V Tree
A large V shaped pine tree on the Antony estate near Torpoint...
Seaton Beach
Located at the bottom of the Seaton River valley this sand and shingle beach is popular with families. At low tide it joins up with Downderry around the headland...
Seaton River
The Seaton River as it flows out of the valley and through the village of the same name...
Portwrinkle
Looking down over the one time fishing village of Portwrinkle. In the background is the start of Whitsand Bay as it stretches 4 miles down the Rame Peninsula...
I'm not against professionalism per se, Andy - it's simply that I couldn't support the move out of town or the change of name. So while I don't genuinely want to see the Carrick Corsairs (or whatever they want to call themselves now :mrgreen: ) do badly, it's cheering on the Bay for me. Camborne this coming Saturday...should be entertaining!
I'll be cheering on Mount's Bay at the Mennaye on Saturday for the match against Cambourne and cheering the Cornish Pirates at Kenwyn on Sunday against Nottingham. Nice to see McAtee back albeit to the bench.
Simon Hockings will be given his first start for the Cornish Pirates in Sunday's home game with Nottingham at Kenwyn (3pm). Hockings replaces South African Matt Evans and Matt Jess comes on for Kevin James.
It would be nice to get a win over Nottingham as compensation for the trip to Bedford losing 31 - 12!
The day kicks off with the ceremonial arrival of the freshly-baked pasties - Philps of Hayle, naturally, only the very best for Cornwall's finest - which are carefully packed into the back of the minibus, watching eyes ablaze with hunger and anticipation.
The Cornish Sages - being rugby types they even have a tie to proclaim their identity lest members become confused or lost - are heading for Falmouth, by way of Hayle, Redruth, Camborne and most points west. The enticing smell of the pasties hangs heavily in the minibus like a Mount Bay fog but stoically they resist. These are men of iron and discipline, Cornish "internationals" one and all.
"A bunch of old rugby buggers growing old together who enjoy each other's company," explains the Sages founder, Harvey Richards. "It was the 1991 County Championship miracle that drew us together. The following year I suggested we gather once a month for a pastie and a pint and the Sages were born. First Thursday of the month, rotating around Cornwall's senior clubs. Average age, probably 70 and climbing, though mentally stranded hopelessly in our mid-20s.
"Old age can be great if, like some, you're surrounded by family and friends. But it can be pretty lonely and testing if, like others, you're on your own and in poor health. We all share a passion for Cornwall rugby but we have also developed into an unofficial support group. We keep an eye out for each other and make sure nobody is floundering."
Eventually - you can always rely on the Redruth contingent to be late - the bus pitches up at the fading Falmouth clubhouse where the lunchtime session is already under way. Sages, in their infinite wisdom, prefer early starts to 'lock-ins' these days. And they like to know the shortest route to the toilet.
Over in the corner there is John Collins, a sprightly and animated 76 and one of the few Cornishmen to have been capped from a Cornish team, refusing to move to a more fashionable club to further his career. He launches into his set piece and, though you sense one or two of the others may just possibly have heard it before, those around hush for tales of Twickenham and other exotic locations.
"When I first got picked for my England debut, against Ireland, it was all very controversial and didn't the old King himself - George VI, God rest his soul - die the next day. Must have been the shock. Well the game was re-arranged for later in the season and I was left sweating to see if I was still in favour for the next match, up at Murrayfield.
"I survived the cut and we beat the Scots before the re-arranged Ireland match. That was a strange one, dreadful Arctic weather and snowstorms on the last Saturday in March. It was so cold that our captain, Nim Hall, ordered us back into the changing rooms at half-time, the first occasion that had happened in an international. A hot cup of tea and a nip of something strong saw us scrape home 3-0.
"We beat the French in Paris the very next week, but that was it for me. My knee went bad the following season and, though Cornwall arranged for me to see Denis Compton's surgeon in London, it never really came right again. Not for rugby anyway. I still walk most days along the beaches and cliffs.
"Of course I should never have played for England. I used to charge 3s 6d for my journey from Camborne up to the 'Midlands' - Truro - to catch the Paddington train. Any fool knew it was only 3s. Disgraceful."
In another corner Barrie Quintrell and his group are chewing the cud. Quintrell is a former club secretary at Penryn, a town known in polite Cornish society as the Borough and throughout the rest of Cornwall as Shagtown due to it being a premier naval port for many decades before the estuary began silting up and Falmouth and Plymouth took over.
