Literary Figures

Following her education at St. Clare's Polwithen and Howell's School Llandaff, she attended Miss Kerr-Sanders' Secretarial College. She served with the Women's Royal Naval Service 1943-46. She married Graham Hope Pilcher on December 7, 1946, when she was 22. They have four grown children, oldest son, Robin, daughters Fiona and Philippa (aka Pippa) and second son, Mark. Rosamunde got her start in 1949 as an author of Mills and Boon romances, under the name Jane Fraser. She published 10 novels using that pen-name. Her first novel as Rosamunde Pilcher, A Secret To Tell, was published in 1955. In 1965 she began to use her own name full time.

WJ Burley, the author of the Wycliffe detective novels which were turned into a popular television series, died aged 88 at his home in Holywell, near Newquay, after a career which saw him write about 800 books. It was the Wycliffe novels that made him famous. ITV broadcast 36 episodes of the series between 1993 and 1998 which regularly attracted 10 million viewers. They were filmed in Cornwall, where Burley spent most of his life. He was overwhelmed by the success of the programme in which Jack Shepherd played the character of Detective Superintendent Charles Wycliffe. Burley was born in Falmouth during World War One and was educated in the town and at Truro Technical School. He then undertook a five-year apprenticeship at Truro Gas Company, where he became assistant manager. He was promoted to manager and travelled throughout the South West visiting gas companies where there were problems. After obtaining a scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford, he moved into teaching, becoming the first head of biology at Newquay Grammar School. He started writing in 1966 and his first two books were about an upmarket detective but he decided a more down-to-earth character was required if he was to write a successful series of books.

Born in London, Thompson spent nine years in the Royal Navy, became a policeman in Bristol and then an investigator for British Overseas Airways during which time he was seconded to the narcotics bureau of the Hong Kong Police. He then headed the Civil Aviation Security Section of what was then Rhodesia in Africa. While in Rhodesia he published more than 200 short stories before returning to England to become a full-time writer, living first of all on Bodmin Moor where his first novel, Chase The Wind was set and for which he won the award for Best Historical Novelist in 1977. His subsequent novels, set in Cornwall, Bristol and Africa have won him world-wide acclaim. For many years he has lived near Pentewan, Mevagissey.

Born in May 1907, Daphne du Maurier was the second daughter of Sir Gerald du Maurier and the granddaughter of George du Maurier. She grew up in London with her sisters Angela and Jeanne and was educated at home by her governess. She had a close relationship with her father and it was him who encouraged her when she began writing stories and poetry at an early age. The du Mauriers visited Cornwall for holidays throughout Daphne's childhood, but it was not until1926 that the family decided to look for a second home there. Arriving in Bodinnick-by-Fowey from Looe, Daphne, her mother and her two sisters discovered Ferryside, the house that was to become their home. Daphne loved Cornwall and spent time at Ferryside whenever she could, and it was there that she wrote her first novel, The Loving Spirit. Then came her most famous three novels, Jamaica Inn, Frenchman's Creek, and Rebecca, each one being inspired by her love of Cornwall. But it was her first book that was to introduce Daphne to her future husband. Major Tommy ('Boy') Browning was so affected by the book that he sailed to Fowey to meet the author. They fell in love and in July 1932 were married at Lanteglos Church. During the first ten years of their marriage Daphne only spent holidays in Cornwall but in 1943, while her husband was at war, she rented a house in Fowey called Readymoney and lived their with her three children. Years before, she first discovered Menabilly, a house belonging to the Rashleigh family. She was fascinated by the place and now she was living in Cornwall she asked the family if she could rent the property. They agreed and in 1943 she moved into the house which was to provide inspiration for much of her writing. When the lease on Menabilly expired in 1969 she moved to Kilmarth, another house rented to her by the Rashleigh family, about a mile from Menabilly. By now Daphne had lived in Cornwall for nearly 30 years and it was by continuing her writing she was able to overcome her disappointment that her husband, who died in 1965, was not with her in her last home. Dame Daphne du Maurier died in April 1989. Throughout her lifetime she wrote several novels and volumes of short stories, five biographies and her own autobiography. The place Cornwall held in her heart and the inspiration it provided was captured in many of her books, and now, the annual Daphne du Maurier Festival of Arts and Literature (www.fowey.co.uk) held in Fowey attracts tens of thousands of visitors.

