Village memoir comes home

by Alaistair Wreford
A unique record of life in a Cornish fishing village in the early 1800s has come home to Cornwall where it is to be preserved for posterity.
The handwritten volume entitled "Summary Memoirs of St Endellion Parish" was compiled in 1834 by John Watts Trevan, who accompanied his sometimes outspoken comments on local characters and events with coloured drawings.
The book has been purchased through funds raised by the Port Isaac Historical Society, who put it on display at their recent exhibition in the village's Penhaligon Rooms.
Society member Malcolm Lee explained that he and his colleagues had been anxious to bring the book back to Cornwall after first hearing of its whereabouts some years ago.
"As far as we know, it was found in a Penzance bookshop some 30 years ago by a London-based book publisher who acquired it for his own interest," said Mr. Lee.
Eventually the book's existence came to the notice of the society through musician Graham Tayar, who shares his timebetween London and Port Isaac and is a friend of the book's last owner. The society were put in contact and eventually an offer to buy the book was accepted.
Mr Lee said: "We are delighted to have it. There can be few communities who have such a detailed record of the lives of their ancestors to look back on.
"There was a danger that if it had ever been sold on the open market the paintings could have been separated from the book as they are valuable in their own right."
The book is to be passed on to the County Record Office in Truro, where it is to undergo conservation treatment. It will then be retained there and made available to researchers and others interested in the history of Port Isaac, Trelights and St Endellion.

One man's look at life

John Watts Trevan is believed to have been a member of Her Majesty's Customs. The son of John Archer Trevan, who is mentioned in the book, he was born in 1800 and died at the age of 57.
The book starts with a description of the location of St Endellion Parish and explains that the land is "wonderfully fertile", depending for manure on nothing more than sea sand and seaweed for local farmers to "first sow wheat, and then barley, without any fallow or intermediate crop on some estates, but on others turnips are sown".
On the cliffs, records Trevan, innumerable land and aquatic birds can be seen - he specifically mentions Cornish Choughs.
He details the fish seen and caught in the waters off Port Isaac, recalling that a sperm whale had come into the cove a few years earlier.
Pilchards, he says, had appearred about 30 years earlier, prompting the construction of large cellars and providing the most important of all the fishing along the coast.
Trevan's "Memoir" also describes the extensive mining, particularly for antimony, which took place and lists all the fishing boats and trading boats operating from the village.
It is when he begins dealing with his fellow residents that Trevan is at his most fascinating:
Dick Clements served in a militia force locally at the time of a threatened invasion but could not tell his left from right, making it difficult to train him to march. His officer , Lieut. Julian, hit on the idea of tying a "thumb bean" of straw round one leg and of hay around the other and shouted out "Hay, Straw, Hay, Straw" instead of "Left, Right, Left, Right".

Notes: by Mary Trevan
  1. The portion of the book about the other inhabitants had previously been attributed to two of his five brothers, Dr Matthew Trevan and Dr Frederick Trevan.
  2. The inside page is inscribed with
    "Mr Trevan
    Pendrean. Sidmouth"
    This was the address of his great-nephew Dr Federick Adolphus Trevan, as recorded in a Kelly's Directory of Devonshire for 1914, where his full address is given as Pendrean, Salcombe Regis, Sidmouth. He was born in 1857, the year that John Watts Trevan died.

Page created on 8 Jul 2000, last modified 8 Jul 2000 and published