THE WAY WE WERE

 

Extracts from GUIDE TO FALMOUTH By R N Worth, published 1891

 

How Penryn Actors Foiled Spanish Invaders 

 

Before Pendennis and St Mawes (castles) were built, the whole coast lay open to the enemy and “Gosson’s School Of Abuse” records an amusing incident said to have occurred at Penryn about the middle of the 16^thCentury. 

 

Certain Spaniards landed unexpected and undiscovered, with intent to take the town, spoil and burn it. Certain actors were presenting a miracle play – that of “Sampson,” it is said – in a barn.

 

As the Spaniards landed, Sampson was let loose on the Philistines with a loud alarum of drums and trumpets.

 

The enemy, fearing they were discovered, fired a few shots in bravado, and in a hurly-burly fled disorderly to their boats, pursued to the sea by the now ready townsfolk. 

 

‘Impudent’ Friends Built Their Own House In Falmouth

 

The Society of Friends has been represented in Falmouth for upwards of 200 years. A paper in the Public Record Office states that in 1667 they had grown so impudent at Falmouth that that they were actually building a house to meet in; and this, although many of their brethren had been sent to gaol for daring to assemble for worship. 

 

The meeting at Falmouth is, and has long been, the largest in the county, and many of the most prominent and useful Falmouthians are, or have been, connected with this body. The present meeting house, in Gyllyng Street, is a new and neat edifice. 

AT LAST: A NEW WINNER IN THE GRAND OVERDONE LOVE SCENE AWARD SCHEME

“A shared crescendo like a hymn of heaven and a thousand sweet symphonies.”

 

From time to time down the decades, in MT columns in various media outlets, and with tongue firmly in cheek, I have referred to my annual Grand Overdone Love  Scene Award Scheme.

 

Loosely defined, this served to highlight total tosh from writers who should know better and which, even now, I can scarcely believe ever actually made it into print.

 

The scheme has all but gone into hibernation, however, with one writer having remained the unchallenged No 1 year after year.

 

Until now.

 

Thanks to a fresh reading of Arthur Hailey’s best-selling AIRPORT, published in 1968, I now realise that the previous champion, at long last, must surrender his dubious title.

 

Here’s Hailey’s winning contribution:--

 

“ . . . she had wanted to hurry, and cried out, ‘Yes, yes! Oh please, I can’t wait!’ But he insisted gently: ‘Yes, you can, you must.’ And she obeyed him, being utterly, deliciously in his control, while he led her as if by the hand like a child, close to the brink, then back a pace or two while they waited with a feeling like floating in air; then near once more, and back, and the same again and again, the bliss of it all near-unendurable; and finally when neither of them could wait longer, there was a shared crescendo like a hymn of heaven and a thousand sweet symphonies, and if Cindy had been able to choose a moment for dying, because nothing afterwards could ever be that moment’s equal, she would have chosen then.”

 

Opinions may vary, of course, but you might agree with me that this puts Wilbur Smith’s offering in THE BURNING SHORE, from 40 years ago, well and truly in the shade:--

 

“When he smiled at her, Centaine felt the world lurch beneath her feet.  When it steadied, she realised that it had altered its orbit and was on a new track amongst the stars. Nothing would ever be the same again.”   

 

Personally, I think the wonder of it all is how/whether Messrs Hailey and Smith could possibly have kept a straight face when writing this stuff.  Maybe they didn’t!  

FALMOUTH IN THE ’80s (17)

Pier Aggro: ‘Welcome To Toytown’ – But Not For The Planning Chief

Planning officers, inevitably, tend not to be the most popular of people. A visit to the Prince of Wales Pier in the early 1980s turned ugly for Carrick planning chief Stephen Watson - and his children. This and the mysterious appearance of a large banner saying “Welcome To Toytown” were among the shots fired in a continuing war of words over the £60,000 revamping of the pier entrance.

