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Summer 2015 E-Newsletter Dear Reader, Welcome to the Summer

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Summer 2015 E-Newsletter Dear Reader, Welcome to the Summer Summer 2015 e-newsletter Dear Reader, Welcome to the summer edition of our e-newsletter. The newsletter covers news from Cornwall Record Office and the Cornish Studies Library and is sent out quarterly. If you know anyone who would like to subscribe, please ask them to send a blank email to [email protected] with ‘Subscribe to E-newsletter’ in the subject line. We hope you enjoy this edition and have a lovely summer. Kind regards, The Archives and Cornish Studies Team NEWS Kresen Kernow – Trustee’s Visit As you may have read in our previous e-newsletters, we submitted a funding bid to the Heritage Lottery Fund for a new archive centre for Cornwall, on the former Redruth Brewery site, back in April. We will learn if we’ve been successful with the bid this summer, so wish us luck! You can read all about the project proposals by visiting www.cornwall.gov.uk/kresenkernow. On June 17th we were joined at the site by David Heathcoat-Amory, HLF Trustee and former MP. He heard all about the project and enjoyed a tour of the site; he will report back to the national board about the project’s progress. Lanhydrock project Participants in the Lanhydrock Volunteer Cataloguing Project have been hard at work continuing with their aim to create a new catalogue for the Lanhydrock Robartes collection. The updated catalogue is now live in the public domain, searchable through the Record Office online catalogue under the reference number ‘CL’. Volunteers involved with stewarding and other activities at the house were invited to help catalogue deeds, rentals, correspondence, plans and industrial records from the collection on-site in the estate house. Nearly a year into the project, 31 volunteers have participated; so far they have contributed a total of 1533.55 hours! Although the historical writing has proved challenging at times, the volunteers have commented on the satisfaction and intrigue they feel when completing their allocated bundles and discover a little more insight into the family estate affairs. They have successfully catalogued and completed the preservation of over 1500 deeds and leases and over 740 individual items in the rental series. Work continues on expanding the catalogue entries with the 50 bundles of correspondence which represent the collection relating to Anna-Maria Hunt, miscellaneous estate boxed plans with one volunteer having now catalogued over 180 plans, and another volunteer completing over 50% of the industrial records. Continued interest has led to the decision to continue the project during 2015, with support from CRO and further funding provided by the National Trust. The news of the project continuation has been met by a delighted response from the group of volunteers who feel there is still much to uncover from the archive material. ‘Brewing Up The Past’ - with Tough Dough Building on the success of our Redruth Community History Project with Cascade Theatre Company, we are working with arts practitioners, Tough Dough, to further capture memories and stories from Redruth brewery and work with children in the local community to create animations inspired by them. The animations will premiere in Redruth this autumn, keep an eye on our Facebook page, www.facebook.com/kresenkernow, for further details. WHAT'S ON? Did you or your ancestors get married in Cornwall? Do you have memories or photos that you would share with us? If so, we’d love to hear from you! On August 1st we will launch Nice Place for a White Wedding, a new exhibition focusing on weddings in Cornwall (both historic and more recent), and we are looking for community contributions to this. We would love to crowd-source some of the content for this exhibition so if you have photos or material relating to weddings in Cornwall that you would like to share please don’t hesitate to get in touch by emailing them to [email protected] with ‘For Wedding Exhibition’ in the subject line. Alternatively you could pop along to our Wedding Day on Saturday August 1st at the Cornish Studies Library from 10am-1pm and we will scan the items for you for inclusion in the exhibition. The exhibition, part of our Life in the Archive series, runs from August 1st-29th, in Library open hours and will feature photos, invitations, historic pre-nuptial agreements, marriage registers and much more. We will be running a range of activities and events as part of Redruth’s Mining and Pasty Festival and the Heritage Open Days scheme on September 11th and 12th. At the community centre in Redruth there will be a marquee housing a small exhibition about Kresen Kernow, the new archive and local history centre for Cornwall