathedral choir. I’d visited the city and cathedral before, but only briefly; this time I had a whole weekend at my disposal and was blessed with bright, dry winter weather. It was around this time that Petroc was presenting many of his Breakfast programmes from Cornwall; an early morning walk down the river estuary on the Saturday took me past the BBC Studios, so very different in scale from Broadcasting House in London. I sat in on a taster morning for potential boy choristers, heard the girl choristers singing the Sunday services, interviewed the then Director of Music Christopher Gray who I think must have given Petroc the demonstration of the organ described in the book not long before or after my visit, and I was even invited to join in a choir curry celebrating the birthday of one of the lay clerks. I’d been told by many church musicians that Truro is a particularly friendly cathedral and was delighted to prove them right. I’m not sure whether I followed in Petroc’s footsteps or he followed in mine, but we both strolled up elegant Lemon Street with its striking Lander Monument and admired the Cornish minerals and splendid art collection displayed in the Royal Institution of Cornwall.

We must also have made similar explorations of Plymouth, included in Petroc’s book as the gateway to Cornwall and a destination for his family on theatre trips or shopping expeditions. En route to Dartington last summer, I stopped off for a night in Plymouth to explore the former naval hospital at East Stonehouse where a cousin two generations above me, a naval surgeon from Letterkenny in County Donegal, died aged 26 after succumbing to TB on board ship in 1901. The complex is now a private residential estate, but a security guard at the gate lodge allowed me in on condition that I didn’t take any photos of the properties. I didn’t manage to find the cemetery where my relative was buried with full naval honours, including a band … the local paper of his home town in Ireland listed some of the mourners, including his father and a large number of medical officers from East Stonehouse, some of them representing colleagues who couldn’t be there because they were at sea. But in the local studies collection at the city library and art gallery, now called The Box, I found illustrations of the slipway at Stonehouse Creek where casualties were brought in to the hospital and exterior and interior shots of the buildings. Despite some complex roadworks, I walked down grand Armada Way, part of the city’s regeneration after so much WWII destruction, and spent a sunny evening exploring Plymouth Hoe, the Citadel, and the old town. Now, thanks to Petroc’s vivid descriptions of his walk along the Cornish shore opposite, I know what I was looking at … and I know that I too have got lots more exploring to do.

+++++++

Trelawny’s Cornwall: A Journey Through Western Lands is published in hardback by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, RRP £22, and is also available as an audiobook