 

Mr Watson said he went to the pier with his children to see the work being carried out, only for one of the boatmen there to become very aggressive and abusive. “He threatened me with physical violence because, I assume, of what has been happening at the pier,” he said.  

 

Much of the concern had centred around the creation of mushroom-shaped boatmen’s huts and public seating stands, which Carrick regarded as a great improvement. However, the previous broad, paved aspect of the pier entrance had found favour with many local people, who liked the wide open view from Market Strand.  

 

Mr Watson felt a lot of the criticism received was “not valid,” adding:  “I accept that no matter what you do you will not please everybody.” He acknowledged that emergency vehicles could not access the pier now, but if the services made very strong representations to the council they would reconsider the point.  

 

He would not be taking up boat operator George Pill’s call for him to resign over the row. “Almost every planning officer is called on to resign with boring repetition,” he said.  “On every scheme, you upset somebody.” 

 

Of the “Toy Town” sign, mysteriously put up in the early hours, Mr Watson said: “We have had it described as Toy Town and as Disneyland. If it brings as much to Falmouth as Disneyland brings in, then Falmouth will be very lucky.”

 

A petition mounted by Mr Pill accused Mr Watson and Carrick architect Harry Grant of throwing away cash on the monstrosity at the pier and quickly gathered around a thousand signatures.

 

Branch Line Rescued By New Generation Trains

 

The Falmouth-Truro branch railway line, for so long the subject of closure speculation, had probably been saved with the introduction of the new generation “bus on rails” trains, it was reported in 1984.  Faster, more comfortable and much cheaper to run, they were due to be phased in over the next two years.  Without them, said Peter Foot, British Rail’s traffic manager for Truro and east Cornwall, it was “virtually certain” the line would have gone.

 

The new units, part of a £4.5 million investment plan by BR for branch lines in Cornwall and Devon, were expected to achieve at least a 50 per cent reduction in fuel consumption and to reduce maintenance costs. The South West region would be the first in the country to use the Class 142 train – an advanced version of the Class 141.  The new class had a Leyland bus body on a rail underframe and seating arrangements and interior design similar to those of modern single-deck buses. 

 

The units they would replace had been operating on the Falmouth-Truro line for more than a quarter of a century – for as long as the line had gone over to diesel from steam – and had never been intended for such long service, said Mr Foot. He added: “What determines the future of the line is the amount of public service grant aid that the Government is prepared to give. The point is that, once the capital cost has been provided for, the running cost will be considerably lower and therefore the line will be much more likely to be retained by the Government grant.” 

 

The local line had been a loss-maker for many years and was repeatedly rumoured to have been on the verge of closure. It had long been regarded as one of the most vulnerable in the country and in 1979 it was revealed that its running costs were three times higher than its receipts.  This had remained the case since, BR confirmed.

 

Roffs’ New Owners Pledge To Keep It Local

 

A management buyout at Roffs Print Ltd, Falmouth’s second largest employer, ensured that the operation would stay in the town, managing director Cliff Brown declared. “It was the owners’ intention to sell the business, but by taking over we are ensuring that the operation stays local,” he said. He and production director Ken Wells acquired a controlling shareholding in the business from its previous controlling shareholders, Pat Wybrow and Jack Lightfoot.  

 

The new owners planned to continue expansion of the company, whose workforce had risen to 80.  It benefitted from a very low turnover of labour and was a market leader in production of continuous stationery, security printing and personalised payment books, with shift work maintaining 24-hour output for five days a week. Mr Brown commented: “We felt we could make a better job of running the company ourselves than doing so for a large group. We know the workforce, we know our industry and we know our business.”

 

The Lady Who Said ‘No,’ Again And Again, To Free National Exposure

 

If you were running a business and you were offered a free plug on national TV, chances are you would jump at it, yes? Even if it meant a departure from routine and some special arrangements. But not so one proud lady in Falmouth’s High Street in March, 1984.  BBC TV producer Chris Tandy was astounded when Sue Jackson, joint owner of Cabaret, repeatedly said “no thank you” to a spot on Saturday Superstore.  He first contacted Mrs Jackson seven weeks earlier after Cabaret – described as “that weird and wonderful array of performing automatons and highly original bric-a-brac” – had been featured on the Taje Hart programme. 

