03/22/15

Eclipse the Eclipse?

Here’s a new poem from Bert Biscoe, Cornish poet, songwriter, mover, shaker and getter of things done. Bert wrote it at the end of the day which had been heralded as one when we would experience a partial eclipse of the sun. Bert reports: “In Truro it was a bit of a damp squib; the light adopted a slightly steely quality, as if it was about to rain, and the gulls were stirred to great anxiety overhead. Many shops closed and staff stood around in the street. Then we all trooped off to our meetings and our counters and our commerce.”
     By way of background, Bert adds: “Passmore Edwards was a Victorian philanthropist who made a couple of fortunes and built libraries, convalescent homes and schools – many of which still stand and are much used throughout Cornwall today.”
     I remember as a boy spending hours in the Passmore Edwards Library in Liskeard, borrowing the adventure yarns of G.A. Henty, the “Biggles” stories by Captain W.E. Johns about the heroic air ace, and the Leslie Charteris tales of The Saint, dashing adventurer and doer of good. Art Snell was the librarian, and he told me that the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was often borrowed but the next 5 volumes stayed on their shelf.
     Edward Gibbon was Member of Parliament for Liskeard from 1774-80. This was thanks to Edward Eliot (the main character in The Miner & the Viscount) whose wife Catherine was Gibbon’s cousin.
     Here is Bert Biscoe’s poem:

 

A break in the monotonous day

From Eclipse Street we step through philanthropic doors

Flanked by grandly composed declarations in marble

Of generosities – we talk and think thanks under-tongue,

Inward, least spoken gratitudes, slight quips of breath,

Marked for Octavius and Passmore –

Such men may never grace the Lodge again!

 

Engineers wrought plastic art to break the great wall

Between Library and Education, Dream and Occupation,

And we stride past catalogued shelves,

Through carousels of earnest commendation –

A civilian copse of titles chanted –

Light from flourished stairwell glass defies eclipse

And austerity dries the lips of book-worn maids

Outcast by despots of digital modernisation –

I stand-to and seek a face, recognition,

A faded eye, one who,

From some distant exchange long-passed,

Mouths ‘Hello!’ over supervisory epaulette –

We each blink a question, resign

Response, accountants cluck, indicators

Flicker, Time consumes librarian-prey,

And marks threaten a second already

Blemished sheet ‘Upstairs!’ I turn away!

 

The stairs pass borough arms stained by donor’s will,

Each Cornish town’s tale etched in mystic creature

And Herald’s bridges, castles, harbours, fields –

At halfway first-floor-landing Cornish light illumines

Cornish cities set in Victorian glass, they flood ‘Old School –

Trurra Tech!’ and its young artisans’ technical minds –

Masterly voices echo times’-table and foreign verbs

Decline in shadow – outside, disappointment grasps eclipse,

Imperious spires disperse suited toe-capped officials

And coffee-chatty-patent-heeled shop assistants.

 

Still the fear of established church,

The faithless might again

Erect druidic stones and clasp

The star’s satanic hand and dance – but……

These boroughs’ stamps impress our cards,

A photographic light of pinhole failure

Brightens, order shrouds we sheep, our fold –

The town returns to cold stairs climbed,

Colleagues gather in the Medium Room:

We begin our essential discourse of process –

Lights in salaried hearts flicker, hangovers

Wash over brown memories between trees

Through tumbled inner woods, talk turns

To technicalities, we trade our bargained time.

 

03/20/15

Duke and Duchess of Cornwall visit Kentucky

Duke and Duchess of Cornwall

Duke and Duchess of Cornwall

The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall are visiting Louisville, KY. Just around the corner. As  the eldest son of the monarch Prince Charles also inherits the title of Duke of Cornwall. In 1337 Edward III set up the Duchy of Cornwall to provide an income for his eldest son. Edward, the Black Prince was the first to benefit.

Today, the Duchy is a huge source of wealth for the Duke. Its work includes development of admirable new towns with traditional architecture and quality materials, such as Poundbury in Dorset. Might there be such a development in Cornwall?

03/19/15

Thursday Thoughts: Book Club

How stimulating it is to have an in depth conversation with enthusiastic readers!

I recently shared this pleasure with The Rosebuds, a long established group of widely read women who got together to discuss The Miner & the Viscount.

The Rosebuds take it in turns each month to choose the book they all read and to share dinner. Mary Beth Heil was our hostess and she put on a tasty spread complete with cottage pie and hard cider. So appropriate for a conversation about Cornwall!

