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The Thames Valley Cornish Association Affiliated to The London Cornish Association F A C T S H E E T as at February 2010 v
Founded by two expatriate Cornish - Miss Iris Reynolds,
the first President, and Mrs Gladys Rosewall, who succeeded her as
President and remained so until her death in 2003. v
The first meeting took place in Slough Town Hall in 1972,
so 2012 will be our 40th anniversary. v
The Association’s
aims were and are: ·
To
foster friendship amongst Cornish people living away from Cornwall. ·
To
stimulate interest in the history, traditions, antiquities and social
conditions of Cornwall. v
Membership is open to those with Cornish connections by
birth, marriage or descent.
Others who like Cornwall can join as Associate Members.
In other words, everyone is welcome! v
Our circa 40 members come from Berkshire, Buckinghamshire,
Oxfordshire, Hertfordshire, London, Middlesex and Surrey (and a few live
in Cornwall and elsewhere), so we have a wide catchment area. v
Founder member Mrs Ruth Williams is President, Dr Francis
Dunstan is Chairman & Hon Treasurer and Mr Jim Jenkin is Hon
Secretary & Annual Event Officer.
We have an active Committee. v
Our annual programme, beginning in September, has a
balance of outings and meetings/talks. v
Meetings/talks take place at The Small Hall, United Reform
Church, Stomp Road, Burnham, Buckinghamshire SL1 7LR and outings are as
shown on our programme.
Light refreshments and sometimes imported pasties (small extra
charge) are provided at meetings and once or twice a year a full supper
is held, including the jolly ‘Christmas Warm-Up’. v
Talks have covered everything from Cornish engineers in
South Africa to acupuncture, Cornish railways, The Crimea, The Scilly
Isles, China, The Cornish Prayer Book Rebellion, Dogs for the Deaf,
Daphne du Maurier, The Royal Farms, The Western Front Association, Great
Gardens of Russia, Cornish ‘Firsts’ and more, i.e. a good
cross-section of Cornish-related and general subjects to suit all
tastes. Outings
include pub lunches, an annual picnic by the Thames and visits to places
such as the Pumping Station at Kew, London, to see the Cornish engines. v For the first 30 years, from 1972 to 2002, an Annual Dinner was held. Principal guests’ subjects included The Eden Project, childhood memories of Cornwall and Cornish poetry. There is usually a greeting from HRH The Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall v In 2003 our annual event was changed, by way of experiment, to a more informal lunch. This proved popular and is now the pattern v
Since 2008 our Annual Event/Lunch has been held at the
Eton College Rowing Centre, Dorney Lake, a spectacular location, with
the added cachet of being a 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games venue.
The Lunch is very well attended by TVCA and other Cornish
Association members alike.
Dorney Lake will be our venue again for 2010. v We are always pleased to hear from potential new members, who will find the atmosphere at all our events friendly and welcoming Note: The London Cornish Association is the central association to which most of the world-wide network of Cornish Associations is affiliated. As well as a wide spread in the UK, there are sister societies in North America, Australia, South Africa and elsewhere, i.e. areas to which Cornish people emigrated.
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Hello
again Already
a month of 2010 gone and, pretty though it was, hopefully so is the
snow. It’s a strange
feeling being marooned in a town, let alone in the countryside.
However, the mercury, or whatever is now permitted, is rising and
even some blossom has been seen. v
Not
only is the weather hotting up but so is the political temperature in
the run-up to the General Election.
TVCA
member Councillor Diana Coad
is Conservative Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Slough, which
currently has a Labour MP. Diana’s
hard-working campaign is going into warp drive now.
We wish her very well. v
Another
person recently in the news is Ossie Williams,
long-term member, husband of President Ruth and devoted Rotarian.
In the latter capacity Ossie founded and then master-minded an
extremely successful series of charity Christmas concerts at Eton
College over 20 years. Renowned
local choirs, orchestras and musicians have been involved and there has
been an impressive list of celebrity compères including Sir Cliff
Richard, Cilla Black and Sue Barker.
Over £100,000 have been raised for good causes. At the age of 81
Ossie has finally handed over the baton to a colleague, so he’ll be
able to enjoy future concerts as an audience member rather than as the
organiser. Many
congratulations to him on such a wonderful concert history. v
From
a concert to a festival - Port
Eliot Festival
has won The Oldie Magazine’s
Best Festival Award in its third annual ‘Oldie Travel Awards’.
The write-up runs thus: ‘The literary festival with a twist!
Great writers, delicious food, wonderful music and a brilliant
atmosphere. Founded by
Peregrine St Germans and his wife Catherine, the festival is now in its
seventh year and is a celebration of words, music, imagination,
laughter, exploration and – above all – fun’.
What a lovely description. v
v
An
enterprising Scilly Islands resident,
Fiona Robson, overcame a setback when her family’s rent was increased
several-fold by The Duchy of Cornwall – she sold two Christmas cards
from HRH The Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall on eBay for £255, which
helped towards the extra amount. v
v
On
a lesser scale Dobwalls
residents were disaffected not so long ago.
They wanted to replace weeds with flowers on a roundabout
on the new bypass but the Highways Agency said flowers would distract
drivers and cause accidents. Bureaucracy
gone mad again in one of the small ways that appear to lack common sense
and take some of the colour out of our daily lives, literally in this
case. v
But
here’s a
happy item
- Mrs Lottie Davis celebrated her 108th birthday in December.