 

“He asked me if I would like to go along and wind the handles of some of our exhibits for the Saturday Superstore programme at its Grove Place headquarters,” she said. “I refused. He could not believe it and I told him I had also refused a fortnight earlier to go up to Birmingham for Pebble Mill At One. I explained that they should come and see us on our premises. Then they would realise that Cabaret is very much a whole event. To film just a few of the exhibits in isolation would not really show what it’s all about.” Or, as the Cabaret brochure put it, “It’s so unique, we can’t describe it.”

 

Mrs Jackson told Mr Tandy: “You read the articles on us in Illustrated London News and She and Craft magazines; then you will see what I mean.”  Several more phone conversations produced a compromise. Rather than have her “winding her handles” live on the programme, the two agreed on a pre-recorded three-minute session at Grove Place.  So the BBC laid on a Range Rover to transport a number of items from the shop to Grove Place on the afternoon before the show was broadcast, when Mrs Jackson was able to have more of a say in things. Viewers may also have noticed a 7ft clown complete with balloons at the back of the stage. This, too, was the work of Cabaret, specially constructed for the programme. 

 

The Gardens Venture That Hit The Jackpot

 

Today it would be called “going viral” and your email inbox would be full to overflowing. The 1980s equivalent – for a marketing exercise hitting the jackpot – was a mountain of physical post lying on your front door mat, making it almost impossible to open that door. This was the experience of Pamela Long, secretary/organiser of the Falmouth Spring Garden Holidays scheme in the autumn of 1982, when she was met one morning with 290 letters that threatened to surge forward into the corridor of her home in Melvill Road.  The experience was repeated over several more days.

 

The scheme was financed and promoted by a consortium of nine Falmouth hotels offering fully-inclusive spring holidays with free coach travel and admission to Cornwall’s most beautiful gardens.  The consortium decided to invest more than a thousand pounds on a press launch weekend, inviting a hundred gardening writers and correspondents from various newspapers and magazines.  Seven took up the offer to be wined, dined and shown Cornwall’s horticultural delights.  Results – leading on to that mountain of mail – included major articles in the Daily Telegraph, Practical Gardening, Amateur Gardening and Popular Gardening, along with the Sunday Telegraph, Sunday Times, The Observer, Woman’s Weekly and Home And Countrycoming on board later.  Consequently, there were nearly 1,300 enquiries from the Telegraph alone, resulting in 650 holidaymakers taking a spring holiday in Falmouth in 1983 and pumping around £100,000 into the area in the process. 

 

Altogether, the hotels concerned had put £32,000 into the scheme in its first five years, with Mrs Long commenting: “I think this is a most important factor in marketing Falmouth and making it a resort for all seasons.  No-one can rely any more on people just coming to Falmouth for a holiday; you have got to go out and get them.”

 

Peter Calls Time On Love Affair With Football

 

After a lifetime of being actively involved in football up and down the country, Peter Thorpe finally called it a day.  His passionate love affair with the game began in the mid-1940s, when he played for St Columb, but he was soon to move to Bristol, where he turned out for the Fire Brigade until a run of injuries forced him to quit playing.  He decided to take up refereeing and at the end of his first season in 1965 was promoted to Class II. It was the beginning of a long and distinguished career that over the years earned him many honours on and off the afield.   After obtaining his Class I status in 1973 he refereed the Somerset County Youth Final. The following season he returned to Falmouth, where his no-nonsense style of refereeing quickly earned him the respect of players and thus ensured even more honours including many more cup finals, both locally and further afield. 

 

His insatiable appetite for involvement in soccer eventually took him into the administrative side of the sport, where he became a councillor on the Falmouth-Helston League and represented local referees on the Cornwall County Referees Association (CCRA) executive committee. The pinnacle of his career was his appointment as chairman of the CCRA, where he strove to achieve an efficient working relationship with the Cornwall County Football Association. 

