Cornish People

William Bickford is acknowledged to have invented one of the greatest boons to mining and quarrying throughout the world, saving countless lives and preventing injuries.

Born in Devon he moved to Tuckingmill, near Camborne, in the heart of the mining district. Early in 1831 he decided to try to stop the accidents caused in the igniting of gunpowder by the miners.

The idea came to Bickford to try to pour gunpowder from a funnel into the centre of a rope as it was spun. This could then be sealed, resulting in a 'fuze'. These cords were tested by miners and were found to be highly successful.

Bickford took out a patent for the 'patent safety rod' in September 1831. Later the name was changed to 'safety fuze' as Bickford travelled around the mines demonstrating how effective and safe this new system was, and laying the foundation for an international business.

The reputation of inventor William Murdoch reflects, in some ways, the fortunes of Redruth.

Murdoch, a Scotsman by birth, was an engineer and inventor who lived in Redruth from 1782 until 1798 and he is best known for the invention of domestic gas lighting.

Other successes included a working model of a lowp-ressure steam locomotive, and a process for clearing beer.

Murdoch House, the building in which he lived, has been restored over a period of time, and currently houses Redruth Old Cornwall Society, the Cornish American Connection, Redruth Story Group, and is used as a centre by artistic and cultural groups.

The commercial success of the London based firm of A & F Pears is due largely to the efforts of two men, Andrew Pears, a farmer's son from Cornwall, and Thomas J Barratt, a man often referred to as the father of modern advertising.

Between them, though a generation was to separate their individual involvement with the firm, they evolved a classic threefold formula for success - spotting a gap on the market, developing a high quality product to fill it, and convincing as many people as possible to buy that product by the use of extensive promotion and advertising.

Andrew Pears arrived in London in 1789 from his native village of Mevagissey, where he had trained as a barber. He opened premises in Soho and was soon enjoying considerable patronage from wealthy families.

The astute Cornishman recognised the potential of a pure, gentle soap and set about perfecting a manufacturing process. Not only was his product of high quality, it also possessed the great novelty value of being transparent, and it was this latter aspect which gave Pears Soap the image it needed to be clearly identified by the public.

William Bligh, later to become famous in the Mutiny on the Bounty(/I>, was born at Tinten Manor, St Tudy, in 1754.

Bligh first went to sea in 1762, at the age of seven, as a captain’s personal servant on board HMS MonmouthI/I>, and joined the Royal Navy in 1770. He was an intelligent man, well versed in science and mathematics, and was also a talented writer and illustrator.

He became sailing master on the Resolution, commanded by Capt James Cook. The voyage ended with the death of Cook in Hawaii.

It is rumoured that, when not at sea, Bligh was the ‘bouncer’ at the Cornish Arms public house in St Tudy.

In 1787, aged 33, he was given command of the Bounty, to transport breadfruit from Tahiti to the West Indies, and set sail on December 23, 1787. In April 1789 the famous mutiny took place, led by Bligh’s one-time friend, Fletcher Christian. After the event, Bligh eventually returned to England and his career in the Navy.

In 1805, Bligh was sent to New South Wales as governor, but his oppressive manner contributed to an uprising in Sydney in 1808, led by John Macarthur, a pioneer and wool merchant originally from Stoke Damerel, in Devon. The British soldiers mutinied and Bligh was forcibly deposed and imprisoned for two years. On his release he returned to England where he was cleared of all blame and later promoted to Vice-Admiral.

In later years, Bligh lived at Farningham, in Kent, and died in 1817, aged 64, in Bond Street, London. He is buried in the eastern part of Lambeth churchyard.

Penzance-born Maria Branwell was the mother of the famous author sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte.

Maria was one of eight daughters and three sons born to Thomas and Anne Branwell and she left Cornwall in 1812 to marry the Rev Patrick Bronte. In 1820 the family moved to Haworth, on the Yorkshire Moors, where Maria died a year later.

The following year, Maria’s younger sister Elizabeth began caring for the six Bronte children.

Henry Trengrouse was born in Helston in 1772, was educated at the Grammar School and became a cabinet maker.

However, in 1807 he witnessed the sinking of the Anson off the Loe Bar coastline which prompted him to devote his life to inventing life-saving equipment.

He invented the rocket life saving apparatus (which saved over 20,000 lives), known as the 'breeches buoy' and also the life spencer or jacket.

He died in 1854.

Richard Trevithick was born in 1771 in Tregajorran between Camborne and Redruth.

His father was the manager of Dolcoath Mine and Richard always showed an aptitude for pumps and machinery. He is famous for running the first steam engine, which he demonstrated in December 1801 through the streets of Camborne.

The power of steam was shown by the fact that it could reach the top of Camborne Hill with a heavy load, something that horses struggled to do. He later went on to run another steam engine at Merthyr Tydfil in Wales.

