From Tripcony to Tripp

Browsing back through the older posts on this site it struck me that some of them are well worth a further airing, albeit with some corrections and revisions if necessary. So, for those who may have missed them the first time around, I’ll be re-posting some of those that catch my eye. Here’s one that tested an intriguing hypothsis about the surnames tripcoy/Tripp. The original, posted in 2019, can be found here.

The other day a correspondent kindly supplied me with an intriguing hypothesis. The surname Tripp emerged in Cornwall very late, by my reckoning no earlier than the first half of the nineteenth century. Some, perhaps most, of those Tripps had changed their name from Tripcony. That name supposedly had its origin in the place now called Trekenning, in St Columb Major, although it was already spelt Tripkunyn as early as 1459 in that area. It also moved westwards at an early point however, being present on the Lizard by the 1500s.

My correspondent suggested that the name Tripcony may have ‘fallen into disrepute’ after 1855 when a Constantine Tripcony, a shoemaker, was charged, along with Matilda Gay, of the crime of stealing 10 sovereigns from a dead body at St Keverne. The body in question, that of a woman, had come from the wreck of the emigrant ship ‘John’, which went aground on the Manacles rocks. She was one of the 75 washed ashore, while another 121 lives were lost at sea. (A full newspaper report of this disaster can be found here.) The two offenders had apparently torn a hole in the pocket of the dead woman and made off with some money. Tripcony and Gay were identified by witnesses. They were found guilty and sentenced to three months in prison. Tripcony was however spared hard labour because of his advanced age – 62.

This grisly episode could indeed have caused some disgust in the neighbourhood. However, unfortunately for the hypothesis, the nefarious activities of Constantine Tripcony did not cause a mass revulsion by Tripconys on the Lizard at their own surname and the subsequent adoption of the name Tripp. Six years later at the 1861 census there were at least 26 households in the St Keverne district headed by Tripconys, with only four Tripps. It looks as if the preference of some for Tripp rather than Tripcony resulted from a more mundane factor – the general tendency to shorten names, especially in the days before mass literacy.