Among the most popular novelists at the turn of the 2Oth century, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch had, according to the Times Literary Supplement, a 'mind which ranges far over time and the world, from ancient Greece through lost Lyonesse down to modern London'. He first used the pseudonym ‘Q’ in writing for the Oxford Magazine, and used it subsequently throughout his career. Q's famous range of adventures, mysteries and humorous bestsellers includes 'The Delectable Duchy', 'The Ship of Stars', 'Lady Good-for-Nothing' and 'Troy Town' - which was modelled on his native Fowey. Cornwall’s ‘Q’ Fund was set up after Sir Arthur’s death nearly sixty years ago to support local people who are researching literary or allied subjects. Although the awards are modest, they have helped over eighty individuals with their studies of Cornwall’s history and culture. This continuing investment in Cornwall’s literature is considered a fitting memorial to the man voted one of the greatest-ever Cornishmen in a poll of readers of the Western Morning News. More Information is available from David Fryer at Q Fund on 01726 67160. A recording of the late Alistair Cooke, veteran broadcaster of the famous Letter from America, reminiscing about his time with Quiller-Couch, is available via the Press Office 01872 274098

Wilson was born in Leicester, England, on June 26, 1931 into a working class family and did not learn to read until he was seven or eight, but once he did learn he set himself the task of reading everything in sight. Wilson says that he spent most of his childhood in a "dream world," extremely bored and dissatisfied with the world around him. Wilson joined the RAF and later worked at various jobs. He met Joy Stewart and fell in love with her. After persuading her to break off an engagement to another man, she joined him in London in 1953. After a few months more of tedious jobs, Wilson at last decided to give up paying rent and ended up sleeping in a waterproof sleeping bag on Hampstead Heath. With just barely enough food to eat, Wilson spent his days in the reading room in the British Museum and worked on a novel, which he now called Ritual in the Dark. The appearance of The Outsider in Literature caused an uproar. It was almost unanimously hailed by reviewers as a masterpiece. The book was a bestseller in both England and America, and within a year it was translated into a dozen languages. However, Wilson began to feel irritated by all the attention, and felt that he was betraying the very principles he had been writing about. Early in 1957, Joy and Wilson were having dinner in their apartment with Gerald Hamilton, a homosexual, when Joy's parents suddenly burst in. Joy's father was armed with a horsewhip, shouting, "The game is up, Wilson!" Joy's parents had always disliked him, but her sister claimed to have read Wilson's diaries and that they proved that he was a homosexual and had several mistresses. What Joy's sister had actually seen were Wilson's notes for Ritual in the Dark. He and Joy decided to rent a cottage in Cornwall, where they remain to this day. Wilson commenced work on a sequel to The Outsider in Literature dealing with religious outsiders which he called The Rebel. Gollancz persuaded Wilson to change the title to Religion and the Rebel and it was published in the autumn of 1957. It was as unanimously rejected as The Outsider had been praised. However, if nothing else, success had given Wilson one important thing: money. They weren't living a life of luxury, but he and Joy were living comfortably and happily. They even had enough money to purchase a larger house in Cornwall, one large enough to house Wilson's massive collection of books and records. Wilson continued to work on Ritual in the Dark, and it was finally published in 1960.

Graham was born in Greenock in Scotland in 1918. His father was a shipyard engineer, and he was apprenticed as a draughtsman in the same industry. However, after attending evening classes at Glasgow University and spending a year studying literature and philosophy as a residential student at a Working Men's College, he committed himself to a career as a poet. So great was this commitment that he chose not to take any other employment, and lived frugally for the rest of his life on the meagre proceeds of his writing and the support of friends and patrons. His first collection of poems, Cage Without Grievance, was published in 1942, and six other collections followed before the publication of Collected Poems in 1979. From 1944, he spent most of his life in Cornwall where he was friendly with the modernist painters of the St Ives School, especially Bryan Wynter and Roger Hilton. In 1954 he married Agnes ("Nessie") Kilpatrick, daughter of David Dunsmuir, and from 1967 they lived at 4 Mountview Cottages, Madron. Graham is best known for his long poem 'The Nightfishing' (1955), and for the poems contained in the volumes Malcolm Mooney's Land (1970) and Implements in Their Places (1977). After a long illness with cancer, Graham died at Madron in January 1986, aged 67.

