ORAL NARRATIVE AND CORNISH MIGRATION:

INTERPRETATIONS OF FAMILY, PLACE, AND SPACE

GARRY TREGIDGA* & TREVE CRAGO§

INTRODUCTION

In recent years there has been a renewed interest in the ‘Great migration’ of
the 19th century, when hundreds of thousands of Cornish men and women left
the far South West of Britain in search of new opportunities overseas. As we
shall see the migration process can be influenced by a multitude of determining
factors that, while often economically related, can also be traced to other less
visible cultural dimensions, which formulate a migrant’s decision to leave his
or her native community. Therefore the first part of this paper will explore the
themes of ‘Family’, ‘Place’ and ‘Migration’ and having established the parameters
via the use of oral narrative this will be followed by a closer examination of the
latest Oral history methodology and its application to a specific case study at the
micro-level.

‘WILL YOU THINK OF CORNWALL SOMETIMES?’:

PERCEPTIONS OF FAMILY AND PLACE

Before studying the dynamics of migration it is essential that the unique

characteristics of the Cornish homeland be considered. Kinship takes on a special
significance in a Cornish context when it comes to notions of ethnoregional
identity. Conversi suggests that language, religion, family, territory and race
provide the distinctive symbols or ‘pivots around which the whole social and
identificational system’ of a distinct cultural group is organised.1 The effective
demise of the Cornish language by the end of the eighteenth century ensured the
loss of an obvious cultural symbol for the region’s inhabitants. A language revival
movement, based on the work of pioneers like Henry Jenner in the early 1900s,
made slow progress during the twentieth century. A recent survey concluded that,
despite growing popular interest, there are still only a few hundred speakers with
the ability to have a fluent conversation.2 In the place of language we can point
to religious differences, with Methodism, rather than the mainstream Church
of England, becoming the dominant religious force in the region from the mid-
eighteenth century onwards. Religious nonconformity, as Rokkan points out, was
often integrated into the culture of a ‘subject’ province.3 This process applied to
Cornwall, where the social influence of Methodism ensured that the cultural and
political life of the region was more akin to Celtic Wales rather than the adjacent
counties of southern England. Similarly, public concern since the 1940s over
the threat to Cornwall’s territorial boundaries, including possible inclusion into a
larger administrative region of South-West England, has encouraged the rise of
Mebyon Kernow, a nationalist party, and led to the adoption of anti-metropolitan
ideas by leading politicians associated with other political parties.

What is the role of the Cornish family in terms of the Conversi model? Although
dismissed by one academic as ‘unlikely’ to provide a political catalyst for
‘differentiating the Cornish from other groups’, the wider significance of the
kinship factor should not be ignored. Indeed, with an economy traditionally
based on small businesses and family farms it is perhaps not surprising that other
areas of Cornish life like Methodism, ethnomusicological tradition and political
alignment have been based on the family unit. Kinship, in short, provided the
cultural infrastructure for the region. Evidence to support this view can be seen
in the autobiographical work of the historian A.L. Rowse. Growing up in the first
quarter of the twentieth century he represented one of the last generations to
experience ‘the age-long routine of Cornish life still unbroken’. For Rowse this
sense of a ‘continuity of custom’ was inextricably linked to kinship, which was
symbolised by ‘the families, the family names which for generations and even for
centuries had belonged to some particular spot … there were always Jenkinses
at Phernyssick, Pascoes at Holmbush, Tretheweys at Roche; Kellows, Blameys,
Rowses at Tregonnissey’.4

This family/place nexus was particularly significant given the fact that the
majority of Cornish surnames are derived from places of residence. Take the
co-author’s surname: Tregidga. It was apparently first recorded in 1332 as a
placename, Tregrisiou, in the mid-Cornwall district of Roseland5 and descendants
of the local family that took this name were living in the same locality over five
hundred years later. Only then did domestic issues lead to the disintegration
of the surviving family unit, with some members migrating to the mining
communities of West Cornwall, others going to the china clay district a few miles
to the east and some travelling even further afield to London and California.
Oral tradition was crucial in passing on a folklore narrative relating to the special
bond of family and place. In the case of the Tregidga’s this was based on a story,
possibly influenced by the rise of the temperance movement at the family and
communal level, that in the first half of the nineteenth century the family had
lost their ancestral home, Tregidgeo Farm, because of the social ‘evils’ of alcohol
and gambling. We can see this in the following extract from an interview with the
Co-authors father, Stanley Tregidga:

