Holiday With History: Morwenna
If you walk down Fore Street, from The Pea Pod store and bus/coach stop on the corner of New Road, half way down the hill before it takes a turn to the left is the imposing gable-end of Morwenna with it’s slate-hung rear extension, tucked just back from the road with a locally notorious bay tree that villagers would pluck leaves from overhung the garden wall.
Built between 1882 and 1885 next-door to Gulls Roost at the end of a terrace of smaller cottages, and owned and occupied by the Hills family for over a century, Morwenna is a large property for Port Isaac in that period. Its double fronted front aspect is impressive, but only really visible if looking uphill from the front door of St Peter’s Church below it. The Church was built at the same time, between 1882 -1884, also on land owned by the Hills family – in fact many of the properties on this triangular block of land between Back Hill and Fore Street, fronted by Canadian Terrace, were built by and lived in by extended members of this family. But Morwenna was the family home.
Thomas Henry Hills (the third in a long line of six Thomas Henry Hills dating back to the 1790s, the first T.H. Hills being the Port Isaac coastguard), and his wife Eliza are believed to be the first occupants of Morwenna. They were married in 1883 and their first child Eliza arrived in 1885, shortly after they Morwenna was completed. Seven more children followed: Sophie (b.1886), Thomas Henry (b.1887), Frank (b.1889), Katie (a.k.a. “Kit” b.1892), Susan (b.1895), Wilfred (b.1897) and Bessie Jane (“Jennie” b.1898).
Thomas Henry (a.k.a. Harry) become a carpenter and boat builder, and the village undertaker. Frank (pictured left in the 1960s at a stile at the top of Church Hill) also worked with boats and moved to Southampton, often hosting sailors from Port Isaac who were joining America’s Cup yachts for the winter there (Port Isaac was one of the Cornish fishing villages whose fishermen were highly regarded sailors and often crewed yachts in the winter). Wilf and Jennie lived most of their lives in Morwenna, residing there after their parents passed away.
The Hills were an active family in the United Methodist Free Church on Roscarrock Hill, whose chapel became the Port Isaac Pottery and is now the Chapel Café.
In 1862 Thomas Henry Hills’ father (another Thomas Henry Hills!) was captaining the Port Isaac coasting smack The Telegraph and was in Bude when the Bencoolen, a large ship (1455 tons and a crew of 33) was wrecked at the mouth of Bude Haven. He paid 30 shillings for the Bencoolen’s bell and brought it back to Port Isaac to be used as the bell in the Methodist Chapel where, apart from during the war years, it was run every Sunday to call the congregation to service until 1993. Thomas Henry would ship coal in to Port Isaac on local merchant Warwick Guy’s smack The Telegraph, and this was stored n the cellar underneath the Methodist Sunday School.
His son Thomas Henry was Society Steward at the Methodist Church and his daughter Jennie was after him, for 33 years, alongside leading the Sunday School.
When they were children, Jennie recalls her father Thomas Henry going out at night to check on the position of the village’s fishing boats during herring season in November and December.
“Father could hear the changes in the weather in the chimney and he would be off to join others trying to locate the position of the herring boats from their lights,”
Wilf had seen service during The Great War of 1914-1918, and been gassed. In his later years he was incapacitated in his bedroom at the front of Morwenna, and had various mirrors set up, some on pulleys, so that he could enjoy the views over Lobber and out to sea from his bed as well as watching his great nephews and nieces playing in the front garden during family picnics. He passed away in 1962.
Jennie would live almost her whole life in Morwenna, until 1991 when she moved into a nearby care home and the property was sold. Jennie lived to be just shy of 100, passing away in May 1998!
In 1915 at age 17, a year after the outbreak of war, she took a job alongside Olive Bate at the Post Office in Port Isaac. They worked together there for the next 46 years. At that time the Post Office was at the very bottom of Roscarrock Hill on the left, adjoining the Platt. It was open from 8am until 8pm and dealt with the sending and receiving of telegrams, which were particularly important for the local fishing industry to sell their catch promptly. Telegrams were sent by Morse code until the telephone line arrived in 1925. In 1945 the Post Office moved to the bottom of Fore Street, opposite the Golden Lion, until 1960 when Jennie and Olive retired and the Post Office moved up the hill to what is now The Boathouse Stores in the old Lifeboat House.
Over Jennie’s lifetime, Port Isaac and the world around it changed enormously. She grew up in a village connected to the outside world by horse and cart and Morse code, remembered the first car owned in Port Isaac, when the houses were linked up to mains water, and worked through the introduction of electricity and the telephone. For many years, she was a key link in Port Isaac’s connection to the outside world. In Jennie’s memoirs, Those Were The Days (available to purchase online and at Secrets and Port Isaac Pottery), she recounts almost every aspect of village life through the early 20th Century, including the 19 shops in the village trading in various wares!
Port Isaac was certainly a very different village a hundred years ago when Jennie Hills was a young lady living in Morwenna, but the fabric of this place has not changed and it is just as charming and beautiful as ever.
Our thanks to Port Isaac Heritage for sharing historic photos of the Hills family with us.