He spent 11 years in Peru working on pumping engines in the mines. He arrived back in England with no money and eventually died penniless in 1833.

A statue in his honour can be seen in Camborne, and the town still celebrates Trevithick Day on the last Saturday in April.

A Quaker apothecary-cum-potter, born in 1705, William Cookworthy discovered china clay on Tregonning Hill, in the Breage area, in 1746.

He experimented with various samples and in 1768 he took out a patent to use the material, soon producing items at his Plymouth Porcelain Factory.

Until that time English pottery had consisted of coarse earthenware and stoneware ceramics and had suffered considerable competition from elsewhere.

He was the first inventor of a process for manufacturing porcelain in Britain.

Sir Humphrey Davy was the inventor of the miner's safety lamp. He was born in Penzance, where a statue of him still stands. He was interested in science and went to school in Penzance and then Truro to the Grammar School.

He started his career mixing potions for a Penzance surgeon and then became an assistant at the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol. He quickly established himself as a capable scientist through his work with gases.

He was president of the Royal Society for seven years. In 1812 he was knighted and in the same year, after an explosion in a coal mine near Sunderland killed 89 miners, was asked to design a safety lamp. His lamp was simple and consisted of wire gauze that allowed oxygen through to keep the flame burning, but held back explosive gases.

He died in May 1829 in Switzerland, aged 51.

Jonathan Trelawney was born in the parish of Pelynt on 24th March 1650.

He was ordained in 1673. Along with his brother Major General Charles Trelawney, he was instrumental in putting down the western rebellion led by the Duke of Monmouth.

As a thank you for his services during the uprising, King James II appointed Jonathan, Sir Jonathan Bishop of Bristol (his brother died shortly after the rebellion) in 1685.

Trelawney was one of seven Bishops who petitioned against King James II's Declaration of Indulgence in 1867/88 (the declaration granted religious tolerance to the Catholics) and along with the others was imprisoned in the Tower of London.

He was held for three weeks and then tried and acquitted. He was made Bishop of Exeter in 1688 and then Bishop of Winchester in 1707. He died in 1721.

Trelawney was immortalised in 'The Song of the Western Men' by Robert Stephen Hawker, and the song can still be heard sung in Cornwall, better known as Trelawny.

Cornwall once produced a world champion heavyweight boxer.

Bob Fitzsimmons was born in 1863 in Helston, where his father was a borough constable. In the 1870s, Bob and his family emigrated to New Zealand where he, his father and his brother worked as blacksmiths.

He took up boxing and competed in fights, which included travelling to Australia and later America. In March 1897, he beat Jim Corbett to become the world heavyweight champion.

Born in 1720 into a wealthy Cornish family, Foote was educated at Truro and Oxford.

He lived extravagantly, dissipated a fortune at Oxford and, after a brief period of imprisonment for debt while a law student at the Temple, appeared as an amateur at the Haymarket.

His talent for mimicry brought him considerable notoriety and almost all his plays included satiric portraits of living individuals. He was often in trouble and Foote's many victims rejoiced when he was tried on a trumped-up charge of homosexual rape, which, although he was aquitted, effectively silenced him.

Foote obtained, through the Duke of York, a patent for a theatre in Westminster (1766), as compensation for a practical joke whilst riding which had cost Foote his leg.

He built the new Haymarket (1767), which he held until 1777.

He died at Dover while on his way to France for the purpose of recovering his health. His portrait by Reynolds is at the Garrick Club.

Born in Padstow in 1793, Sir Goldsworthy Gurney was operating his own medical practice by the time he was 20.

At an early age he met Richard Trevithick, a pioneer of steam railways, and went on to build a steam-powered road vehicle himself. His carriage successfully travelled to and from London to Bath at an average speed of 15 miles per hour; he built several more and opened a passenger service.

He moved to London in 1820 and two years later was appointed lecturer in chemistry and natural philosophy at the Surrey Institute. It was here that he invented the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe, a system for burning a jet of oxygen and hydrogen to produce an intensely hot flame.

He experimented with it on different substances and discovered that a brilliant light was produced when the flame was played on a chunk of lime. This was limelight, and was so intense that it could be seen 95 miles away.

It found many uses in the theatre, (hence the phrase "to be in the limelight") but it was limelight's use in lighthouses that brought about Gurney's most famed invention. Gurney solved the problems associated with limelight with his Bude Light.

He used a single Bude Light to light his whole castle in the town, with a system of prisms and lenses running down his hallways to distribute the light into every room.

A descendant of Bishop Trelawney, Emily Hobhouse was born in 1860 in the village of St Ive near Liskeard.

Educated at home, she lived with her parents until she was 35. After the death of her father in 1895, Emily went to Minnesota, in the United States, where she remained for about two years, helping the emigrants working on the mines.

Her main work was to combat the severe drinking problems in the town. She became engaged to John Carr Jackson and went to Mexico where she bought a ranch.