During the 1940s Derek and Jean Tangye lived in London. Derek, whose boyhood holiday home was Glendorgal at Newquay, was a Fleet Street journalist and the author of books about the British Empire and his travels round the world. Jean Nicol was the public relations officer for the Savoy Hotel and through this she and Derek were part of a glittering social scene. In 1950 they turned their backs on London and became the tenants of Dorminack, a run-down cottage and flower farm, in the far west of Cornwall. Here, from 1961, Derek wrote the autobiographical books which became known as the Minack Chronicles. In these 20 volumes he shared stories of nature, donkeys, cats, the vagaries of the weather as they eked out a precarious living from the farm. Jeannie wrote Meet Me At The Savoy, about her days there, and a trilogy of novels set in a large hotel, as well as painting the local landscape, their cats and donkeys and providing the line drawings which illustrated the Minack Chronicles. In 1979 they bought about 20 acres of wild cliff land adjacent to their tenanted farm. They called it "Oliver Land" and this became "The Minack Chronicles Nature Reserve - A Place For Solitude". Jeannie died in February 1986 and Derek in October 1996. His ashes were scattered in the Honeysuckle Meadow in the Nature Reserve.

Born at Carnkie, Redruth, in 1935, Thomas was educated at Oxford and became a teacher before becoming a full-time writer. Widely known as a poet, he also written novels, including The White Hotel which became an international best-seller for which he received the Cheltenham Prize in 1981, the Los Angeles Fiction Prize and the P.E.N. Fiction prize. His biography of the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Orwell Prize in 1998. A writer of daring and imagination, Thomas’s work is concerned with myths, dreams and deep psychological forces, exemplified in his Flying Into Love (1992) which centres on the assassination of President Kennedy. In May 2004, Thomas’s first play, Hellfire Corner, was produced at the Hall For Cornwall. The play’s title refers to the infamous corner of the Redruth rugby ground where generations of Cornish have gathered together over the years to cheer on the county team. Set in Cornwall at the beginning of the 20th Century, the play centres on the lives of a group of rugby-supporting miners and bal maidens (women who broke up ore on the surface) who overcome adversity partly through their idolatry of Redruth rugby hero Bert Solomon, who attended Trewirgie Primary School, as did Thomas. Solomon played once for England and then refused to play again, preferring to look after his beloved racing pigeons rather than play with public school London toffs. The play Hellfire Corner grew out of Thomas’s early experiences, of chapel, rugby, story-telling and humour. The mines had died, but they culture to which they gave rise lived on in the 1940s and 1950s. Thomas’s father was a passionate supporter of rugby at Redruth and after one match, father and son stayed on in the stand, waiting for the ground to clear. Thomas’s father pointed out an elderly figure in a raincoat, standing alone by the goalposts, near Hellfire Corner. It was Bert Solomon.

Alfred Kenneth Hamilton Jenkin was born in Redruth in 1900 and had a distinguished career as a historian with a particular interest in Cornish mining, publishing The Cornish Miner, now a classic, in 1927. He was a founder bard of the Cornish Gorsedd, taking the name Lef Stenoryon. He attended University College, Oxford, where in 1919 he became a friend of C S Lewis. Both were members of The Martlets Literary Society. They often met for tea then talked or went for walks or bicycle rides. Lewis wrote that Jenkin was the "first lifelong friend" that he had met at Oxford. The Hamilton Jenkin Collection at the Cornish Studies Centre consists of a fine run of the Mining Journal (complete from 1835 to 1932 to which the Cornwall Library has added from 1964 to 2000) and inestimably valuable to Cornish mining history research) and a complete set of the Mining Magazine (from 1909 and continued until 2000) together with books and pamphlets, was presented in 1966, with further additions shortly before his death in 1980. A plaque to accompany the collection was worded: “The books… formed part of the private collection of A K Hamilton Jenkin MA, B.Litt, FSA, of Trewirgie House, Redruth, the home of the Jenkin family since 1770 and were presented by him to the Redruth Library as a memorial to the long association of his family with the life of Cornwall. 1966.” Hamilton Jenkin was later given an honorary doctorate by the University of Exeter in 1978. This collection, too, was acquired for the former Redruth Public Library by the efforts of C J Langman.

