Lamorna Writers

My biography of the Lamorna based romantic novelist, Cecily Sidgwick, and her philosopher husband, Alfred, is reproduced on this website. 

 

Cecily Sidgwick, who was of German Jewish origin, was a hugely successful novelist, publishing over forty works.  She lived in Lamorna from 1906 until her death in 1934.  Many of her novels contain autobiographical references and a number of them describe life in Lamorna and her artist friends there (and their homes, studios and gardens).  They are an invaluable record of the Lamorna colony and I draw on them extensively for my lecture on the Social History of that colony.  She also passed fascinating, and often humorous, comment on German / Jewish / English modes of life, particularly as regards the management of the household, and there is much of interest in her works for the feminist historian and those researching German / Jewish / English relations.

 

For more information and to read the biography, click here

My biography of the Author, Artist and Adventurer, Crosbie Garstin, eldest son of Newlyn School painter, Norman Garstin, was published in 2017. 

 

Crosbie Garstin led an extraordinarily adventurous life, which saw him work as a broncho-buster, lumberjack, gold miner, harvester in Canada and North America, as a bush-ranger and cattle ranch manager in South Africa and as a cavalryman in France, Ireland and Italy during WWI.  He used these and other subsequent experiences in his writings, which include poetry, short stories, comic war stories, adventure novels, farces, amusing travelogues etc.  An irrepressible and irreverent character, he lived in Lamorna from 1919 to 1930, when he drowned at Salcombe.  Or did he do a runner?

 

The biography is a limited edition of 300.  Copies are still available.  For more information and a review, click here

Charles Marriott lived in 1901-2 at 'Flagstaff Cottage', Lamorna.  In 1902, this became the home of Samuel John Lamorna Birch after his marriage and has remained the home of the Birch family ever since.  Marriott used his experiences in Lamorna in his third novel Genevra (1904) and in a number of short stories, which featuired in the rarely found compilation, Women and the West.

 

The following are articles on these books written by me for the Lamorna Society magazine, 'The Flagstaff' - that on Genevra in the Summer 2015 issue and that on the short stories in the Summer 2017 issue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Charles Marriott’s Genevra (1904)

 

Charles Marriott (1869-1957) was the son of a Bristol brewer and first visited Cornwall in 1889. He then worked for twelve years as a photographer and dispenser at Rainhill Asylum in Lancashire, before winning huge acclaim in 1901 for his first novel, The Column, which was set partly in Cornwall, albeit I have not been able to determine precisely where. This prompted him to move to the Duchy, where he lived initially in Flagstaff Cottage, Lamorna. Accordingly, he occupied the cottage immediately before John Lamorna Birch. Deciding that he preferred the painterly bustle of St Ives, he moved there in 1902, where he became a stalwart of the Arts Club. In 1903, he published his second novel, The House on the Sands, which featured St Ives, but his third novel, Genevra (1904), is set in Lamorna, and so includes some fascinating descriptions of the valley and the locality at that time. In particular, the family home of the heroine, Genevra Joslin, ‘Trecoth’, is based on Trewoofe Manor, just as Crosbie Garstin later based ‘Bosula’ on it in his Penhale trilogy. Flagstaff Cottage also features, albeit Marriott is not too complimentary about it.

 

Leonard Woolf, who had just read Marriott’s first novel, The Column, recommended it highly when writing to Lytton Strachey in April 1901 - ”If I were a reviewer I should shout & scream ‘A New Great Author’.” Woolf was not alone: comparisons were made with Henry James and, later, E.M. Forster, and Sutherland in Victorian Fiction notes that “reviewers of the period reckoned The Column a major work of English literature”. Accordingly, I have always been a little ashamed of myself for never managing to get very far into it, let alone finish it, despite several attempts. However, in a recent assessment of Marriott’s literary work, I was quite relieved to find that The Times literary critic had not been so enthusiastic, commenting “To mark it with a pencil, we find easy; to read it, is a trial of patience almost not to be borne; to digest it, is flatly impossible. A more dull, tedious, affected production, we have never encountered.” (Quoted in Rebecca Sitch, Domesticating Modern Art - Charles Marriott (1869-1957) and the Art Of Middlebrow Criticism, in Ed. Kate Macdonald, Transitions in Middlebrow Writing 1880-1930, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.)

