Apart from its abundance of spring flowers, Cornwall’s mild climate appeared to offer its only prospect of economic salvation. Every summer the Cornish Riviera Express conveyed many thousands of tourists, not only ‘the privileged minority who might otherwise holiday in the real Mediterranean, but … anyone who could afford the price of a third class ticket from Paddington’. The journalist and travel writer S.P.B. Mais helped the romance along with a series of promotional booklets written at the behest of the Great Western Railway hinting at ‘a western land of Celtic mysticism’. Even the trains carried such resonant names as Trelawney, Tintagel Castle, Tre, Pol and Pen. When a rival railway company decided to make North Cornwall its own preserve, putting such places as Tintagel and Boscastle on the tourist map, it gave its locomotives such appropriately Arthurian names as Merlin, Lyonesse, Iseult, Sir Cador of Cornwall, Sir Constantine — and even the traitorous Sir Mordred was briefly considered suitable. Despite their mystic names, the trains were among the fastest in the world. In 1938 the playwright Beverley Nichols was struck by the anachronism of George VI ‘flying through a country that even his father would hardly recognise, so quickly are the landscapes passing’, to collect ‘a grey cloak, a brace of greyhounds, a pair of gilt spurs, a pound of cumin, a salmon spear, a pair of white gloves, a hundred shillings and a pound of pepper’, dues owed by the Duchy of Cornwall to its Duke/King.
The South-West’s tourism boom had begun before the First World War, and it expanded dramatically between 1920 and 1938, with a rise of 80 per cent in the number of people employed in hotels, boarding houses, laundries and cafés in Devon and Cornwall. Tourists came not only by train but increasingly by coach or car, as roads were improved and car-ownership increased. The tourist traffic was of course seasonal: employment in Cornwall would dip to its lowest point in January, and peak in June.
Cornwall, with its Arthurian romance, its Celtic culture, its periodic ‘Cornish revival’ movements, now intertwined with the romance of ivy-covered, suggestively gothic, disused mineshafts and engine houses, spectacular coastline and stretches of silver sand, and the charm of ‘remote accessibility’, also held appeal for those who had no need to fuss with a third-class railway ticket, but could motor down with a wicker picnic hamper (though the journey on A-class roads from London might well require an overnight stop). During the 1930s Cornwall became the summer destination of choice of a number of artistic, literary and generally ‘bohemian’ types — though with its ‘reputable light’ Cornwall had been attracting artists challenged to paint its ever-changing seascapes since before the First World War. Vanessa Bell went (as did her sister Virginia Woolf), Augustus John (whose son Edwin had settled at Mousehole), the artist Laura Knight (who also had a cottage in Mousehole), her friend and fellow painter Dod Procter and her artist husband Ernest, as well as the writer who gave Cornwall to popular literature, and whose work is still celebrated in an annual festival that brings literary tourism to Cornwall, Daphne du Maurier.
Although he did move not permanently to Cornwall until 1939, the painter Ben Nicholson was a regular summer visitor to St Ives throughout the thirties. There was already a thriving Society of Artists in the town, which had held an annual exhibition since 1927 and sent work to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. It was in St Ives that Nicholson ‘discovered’ the local fisherman Alfred Wallis, who often painted on cardboard supplied by the local grocer. ‘No one likes Wallis’ paintings [though of course] no one liked Van Gogh for a time,’ reported the artist Christopher Wood, who had been on a walk with Nicholson when they glimpsed Wallis’s work for the first time through the open door of his cottage. But they would. Today twelve of his paintings hang in Tate St Ives, and his images of sailing boats circulate on greetings cards.
But St Ives, Newlyn and Mennabilly/Manderley were as far from the concerns of St Day as were the ‘professional Cornishmen’ of the 1930s, most notable among them the historian A.L. Rowse and the essayist ‘Q’, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. Similarly, the town had little time for a new revivalist organisation, Tyr Ha Tavas (Land and Language), which emerged in 1933, declaring that it stood for ‘the unity of persons of Cornish birth or descent who value their Cornish heritage, and who desire to maintain the outlook, individualism, culture, and idealism characteristic of their race’, and pronouncing a determination ‘to show Cornish people what Cornish men have done and what they still can do to help the World’. There had been a series of earlier Cornish revivalist movements, since ‘Every Cornishman knows well enough, proud as he may be of belonging to the British Empire, that he is no more an Englishman than a Caithness man is, that he has as much right to separate local patriotism to his motherland … as has a Scotsman, an Irishman, a Welshman, or even a Colonial, and that he is as much a Celt and as little of an Anglo-Saxon as any Gael, Cymro, Manxman or Breton.’ A College of Bards, a Cornish Gorsedd, affiliated to its Welsh and Breton sister organisations, was established in 1927, and held annual ceremonies conducted by blue-robed bards speaking the Cornish language. But by 1937 a newspaper correspondent reluctantly admitted: ‘If we are quite truthful we have to admit that the revival of the Gorsedd has scarcely touched the lives of the common people of Cornwall.’
The members of Tyr Ha Tavas, mainly young people, lobbied local MPs to give greater importance to specifically Cornish problems, and produced a magazine, Kernow (the Cornish word for ‘Cornwall’). However, Kernow always sold more copies to those outside Cornwall than to those who lived there, and the marginal political thrust of Tyr Ha Tavas failed entirely to address the social and economic problems of the county, which St Day had in great number.
Those few men still employed in the few mines operating would leave the village just after five in the morning to go down on the early-morning shift, ‘up again at 3.30 p.m. then walk home … there were no baths or showers … mining was hard, dirty and wet work and the miners did almost everything by hand. The only lighting was candles or carbide lights.’ Nevertheless, work was so scarce in the Welsh coalmines that ‘A number of families decided to pack up and head for Cornwall, with just a glimmer of hope that their luck might change,’ remembers F.R. Clymo, who was a boy at the time.
I have no idea how many were involved in this trek, but I well remember five or six men coming to St Day … It took them almost a month to reach us, sleeping rough as they went. They were desperate men who had to make it because their families left behind in the valleys were dependent on them. About a month later when accommodation had been found their families came down in lorries, which were sponsored by the British Legion … I remember the new intake of Welsh girls and boys who came to our school … they were like refugees … [but] at no time did we have any industrial projects since the closing of the mining industry … very few people were tempted to become residents here.
The only casual work likely to be had, Clymo recalled, was
when Falmouth Docks would get a shipload of cement in, which would have to be unloaded … it was a job not done by the dock labourers, so … the labour exchange would direct a certain number of unemployed men to report to the docks … There was no such thing as refusal. Refusing meant instant stoppage of unemployment benefits … I’ve seen men return after three days of this work with their hands raw and bleeding through continually carrying hundredweights of hot cement from the ship to the warehouse. On another occasion, right here in the village the GPO put the main telephone cables underground from the Exchange …