And a lively conversation it was. Where did you get the idea for the story? Where did the fictitious characters come from? Were you or your family part of the characters? Were politics really like that? Sounds worse than today. We followed the map in the book, the places sound beautiful. What do they actually look like? What was it like growing up in Cornwall? What parts of the story were true and what parts did you make up? Did the story of the great diamond actually happen?

Gourmets that they were, they wanted a recipe for a Cornish pasty. They pronounced it “paysty”. I said “pahsty” is the proper way. “Paystyies” take practice: they’re what you twirl in opposite directions.

They so enjoyed meeting with the author and getting insights into the process of writing a big book. As Mary Beth wrote, “Richard, It was so wonderful for you to come to our book club.  Everyone enjoyed hearing the ‘story behind the story’ and how personal the book is to your life.  Thanks again and I will pass on the info right now to all the members.  We will spread the word.”

Let me know if you would like me to talk to your book club. I would enjoy it; such fun. I hope you would too.

 

 

 

 

03/12/15

Thursday Thoughts: Don’t Read my Novel on the Beach!

My book has just received the kindest review on Amazon (you can see it here: http://amzn.to/1AhLXp7) from a dear friend in my Monday Morning Writers Group. This was a great effort – working with the computer does not come easily. Much appreciated.

This group gave constructive feedback and comment throughout the entire 5 years of research and writing. It was a privilege to receive such valuable criticism, often with cheerful twitting and warnings against too much information, bodice busting and the like – which stimulated just three years ago a poetic response (with apologies to Noel Coward).

Don’t read my novel on the beach, Lady Rockingham

Don’t read my novel on the beach, Lady Rockingham
Don’t read my novel on the beach.
The shore is overcrowded,
The temperature’s often hot,
And you certainly could not
Expect to read much plot,
Just absorb all it would teach.
It’s a good book
So take another look,
There are few acts,
But you’ll learn some facts,
And then you too can preach.
But anyroad, Lady Rockingham, good Lady Rockingham,
Don’t read my novel on the beach.
Regarding yours,
Dear Lady Rockingham,
Of Monday, March the fifth,
You spoke with pith,
And made it clear
It mayn’t be such a good idea
For writing to be my sole career
Unless, I add more humanity,
Even some inanity
From a sexy little peach,
Pray even then Lady Rockingham,
Don’t take my pen, Lady Rockingham,
And never read my novel on the beach.
Don’t read my novel on the beach, Lady Rockingham,
Don’t read my novel on the beach,
My villain is really nasty,
A single dimension cad,
He devours many a Cornish pasty
So he can’t be all that bad,
The viscount’s diet is healthy,
He’s privileged and wealthy,
(Though a little smuggled brandy
Tends to make him awfully randy),
It’s from the tin, dear,
Down the mine, dear,
But aargh, Lady Rockingham,
Don’t go too faarr, Lady Rockingham,
I never dreamed
I’d get so steamed
If people ever read my novel on the beach.

© RJCH — March 5, 2012

 

03/5/15

Thursday Thoughts: The Patron Saint of Cornwall

March 5th is St. Piran’s Day and the Cornish celebrate it with enthusiasm! Piran is the patron saint of tinners and of Cornwall. The legend of St. Piran is a great favorite. I chose it for the Prologue of The Miner & the Viscount. The story speaks to Cornwall’s mystical origins rooted in the Celtic culture and language and to the importance of tin. Piran, or Pyran (Cornish: Peran) was an early 6th-century Cornish abbot and saint, supposedly of Irish origin. It was Piran’s demise and miraculous escape that gives him legendary status.

According to many contemporary accounts, Irish heathens, perhaps Druid priests, tied Piran to a mill-stone and rolled it over the edge of a cliff into the stormy Irish sea. However, I don’t believe the artist got the details  quite right, because actually Piran was spreadeagled on the millstone. It must have really hurt!

St. Piran

St. Piran

Anyroad, the storm immediately calmed and Piran floated safely over the water to land upon a sandy beach on the Cornish coast that became known as Perranporth. Happy St. Piran’s Day!

02/26/15

Thursday Thoughts: The Study of History

What is the point of studying history? The people are dead, the battles are over, the tools are different, the places have changed.

As I was pondering this question the mailman delivered a magazine from my old school. Flipping the pages, my eye caught an article about an old boy whose life had progressed from poor student to decorated admiral in the Royal Navy. The author asked why remembering such a career might have significance for us today. He suggested that we expand our own minds when we expand our horizons backwards, and that our capacity to remember is the most fertile element of our minds.