 

Indeed, ten years later, Edwin Pugh, writing in The New Age, labelled Marriott’s ‘artificial ornate’ way of writing as being a model of ‘bad’ prose style - “bad because it is stilted and self-conscious” and “vulgar because it is pretentious and affected”.(ibid).  Having had a similar problem getting through Marriott’s second novel, The House on the Sands, I did not approach Genevra with any great enthusiasm, but I am delighted to say that it is far more readable and is not at all pretentious. Indeed, I believe that you would enjoy this tale of a Cornish girl, with poetic talent, whose ancient family home is in danger of being repossessed, due to the incompetence of her weak-willed brother and his charmless wife as flower farmers. Encouraged by her brother to marry the solicitor to whom he is indebted, Genevra finds herself torn between her duty to uphold her family name and save her family home, and her own emotional and literary aspirations. The presence of a Welsh artist lodger, for whom she falls, but who is as equally dedicated to his art, as she is to her poetry, complicates the choices that she has to make.

 

The Lamorna setting, albeit the valley is called in the novel Rosewithan, is confirmed by this extract describing the road past Clapper Mill and Oakhill Cottages to Trewoofe, where Genevra Joslin and her brother, George, lived.

 

“At this point the road had the indescribable character of approaching some place of importance. The ridge of the hill was beset with twisted oaks, evidently the survivors of a larger number, holding the sunset between their bare branches like dregs of wine, palpably thickened. Under the left flank of the hill was a large overshot water-wheel fed by a pulsing channel which here passed beneath the road. Further to the left a great valley shut in between solemn carns curved away grandly to the invisible sea. On the right, four white cottages, built in a row as if against fear of solitude, stared hopelessly down the valley over garden ramparts of ice-plant and tamarisk. There was no sound except the plashing of the water which escaped over the green-stained timbers of the wheel now stationary. Below the mill the water found its way into a bigger stream hastening through the valley to the sea....Over the brow of the hill the road plunged and rose on its way to the Land’s End...Genevra turned to the right along a straggling avenue of elms coming round to an irregular group of farm buildings, shadowed by rook-haunted trees and standing in immemorial mud. This was Trecoth, once the most important manor of West Cornwall, and dating from the Norman Conquest. Although approached on either hand by a hill, Trecoth cowered in a cuplike hollow and made no outline against the sky. There was nothing to attract attention from the main road; only when standing in the town-place did one comprehend its former consequence. The plan was still that of the letter E, indicating that the present buildings dated from the sixteenth century. That part corresponding with the lower limb of the letter was still inhabited, the rest was divided into barns and sheds, all more or less decayed, some of them roofless. Facing the short limb and hidden from the road was a newer building perhaps a hundred years old and this was the dwelling house of the Joslins. The whole place wore the peculiar sullen look of ancient granite houses which take on the grandeur of age without its tenderness, and suggest doom without romance.” (p.13-4).

 

Later in the story, the artist lodger, Leonard Morris, opts to use the old banqueting hall of the original manor house as his studio. Marriott describes its then condition as follows:-

 

“The place referred to by Genevra as the banqueting-hall was interesting because the original doorway was nearly intact, though the rich carving was disfigured - almost obliterated indeed - by successive layers of whitewash. That portion of the building opposite Genevra’s window was roofless and decayed: the blackened fireplace exposed, the fallen stones overgrown with mosses and weeds; but the remainder, about two-thirds of the back of the letter E facing the Rosewithan Valley, was in decent repair, and used by George Joslin as a storehouse for ‘shooting’ potatoes, baskets and trays for use in planting, and other odds and ends.” (p.58-9).

 

It is interesting to learn that, in addition to its later travels to St Ives as a garden ornament and back as Margaret Powell’s front door, the well-known carved doorway of Trewoofe Manor was at this juncture so little thought of that it was covered in whitewash.  Like Cecily Sidgwick did a few years later, Marriott refers to the plantation near Trewoofe as known locally as ‘Merlin’s Wood’. This comprised a variety of trees - “oak, ash, chestnut, beech, and hazel, with an unusual mixture of laurel which gave it a curious distinction...The atmosphere was that of legend and enchantment, made more magical by the absence of heavy shade. There was very little undergrowth to hide the extraordinary contortions of the tree branches; and the beech trunks, silver satin, lit from every quarter, had no definite shadows, and thus became unsubstantial, baffling the eye. It was a place of illusion rather than mystery. Huge granite boulders covered with mosses, lichens, and sprouting ferns were grouped round pools of dark water patterned with fallen beech leaves, like blue steel arabesqued with copper sequins. The light brown carpet of the wood was diapered with the clover-like leaves of the oxalis upheld on their fine stems and forming a shimmering green veil a few inches above the ground. The wood ascended brokenly, the upper edge castled against the sky with towering blocks of granite, hung with ivy, and here and there fallen together, leaving caves and crevices between them.” Perhaps, one day, such descriptions will be useful if sections of the Lamorna woodlands ever come into the hands of an organisation keen to restore them to their former glory.