Well, the first I knew about it, when my Uncle George used to come up Christmas
time. And, er, after we had a meal, my Uncle George was settling way down, the
whiskey ant that, me father and me auntie would start to go out the door [...] and
me Uncle George used to say ‘where are you pair going? I suppose you’re going on
the beer. And he said ‘I call you “Whiskey Bess” abd “Beerey Ern”. He said... “all our
familiy was like that, my grandfather and his brother, they lost the farm through beer
drinking and gambling.6

Migration added a further dimension to the cultural symbolism of the Cornish

family. In recent years there has been a remarkable reassertion of the links with
the homeland as Cornish descendants overseas turn to a communal identity based
upon conceptions of the Celticity of their ancestors.7 Celtic festivals and Cornish
tartans have been coopted as cultural icons of local communities in Australia and
North America, while organisations like the Cornwall Family History Society, with
over 5,000 members, operate on an international basis. Some families, such as
the Udys, Rosevears and Lobbs, seem reminiscent of the clans of the Scottish
Highlands by holding grand reunions in Cornwall for descendants throughout the
world. James Udy’s study of his family history demonstrates how the focus on
kinship can have wider cultural implications for the Cornish overseas. Conversi’s
cultural pivots of family, race and religion effectively provide the framework for
the book, with considerable reference to both Celtic identity and the passion of
Cornish Methodism. This reflects the way in which Udy’s genealogical research
paved the way for a personal rediscovery of his Celto-Cornish heritage:

As I gazed on this typically Cornish scene, I felt strangely moved as I realised that my
Udy family roots were here in the parish of Roche and the surrounding parishes … As
this was their country, I felt that it was part of my spiritual country too. In Australia I
had grown to manhood oblivious of my Cornish heritage, but now, having immersed
myself in the study of early Cornish documents for some time, the name Udy was
beginning to conjure up vivid associations with Cornish history and Cornish culture.8

Oral history is a useful medium for enhancing our understanding of this multi-
faceted process. In December 2000 the Cornish Audio Visual Archive (CAVA)
organised an interview session at Rescorla Methodist Chapel in mid-Cornwall.
Built in 1873, at the height of the Great Migration, the chapel itself is a living
reminder of the enduring family links that still exist between the Cornish homeland
and its branch communities overseas. For example, a bible on the pulpit lectern
was donated by a local family that had emigrated to British Columbia in the
1940s, while a marble plaque was presented by a Mr Pendray of Detroit, USA
in memory of his parents. Of particular significance for our purposes was an
interview, or rather a free-flowing conversation, which was conducted with three
local characters: John Tonkin and Sam Gregory, who are in their seventies; and
the 91 year-old John Rundle. The result was a wide-ranging discussion covering
such topics as family life, politics, religion, social conditions and labour relations.
Significantly, however, the migration of individuals and families provided a
common link for many of these subjects, whether in terms of the social impact
of in-migration on traditional Cornish society or the cultural-economic influence
of the Cornish Diaspora itself.

Above all, the Rescorla session points to the broader impact of migration on
family identity. Rowse’s ‘continuity of custom’ narrative referred to earlier can
easily create an image of a parochial and unchanging way of life that was only
undermined by the intrusion of Anglo-urban society after the Second World War.
How does this concept relate to the global picture where Cornish families played
an important part in the creation of new and vibrant nations like the United
States and Australia? This paradox is clearly evident in the comments of John
Tonkin. In conversation with Gregory and Rundle he laments the post-war decline
of community life as a result of social and demographic change, particularly in
regard to the family unit:

