Calf, Cogar and Creeper

Here are three less common surnames, this time from nicknames or occupations.

Calf was supposedly a nickname in English for a calf-like person (skittish maybe?), or perhaps for someone whose job was tending calves. Mary Calffe was buried at Bodmin in 1563 and the name was present from that point on in the Bodmin-Fowey district, spreading west as far as Probus and east to St Mellion by 1641.

Cogar was either a name for a builder of, or for a sailor of, cogs or cock-boats. It seems to have arisen on the Roseland and close enough to the coast for this meaning to be entirely credible. In 1545 John Coger was listed at St Michael Caerhays paying a benevolence (a land tax) and in 1588 Hugh Coga was buried in the same parish. In the mid-1600s the name was still largely confined to the Roseland, although by this time it was also found at St Ives and Gwithian in the west and on the Lizard. That could have been the result of migration from mid-Cornwall or perhaps denotes other, separate origins in the west.

The early coastal distribution of the name Cogar

Creeper is claimed to be a nickname, possibly from the English word cripple or from the word creep, as in crawl. It arrived late in Cornwall, not being recorded until Honor Creeper was buried at Tresmeer, to the west of Launceston, in 1689. The surname remained restricted almost entirely to the Launceston district in the early 1700s. Its late arrival combined with its geographical distribution make it unlikely that there was any connection with the Cornish name Creba/Crebo, found at Crantock, as I proposed in The Surnames of Cornwall.

The Levant mine disaster

A hundred years ago today the man engine collapsed at Levant mine, Pendeen, near St Just. This was the second worse mine disaster in Cornwall’s history. Thirty-one miners lost their lives and many others were badly injured. The man engine was a device that conveyed miners to and from the surface, allowing them to avoid the former, laborious climb up the ladders at the end of their core (shift). It was invented in 1841 by Michael Loam of Liskeard, although his design owed much to similar contraptions at work in Germany. The first man engine was installed at Tresavean Mine, Lanner and it was then adopted in several of the larger and deeper Cornish mines.

A report in The Times on the disaster explained how the man engine operated.

‘It consists of a ponderous wooden beam [in fact several sections of beam bolted together] which extends from the top to the bottom of the shaft, which is 600 yards deep. At intervals of 12 feet are steps on the beam, each of which affords foothold for one person, while on the side of the shaft are stationary platforms at intervals of 12 feet. At every stroke of the engine the beam is raised and lowered, and the men step on and off the platforms and are carried up or down by the movement of the beam. It is a rather slow process, but has been carried on for years without serious accident’

That was not the case on the afternoon of Tuesday, October 20th however. The Times went on to describe what happened.

‘From 100 to 150 men were on it when the change of shift was taking place. When the connecting rod broke the engine was at the top of its stroke, and the gigantic beam with its load fell 12 feet. Many of the platforms on the side of the shaft were smashed, and the men on them were knocked off and crushed. Some were unhurt and managed to reach the surface. Rescue parties brought out others, but a number of miners at different levels could not be reached …’

The engine rod had only dropped 12 feet but in doing so had taken away much of the timber work on which men were standing. The local paper, the Cornishman, carried an eyewitness account from a young miner, Robert Penaluna, who was riding on the engine at the time of the collapse …

‘When the engine broke it was a tremendous crash for in dropping she knocked away timber and everything else in her path. The engine rod on which we were travelling shook violently. The smash gave a terrible shock to us all … the screams of some of the men were awful, as they gripped the rod like grim death … I wouldn’t go through an experience like that again for the world.’

Aunger, Betties and Cattran

Here are three more family names that were largely confined to Cornwall in the 1881 census. These three have their origins in first names.

Aunger is supposedly from a Norman-French first name Aunger or Anger. It was found in Cornwall at an early period, appearing close to the border with Devon in the 1530s and 40s. It had ramified by the mid-1600s and spread as far west as St Minver on the Camel estuary in the north and Fowey in the south, while remaining confined to east Cornwall. That geography makes the expected confusion with the name Angear less likely as the latter was found principally in the west.

Betties. From the 1500s onwards there was a general tendency to add an -s to a personal name to denote ‘son of’, as in Williams or Hicks. The name Betty was found in Cornwall as early as the 1520s. This was either a pet form of Beton or Bett, which would themselves have been short for Beatrice or Bartholomew. Rather oddly, the fashion of adding an -s to Betty didn’t appear in the records until the late 1700s when the name Bettys first crops up in north Cornwall – at Blisland and further east at Trewen. Earlier in the 1600s the preference was for Bettinson.

The early distribution of the name Betty

Cattran. Although an earlier Anne Cattran is found in the baptismal register at Sancreed, this name was specific to nearby Paul parish in Penwith. There, a Thomas Cattern was married in 1694, the spelling reflecting the local pronunciation. Earlier in Paul parish and elsewhere we find the name Catharine and Cattran was no doubt a variant of that name.

