A Cornish Christmas E-Book

Tony Deane

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 155

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Explore the rich heritage of Christmas past in Cornwall with this varied collection of carols and customs, stories, folklore and memories. Presented alongside images of local scenes, the extracts, compiled from a wide range of sources, can be enjoyed by long-time residents and newcomers alike. From the lights at Mousehole and winter games on the beach, to recipes for traditional figgy pudding and Cornish mead, this delightful collection is a comprehensive seasonal anthology of the county and will be a treat for all.

Leseprobe

Christmas at Penelewey.

For (in chronological order)Kate, Ben, Adam, Hannah, George,Megan, Poppy, Isobel and Rosie

First published 2025

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Tony Deane and Tony Shaw, 2025

The right of Tony Deane and Tony Shaw to be identified as theAuthors of this work has been asserted in accordance withthe Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 83705 014 7

Typesetting and origination by The History Press.Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books, Padstow, Cornwall.

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CONTENTS

The Authors

Acknowledgements

Introduction

A Cornish Christmas

Bibliography

THE AUTHORS

Tony Deane and Tony Shaw have both been involved in British traditional culture for well over forty-five years. They wrote Folklore of Cornwall in 2003 and have written individually on different aspects of folklore and country life. They were fellow members of the folksong group Legacy in the 1960s and 1970s and, despite their advanced years, continue to sing in folk clubs and at festivals.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We wish to thank all the writers who have contributed to this collection. While acknowledgements are made in the text, special mention must be given to the following: The extract from I Would Not Be Forgotten is reprinted by permission of Tabb House of Padstow © Patrick Hutton, 2004. Virginia Spiers, for actually thanking us for including In the Brief Midwinter, a rarity indeed. The extract from Schoolhouse in the Wind by Anne Treneer is reprinted by permission of University of Exeter Press, with special thanks to Victoria Owen. The extract from The Main Cages is reprinted by permission of Harper Collins Publishers Limited © Philip Marsden, 2002.

We received no other replies to our requests for permission to include extracts but will obviously include full details in any future editions of this book. All unattributed items are by ourselves.

The staff of the Cornish Studies Library at Redruth proved, as ever, to be consistently helpful, while many friends offered useful information and advice: among them were John Buckingham, Jane Coley, Geoff and Fran Doel, Tony Foxworthy, Robert and Ros Husband, Graham O’Callaghan, Doc Rowe, Sally Shaw, Stephanie Smart, Rex Trenouth, David Watts and James Whetter. We should thank those who provided pictures, particularly Audrey Deane for her photographs. Especial thanks must go to Iris Bishop for transcribing the music and to our families for withstanding the book’s gestation period.

To anyone who, in our dotage, we have inadvertently overlooked: our apologies.

Tony Deane, Reigate

Tony Shaw, Penelewey

November 2007

INTRODUCTION

With its unique position on the British mainland it is hardly surprising that many of Cornwall’s celebrations are rooted in those local twins: the land and the sea. Some festivals – like Tom Bawcock’s Eve in Mousehole – possibly pre-date today’s widely accepted meaning of Christmas, while others are firmly of the Christian faith. There is a bleak quality to much of Cornwall’s landscape that is, perhaps, at its best in winter and thus overlooked by summer tourists. Padstow’s Mummers’ Day celebrations, which have attracted such controversy in recent years, are enhanced by the cold: the players seem to spring from the grey streets and bring light to the most grim Boxing and New Year’s Days.

In the following collection, we have plundered the works of Hunt, Bottrell and Courtney, nineteenth-century folklorists whose researches form the basis of all who have followed them. We look at far more than folklore, though: here is a cross-section of Christmases old and not so old, from the experiences of both indigenous writers and incomers to Cornwall. Gorran’s finest chronicler Anne Treneer rubs shoulders with Robert Stephen Hawker, the eccentric vicar of Morwenstow. That patrician historian Dr A.L. Rowse began life as the son of a china-clay worker and recalls Christmas in Tregonissey in A Cornish Childhood, while his near-contemporary and neighbour, the blind and deaf poet Jack Clemo, describes rare snowfall nearby. There is an extract from Sir Arthur Quiller Couch, better known as ‘Q’, a writer now sadly neglected, and a poem from the late Charles Causley. Lady Clara Vyvyan and the virtually unknown Mrs John Bonham are among many other visitors to these pages. Ex-patriot Cornishmen are not forgotten, as Oswald Pryor vividly describes Christmas in South Australia.