You haven’t got the continuity, boy. Then, the families had been together for several
generations, say grandfather or somebody had moved in as a young man and raised
 his family and then his family had raised a family, so you had continuity. Now, people
are on the move all the time for jobs and better their circumstances and this and that.
You didn’t have the mobility then, did ee.9

Yet Tonkin himself was accustomed to a lifestyle based on mobility. As a young

man he had followed in his father’s footsteps by working abroad in Canada and
Nigeria. During his teenage years he had joined the local Working Men’s Institute
and was fascinated by the stories told by the old men of the village sitting on the
‘circle of chairs around the fire. There wasn’t one around the circle that hadn’t
been somewhere and some of them had been to Australia two or three times’.10
Their everyday conversation seemed to flow naturally from events in Cornwall to
experiences in San Francisco or Johannesburg. Interestingly, this international
dimension was present in the discussion of the Rescorla circle. For example,
when Rundle mentioned about a local smallholding owned by a Guy Udy, this led
Tonkin to talk about Udy’s travels in America:

JT: And, of course, in the western states the cowboys and the sheep farmers didn’t
get on all that well … And one of the stories he told me, he said he was, er, on a
mountainside with the sheep … and he had a sheepskin coat on that he was rather
pleased with, … He said he seen a rider coming across the level plain … and, the rider
spotted him and changed course. … when that happened, I went higher up still. … He
said in the end [the rider] got tired of doing that and turned around and went away
again. So I said, well, he could have had a message; he could have had a letter or
something like that. Didn’t you want letter from home? So Guy said, ‘well, ez, I could
have done with a letter from home, he said, but I wanted to keep my sheepskin coat
more than I wanted a letter and I didn’t know what he had in mind’ (laughter…)

SG: Was that any relation to Gerry Udy up Carbis?

JT: I suspect it might be …

JR: … They’re distant [relations].11

There is a symbolic significance to this extract. Gregory’s intervention

demonstrates how oral narrative can move rapidly over time and space, in this
case by making sense of a formerly unrecorded historical event in the USA by
relating the central figure of the narrative to a relation living in modern Cornwall.
Moreover, this concept helps to explain Tonkin’s seemingly contradictory remarks
concerning mobility. Migration in more recent times is perceived in the context
of change in Cornwall itself with immigration apparently undermining the old
homogeneity of the region. For Tonkin the Cornish Diaspora was inherently
different since its cultural momentum was firmly rooted in the motherland.

LOVE, DISINHERITANCE AND LAUNDRY;

APPLYING THE METHODOLOGY OF THE ‘ITALIAN SCHOOL OF ORAL HISTORY’

Having established the framework of subjective Cornish Migration Studies we will

now apply a progressive oral history methodology to this field. Subjective elements
seldom surface in ‘traditional migration theory’. The resulting quantitative-based
analysis of migration gives a predominantly negative impression of migration
in much existing academic research. Consequently, ‘Rarely is migration seen
as desirable [or] described in constructive, positive terms’.12 Yet without doubt
migration was and is an intensely personal decision. Through the recording and
interpretation of testimonies, the ‘Oral Historian’ is presented with a unique
opportunity to be able to reveal the less apparent motivations, which lie behind
the migration process.

Over the years genealogists and historians taking a more conventional approach
to their respective disciplines have looked upon oral history as a source, which can
be problematic in its form and content.13 But as Portelli, the Italian oral historian,
observes, in oral narrative and autobiography ‘the sources are persons rather
than documents or artefacts, and persons have an (un?) fortunate reluctance
to reducing their lives to data for someone else’s interpretations’.14 Alistair
Thompson, who considers that Portelli has over the past two decades been, ‘the
most exciting and rewarding writer in English about oral history’15, is another
oral historian who sees the unique opportunity that personal testimony offers in
revealing unique ‘glimpses into the lived interior of migration processes’:

while other sources reveal the creation, implementation and contestation of migration
and ‘ethnic affairs’ policy, or the statistical patterns of movement, settlement,
employment and welfare, oral testimony and other forms of life stories demonstrate
the complexity of the actual process of migration and show how these policies and
patterns are played out through the lives and relationships of individual migrants,
families and communities.16

From this it can be asserted that the oral historian brings to the field of
genealogy a means of exploring the ‘reasons behind reasons’. This is noted by
another eminent Italian oral historian Passerini, who remarks, that ‘essential
for an understanding of history is not just knowledge of the lives of obscure
and ordinary individuals … but information about the ideas feeding into their
everyday experience.17 Passerini furthermore considers that within the field of
‘contemporary’ Italian historiography a belief has steadfastly remained that
the past is something outside oneself and she challenges this by calling for
the relationship between the ‘symbolic’ and the ‘real’ to be more adequately
analysed.