Three golden ages and six turning points: a history of Cornwall in 500 words

Yesterday, I was asked to give a short talk on the history of Cornwall. How do you sum up 2,000 years of history in 45 minutes? Tricky. This was my attempt.

A golden age is a period of victory or defeat (or both) which later becomes mythologised and looked back on with pride. A turning point is a time when the flow of history seems to change course.

Cornwall’s first golden age was between the departure of the Romans in 410 and the arrival of the English in the 800s. This was when Cornwall had an independent existence. At first it was the centre of a larger kingdom of Dumnonia, with an elite trading post at Tintagel and colonies in Brittany. When the Mediterranean trade dried up it became a decentralised collection of communities bound together by early Christianity rather than by kings and administrators.

Three turning points then occurred over the next half millennium. The Normans arrived in 1070 and gradually extended their overlordship from their early base in the far east at Launceston. Population, trade and towns grew until the shock of the Black Death in 1349. Cornwall recovered rather better than other places. It was during the late 1300s and 1400s that the Cornish language held its own after an earlier retreat, backed by the patronage of Church and Crown. The third turning point arrived with the religious reformation of the 1530s.

This heralded Cornwall’s second golden age, one viewed by some as a romantic period of struggle against the encroaching English state. Risings in 1497 and 1549 both failed, their leaders executed for treason. Yet in 1642 the Cornish avenged themselves. They became the spearhead of the royalist army of the west, thus unfortunately backing the wrong side in the British civil wars. The following century was more subdued, at least politically.

Another turning point followed in the 1730s, when steam technology began to be applied to the long-established business of mining. Deep copper mining drove the precociously early industrialisation of Cornwall, its third golden age. This created a distinctive rural-industrial society, where elements of the new and the traditional were stitched together. Population growth and new settlements laid the ground for the enthusiastic reception of John Wesley and the wholesale transfer of allegiance to a vigorous, revivalist Methodism. Meanwhile, Cornish engineers were raising the efficiency of steam engines to hitherto undreamt-of heights in the generation after 1810.

The fifth turning point brought this to a juddering halt in the 1870s when a calamitous fall in the price of copper made its mining uneconomic. Tin mining survived but underwent periodic crises, as in the 1890s or 1920s. Population fell as emigrants fled to the mining frontiers of the New World. The first wave in the 1840s and 1850s had sought a better life on the basis of the demand for their mining expertise. The second wave had little choice but to go as opportunities closed down at home.

A century of de-industrialisation was ended by the final turning point – the counter-urbanisation that set in from the 1960s onwards. This began half a century of mass migration to Cornwall, when it became a preferred site for holidaying and second homes. Demographic change accompanied a social transformation that we are still living through and struggling to cope with.

Did the mass migration after the 1960s threaten the Cornish identity or stimulate its renaissance?

From Tripcony to Tripp

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 probably had its origin in the place now called Trekenning, in St Columb Major (and incidentally has nothing to do with rabbits). It 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 been washed ashore 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. The two were found guilty and sentenced to three months in prison. Tripcony was however spared hard labour because of his advanced age – 62.

The John went aground on a spring tide but conditions were not especially rough

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.

Pondering on potatoes

There’s some potato harvesting going on nearby. A bit different from the 18^th century however. Now heavily mechanised, then it would have been labour intensive, the fields full of people rather than a few lumbering tractors and their associated gizmos.

Potato cultivation was widespread in Cornwall by the 1750s. An observer in the early 1800s wrote that it was the ‘blessing of the poor … cheap, wholesome and nutritious’. As in Ireland, it helped to feed a rapidly growing population. Unlike Ireland, in Cornwall the labouring poor also had resort to salted pilchards. So the effect of the potato blight in 1845, although helping to trigger the last occasion of widespread food rioting in 1847, was not disastrous.

The 1790s and war with France made grain imports difficult and resulted in high prices. The period saw an extension of potato production as a result. This was mainly by small farmers for the market and smallholders in the mining districts for their own consumption. According to the Cornish historian Samuel Drew, writing in the early 1820s, farmers in west Cornwall were planting two crops of potatoes a year. Kidney potatoes were planted in December and taken up in May. The second crop of potatoes went in at the end of April or beginning of May and might be harvested as late as December.

The spring crop was the forerunner of the early potato trade. Farmers in the Penzance district began to grow potatoes with an eye on upcountry markets. As early as 1808 it was reported that Cornish farmers were supplying potatoes to Plymouth, Portsmouth and London. That early potato trade really began to get under way with the introduction of steamers in 1837 when boats from Hayle and Falmouth began to pick up potatoes from Mounts Bay and deliver to the London market. After the 1850s of course, the railway took over.