"There's a bit of a misconception about Cornwall and rugby," Quintrell insists. "The love of Cornwall is what comes first. When 45,000 Cornish fans travelled up to Twickenham for that 1991 county final it was, more than anything, an expression of our national identity. Don't forget, this was when the devolution arguments were raging for Wales and Scotland as well.
"We don't always deserve our reputation as rugby fanatics, though we're keen enough. Down at Penryn, the oldest club in the Duchy, we'll be lucky to get 150 spectators for a match. The local football club will regularly get more."
Terry Mungles - Hayle stalwart, former England triallist and much valued Sages minibus driver - sips his orange juice before delivering his verdict. "I worry about the Pirates trying to get up into the Premiership and this 'Team Cornwall' concept," he said. "There's hardly a Cornish player in the side and they'll struggle for gates until that's rectified.
"When Cornwall got 15-20,000 crowds at Redruth it was because seven or eight of our rugby towns were represented. The whole of St Ives or Hayle or Penzance used to trek up to Redruth if one of their lads was playing. If the Pirates are going to be a long-term success they've got to somehow tap into that."
Elsewhere, familiar arguments rage between the songs that are beginning to strike up. First a Cornish mystery worthy of a Daphne du Maurier novel or an Inspector Wycliffe investigation. Who was Frederick Stanley Jackson, the star of Cornwall's championship-winning side in 1908, who also won an Olympic silver medals that year?
Jackson was suspended and recalled from the 1908 Lions tour of New Zealand - where he was considered the tourists' best forward - to be investigated by the Rugby Football Union for professionalism. He sailed from Wellington to Sydney on the Maitai but, for whatever reason, decided he could not return to Cornwall and slipped back to New Zealand unannounced to marry a Maori woman he had met. They had four children, one of whom, Everard, became a noted All Blacks prop.
The Lions tour brochure reported that Jackson was born in Camborne and educated at the Camborne College of Mines, but there are no records to that effect. The Manchester Evening News reported that he was a former professional with Swinton, born in Wales under the name of Gabe and educated at Monmouth, who made a new life for himself in Cornwall. Again there are no records substantiating this.
The best Cornish player never to have been capped is another hardy annual: Penryn hooker Roger Harris - who sat on the England bench more than 20 times, having the misfortune to be a contemporary of John Pullin - gets the vote of the younger generation but the octogenarians always push for Redruth flanker Willie Phillips, rated by the 1947-48 Australians as the best loose forward they encountered on their British tour.
The fittest, strongest Cornish player of all time? Launceston's Graham Dawe - later to achieve fame with Bath - has his supporters but Falmouth's Dick Jacket, who played 21 years of county rugby between 1901 and 1922, gets the vote.
Jacket was a fisherman and noted sculler who earned useful pocket money as a nude model for Cornwall's many artists. By repute he would carry his scull from Falmouth to Hayle on his back, win a small fortune at the regatta races, and then drag his vessel back to Falmouth.
As the evening draws in and the Sages prepare to leave there is just time for a couple more songs. Trelawny, of course, the Cornish national anthem for which they all put down their pint mugs and defiantly stand to attention, bad knees and aching backs forgotten for a minute.
Before that came song No 12 - sandwiched between Grandfather Clock and Whisky, Johnny - in Richards' photocopied song sheet which he hands out. No need, they are word perfect:
"Will your anchor hold in the storms of life
When the clouds unfold their wings of strife
When the strong tides lift and the cables strain
Will your anchor drift or firm remain?"
Cornish rugby has been their rock, their anchor at all times. The Sages can't change the future but reliving the past helps them to cope with the present. And the pasties were made in heaven.
KingMark is right. The 1989/91/92 finals kick started the whole Cornish identity, St Piran flag, Cornish Assembly thing and made the Cornish believe in themselves . Let's keep all the Cornish rugby on this thread !
The Mystery of Frederick Jackson
The 1908 Lions didn't have a spin doctor on board who could explain away this scandal.
Leicester forward Frederick Stanley Jackson was the sensation of the Anglo-Welsh tour to New Zealand when he was denounced as a rugby mercenary, put on the boat back to England and thrown out of the game for good by the RFU.
He boarded the steamer Maitai in Wellington, leaving his close friend and Leicester team-mate John Jackett in tears on the wind-swept dockside.
But Jackson - if that was his name - never returned. Nearly a century on his family are still searching for clues about his real identity.