She comes from West Bromwich but moved at 99 to Cornwall to be
near her son and now lives in the Poldhu Care Home at Poldhu on The
Lizard. Mrs Davis is one of
Britain’s oldest women and attributes her longevity to having begun to
take a nightly drink of whisky at 75, after a life-time of being
teetotal. Very
sensible. And
Britain’s oldest twins, Jenny Pelmore and Betty Richards, who also
live in Cornwall, were 102 on New Year’s Day 2010.
The three ladies all still enjoy a good quality of life. v
Quality
of life
was the subject of a recent and very extensive Government survey.
It listed the best and worst places to live in the UK.
The best places were awarded three or two green flags and the
worst two or three red flags, judged over a wide range of criteria
including public transport, childhood obesity, health, housing and crime
reduction. Cornwall
received two red flags, falling down on child safety and housing. v Did you know that the UK’s third most common surname, Williams, traditionally Welsh (like number 2 Jones - no 1 is Smith) but previously found in large numbers in Cornwall (viz our President Ruth and husband Ossie) is now in steep decline there. Family history Website www.findmypast.com compared distribution of the top English and Welsh surnames in 1881 with now and found big shifts in their whereabouts. These internal migrations are attributed to better education and economic development, which induce people to move around for work and other opportunities. v
There’s
a wealth of historical, bizarre and curious variety in the names
of pubs.
In Hayle there’s one called The Bucket of Blood, thought to
date from some 200 years ago, when the owner found a human head in the
bucket of the nearby well. v
Here’s
another ‘did you know’. At
Treave there’s a
replica of Stonehenge
put up by an eccentric female dowser in the garden of her bungalow –
she couldn’t get planning permission to make a really big circle!
An Internet description calls it ‘Clonehenge’! v
A
wistful find
from 2008 has just been publicised: a bag of photographs of a pretty
young woman and love letters dating from the 1940’s to the 1960’s,
with other memorabilia, left on a First bus in 2008.
The coach had travelled in London, Devon and Cornwall, and it
seems that the lady, who may have been Miss Anna Paton, had lived in St
Ives, as well as in London and various places abroad.
The bus company has drawn a complete blank on trying to find the
owner of this very personal collection so have made it known in a
further effort to track down the person who left it behind.
v
Meanwhile
Timothy James of Penzance wrote to The
Daily Mail regretting Parliament’s renewed refusal to include ‘Ethnic
Cornish’
as a 2011 Census description. We
should appeal, he says, to The European Parliament and makes some
interesting points: ‘European countries all recognise Cornwall as
distinct ….. (and one is still at war with us.
Holland didn’t make peace with Cornwall, as it did with
England)’. ‘Don’t
worry too much though’ Mr James continues,
‘Serbia doesn’t recognise Kosovo but 62 other countries do.
It could be the same for Cornwall’.
v
Another
‘Letter to the Editor’, from Mr Matthew Dale of Restronguet to The
Daily Telegraph, reported on an innovative
use of a leaf-blower,
following other letters about their noisiness.
When visiting Minions, which has hardly a tree in sight, he was
surprised to hear a leaf-blower and found the owner was blowing sheep
dung off his drive with it, a usage probably not thought of by the
manufacturer. v
There
was another surprising item in The
Mail on Sunday’s ‘Live Magazine’ a few months ago, a
photograph showing where the newest
Internet feed
comes into Britain and, guess what, it’s buried in a Trans-Atlantic
cable under a North Cornish beach. The exact location is secret for security reasons.
Most people think the Internet is connected by satellite but
evidently 90% goes through cables, not least between the world’s two
busiest hubs, New York and London.
Fascinating stuff. Oh
and by the way Internet capacity could run out in 2014, so we could be
back to snail mail in a big way. v
v
Talking
of things coastal it seems that Frances’s biggest television channel,
TF 1, plans to adapt ITV 1’s ‘Doc
Martin’
and several villages are vying to be chosen as the filming location.
Clohars-Carnoët in Brittany and Collioure down near Spain for
instance both feel they have everything needed to recreate the
atmosphere of ITV’s fictional Port Wenn, Cornwall.
It seems, said The Times in January, that ‘The simple formula of a high-flying
surgeon forced to become a small-town GP due to an unfortunate phobia
for blood has proved easily translatable into dozens of cultures’. v
A
significant real person, who died in January at 88, was The
Right Reverend Monsignor Graham Leonard,
Bishop of Willesden, Truro from 1973 to 1981 and London.
His father was an evangelical Anglican vicar but, after Oxford
and war-time Army service, Bishop Leonard became influential amongst
Anglo-Catholics and in retirement became a Catholic.
He achieved his desire to be a pastor and teacher.
In Cornwall he forged links with the Methodists and encouraged
the use of Cornish in public worship.
‘This was’, said The Times, ‘perhaps the happiest time of his life as a Bishop’. v
Thanks
to everyone for saying they’ve enjoyed reading the Tag. It also goes, by
the way, to ace glossy magazine Cornish
World whose Editor,
Nigel Pengelly, sometimes uses extracts from it.
If there are any scribes
out there who fancy producing their own-style bulletin, please contact
our Chairman or Secretary. [News
taken from: Windsor Express, The Oldie, BBC Radio 4, The Daily Mail,
Private Eye, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Mail on Sunday, The
Times]
Editor:
P A Powell
The Thames Valley Cornish Association
77 Bolton Road, Windsor, Berks SL4 3JX
Affiliated to The London Cornish Association |