ART SPOT

AN EXCEPTIONAL CHALLENGE FOR ARTIST JAMIE – AND THE RESPONSE HE NEVER EXPECTED!   

  

Nope, not a photo – this is an oil PAINTING by Jamie Medlin

 

Jamie Medlin, acclaimed Falmouth marine artist, is staging the biggest-ever exhibition of his stunning photo-realistic works from today (Saturday, April 20) to June 29, and it’s on his home territory, at Falmouth Art Gallery, 

 

“Nuances Of Light” features 34 of the best-ever paintings from his entire career in maritime art, with works from his own collection and borrowed back from clients all over the country.

 

A Medlin painting will typically take a few months to complete – sometimes a lot longer - such is his dedication to the finest detail in producing works that are indistinguishable from photographs.

 

The tiniest detail out of place can be seized upon by a discerning client, so he takes no chances.

 

Mind you, there was one opportunity when he needn’t have been quite so accurate, had he been so inclined.

 

He took on a commission for a gentleman who wanted a picture of his dad’s boat, as a memento of happy times.

 

The light and tonal elements – getting the colours just right - were exceptionally challenging because of the poor reference supplied and Jamie mentioned to the client how he had needed to work extra-hard on these to match the colours perfectly.

 

Came the reply: “Oh, you didn’t have to worry about that. I’m colour-blind!” 

BOOKS AND PAINTINGS UPDATE

Many of you (well, at least five) have asked what’s happened to my local nostalgia books.

 

Well, the simple answer is that they have run their course and I have no plans to do any more.

 

For the time being at least, I am focussing just on my ghost-written Cornish footballer autobiographies and, of course, this blog.  Plus my paintings, on which more in a mo.

 

All of which I love doing.

 

The Falmouth nostalgia books could easily have run on forever and a day, but I concluded that two books a year, along with my other commitments, was starting to get just a bit too much for this retired old codger.

 

As for my little foray into novel-writing, well, the plotting and writing were hugely enjoyable but ultimately a poor fit with everything else in my life; with the benefit of hindsight, I would probably have been wiser to have been guided by my head rather than my heart, and stayed well clear of it. Next life, perhaps!

 

My present book project – GAME OF TWO HALVES The Tommy Matthews Story – is now well advanced and should easily hit publication target of September/October this year.

 

In the meantime, I’ve now begun work on the next book after that – RAPPO’S WORLD OF FOOTBALL FUN – and secured one of the top names in Cornish football as my autobiography project for 2025-26.

 

As with all my fund-raising projects – books and paintings – all moneys go direct to Cancer Research UK.

 

Regarding those paintings, a goodly number of them, of course, have featured here and on social media over the last few months, with greatly encouraging results and comments.

 

You may like to know that you can see more of my paintings in the online artshop of my teacher Jeanni Grant-Nelson - https://www.visual-awareness.com/store/c16/Mike.html 

WADDEE MAKE O’ THESE ‘ERE CORNISH ACCENTS, MY ANSUMS??

 When I was exiled on Merseyside during those dark early ‘70s days (see blog April 2), I couldn’t lay my hands on enough reminders of my beloved homeland, especially books. 

 

One of them – a strong recommendation from my Dad, and which certainly didn’t disappoint – was Penmarrick by Susan Howatch.

 

This epic family saga made such an impression on me that I read it twice more, including once even after I had returned to Cornwall.

 

From one of those old letters of my Dad’s, though, it is evident that we agreed that Susan “wasn’t strong on accents.”

 

But he quickly added: “Don’t forget that they vary quite a lot even within Cornwall. The St Ives chat differs from that in Camborne, whilst there is little in common between Penzance and, say, Launceston.

 

“I often squirm when I listen to some actor doing his best to be a Cornishman.  The only person I have ever heard on the radio with an authentic mid-Cornish accent is Hilda Rowse.”