Perhaps the most vibrant recollections of past Christmases are to be found in contemporary newspaper reports; we have included several here, mostly from the prestigious West Briton. Some reveal dark aspects of the past, proving that the ‘good old days’ were not always so good: the shadow of the workhouse was never far away. Practical joking, too, was prevalent, displaying random cruelty that would not find favour today. There are several nods to the bibulous nature of Yuletide excess, including some previously unpublished reminiscences. Christmas would not be complete without traditional food: there are recipes here, for starrygazy pie and eggy hot, amongst others. To punctuate the text, we have included a selection of carols and secular songs, some familiar, others virtually unknown, but all either unique to or widely sung in Cornwall.

Obviously, this anthology is not comprehensive but we hope that our choices will take you back to the original sources, will whet your appetites for more tastes of Cornish Christmases. Life in Cornwall is becoming more cosmopolitan as, with rising property prices and shortage of employment, many ‘locals’ move out to be replaced by retired businessmen and second-home owners. So, perhaps, these flashes of what Christmas in Cornwall was and, in some cases, still is like, will encourage a deceleration in the rat race. You could start by visiting Padstow to hear the town’s ancient carols during the pre-Christmas week: a haunting sound from a different century.

In general, we have retained punctuation and syntax from the original documents, often eccentric by today’s standards, with the Oxford comma flagrant. Setting dialect down on paper is fraught with difficulty and there are inconsistencies here: Q and Rowse were good at it; others less so. We believe that, if not all of these pieces display the highest literary quality, each one contains the spirit of Cornwall and Christmas. They should both be relished.

AUNT MARY

By Robert Stephen Hawker

Robert Stephen Hawker, vicar of Morwenstow from 1835 to 1875, was, perhaps, better known as an eccentric than as a reverend gentleman. He was actually a Devonian, born in Plymouth in 1803 to a clerical family: his father was a doctor who later took holy orders to become vicar of Stratton. Hawker himself was of the high-Anglican persuasion and professed to hate all dissenters but, in fact, his prejudices bowed before his natural generosity of spirit and he gave freely to the poor and sick; he was especially considerate towards those shipwrecked mariners who were frequent, if unwilling, visitors to Morwenstow’s treacherous coastline. He died in his home city of Plymouth in 1875, after a deathbed conversion to Roman Catholicism.

As a poet, Hawker was talented but didactic. Yet, through the miasma of religious pedantry, shone several gems: the unfinished Arthurian epic Quest of the Sangraal, which Tennyson considered a serious rival to his Idylls of the King; Song of the Western Men, better known as Trelawney and now regarded as the traditional Cornish national anthem; and the piece featured below. This is headed by an extract from I Would Not Be Forgotten (2004), Patrick Hutton’s excellent critical study of Hawker’s life and work; the poem is a reworking of The Holly and the Ivy theme, which Hawker subtitled A Christmas Chant. Tony Deane wrote the tune.

‘Modryb Marya – Aunt Mary’ (1838) provides a welcome antidote to all that carping about Dissenters, offering as it does a warmth and simplicity to match the relationship that Hawker hoped to establish with his new parishioners. With its cheerful rhythm, and slightly varied refrain that so well suits a carol, it takes as its theme the symbolism of the holly tree in Christian folklore, embracing the hedgerow’s uniquely bright bounty at Christmas, there for everyone including the poor. It is also evergreen, emblematic of eternal life, and spattered with berries, like blood falling from the crucified body of Christ onto his mother standing below. Meanwhile the robin, his breast reddened by the same source, sings on Christmas Eve, and shelter is given to all the birds especially on Christmas Day. There is a hint of the poet’s favourite habit of equating birds with angels, ‘Ubi aves ibi angeli’, where birds are, there are angels. The name ‘Aunt Mary’s Tree’ becomes entirely appropriate. The same symbolism is taken a stage further in the much better known carol ‘The Holly and the Ivy’, with the thorns of the holly representing the pain of Mary’s childbirth and of Jesus on the cross. Hawker’s lovely carol has never achieved such popularity. Presumably the title, and his translation of it, provides too much of a local emphasis.

