Cornish Saints & Sinners

by J. Henry Harris

[Chapter XXVI]

Newquay is in Cornwall without being Cornish, and is one of the few towns which has no "saint" belonging to it. Most of the towns in the peninsula date back to the days of saints and giants, and then crystallize somehow. Newquay didn't grow that way, and was content to remain until quite recently the habitation of a score of fisher families, who lived by beach-combing and pilchard-seining. If the town of to-day were wiped out, there would remain the old fish-cellars, a few weather-beaten cottages, and the "Huer's hut" on the Headland. Newquay town is a modern creation, and lies between Padstow and St. Ives, which are rich in saints and antiquities, and stand apart and distinct from everything modern, crystallizing around and about, but receiving little of the old life and tones. The original name of the place was Towan Blistra, which sounds genuine. The growth of Newquay is no miracle. People who went there for their health got better, and then the "faculty" said, "Try Newquay;" then the Great Western Railway took up the cry, and shouted, "Try Newquay;" and that's all the process.

The sea and rocks, and sands and caves, are all genuine. The fine hotels are fine hotels, and fine hotels after their style are new in this part of the world. The houses have a hurried, built-by-contract look about them, and the whole place wants to be built over again, and built differently. Most of the inhabitants now are Cornish in a transition state, so you don't know quite where you are. The hotel porter was regal; the man in charge of the lift was imported with the machine, and when asked, said he thought a "piskie" was a new crank, or something like that, for working the lift. Newquay is like that now. You go there for the air, and you get it until every nerve is braced, and you get rid of the dismals, and eat and drink and sleep, until you find that the one pleasure of life is living, simply that. Even Cornish people come to Newquay to be toned. The Bookworm lost his restlessness at night entirely here, and no longer read strange books in his sleep.

If you want to talk with a real Newquay man, you will find him on the Headland, looking at the sea. We scraped acquaintance with one watching his nets dry on the grass. He told us he hadn't heard about piskies lately. When he was a boy, and fish was cured in the old cellars, and the Headland was the Headland, and no mistake about it, and when a fisherman was a fisherman, and everything was as it ought to be, and had been from time "back along," why, then, there were piskies, of course. Everything was different now, and he would not be surprised if piskies were never heard of any more. Guy said gently that that might be a good thing, but the man ironed out all intelligence from his face and said nothing. He did not wish to have old memories stirred just then.

NEWQUAY

The old men wandering about the Headland always looked seaward when talked to, as though they were sure of the sea, and the rocks, and the beaches; all else, round and about, was slipping from them—new houses, new streets, crowds of people in strange garments, and such faces! worn and wisht! why did they pitch upon this place? Guy said these old grumblers were very ungrateful. A fine town had sprung up, money poured into the place, and nothing was taken from it, and the old boys were not thankful. The Bookworm took the side of the native, and said no one liked the place which he called his own, and had grown to love, to be transformed by strange hands so suddenly. What did the ancient Briton think of the Roman villa with tesselated floors, and hot and cold baths, and clothes mended on the while-you-wait system? Much better, no doubt, than British huts and blue paint, but not to the native taste. A diet of Chablis and oysters disagreed at first with a stomach used to whelks and gingerbeer.