 

Breaking into his own proper Cornish, he remarked: “She d’tell sum ‘ansome yarns when she d’get goin’ and so she ought to.  Hilda was born and raised on a farm between Truro and Probus.”

 

She would have been well before my time, but in my own experience of TV and radio I can think off-hand of only one non-Cornish actor these days who sounds like the real thing.

 

That’s Joe Absolom, as Al Large, in Doc Martin (although Caroline Katz, as Doc’s Louisa, does a pretty good job, too).

 

So many other attempts at a Cornish accent are just plain laughable, aren’t they?

 

As for getting accents right in books, I learnt from my own little foray into novel-writing just how difficult it can be, in more ways than one.

 

It’s a bit of a dilemma. On the one hand, the more accurate you make the accents, the more you risk making it hard work for the readers as they try to make head or tail of the unfamiliar spellings.

 

But on the other, if you only insert the accent sparingly, the whole thing will immediately come across as unreal – “ee wouldn’ talk like ‘at!” the knowledgeable Cornish reader would immediately complain. 

 

Spot the inconsistency for yourself.  The next time you read a character starting to speak in a supposedly Cornish way, see how quickly they will not drop an H or two when they should!   

THE DAY IT ALL HAPPENED IN FALMOUTH: BOBBY MOORE . . . A REVOLUTIONARY NEW YACHT . . . AND A ROCKET FOR THE JUMP JET

Very hard to believe now, especially when you walk through its main street and see so many empty shops, but there was a time in the not-so-distant past when Falmouth was being hailed as the South West’s boom town.

 

That was probably never more so than in the summer of 1988, with Peter de Savary (PdS), then Falmouth-based, at the height of his swashbuckling Cornish entrepreneurial powers.

 

Not only was he seemingly buying up everything that moved (or at least trying to), he was also attracting much international publicity with his revolutionary new monohull Blue Arrow, targeting the America’s Cup yacht race.

 

The media spotlight came to a head in July of that year with the launch of the Blue Arrow at Falmouth Docks, where she had been built by Pendennis Shipyard, itself another of PdS’s projects. 

 

As was customary, no expense was spared for the grand launch event and among the special celebrity guests that day was none other than Bobby Moore, captain of the 1966 England World Cup-winning side.

 

The guests also included someone a little less famous, Falmouth Packet reporter Moira Holden.

 

According to the paper’s unidentified Pendennis columnist, she was “star-struck” and  “all a flutter” for a week or more after the great man himself had stopped beside her and asked:  “Is that seat free?”

 

Moira, a self-confessed football fanatic, later commented: “I have told the tale of my  chance meeting with my hero so many times I’m even getting a bit bored with it myself!”

 

Elsewhere in town on that launch day, however, some hearts were set racing in an entirely different way.

 

The best-kept secret of the day was the arrival of a Sea Harrier jump jet to join in the celebrations with a ten-minute demonstration of low-flying over the harbour, followed by its trade-mark rapid ascent.

 

Mrs Ruth Dunstan, a no-nonsense local councillor and figurehead of the feisty Falmouth Action Group, complained to local MP David Mudd about the aircraft’s “bizarre and unwarranted intrusion.”

 

She told Moira: “The visitation was entirely unexpected.  The sudden and deafening noise was alarming even to those with strong nerves and would certainly have been devastating to the infirm, the elderly and domestic animals.

 

“From a business point of view, telephone and other conversations were drowned out.

 

“And from a personal point of view, why should those of us resident here not quietly enjoy our homes and surroundings without such cavalier treatment?”

 

There were also reports of people out walking in the Greenbank area who thought it was an emergency, with the jet about to pitch into the sea.

 

Mr Mudd confirmed that he had raised the matter with the Ministry of Defence.

 

As for what PdS made of it all, I was his Cornwall PR man at the time and am pretty confident, looking back, that this was one occasion when he chose not to go public with his feelings . . .