Betjeman fell in love with Cornwall during his childhood holidays and returned to the county every year until his death. In a 40-year career as a poet, he celebrated the English countryside, poked affectionate fun at the country set and cursed the vulgarity of the lower orders. Appointed Poet Laureate in 1972, he was eventually hailed by The Times newspaper: 'By appointment: Teddy Bear to the Nation'. At Oxford, he found his niche as an entertainer, adept at amateur dramatics and comic verse. After failing to complete his degree, he worked as a schoolteacher, then in 1930 began writing for The Architectural Review. In 1932, his first book of poetry, Mount Zion, was published privately by James. In 1933, he married Penelope Chetwode, and they settled in the Oxfordshire village of Uffington, where their son Paul was born in 1937. When the Second World War broke out, Betjeman was rejected for active service and went to work for the Ministry of Information. After the war Betjeman resumed his career as poet and architectural critic, dividing his time between London, rural Oxfordshire and Cornwall. Betjeman and Penelope grew apart and Betjeman found companionship with Elizabeth Cavendish, whom he met in 1951. Beset by loneliness and the fear of death which had been themes of his poetry since the 1940s, he was further weakened by Parkinson's disease and a series of strokes. He died in 1984, aged 77, and is buried at St Enodoc Church at Trebetherick on the North Cornwall coast. In a 1974 poem, The Last Laugh, he asked to be remembered, characteristically, as an entertainer.

Welsh-born, Val Baker lived much of his life in the Penzance area, a writer among artists whose amiable nature and generous spirit won him a wide circle of friends among the art colony of St Ives and throughout Cornwall. Val Baker's literary output was prodigious. Most people knew that he was a well-established author but few appreciated the extent of achievement. In his lifetime, he published 14 novels, 26 autobiographies, 23 short story collections, 18 books on general subjects, 41 edited collections of other writer's work and several hundred short stories. He began work as a junior reporter on several regional newspapers and worked briefly in Fleet Street where he learned many of the basic skills of the writer's trade. On the outbreak of war he became a conscientious objector. He had been vegetarian since the mid-30s and was to remain so until his death in 1984. In 1948, following the break-up of his first marriage, Val Baker moved to West Cornwall where he rented a cottage on Trencrom Hill and it was from here that the first issue of his county arts magazine the Cornish Review was published between 1949 and 1952. The magazine offered the very best of Cornish writing on all aspects of the arts, including articles by Bernard Leach, R Morton Nance, Peter Lanyon and A K Hamilton Jenkin, as well as poetry by the young Causley, Clemo, W S Graham and Arthur Caddick. During the 1960s an inheritance enabled him to achieve a lifelong ambition with the purchase of a 60ft motor fishing vessel named Sanu, in which the whole family found adventure, and misadventure at sea. It was these voyages which provided much material for the series of autobiographical books for which Val Baker was best known.