which will be located inside the historic fabric of the former Redruth Brewery. There will also be guided walks around the neighbourhood looking at the array of businesses formerly on the site as well as the impressive line-up of industrial trailblazers who lived and worked locally, including William Murdoch, Richard Trevithick and James Watt. These will leave from the marquee located in front of the Redruth Community Centre in Chapel Street. To book your place on a guided walk please email [email protected] or call 01872 323127. There will also be an accompanying exhibition of Redruth Brewery related artefacts from the Trevithick Society and documents as well as musical entertainment (Friday only) at the Cornish Studies Library. In late October we will open the final in our series of Life in the Archives exhibitions with a very special event… There will be more details to follow in the coming months so keep your eyes peeled! For the most up to date information about what’s going on, Like us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/kresenkernow RECENT ACCESSIONS Lack of storage space at the Record Office and the consequent postponement of some accessions is beginning to take effect, resulting in only 33 new accessions between March and May 2015, although this still represents a wide range of new material for our collections. Plymouth and West Devon Record Office gave us a small collection relating to the fascinating career of Richard Dale (born 1877), a master mariner from St Ives. It appears he first went to sea at the age of 15 and by the end of 1894 was engaged as an ordinary seaman on the sailing ship Toxteth of Liverpool. His detailed diary reveals the rhythm of life on board ship: the system of watches, meals, daily tasks including cleaning the decks, setting and furling sails and weather conditions. The voyage gets off to a bad start; they remain windbound at anchor 11 days over Christmas 1894, during which time Richard says he ‘never felt so homesick in my life as I have felt today thinking about Christmas’ though the Christmas dinner of sea pie, duff and a glass of port wine was ‘not so bad as I expected’! Richard later qualified as a master mariner and the collection includes letters from later voyages as well as from the time he spent as a prisoner of war in Germany after he was captured following the sinking of his ship during the First World War (collection reference AD2394). The Record Office has also received important records for two Cornish schools going back to the 19th century: log books for St Agnes, 1865-1952 (SAGN1/1/6-10) and an admission register for Lanreath, 1878-1910 (SLANR1/2/1). School records are some of our most heavily used and are a great way of giving today’s school children an insight into what life was like in the past. Both accessions also shine a light on what the pupils studied at school. A volume for St Agnes School from the 1930s lays out the syllabus for years 1-4 (age 11-15). In nature study pupils were expected to be able to identify grasses including Sheep’s fescue, common Quaking grass and Yorkshire fog while the needlework syllabus included constructing both a run and fell seam and a French seam! At Lanreath School in 1971 pupils were expected to translate ‘Do not walk into the garden with the most beautiful girl’ into Latin – very useful I’m sure! We also received items highlighting Cornwall’s appeal as a holiday destination; these include a range of photos of areas such as Kynance Cove, and a detailed account of a trip to Cornwall given in a scrapbook compiled by Dorothy Craig during a caravanning holiday she made with Jim Robinson and Snuff the dog in the summer of 1953. They arrived in Bude on 30th July, which she describes as ‘a pleasant place’. The following week was spent extensively touring around including taking a day trip to the Isles of Scilly. She comments that St Michael’s Mount ‘is not nearly so fairy like when viewed from below, as it was seen at a distance in the shimmering haze of the setting sun’ whereas Polperro ‘lived up to all I had imagined and besides that produced the best ice cream I have ever tasted!’ In addition to diary entries and photographs the scrapbook contains tickets, postcards and tourist guides picked up during the trip (AD2381/1). A selection of new books is also now available at the Cornish Studies Library including: Wheal Basset: Five centuries of mining at Carnkie by Allen Buckley. Trevithick Society, 2015. (ISBN – 0957566940) This publication begins with fascinating insights into the earliest days of mining in the Carnkie area, progresses through the boom years of the nineteenth century and ends with the struggle for survival of Basset Mines Limited, one of the largest mines ever to work in Cornwall, before its closure in 1918.
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