 

As one might imagine, given that Marriott himself lived there for a year or so, Flagstaff Cottage features in the story, as the home of the unconventional retired teacher, Uter Penrose. However, the author calls it an “ugly gray cottage...perched on a shoulder of the cliff, and staring backwards along the road out of little windows like [Penrose’s] own imperturbable eyes. On the opposite side of the valley was the great scar of the quarry; the slope of the hill spoiled by livid heaps of discarded granite.” (p.74). He was equally scathing about the interior. In “the queerly furnished” sitting room, “the worn leather-covered chairs left but little space to move about in, and one wall was entirely taken up with a rickety bookcase with glass doors. The bagging wallpaper had taken on an amazing variety of tints with damp, and the recesses of the windows, one looking seaward, the other facing the quarry, were not papered at all. In spite of the fire, the room smelt of mildew.” (p.78-9). It was only the view from the front on a starry night, as the Newlyn luggers were out in the bay, herring drifting, that moved him to comment that “their riding lights matching the stars gave the illusion that he stood at the edge of the world and looked down into the abyss of the sky.” (p.93).

 

There are some interesting sections of the novel, during which Marriott records various local practices that he has witnessed. One concerned the inter-connection between furze collecting and rabbit shooting.

 

“Hunting in West Cornwall means less the pursuit of the fox than rabbit-shooting. The prevalence of these enemies of the farmer has developed a local breed of dog, a cross between a setter and a spaniel, admirably adapted to the character of the country. During the late autumn, the furze-cutters, protected with gauntlets and greaves, and armed with stout hooks, are at work on the moors cutting and bundling furze to be stacked for fuel. Their labours leave wide lanes and aisles of bare ground between the rectangular furzy thickets. The dogs work in couples with exquisite inter-dependence, like two ‘forwards’ dribbling at football. They are put in at one end of a thicket, whilst the guns command the clearing at the other. When once the dogs have disappeared, there is nothing to betray their presence except a sinuous vibration of the furze-tops and a stifled yelp of excitement, until with padding feet the rabbit bounds from cover under the muzzles of the guns. Where the old hedges of rough stone and beaten earth are honeycombed with burrows, a ferret is used. The little pink-eyed beast is taken from somebody’s pocket and insinuated into an opening whilst the sportsmen stand on top of the hedge with bent heads listening to the muffled music of the bell, now fainter, now louder, as ‘Bun’ explores the labyrinth, occasionally ceasing altogether, and causing a moment of anxiety lest the ferret shall have succumbed to the temptation to lie-up. Presently, there is a hollow throbbing, felt rather than heard, within the hedge. Heads go up, backs straighten, the guns come to the ready; it is quick shooting, for no man can say on which side of the hedge the rabbit will break away.” (p.124-5).

 

Given that Genevra’s brother is involved in flower farming, there are some atmospheric descriptions of the flower fields on the cliffs above Lamorna. Marriott calls the farm ‘Trenowan’ and as it was approached from the Cove up through the quarry, it was presumably situated near Kemyel. There are also some evocative descriptions of Treen Dinas, home of the Logan Rock, and, of course, of Carn Galva and Lamorna Cove itself.

 

Marriott was living in Lamorna at the time that the bells at St Buryan Church were substantially refurbished in 1901, and he also finds an excuse to make mention of the quaint Latin inscriptions on two of the bells - Virginis egregiae vocor campana Mariae (I am called the bell of Mary the Glorious Virgin) and Vocem ego do vobis : vos date verba Deo (I give my voice to you : give ye your words to God).

 

Marriott continued writing novels for a decade or so, then branched into travel books, some of which were illustrated by his St Ives artist friends, such as William Titcomb and Albert Moulton Foweraker, before becoming art critic of The Times after World War 1. His modernist leanings, and some acerbic comments about the art of some of his former traditionalist colleagues, did not result in lasting friendships, particularly as it was felt by some that Marriott had gone on refining himself to such a degree that there was little of the original Marriott left.

 

There are some original copies of the book available on www.abebooks.com and new reprints are also now being produced.