Doc Martin: working hard to reproduce stereotypes of Cornwall and sell second homes Ask people what they know about the village of Port Isaac on Cornwall’s north coast in Endellion parish and they’re likely to respond with ‘Doc Martin’. This apparently endless series about a lugubrious doctor in a ‘sleepy’ Cornish fishing village is a … Continue reading Port Isaac: of medical men and myths
Category: social history
Memories of former times: Egloskerry
Egloskerry provides us with a fine example of the small rural parishes that lie to the west and north of Launceston in north Cornwall. In the nineteenth century heavily dependent on farming, nonetheless its children were not inevitably rooted to the soil. Quite the opposite in fact as, of the five Egloskerry children in the … Continue reading Memories of former times: Egloskerry
Egloshayle – born in the workhouse
Egloshayle in the nineteenth century was a predominantly rural parish although including the bit of Wadebridge that spilled over the bridge from St Breock. Nevertheless, the 14 children from Egloshayle who appear in our database could claim rather more diverse family backgrounds than the bog-standard rural parish. There were a couple whose fathers were the … Continue reading Egloshayle – born in the workhouse
Looe’s migrating fishing families
Arriving at East Looe, we meet the first substantial community of fishing families on our long trek through the Cornish parishes of Victorian times. In fact, according to the 1851 census fewer than one in ten of the adult men in East Looe got their living from fishing. Full-time fishermen (there may have been many … Continue reading Looe’s migrating fishing families
Miner’s cottage, manor house and famous neighbours
As the examples in the previous blog showed, some of the children in our Victorian Lives database did not move far beyond the confines of the district in which they grew up. Others, for a variety of reasons, broke away and by the time they were 40 their childhood landscapes were just fond memories (or … Continue reading Miner’s cottage, manor house and famous neighbours
Davidstow: free will or predestination?
For many men in Victorian Cornwall freewill must have been a remote concept. With predictable regularity son followed father into the father’s occupation, generation after generation. Social mobility may have been an alien idea for the vast majority but some men broke the bonds and switched jobs. But who? William Francis Burnard grew up in … Continue reading Davidstow: free will or predestination?
The Thomases go to town
Cury is a small, rural parish on the Lizard peninsula, four to five miles south of the market town of Helston. We might expect some of those growing up in Cury to be attracted to their nearby town. And so they were. Ann Thomas for example grew up in a farm labourer’s family in Cury. … Continue reading The Thomases go to town
Cubert: local moves and global migrants
Cubert is a small parish between Perranporth and Newquay which supplied five children for the database. One has not yet been traced beyond 1861; the others all left the parish at some point but three of them only moved within the confines of mid-Cornwall. Cubert churchtown As an example, we can take James Edwin Hubber, … Continue reading Cubert: local moves and global migrants
Praze people
Thomas Laity was born into a large mining family in the village of Praze in Crowan. His father William was a miner, as was his oldest brother while two grown-up sisters worked as bal maidens. There is some suggestion that his parents had migrated during the depressed years of the late 1840s, as his sister … Continue reading Praze people
The long arm of the law
Some of those in our Victorian Lives database had parents with backgrounds that were more out of the ordinary than others. Alfred Preston was one. We meet Alfred’s mother, before Alfred had been born, in Bodmin Jail in November 1848. Mary Ann Preston, then aged 22, and her brother Thomas, a 19 year-old sawyer, were … Continue reading The long arm of the law
Cornish studies resources 