In the early months of 1908, rugby was recovering from its first civil war. Leicester narrowly escaped expulsion from the union following a lengthy investigation, the game's governing body divided into factions and the man at the centre of the case chose to see out his days in silent exile on the other side of the world.
RFU president Arnold Crane tendered his resignation when his committee refused to throw Leicester out of the game over accusations of payment to players. Instead the biggest price was paid by the man from Cornwall who was the greatest forward of his age.
Jackson's name, for reasons that will become apparent, does not receive much prominence in the history of the sport. Records of his early playing career for Camborne and Plymouth are lost.
More colourful figures from the South West like Bert Solomon, the shy centre from Redruth who defeated Wales single-handedly before turning his back on England, and full back Jackett, capped 13 times, are known for their contributions to Cornwall's County Championship victory in 1908 and the Duchy's appearance in the Olympic Games Final at White City later that year.
But you can pick through the surviving accounts from Leicester, Jackson's club from 1905, or newspaper reports of county games, and judge his impact. Simply put, he was the Dean Richards of his day and in the few surviving photographs, his brooding features and massive frame make that physical power apparent.
Between 1902 and 1908 he appeared 16 times for Cornwall and in the championship-winning season was leading a pack that steam-rollered everything in its path.
After beating Devon, he was carried on the shoulders of the crowd through the streets of Redruth and contemporary reports tell of a forward with "splendid physique and considerable skill ... always in the fiercest part of the battle". He led the way in the 17-3 final win against Durham, when 17,000 spectators were shoe-horned into the Recreation Ground.
Several other Cornish players had followed Jackett to Leicester, but none with more success than Jackson - a powerful goal-kicker, who could hammer that era's heavy leather ball vast distances.
He was Tigers' leading scorer in 1906-07 and the English game's most formidable forward by 1907-08, a season in which he scored 98 points for Leicester. His tally of 14 tries included hat-tricks against West Hartlepool, Birkenhead Park and Bedford.
So it was only a matter of time before the selectors sat up and took notice. And that was where all the trouble started.
In 1908 Jackson was invited to travel to New Zealand and Australia with the Anglo-Welsh side - the earliest British Lions - on a tour designed to reinforce the supremacy of the union code over rugby league, the professional clubs of the Northern Union who had split the game in two a decade earlier.
So imagine if one of those flag-bearers of amateur purity was shown to be little more than a mercenary, one who had crossed codes with impunity and played under assumed names to protect his identity? In the summer of 1908, as the RFU sat down to investigate payments to players at Leicester, that is exactly what happened.
The whisper was that Jackson was not a mining engineer from Camborne at all. He was a Welshman who had called himself Gabe or Jones when he played in the Northern Union.
Rugby league champions Swinton had made the connection. They remembered a thick-set Welshman who had played for them several years earlier and were prepared to claim that John Jones from Swansea and Frederick Jackson of Leicester were one and the same.
It was the sporting sensation of the summer. Newspaper bills shouted 'Is Jackson Jones?' to the public. The RFU had to act.
The telegram that arrived in Wellington, New Zealand on June 25 contained five words: 'Jackson suspended, return him forthwith'. Tour manager George Harnett did as he was told. A day later Jackson was boarding the Maitai and sailing for Sydney on the first leg of the journey home to face the music.
Jackson, though, was reticent. On the quayside he informed a reporter from the Wellington Dominion newspaper that he "had no knowledge whatsoever" of the charges. All he wished to say was that he wanted to "thank the football public in New Zealand for the kindly manner in which he had been treated by them".
And he never did return to England. By the end of the year he had found his way back to New Zealand and started a new life. He acquainted - or reacquainted - himself with the rugby league code and played for his new homeland in 1910 against the British touring side. After that he quietly faded into the background.
He married a Maori woman he met on that Anglo-Welsh tour. Four children were born, a daughter and three sons named Everard, Sydney and Irwin. The playing link was strong (few others could have inherited the genetic advantages of the Jackson boys). Everard was a prop forward of the highest class, winning six All Black caps before the Second World War. His career ended after he lost a leg fighting in the Western Desert. Sydney was no mean player either, winning Maori caps in the 1930s.
But the rest is silence. Frederick Jackson returned to rugby union and became an East Coast selector when he lived in Hawkes Bay. He eked out his days through two World Wars and died in Auckland on April 15, 1957.
But who was he? His last surviving son Irwin had questions with no answers. A decade ago he was still trying to discover his father's real name or date of birth.