John Courtenay Trewin was born near The Lizard, Cornwall in December 1908, the son of John Trewin, Master Mariner. He was educated at Plymouth College and at the age of 18 he began work as a journalist for The Western Independent in Plymouth, becoming their dramatic critic two years later. In 1933 he moved to London and joined the staff of The Morning Post , continuing his theatre work by acting as the Post's second-string critic. After the merger with The Daily Telegraph in 1937 Trewin worked as a freelance writer. He became a regular contributor to The Observer and eventually joined their staff, working as Literary Editor from 1942 to 1948. In 1958 he took up the position of London dramatic critic for The Birmingham Post , which he continued until his death. Trewin wrote theatre reviews and articles for other publications throughout his career, including Punch , John O'London's Weekly , The Illustrated London News and The Times . He was the author of many books: studies of English theatre history such as The Edwardian Theatre , discussions of Shakespeare including Five and eighty Hamlets , biographical studies of actors and directors including Peter Brook, Paul Scofield, Edith Evans, Sybil Thorndike, John Neville, Alec Clunes and Robert Donat, and books on his West Country origins such as the autobiographical Up from the Lizard . Trewin was the editor of The West Country Magazine (1946-1952) and of fifty volumes of Plays of the Year . He was President of the Critics' Circle (1964-1965) and the West Country Writers' Circle (1964-1973), was created a Bard of the Cornish Gorsedd, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1981 was made an OBE for services to the theatre. He married Wendy Monk in 1938 and they had two sons. He died in February 1990.

Writer and broadcaster Charles Causley was born in Launceston in 1917 and lived most of his life in the town. From boyhood, Causley intended to be an author. He began a novel at the age of nine and continued writing in a desultory fashion throughout his education at Launceston College. At 15, Causley quit school to begin working. He spent seven gloomy years first as a clerk in a builder's office and later working for a local electrical supply company. Causley also played piano in a four-piece dance band, an experience which may have influenced his later predilection for writing poems in popular lyric forms. In 1940 Causley joined the Royal Navy in which he served for the next six years. Having spent all of his earlier life in tranquil Cornwall, he now saw wartime southern Europe, Africa, and Australia. Likewise, having already felt the tragedy of war through the early death of his father, Causley experienced it again more directly in the deaths of friends and comrades. These events decisively shaped his literary vision, pulling him from prose and drama into poetry. Although Causley wrote one book of short stories based on his years in the Royal Navy, Hands to Dance in 1951, his major medium for portraying his wartime experiences was poetry. Returning to Launceston, he entered the Peterborough Teacher Training College to study English and history. Upon graduation he began teaching at the same grammar school in Launceston where he had studied as a boy. Causley died in November 2003. the 'most unfashionable poet alive' and is buried in the St. Thomas Churchyard Launceston next to his mother's grave, 100 yards from where he was born.

Way back in 1979, A L Rowse, "the greatest living Cornishman" as he was then often described, predicted that one day - after his death - there would be a great "Rowse industry", a steady stream of books and articles and perhaps television and radio programmes about his life and work. Historian, poet, biographer and autobiographer, Rowse was one of the most lively and controversial figures of his age. Mischievous, funny and often viputerative, his diaries were the object of much speculation during his lifetime, but could only be published after his death in 1997. Born at Tregonissey in St Austell, in 1903, he was the son of a poor, virtually illiterate clay worker, but went on to become one of the most prolific authors of his time, still publishing in his 90s. He recollected his life as a boy in Cornwall in his book A Cornish Childhood. Although passionately fond of travel in Europe and America, he remained rooted in Cornwall. For 50 years he was a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford (its first working-class entrant) and seized opportunities offered in scholarship, literature, politics and, most of all, in public controversy. Rowse achieved worldwide fame in 1973 when he claimed that the elusive Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets was Emilia Lanier, mistress of Queen Elizabeth's lord chamberlain. The title of Dr James Whetter's personal memoir: Dr A L Rowse: Poet, Historian, Lover of Cornwall, is taken from the inscription on Rowse's memorial stone at Black Head, near his former home at Trenarren. James Whetter attended the same school as Rowse, in St Austell, and, like the great man, was drawn at an early age to Cornish history. When Rowse had retired from his hectic academic career, spent variously in Oxford and America, he came home for good to Trenarren, just across the bay from James Whetter at Gorran. James Whetter explains, as a young postgraduate, had sought Rowse's advice on Cornish research, and they had kept in touch over the years, but it was not until after Rowse's retirement that they became close. It was in the closing years of Rowse's life that the two met frequently, to compare notes about Cornwall's past but also to set out together on little adventures, pilgrimages to Rowse's favourite spots in Cornwall. After a stroke in 1996, the year before his death, Rowse became virtually bed-bound. James Whetter then became one of the small group of loyal friends who visited Trenarren regularly, trying to keep up their old friend's spirits, and celebrating with him the embarrassingly belated public recognition of his enormous contribution to British life and letters - the Companion of Honour. James Whetter concludes that A L Rowse was the "greatest scholar Cornwall has ever bred" and although it was fashionable in academic circles in Rowse's later years to decry and belittle his contribution to historical studies, it is only now, after his death, that historians are coming to a more balanced assessment of his life and work.