He pointed out that Thomas Jefferson wanted education to be primarily historical, so that “our people would thus be enabled to judge of the future.” 

He argued, not that you could predict the future from the past, but that those who are ignorant of history would be incompetent to consider possibilities for the future in a wise and informed way. Indeed, President Jefferson’s view was that a sense of history is vital to the citizens of a free society if they are to remain free in the long run. The past is what gives us a deep perspective.

T.S. Eliot put it eloquently in Burnt Norton: “Time present and time past are both, perhaps, present in time future, and time future contained in time past.”

The author concluded with a wonderful quotation from a medieval chronicler who recorded the words of an old knight on the eve of battle. “It will not be a waste of time for you, young heroes, to listen to an old man who, through the chances of time, the changes of kings, and the variable issues of war, has learned to reflect on the past, to weigh up the present, and to surmise about the present from the past, the future from the present.”

 To preserve our civilization, we must understand.

Clifton College

 

  With thanks to Dr. John Cottrell for his

   address in the chapel at Clifton College.

 

02/19/15

Thursday Thoughts: The Dissolution of the Monasteries in Cornwall

My readers are intrigued that each of the three great houses where my story takes place (Port Eliot, Boconnoc and Lanhydrock) were originally priories. Each house has a church near by. We learned in our history lessons about the Dissolution of the Monasteries in England. The powerful Henry VIII and his cunning chancellors perpetrated the greatest real estate scam under the cover of the Reformation, while Henry satisfied his desire for Anne Boleyn. But what went on in Cornwall?

Cornish genes have always had traces of the rebel and many of the rebellions were about religion and clinging to the old ways. In Chapter 29 the Methodist preacher gently rebukes the mine captain’s wife. “My dear Mrs. Penwarden,” chided the Reverend, “I do believe you would have joined your fellow Cornish in the Prayer Book Rebellion in 1549. You would rather keep the Latin than allow English to replace the Cornish language. I expect for two pins you’d still worship the moon goddess and dance on Midsummer Night’s Eve!”

Here is an account from the Cornwall Family History Society about the brutal treatment by the crown that sparked this rebellion, and in particular the destruction of an important center of Cornish worship and learning.

GLASNEY COLLEGE RECREATED IN PICTURES

King Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, between 1536 and 1545, signalled the end of the big Cornish priories, but as a chantry church Glasney survived until 1548, when it suffered the same fate.

The smashing and looting of the Cornish colleges at Glasney and Crantock brought an end to the formal scholarship that helped sustain the Cornish language and the Cornish cultural identity, and played a significant part in fomenting the opposition to cultural ‘reforms’ that led to the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549.

Apart from being sorely missed centres of indigenous cultural excellence, many in Cornwall saw these institutions as bridges to the Celtic past, back even to the Christianised paganism of their forefathers.

In Cornwall, where the vast majority of the population spoke only Cornish, the new measures effectively took away the means of worship. When the Cornish protested, English forces responded with a series of massacres. During one notorious incident, 900 bound and gagged prisoners had their throats slit in ten minutes.

Over 11% of the people of Cornwall were brutally murdered by the forces of England in what has been described as the ‘Cornish Holocaust’.

When traditional religious processions and pilgrimages were banned in 1548, commissioners were sent out to destroy all symbols of Cornish Roman Catholicism. In Cornwall, this job fell to William Body, whose desecration of religious shrines angered many. Along with other assaults on Cornish legal rights, culture, language and religion, this led to his murder on 5 April 1548 at Helston.

The massacre of thousands during the vicious suppression of a Cornish rebellion more than 450 years ago was an “enormous mistake” which the Church should be ashamed of, the Bishop of Truro said.

In acknowledging the “brutality and stupidity” of the atrocities on behalf of the Church, Bishop Bill Ind tried to heal much of the hurt felt by many Cornish people, who believe the Church of England has long tried to ignore the events of 1549 Prayerbook Rebellion.

Glasney College

Glasney College

02/11/15

Thursday Thoughts: Cornwall’s Trade with South Wales

Cornish Story www.cornishstory.com is the outreach program of the Institute of Cornish Studies at the University of Exeter in southwestern Britain. It explores the story of Cornwall and the Cornish overseas in the past and present. They are developing a research project on the historic maritime connections between Cornwall and South Wales. This will be interesting to follow. Coal from south Wales plays an important part in my story. It fuels the new-fangled steam engines in the mines. In Chapter 52 the great inventor John Smeaton drives with the mine captain’s son, Jemmy, to get spare parts for the engine. By the way, Smeaton designed and built the lighthouse on the hazardous Eddystone reef off the southeast coast of Cornwall.