This observation can be applied to migration studies within the field of

genealogy.

The extracts below, taken from an hour long informal interview, aim to reveal
the complexities of ‘oral history’ as a genealogical source and methodological
approach in the context of family, place and space. The source interview tells
the story of a migrant’s decision to move from Cornwall to the USA. In this
case the interviewee is Eileen Crago (the co-authors mother) and relates to the
experiences of her grandmother following the death of her first husband Henry
Kneebone from ‘Lock Jaw’ (tetanus) in the early years of the 20th century:

… Well much to everyone’s amazement my grandfather’s father decided well whose

going to run the farm? (My father was only 14 years old) That was no good, and
I think he was a man more interested in money than he was in family. And took
the farm away from this poor woman and gave it to another member of the family
giving her just a little bit of old small holding in which it was impossible to scratch a
living.18
In terms of the provenance of the information contained within the narrative, it
is evident that it does not consist of ‘direct’ first hand evidence. Indeed, Eileen
Crago wasn’t born when the described chain of events took place and therefore
this testimony is based upon the ‘opinions’ of an interviewee who ‘belongs’ to
a displaced branch of the Kneebone family. She is a living representative of the
collective memory of a group of individuals, who to all intents and purposes, were
disinherited not only in terms of financial wealth but also, just as importantly,
in ‘social status’ within their native community. In this sense the interview is
biased in terms of its content, but does this lack of objectivity really matter?
Increasingly modern oral historians would argue not. As Thompson explains,
by ‘listening to the myths, fantasies, errors and contradictions of memory, and
paying heed to the subtleties of language and narrative form, we might better
understand the subjective meanings of historical experience’19

In this instance, the listener is hearing only one side of the story. The interviewees
reference to her great grandfather’s preference for money rather than being
concerned for the welfare of his dead son’s family sounds callous in the extreme.
Yet Eileen omits to mention that her Father (Harry) was only 14 years of age
and was actually visually handicapped due to an attack of the measles as a
boy. He therefore would have been incapable of running a farm alone. Perhaps
seen in this light the decision to re-house the widow is not quite so harsh. Yet
importantly Eileen Crago’s narrative does reveal why the migration process was
about to start within this family group.

Whatever the rights or wrongs behind their eviction the changes brought about
by Henry Kneebone’s death to his immediate family (especially his widow) were
enormous. ‘Nanny’ Richards was forced to raise a family with precious little
income, apart from the money she could earn by taking in sowing, until she was
offered a means of escape from this drudgery through a proposal of marriage
from a first cousin (who had been her ‘first love’);

… She was passed childbearing age and she thought well I might marry Jim, and then
they told her there was a deciding factor which she told me herself when she came
over in 1957. The deciding factor was they told her that they sent the washing out to
the laundry. Laundry did not take place in the house and because all those years she
had to either to fetch water or pump it and literally have a, you know, have a boiler
going. It was the worst chore of her life she decided, that was it, she would go to
America and marry Jim.20