In The Vicar of Morwenstow (1876), his somewhat fanciful biography of Hawker, Sabine Baring-Gould adds this gloss to the song:

In old and simple-hearted Cornwall, the household names ‘uncle’ and ‘aunt’ were uttered and used as they are to this day in many countries of the East, not only as phrases of kindred, but as words of kindly greeting and tender respect. It was in the spirit, therefore, of this touching and graphic usage, that they were wont, on the Tamar side, to call the Mother of God, in their loyal language, Modryb Marya, or Aunt Mary.

Now of all the trees by the king’s highway,

Which do you love the best?

O! the one that is green upon Christmas Day,

The bush with the bleeding breast.

Now the holly with her drops of blood for me:

For that is our dear Aunt Mary’s tree.

Its leaves are sweet with our Saviour’s Name,

‘Tis a plant that loves the poor:

Summer and winter it shines the same,

Beside the cottage door.

O! the holly with her drops of blood for me:

For that is our kind Aunt Mary’s tree.

‘Tis a bush that the birds will never leave:

They sing in it all day long;

But sweetest of all upon Christmas Eve,

Is to hear the robin’s song.

‘Tis the merriest sound upon earth and sea:

For it comes from our own Aunt Mary’s tree.

So, of all that grow by the king’s highway,

I love that tree the best;

‘Tis a bower for the birds upon Christmas Day,

The bush of the bleeding breast.

O! the holly with her drops of blood for me:

For that is our sweet Aunt Mary’s tree.

IN THE BRIEF MIDWINTER

By Virginia Spiers

The Guardian newspaper includes a Country Diary in each edition. Here is the entry for 29 December 2004, written by Virginia Spiers, from the Tamar Valley:

In the gloomy, short days of midwinter, brief spells of sun are at a premium, gilding the tops of bare trees and emerald fields in the Tamar’s steep tributaries. Sunbeams glint off ivy, holly and harts tongue; haloes shine around mossy branches and, in sunken lanes, midday shadows reach towards the tops of banks thick with pennyworts. On clear nights, stars compete with urban glow and rural house lights, supplemented now with flashing garlands, luminous snowmen, electric icicles and reindeer with Father Christmas.

Towards a more sparsely populated part of the south coast, dampness enhances the marzipan smell of winter heliotrope beside Lansallos churchyard and the slippery path towards the grey sea and elusive horizon. Jackdaws flock across the stepped and buttressed cliffs clad in ivy and bracken almost to sea level. Tufted lichens on Pencarrow Head, yellow-lichened elder and brilliant gorse flowers contrast with blackthorn scrub. Grazing sheep and ponies trample and help control rank vegetation above Lantic Bay. A couple of violets beside the muddy path hint at next year’s spring, and orange-berried stinking-iris thrive with stunted sycamores by Blackbottle headland. The Gribbin is blurry and closer, just across the Fowey Estuary, Readymoney Cove is shrouded in drizzle.

Before Christmas, Polruan seemed almost deserted, holiday cottages in its narrow streets shut up and dark. Upstream, by Pont Pill’s vacant moorings, rain drips through old oaks on to holly berries and hazel catkins. Uphill, the tower of Lanteglos church is a pale grey silhouette and the narrow roads are awash.

Midwinter.

MOUSEHOLE ONTOM BAWCOCK’S EVE

We were commissioned to write the original edition of Folklore of Cornwall in 1974. Twenty-nine years passed before the work was updated and this extract comes from the new version, amended to include the full text and tune of Tom Bawcock’s Eve. The song was created from surviving fragments by Robert Morton Nance, once Grand Bard of the Cornish Gorsedd, early in the last century and set to a Cornish dance-tune called The Wedding March. It was printed in Ralph Dunstan’s Cornish Dialect and Folk Songs in 1932. The dialect words translate as follows: morgy - dog-fish; lances – sand-eels; scad – horse-mackerel; fairmaids – pilchards; oozles – throats; clunk – swallow.

