At Least They Were From A Northern Culture II

So there I was, all ready with my screwdriver and hammer waiting for my kitchen when I get a phone call telling me it won't be here until tomorrow. Ho hum. Anyhow, it does mean that I do have a little time to compose another blog posting.

You wait for ages for a really good (i.e. bad) letter to come onto the pages of the E&E, and then 2 come along at once. I just love this bad boy from L T Sargent. If you're going to write a boring letter to the Echo, you might as well do it properly. Here it is in its entirity. Warning, try not to read it all in one go, save you may fall into a coma of boredom. I have done it, but I am trained in the reading of rambling letters.


A NAME FROM ACROSS TAMAR

12:00 - 15 March 2006
Names have always interested me and therefore Kerra Maddern's report, Echo March 6, of headmaster Steve Maddern's temporary move from West Exe Technology College to St James School got my attention. I remembered that a Thomas Maddern from St Just, a village in the toe of Cornwall, was a compositor on The Cornish Times newspaper at Liskeard when I was a junior reporter on that paper before I joined the Royal Navy in the Second World War.

Tommy, as we called him, was a neat, quiet man of average size, who was always intent on his work. yet polite and friendly. I can still see him in the mind's eye as he selected types (letters and other characters) from the type cases (sloping racks) and placed them in line in his hand-held composing stick, which was about the size of a mobile telephone. We never dreamed of such things!

The Cornish Times was mainly set on three linotype machines, but the display advertisements and jobbing work were hand-set by about 10 compositors.

But to return to the Madderns, I quote from G Pawley White's A Handbook of Cornish Surnames (1972): "Maddern, Mardon. From parish name Madron. Mostly found within 10 miles of that parish today."

By strange coincidence, I met a lady on March 7 during a paper and book foray and she said her aunt who lived in St Just was named Maddern. I turned to speak to another person and forgot to ask the lady if my compositor friend of nearly 70 years ago may have been one of their St Just ancestors. Anyone surnamed Maddern must have a Cornish ancestor, I think.

Are Kerra Maddern and Steve Maddern Cornish or of Cornish descent and are they related to each other?

Like my late father and several previous generations of our family, I was born in Looe.

We were all proud of our native Cornwall, which the English invaded and plundered. But like many thousands of our fellow Cornishmen and women we have had to find work and build homes across the Tamar and the oceans. The Cornish and the English generally get on well together and the latter seem to love Cornwall.

L T Sargent

Cowick Hill, Exeter


A beautiful exponent of the absolutely irrelevent, of-no-interest-to-anyone-ever, what's-the-point-oh-there-isn't-one letter. It just reminds me of Abe Simpson going on one of his rambles in the Simpsons. Superb.