Within this passage of narrative the testimony is constructed from the evidence
of Eileen’s father and a direct meeting with her grandmother. By then Eileen
herself was a married woman and therefore the information, which she received,
was likely to be more specific and adult in nature. A further question raised by
this extract is why was it of vital importance that this middle age widow should
be a focal point of a family group in New Jersey? As it turns out the plot which is
unravelling here is no romantic fairy tale. Jim Richards, the first cousin, she was
to subsequently to marry, was a diabetic and a very sick man. This was a major
fact that the barrage of proposals from across the Atlantic failed to mention
until after her eventual arrival in America. By then of course the big migration
decision had been made. Yet ‘Nanny’ Richards was still to realise her American
dream:
 …Then she went to New Jersey, where he had a very nice house I remember it was
24 Manning Avenue. One of those wooden houses? I don’t know what you call them
something board houses, white, big gardens.
…The town that they went to was called Butler and I believe it was industrial because
one of my cousins eventually told me that there was always a pall of rubber smell
over the whole town. And I imagine that is where Jim must have worked.
Though he had a lot of shares in the Bell Telephone Company and they lived quite a
bit off those.21

It would appear that the promise of a better life contained within the pestering of
her American cousins ran true in respect that it did not disappoint her aspirations
in terms of economic and social status. In this respect she can be categorised
very much as an economic migrant. Moreover, the vision of the American dream
was to be passed on to other members of the family. All of her children with
the exception of her eldest son, Harry (Eileen’s father) were to follow their
mother out to the New World to seek their fortunes. Within the extract below
the experience of her youngest son is retold. Also contained within the following
passage of narrative is a reference to ‘Cousin Jack’, a phrase or nick name which
was applied to the Cornish specialist hard rock miners, who migrated to the
four corners of the earth following the collapse of Cornwall’s mining industry in
the nineteenth century. This phrase apparently was originally coined because if
there was a job vacancy going the Cornish migrant workers always had a ‘cousin
jack’ at home who could come over to do the job. Significantly this reveals the
importance of kinship in the migration process:

…He went out immediately before the war and became quite successful, first as
a representative of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, and then he became in
insurance. Because he used to do most of his work up in Pennsylvania, up in the
mines. Because he was a ‘Cousin Jack’ he found he did very good business (and he
was a little business man) he was the sort of brainy member of the family he was slick
and he was what America wanted really and he loved America. He told me so, he’s
been over several times, he is dead now. But he told me he loved it and although he
wanted to come back and see Cornwall his memories are of struggle.20

But what of those left behind in Cornwall? As this interview reveals ‘the American
dream’ was not to the taste of all. For some members of the family (in this
instance the eldest son Harry’s household) their identification with Cornwall was
too strong to consider the migration process regardless of their comparative
poverty. Despite the welcomed food parcels, which arrived regularly from
their American cousins throughout the Second World War, a type of festering
resentment was evolving:

I was aware as very young child that we were being patronised we were the ‘poor
people left behind’.
We hadn’t made it and they were in a position to help us and they did, they were
wonderful not only in goods, they sent us money. And forever a letter came they
came frequently I mean you had a letter a week and there was always money,
there were dollars inside to go down to Barclays and change you know. But there
was something in me that resented it and I don’t know I think that may have come
through my mother who probably resented it. Because you know kids take up vibes
from their parents. I don’t know and when Nanny came over in the early nineteen
fifties she wanted to take me back and I refused, I didn’t want to go, I didn’t want
to leave.23
CONCLUSION

It can therefore be said that oral history is extremely complex in terms of its
chronological form and content. We are made aware that the domain of our
personal memories paradoxically consists of more than the individual who is
giving a testimony. Indeed in this instance the narrative contains the collective
thoughts or consciousness of Eileen’s family or John Tonkin’s teenage memories
of Guy Udy. Furthermore, the information, which the interviewees recounted in
chronological order, was not necessarily acquired in this fashion. One reason
for this is because individuals pass on different elements of information via the
process of history telling24 depending on whom they are communicating with i.e.
child or adult.

