Poldark's Cornwall by Winston Graham

Author:Winston Graham [Graham, Winston]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

The tightly packed houses of St Ives.

The tightly packed houses of St Ives.

Godrevey Lighthouse sits off the eastern end of St Ives Bay.

Tater Du is Cornwall’s newest lighthouse, built after a wreck off Mousehole in 1963.

Nowadays it is quite difficult to get into the town: if you are a tourist you will be directed to a huge car park high above the town and will be expected to walk from there. It was the only solution short of a destruction of the town and the construction of giant car parks on the quays. Fortunately St Ives has set its face against any such thing; you can take it as it is or you don’t take it at all.

Of course there has been much building, chiefly along the approach roads, most of it cheap and hideous, but the town itself has tried to keep its dignity and its individuality. There has been a recent scandal because the lifeboat house was retiled with red slates. The Council is insisting that they shall be taken off and replaced with grey. More honour to the Council. Sit on any of the beaches of St Ives and look back at the land. Note the colour and the elevations. Grey prevails everywhere, and low profiles. Compare this with the ravages of the French Riviera, of the Costa Brava, of Corfu.

Recently there has been a tragic loss of life when the Penlee lifeboat, near Mousehole on the other coast, was overturned while trying to rescue men from a shipwreck, and all the lifeboat crew was drowned. Few now perhaps will remember a similar disaster occurring to the St Ives lifeboat crew under Coxswain Cocking in 1938. I cannot remember whether there were any survivors from this crew – I think one – but I remember going down the following afternoon and looking at the lifeboat, the John & Sarah Eliza Stych, where it had been deposited by the sea upright on a flat reef of rock, almost undamaged-looking but empty of men. It was as if some great beast had swallowed them and spat out the husk. And the beast, still lashed by what was left of an eighty-mile-an-hour gale, provided a world of tumbling water and a mist of spume and spray drifting inwards across Trencrom Hill and wandering far overland towards the southern shore.

St Ives has a fine record for the courage of its lifeboat crews, and, before there were any lifeboats, the pilots, who seldom failed to risk their lives when ships in distress were blown into the bay. In the twenty-five years ending in 1848, over 150 vessels were wrecked on this coast between Cape Cornwall and Trevose, so there was opportunity enough for both heroism and acquisitiveness.

It is curious that it is the acquisitiveness which has entered into legends of the time. Of course wrecking was extensively practised. To a Cornishman a wreck was the spoils of the sea, just as surely as a shoal of fish. Wrecks were a gift of

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