John Roach, St Ives, circa 1921.
This is the only photograph that I have of any of my St Ives ancestors: great-grandfather John Roach, born in 1849 to Ann and John Roach. Like all John Roaches before him, he was a man of the sea.
I never heard tell of him: my maternal grandfather (his son) died long before I was born, and my grandmother was a person of few words. But this photograph found its way into our family archive, such as it was.
Great-grandfather John grew up in the heyday of the St Ives pilchard industry and as a child would have joined the crowd that gathered to witness the shoals coming to shore. In 1851 Wilkie Collins described how the huers or signalmen on the cliffs would spot the shoals coming to shore and alert the waiting boats below.
“If it so happened that a stranger in Cornwall went out to take his first walk along the cliffs towards the south of the county, in the month of August, that stranger could not advance far in any direction without witnessing what would strike him as a very singular and alarming phenomenon. He would see a man standing on the extreme edge of a precipice, just over the sea, gesticulating in a very remarkable manner, with a bush in his hand; waving it to the right and the left, brandishing it over his head, sweeping it past his feet - in short, apparently acting the part of a maniac of the most dangerous character."
After some time of this, the fish arrived close enough to the shore for the boats: to surround them with their seine nets.
“The first sight from the cliffs of a shoal of pilchards advancing towards the land, is not a little interesting. They produce on the sea the appearance of the shadow of a dark cloud. This shadow comes on and on, until you can see the fish leaping and playing on the surface by thousands at a time, all huddled close together, and all approaching so near to the shore, that they can be always caught in some fifty or sixty feet of water.”
Boy sailor
Despite the lure of the catch, John did not join the local fishing fleet. By the time he was 13 years of age, he was a boy sailor in the Merchant Service alongside his father.
In his twenties, John married Wilmot Paynter, a local girl from a mariner family, and they moved into their own rented house in St Peter Street, Downalong. John and Wilmot had ten children, including my grandfather Samuel. Three died in infancy, not uncommon in those times, and their names given to the surviving siblings who followed them.
Southern Comfort:“Vintage Cornish fisherman's cottage maintaining its charm and period character.” St Peter Street, Downalong, 2012. Photo: Lesley Lawson.
By his early forties great-grandfather John had earned a master’s ticket, qualifying him to captain a craft of any size.
But life in Downalong was changing rapidly. The St Ives fishing industry had been under threat from foreign competitors who arrived from east coast ports, and steam trawlers were outpacing traditional sailing boats. The Cornish fishermen just could not keep up. By the late 1860s the direct rail was attracting a new community of artists who were buying up the empty cottages and net lofts for use as studios.
But the greatest blow to the fisherfolk of St Ives was the decline in the pilchard catch. Through over-fishing or changes in sea temperature, the pilchard season was ending earlier and earlier each year. By 1908, the huer stood alone on the cliff, the shoals were seen no more. Drift fishing out at sea continued for another few years but was increasingly unsuccessful. The last voyage of St Ives luggers to North Sea was in 1920. All came home in debt.
As a captain in the merchant service, great-grandfather John was protected from the vagaries of the fishing industry. In 1901, John and Wilmot were wealthy enough to buy their own home and moved up the hill to the more “refined” neighbourhood of Trenwith Terrace. It was a humble abode: three up two down, with an outdoor loo, but miraculously spacious in comparison with the Downalong cottage.
Heartbreaks
But there were heartbreaks down the line. With no fishing work, three of his sons reinvented themselves, joining the great Cornish migration to the gold mines of the new world—the two eldest to the USA and my grandfather Samuel to South Africa.
Worse was to come. Wilmot died at the young age of 55 years. According to the death certificate she had suffered cancer of the cervix and exhaustion. Her death was registered by her brother-in-law, presumably because John was on the high seas at the time. By 1911, only the four younger children remained at home, and of these only Frank, a butcher, was employed.
Great-grandfather John sailed on. He was in his mid-sixties when World War I broke out, and he played his part. His ships braved the German U-boats to bring essential cargo home. Luckily, he escaped direct attack, unlike some 14,500 merchant seafarers who perished in that war.
Here he proudly wears the medals awarded to those who served at sea in danger zones. His contented gaze perhaps anticipates the response of his sons abroad.
I come across this photograph in an upright frame on my brother-in-law Robert’s desk. He liked the image: some old bloke from St Ives, he says. I am excited to see the inscription on the back—Captain John Roach. Several years later, after Robert’s death, his study has been converted into a spare bedroom and the photograph has completely disappeared. My sister thinks she may have thrown it out in a flurry of bereavement clearing. I search through Robert’s desk and find a memory stick of family photographs—great-grandfather John has made it into the digital age.
John’s life was a heroic one by all accounts. But one with little material reward. By 1925, retired and with no one in the family working, he had fallen on hard times. According to city records, he was excused from paying rates.
He died in 1932 at the age of 82 years, and was buried in Barnoon Cemetery overlooking the sea. There was no headstone on his grave.
Unmarked graves in Barnoon Cemetery , 2012. Photo: Lesley Lawson.
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Lovely Les. What a family history.