She visited England in 1897 and returned to Mexico, accompanied by her cousin. In 1898, with her engagement broken off and her money largely lost in a speculative venture, she returned to England.

When the war with South Africa broke out in October 1899, Leonard Courtney, a liberal MP, invited Emily to join the South African Conciliation Committee, of which he was president.

In 1900 she formed the relief fund for South African women and children and more than 20 years later the people of South Africa raised £2,300 and sent it to Hobhouse in recognition of the work she had done on their behalf during the Boer War. The money was sent to her with the explicit mandate that she bought a small house for herself on the coast of Cornwall. Hobhouse purchased a property at St Ives.

Hobhouse had also been an opponent of British involvement in the First World War and became involved in dangerous activity during the conflict, after which she helped keep Germans and Russians alive.

Emily Hobhouse died in London in June 1926.

William Lovett, the son of the captain of a small fishing vessel, was born in Penzance in 1800 and went on to become a founder of the National Union Of The Working Classes, emerging as a major leader of reform.

His father had been drowned at sea before William was born and at the age of 21 he decided to find work in London. Lovett began attending evening classes at the London's Mechanics' Institute, where he met the radical publishers Henry Hetherington and John Cleave, who introduced him to the socialist ideas of Robert Owen.

Lovett abandoned his Methodist beliefs and later became a member of Owen's Grand National Consolidated Trades Union. In 1836, Lovett, Hetherington, Cleave and James Watson formed the London Working Men's Association (LMWA). When supporters of Parliamentary reform held a convention the following year, Lovett was chosen as the leader of the group that were now known as the Chartists.

In 1839 Lovett was arrested for making a speech and spent 12 months in Warwick Gaol. In 1842 he retired from politics and devoted the rest of his life to the development of working class education.

Lovett continued to run a bookshop, wrote school textbooks and taught evening classes, dying - in extreme poverty - in 1877.

Richard Lower was born on the family estate at Tremeer, near Bodmin, and is famous for his anatomical work on the brain and nerves.

He was involved in the first experiment with blood transfusions. Educated at Westminster School, he entered Christ Church, Oxford, in 1649 as the holder of a studentship, receiving his BA in 1653 and his MA in 1655. He stayed in Oxford studying medicine.

In 1667 Lower moved to London and set up in medical practice, first in Hatton Garden.

Lower is famous for his anatomical work on the brain and nerves, carried out as the assistant of Thomas Willis in Oxford in the early 1660s, and for his own anatomical and physiological investigation of the structure and action of the heart.

He was also involved in the first experimental transfusions of blood into a human subject in 1666. He was one of the most skilled and accomplished vivisectionists of his time.

John Couch Adams was born in the parish of Laneast, on Bodmin Moor, and, as an astronomer and mathematician, became the co-discoverer of the planet Neptune.

In 1841, while still an undergraduate at Cambridge, he decided to investigate the irregularities of the motion of Uranus, in order to find out whether they may be attributed to the action of an undiscovered planet beyond it. In September 1845 Adams gave accurate information on the position of the new planet to James Challis, director of the Cambridge Observatory.

Action was not taken by Cambridge and Urbain Le Verrier's later prediction was published before Adams's. It was Le Verrier's prediction which led to the discovery of Neptune in 1846 by Galle at the Berlin Observatory.

In 1859 Adams succeeded Peacock as Lowndean Professor of Astronomy and Geometry at Cambridge and held the post for over 32 years. He became director of the Cambridge Observatory in 1861.

He never boasted of his achievements and refused a knighthood which was offered to him in 1847.

John Arnold was born in Bodmin in 1736 and was apprenticed to his father at an early age as a watchmaker. In 1764 he constructed the smallest ever repeating and striking watch, which was set into a ring and presented to King George III as a gift. He was reputed to have been paid 500 guineas for its manufacture.

Arnold turned his attention to the manufacture of more accurate timepieces and invented one of such quality and reliability that Capt James Cook used it on his South Sea voyages.

Arnold set up a factory in Chigwell and in 1788 he produced the first pocket chronometer, which so impressed the Astronomer Royal that he decided to test it himself at Greenwich. The watch went so well in trials that he decided to give it a new name, that of chronometer, and was thus the first person to use that term in its modern sense.

Arnold and his son founded the firm of J Arnold & Son between 1787 and 1799, and the name survives today.

John Arnold was the leading chronometer maker of his day; his contribution to solving the problem of measuring longitude was very important and he was responsible for many improvements to the manufacture of watches and chronometers.

He died in 1799 at the age of 63 and is buried in Chislehurst, Kent.

Guglielmo Marconi was born in Italy in 1874, and came to England in 1896. He had been working on an early system of wireless telegraphy when he arrived.

From his wireless station in Poldhu, near Mullion, he transmitted the first wireless signal across the Atlantic in 1901.

His success led to the twinning of Helston with Sasso Marconi, his Italian home town.