Research in England has proved fruitless so far. There are no records of a Frederick Stanley Jackson being born in Camborne, or a Gabe or Jones who fits the description from Swansea, or at Llandovery College, where the Manchester Evening News reported in 1900 that the Swinton player was educated.
The profiles of the Anglo-Welsh party from 1908 claim Jackson attended the Camborne School of Mines, but there is no record of him ever having studied there.
In a letter, Irwin confessed: "For reasons of his own, dad was very reticent of his past before 1908." He remembers his father speaking of Boer War service. But that is it. The man himself, in the intimacy of his own immediate family, never told the whole truth about his life.
If the silence is annoying for those with an interest in rugby history, it was infuriating to Irwin Jackson.
Who am I? Where am I from? What are any of us without the answers to these questions. For some reason, one of England's greatest players, banned after a string of allegations about his sporting past and protected his real identity. He carried the answers to his grave.
Simon Mills
http://www.rfu.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/RFUHome.News_Detail/StoryID/11170
A very interesting story, will we ever discover the truth?
I wouldn't agree with all of that statement, the whole Cornish identity claim had been kick started several years earlier but still had a long way to go to get the whole of Kernow to wake up to that fact. The success of the Cornish national XV getting to several semi finals in the 80's started to wake the Cornish identity feeling within Kernow and the finals of 1989/91/92 really were the Cornish coming to terms with the fact that we are a seperate people with pride in our identity. The winning final of 1991 was definately the alarm bell waking the Cornish up, the feeling of national pride in being Cornish since then has really gone from strength to strength.
I know what you mean Andy, the Cornish have always been proud of their distinct identity. In 1904 Henry Jenner produced the first handbook of the Cornish language and since 1951 MK have done a great job of promoting the language, committing itself to Cornish self-government, trying to further the acceptance of the Celtic character of Cornwall, pressed for a Cornish university and for Objective one funding. The St.Piran's flag, only a generation ago condemned as 'MK's flag,' now flies from flag poles across Cornwall. I do think however that the huge support shown at the Twickenham rugby finals confirmed the passion for Cornwall and this should not be forgotten. It's a shame that some on trelawny's army still need to refer to the Duchy as a "county" !
Yes good one Tumbled! I've never understood on the one hand Cornwall's passion for rugby and on the other hand the majority's great passion for under selling themselves particularly by accepting and using the word "county". Using it just sells us short and one day the penny will drop.
For info: The Admiral Benbow is running a coach on Sunday 20th November to Harlequins. Leaving Penzance RFC at 7 a.m. and returning to Penzance after the match.
Tickets are priced at £32.00 each and includes:
Travel in Executive coach.
Grandstand seat in the ground.
A free draw on return journey for:
1. A free evening meal for two at the Admiral Benbow
2.Bottle Scotch
3. Bottle Vodka
4. Box Chocolates.
Applications accepted from Tuesday 1st November 2005 and after.
Seats are limited and on a first come first served basis.
Is there any more news on this and if correct will "County Hall" now become known as "Kernow Hall" ?? I just wish the same could be done over on Trelawny's army and some would drop the term "county" !!
All of which begs the (rather rhetorical) question, why did Cornwall enter a rugby team into the County championship? (not to mention revel in winning it!) Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it as much as the next Cornishman - just thought I'd mention it.
Police name death crash cyclist
Police in Cornwall name a cyclist who died after being badly injured in a collision on Sunday.
Training to distribute aid boxes
Cornish-based charity Shelterbox trains Burmese workers to distribute its boxes of aid for cyclone victims.
Pony pair graze conservation area
Two Exmoor ponies are installed at a Cornish conservation area to help manage the site by grazing.
Gyrocopter pilot had heart attack
A gyrocopter pilot whose machine crashed on the way to Bodmin Airfield died from natural causes.
Sanctuary man jailed over abuse
The former owner of a donkey sanctuary is jailed for five years for sexually abusing young girls.
Lorry stuck between buildings
A wrong turn ends in embarrassment for a lorry driver as his vehicle gets stuck in a Cornish village.
Police save harbour jump suspect
A man attempting to run from police is rescued by them after jumping into a harbour in Cornwall.
Chapel to host animal blessing service
An animal blessing service is to be held at Tredarvo chapel on Sunday at 3pm, conducted by reverend William Ireland. Anybody is welcome to attend the hour-long service with their pets, and this will be followed by refreshments. Mr Ireland said: "I ...