Born in Poole, Dorset, in October 1931, John le Carre (real name David John Moore Cornwell) attended the universities of Berne and Oxford, he taught at Eton and spent five years in the British Foreign Service before he released his first novel in 1961. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, his third book, secured him a worldwide reputation and he now divides his time between England and the Continent. He says: “I hate the telephone. I can't type. Like the tailor in my novel The Tailor of Panama, I ply my trade by hand. I live on a Cornish cliff and hate cities. Three days and nights in a city are about my maximum. I don't see many people. I write and walk and swim and drink. Apart from spying, I have in my time sold bathtowels, got divorced, washed elephants, run away from school, decimated a flock of Welsh sheep with a twenty-five pound shell because I was too stupid to understand the gunnery officer's instructions, taught children in a special school. I have four sons and ten grandchildren. It is well over 30 years since I hung up my cloak and dagger. I wrote my first three books while I was a spook; I wrote the next 13 after I was at large.”

Born in 1916 in the hamlet of Goonamaris, St Stephen, near St Austell, Jack Clemo lived in poverty amidst the bleak clay wastelands of Cornwall, but was described by Kenneth Allsop as “the John Bunyan of the century.” Educated at the local school, at the age of five Clemo had trouble with his eyes. Because of his illness he attended school irregularly and enrolled on a correspondence course with the London School of Journalism. Later in life he also became deaf. After writing two visionary novels and his autobiographical Confession of a Rebel, he lost his sight in 1955. He wrote articles for local newspapers about his ideas of Tolstoyan socialism, much to the dislike of the locals and even, it is said, A L Rowse, Daphne du Maurier and Quiller-Couch. His Selected Poems (1988) and Approach to Murano (1993) show the development of his poetry from a puritanical anti-nature stance to a later, mellower outlook. He married Ruth Peaty, a Dorset woman, in 1968 and settled permanently in Weymouth. The Cured Arno is his last collection, which he had only just completed at the time of his death in 1994.

William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, was born at St Columb Minor near Newquay in 1911, his mother also being a native of Cornwall. After Marlborough Grammar School (where his father taught) and Oxford, he worked for a time as an actor and later as a teacher. After serving in the Royal Navy during the war, he returned to teaching, but from 1961 was a full-time writer. In 1980 he won the Booker McConnell prize with his book rites of Passage (the first volume in a trilogy that concluded with Fire Down Below, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. He died in 1993 at his home at Perranarworthal near Truro.

Author Winston Graham, who wrote the hugely popular Poldark series, died aged 93, having lived at Perranporth (where he wrote the first four Poldark novels) for 30 years, before moving to Sussex. The books were made into a hit 1970s BBC costume drama starring Angharad Rees, Robin Ellis and Ralph Bates. His tales of Ross and Demelza Poldark have been translated into dozens of languages and the TV series were shown in 22 countries. Set in 18th Century Cornwall, they examined the social relationships of the era between the oppressed poor and the wealthy land-owners. Graham's original plan was to write three books focusing on the love triangle between the war hero Captain Poldark, cousin Francis Poldark and aristocrat Elizabeth Chynoweth. But he extended the series as he became more interested in the society's wider tensions. Outside the Poldark saga, Graham's best-known book was Marnie, which became an Alfred Hitchcock movie starring Sean Connery. Ross Poldark was first published in 1945, followed by Demelza in 1946, Jeremy Poldark in 1950, and Warleggan in 1953. The Walking Stick was made into a movie by MGM and starred David Hemmings. In 2002, Graham announced that Bella Poldark, the 12th volume of the tales, would be the last. He wrote 40 novels in total and was made an OBE in 1983.