In Mousehole, on 23 December, the fisherfolk celebrate Tom Bawcock’s Eve. The day is said to commemorate a period of local famine eased by the brave efforts of one fisherman, Tom Bawcock (or Bowcock), who put to sea in a dreadful storm and returned with seven different varieties of fish to feed the starving villagers. The little port is bathed in colour for Tom Bawcock’s Eve, as both the buildings around the harbour and the boats in it are hung with Christmas lights. After a character dressed as Tom, with a mock boat attached to his waist, processes with musicians to the Ship Inn, portions of starrygazy pie, with fish-heads poking through the crust, are handed out to customers. A song, restored in the 1920s by Robert Morton Nance, accompanies the proceedings:

A merry place, you may believe,

was Mousehole ‘pon Tom Bawcock’s Eve:

To be there then who wouldn’t wish to sup on seven sorts of fish?

When morgy brath had cleared the path comed lances for a fry

And then us had a dish o’ scad and starrygazy pie.

Chorus.

Next comed fairmaids, braw thusty jades, as made our oozles dry,

And ling and hake, enough to make a running shark to sigh.

Chorus.

As each were clunk his health was drunk in bumpers brimming high

And when up came Tom Bawcock’s name we praised un to the sky.

Chorus.

The festival’s origins perhaps had deeper significance than the quelling of hunger: Bawcock could be derived from the Cornish mow-cock, ‘cock fair’, or the French beau coq, ‘the cock of St Peter’. A village dance in nearby St Just-in-Penwith was called The Cock Dance and, in antiquity, the cock was regarded as the sun’s sacred herald, while the fish was a fertility symbol.

The Mousehole Cat, a book for children written by Antonia Barber in 1990, illustrated by Nicola Bayley and later produced as an animated film, tells Tom Bawcock’s story and the memory of his heroic voyage lives on in his home village. Only once in recent years was he forgotten. In the terrible aftermath of the Penlee Lifeboat disaster of 1981, when eight men of Mousehole – among them Charlie Greenhaugh, then landlord of the Ship Inn – perished, a greater courage than Tom’s took precedence and the lights in Mousehole harbour were dimmed.

There are various versions of starrygazy (or stargazy) pie, a dish on the permanent menu at the Ship Inn in Mousehole. Here is one from Sally Shaw’s collection:

To serve 6.

shortcrust pastry, made with 285g plain flour;

8 pilchards, sardines or small herrings;

salt, pepper;

1 large chopped onion;

approx 3 tbsps chopped parsley;

3 hard-boiled eggs;

3 rashers streaky bacon;

beaten eggs to glaze.

Roll out the pastry for double-crust plate pie.

Cover the plate, brush the rim with water and roll out another piece for the lid. Keep it aside.

Preheat the oven to Gas Mark 6 (200ºc, 400ºf).

Clean and bone the fish, leaving their heads in place.

Season inside and stuff with finely-chopped onion and parsley. Fold back into shape.

Lay the fish on the pastry like the spokes of a wheel with their heads on the rim so that they can gaze upwards. Fill the gaps in between with chopped bacon and hard-boiled eggs.

Put the pastry lid in place, pressing down between the fish heads so that it meets the pastry of the lower rim, making a wavy effect. Brush with beaten egg.

Bake for 30 minutes, though if the fish are large allow 15 minutes more at the reduced heat of Gas Mark 4 (180ºc, 350ºf).

Serve hot.

Although Mousehole exemplifies the custom of decorating Cornwall’s harbours with Christmas lights, it is not unique: the lights at Padstow, Mevagissey, Coverack, Newlyn, Cadgwith, Penzance and Porthleven are among the similarly impressive. Denis Atherton wrote in The Guardian for 23 December 1995, that:

Summer visitors to picturesque Cornish fishing harbours would not give a passing thought to Christmas light displays. But hardly has the last caravan disappeared over the Tamar Bridge than the fishing communities set about the task of flooding their villages with a rainbow of seasonal colour.

He described the favourite displays of sea-serpents and spouting whales, then continued:

Ashore, house windows and shop fronts are lit up. And the light and the colour rises up the steep backdrop of the fishing villages in a kaleidoscope that would astonish the summer visitor more used to thinking of Cornwall’s pretty harbours in terms of sand, rocks and sunshine.

The custom of Christmas lights has its roots in the misty Cornish tradition of a candle in the window to guide the seamen safely home. In Victorian times, most fishermen’s cottages sported a Christmas candle throughout the festive season, though the vogue for the modern, extravagant displays dates mostly from the 1960s.