As they drove along the crooked track towards St. Just, they came across a large number of heavily laden mules in a train traveling towards them. They were carrying panniers strapped to their backs. The drovers gave them a cheerful wave.
“Look at all them mules, scores of them. What are they carrying?” asked Jemmy
“Mining coals,” said Smeaton. “Won’t be long before we get more steam engines installed, and there’ll be hundreds of them bringing coal from the Cornish ports, shipped by sea from south Wales. I’ve designed and built all kinds of contraptions for t’ coal mines, far away as Yorkshire. Coal’s being used more and more. Lot of money being made from coal. Dirty stuff to handle; still, where there’s muck there’s brass. That’s what we say in Yorkshire.”
Jemmy had to listen carefully when Mr. Smeaton spoke. He was quite difficult to understand, not like the Cornish. It must be because he was a furriner, from way up north in Yorkshire. Jemmy noticed that when Mr. Smeaton said brass it sounded clipped, short, not like his dad who said brass with a long a, took more time over it. Odd, and instead of saying “the,” Mr. Smeaton said “t”, but Jemmy was too polite to say anything.
“I wish I could be an inventor like you, Mr. Smeaton,” said Jemmy wistfully. “Must be very in’erestin’, thinkin’ up new things, tryin’ things out, and seein’ the world.”
Mule train

Mule train

08/28/14

Thomas Newcomen

I am pleased to welcome a guest blogger, Susan W. Howard, now of San Jose, CA., and a descendant of the illustrious Hornblower family of Cornwall. This link will take you to the biography of Joseph Hornblower  http://penwood.famroots.org/joseph_hornblower.htm

Susan gave a talk about her researches at the Cornish Gathering in Milwaukee. She has written this brief portrait of Thomas Newcomen, who is credited with being the inventor of the atmospheric steam engine, which would “do the work of five horses.” One was built at the Wheal Vor mine as early as 1710 and by the time my story opens in 1760 as many as 70 were at work in Cornwall. The engine worked by injecting cold water into the steam cylinder to create a vacuum. The later designs of the Scotsman James Watt and the great Cornishman Richard Trevithick used the energy of expanding steam.

The Newcomen Engine

The Newcomen Engine

Thomas Newcomen, inventor of the atmospheric steam engine, was a modest and devoutly religious man who left behind few records of his life. Some eighteenth century scientists such as Royal Society member John Desaguliers had difficulty in giving Newcomen credit for his invention. Desaguliers wrote that the engine that began pumping water from the mines at Coneygree colliery near Dudley Castle in Staffordshire in 1712 came about “very luckily by accident.” Newcomen in fact did possess the intellectual capacity and practical experience to build the engine. He relied upon his close-knit circle of fellow Baptists to supply help and needed expertise. Among them were John Calley, Humphrey Potter, and Joseph Hornblower, who built Newcomen engines in Cornwall. Newcomen may have begun building an engine at Wheal Vor in Cornwall as early as 1710; the Royal Cornwall Museum gives him credit for a machine built there in 1716.

Thomas Newcomen was born in Dartmouth, Devon in 1664. He became an ironmonger and while in his early twenties he visited mining regions in the West Midlands and Cornwall to sell and to manufacture metal tools and small household items. No record of an apprenticeship survives, but bills for ironmongery and purchases of bulk iron have been found. Letters written by his contemporaries do contain references to Newcomen and the steam engine. Two of Newcomen’s own letters have survived, and as far as can be discovered, no portrait of him was made. Apparently he began experimenting with steam engines in the mid-1690s. The extent that the ideas of other inventors or scientists influenced his work is a matter of conjecture. Inventor Thomas Savery had already been granted a patent for a “fire engine,” so Newcomen joined in a partnership with him to build an engine suitable for pumping water from the mines. Eventually more than 2,000 atmospheric steam engines were built. Newcomen was also a lay preacher, a trustee of the Netherton Baptist chapel (near Dudley) and an Overseer of the Poor. After his death in 1729 at the London home of fellow Baptist Edward Wallin, Newcomen was buried in Bunhill Fields, a nonconformist cemetery in London; the location of his gravesite, like so many of the details of his life, remains unknown.

Note: Desaguliers quote from L.T.C. Rolt and J. S. Allen, The Steam Engine of Thomas Newcomen, (Landmark Publishing, Ashbourne, Derbershire, 1997) 46.