For example, on her Grandmother’s last visit to Cornwall in 1957, Eileen

acquired part of the information contained within the recorded narrative as a
married woman and not as the small child that had witnessed her grandmother’s
departure during the 1930s. Despite this, the migration process is presented
to the interviewer as a continuous chronological micro-saga. In effect what the
oral historian is being given in such an instance is re-constituted history. Yet
this subjective side of oral history can bring the study of genealogy alive and
becomes of relevance and interest to a wider circle of researchers looking at
community or the cultural geography of a locality rather than a single family
or household. After all, seldom can conventional sources and records purvey
the sentiments of kindness, jealousy, or resentment, which abound within the
subjective interpretations of oral history narrative.25

1
Garry Tregidga, Assistant Director of the Institute of Cornish Studies.
2
Treve Crago, Senior Researcher for Oral History, Institute of Cornish Studies, Exeter University.
3
D. Conversi, ‘Language or Race?: The Choice of Core Values in the development of Catalan and Basque Nationalisms’,
Ethnic and Basque Nationalism, 13, 1, 1990; see also B.Deacon, ‘And Shall Trelawny Die? The Cornish Identity in
P.Payton (ed.), Cornwall Since the War, Redruth, 1993, pp. 212-4.
4
K. MacKinnon, a government report on the Cornish language, GOSW, Plymouth, 2000.
5
S. Rokkan, Citizens: Elections: Parties: Approaches to the Comparative Study of the Processes of Development, Oslo,
1970, pp. 72-144.
6
A.L. Rowse, A Cornish Childhood, London, 1942; L. Bryant, ‘The Cornish Family’ in Payton, Cornwall Since the War,
p. 182.
7
G. Pawley White, A Handbook of Cornish Surnames, Redruth, 1988 edition, p. 54.
8
Interview with Stanley Tregidga, recorded 14-05-01 by G. Tregidga, Cornish Audio Visual Archive.
9
P. Payton, The Cornish Overseas, Fowey, 1999.
10
J.S. Udy, A Pride of Lions: The Story of a Cornish family called Udy, Yarraandoo Life Centre, 1995.
9
CAVA Memory Day at Rescorla, 4-12-00, Cornish Audio Visual Archive.
10
CAVA Memory Day at Rescorla, 4-12-00, Cornish Audio Visual Archive.
11
CAVA Memory Day at Rescorla, 4-12-00, Cornish Audio Visual Archive.
12
For a more in-depth analysis of this debate see R.J Kleiner, T Sorenson, O.S Dalgard, D Drews (eds.), International
migration and internal migration: a comprehensive theoretical approach, in I.A. Glazier & L. De Rosa, (eds.) Migration
across time and nations: population mobility in Historical Contexts, New York, 1986.
13
For a comprehensive review of the applications of ‘oral history’ see, Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past; Oral
History (Third edition), Oxford University Press, 2000.
14
Alessandro Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia; Oral History and The Art of Dialogue, University of Wisconsin, 1997,
pp. 79-80.
15
Alistair Thompson, Review of the battle of Valle Giulia, in, Oral History, Vol. 29 no 1, 2001, p. 111.
16
Alistair Thompson, Moving Stories: Oral History and Migration Studies in Oral History, Volume 27 No1, University
of Essex 1999, p. 28.
17
Passerini L, Fascism in Popular Memory, The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class, Cambridge University
Press, 1987, p. 7.
18
Interview with Eileen Crago recorded 10-2-2001, by Treve Crago, Cornish Audio visual Archive.
19
Alistair Thompson, Moving Stories: Oral History and Migration Studies in Oral History, Volume 27 No 1, University
of Essex 1999, p. 33.
20
Interview with Eileen Crago recorded 10-2-2001, by Treve Crago, Cornish Audio visual Archive.
21
Interview with Eileen Crago recorded 10-2-2001, by Treve Crago, Cornish Audio visual Archive.
22
Interview with Eileen Crago recorded 10-2-2001, by Treve Crago, Cornish Audio visual Archive.
23
Interview with Eileen Crago recorded 10-2-2001, by Treve Crago, Cornish Audio visual Archive.
24
Alessandro Portelli considers that history-telling narratives can be organised in terms of point of view, social and spatial
referents, see The Battle of Valle Giulia; Oral History and The Art of Dialogue, University of Wisconsin, 1997, pp. 27-
29.
25
The topic of subjectivity within migration studies is discussed within, W.T.R Pryce & Michael Drake, Studying
Migration, in, W.T.R Pryce (ed.) From Family History to Community History, Cambridge University Press, 1994.