Read on March 16th, The Minack Chronicles Revisited starts with a long section of biography by John Nash and then has two of Derek Tangye’s memoirs reprinted.
I was immediately amused and relieved to read that this biographer also had at least a little trouble with Derek’s conservativism. (I also recently acquired and have read the excellent Went the Day Well.)
You can also see how beautifully this book is put together. I don’t think I would seek out One King, even though Nash said that Derek “took a generally enlightened view about what the future should be for the native peoples of the Empire” (remember, One King was written in the 1940s)…but not so enlightened as to give the Aborigines of Australia more than a few words.
(Meanwhile, I read Derek’s first memoir, pre-Minack Chronicles and before Jeannie, Time was Mine, and found him progressive toward other peoples (although not toward women), marred by two occasions of disturbingly racist language that jarred badly with the rest of the book. There was no such language in his later books, so I think he grew up. It is one thing to have used some racist words when a book was written in the early 1940s, although some people were enlightened even then. It is something else to have said book reprinted in a volume with two Minack memoirs in the early 1990s, a decision for which I feel the publisher was responsible; Derek, being in mourning, may not have given it much thought.)
After they had acquired the lease on Dorminack Cottage, Derek and Jeannie proved themselves to skeptical locals who thought they’d leave like many vacationers seduced by Cornish summers. Hard work does impress the locals!
In each of the three biographies, Jeannie is given credit …
Jeannie wrote her first book during their early life at the cottage, her memoir of her London life, Meet Me at the Savoy. It paid for getting running water to the cottage. This biographer speculates that without the books, their flower farm life would have eventually economically failed, not because of lack of hard work but because of changing times.
The books were so popular…
,,,and yet mostly out of print now, and among my friends, I feel alone in having read them or even heard of them. That is why I want to encourage you to find them and read them.
Ah, Cornwall…
This biographer and David Power both say that Derek and Jeannie did not acquire many close friends despite the many visitors who came to meet them because of the books. One was Howard Spring, whose memoirs I am going to read, another was David Cornwell (John Le Carre), who later wrote that he had at first been skeptical about Derek but later found him to be completely genuine. Cornwell had plenty of people show up at his house looking for Derek’s.
I found the books pretty easy to find, just cheap little paperbacks though….so if you want to read them, you might want to start looking, and, as John Nash said, they are best read in order.
On March 20th, the next biography arrived, this one a 724 page book that took me three days to read (because good work weather interfered).
It is still in print so I made sure to buy a new copy. It is a novelised biography where the author, who knew Derek and Jeannie, added imaginary scenes and conversations to the well known story. Pauline herself says she found Christianity at Minack, which is interesting because I did not feel Derek presented himself and Jeannie as being spiritual about anything other than nature. Pauline keeps her own faith to the beginning and end of the book and uses the word “destiny”, which is one that Derek used, throughout the biography.
Some things I found most interesting: Some locals felt that their relatives were not given proper credit by Derek for the work that they did at the cottage and farm. And sometimes Derek did not mention them at all. Also, both this and the next book reveal that he could be temperamental with workers, who sometimes would quit and later return! I know how that goes from the workers’ point of view.
(I remembered a job at a tourist destination where my partner and I did all the work on the garden, and when a reporter from the paper would come, the owners would pose outside with a pair of secateurs and never mention us. I remember at the same place, writing a two page tour description of the garden to leave for guests on a big garden tour day when I had several gardens on the tour and couldn’t be there all day, describing the names of the plants and so forth, and the owner insisted that her name be signed to it as if she had co-written it, even though she could not have identified most of the plants herself.)
Derek and a longtime worker Tommy, who loved working at Minack, fell out because Derek criticised that Tommy would stop work, stand up and look out to sea at birds or boats. This also brought back a memory of one of the first gardening jobs I had on the peninsula for a woman who told me she had had someone before me, but that every now and then he would stand up and look at the sky. I thought, don’t you realise how hard this work is and that sometimes you just have to stand up and stretch in order to keep going? The job went ok but I realised I didn’t want to work for someone who was going to police every moment.
I was amazed to learn that the settlement for damages that the Tangyes received when some glittering faithless friends from America wrote a play, performed in London, that fictionalised and ridiculed their country life, was worth at least 66 thousand in today’s dollars and is what paid for some of the remodelling and expansion of the cottage. I had wondered how that was afforded!
All three biographers (and Derek himself) wrote about his feelings of inferiority.
All three biographers wrote about how very kind Derek and Jean were to the pilgrims to came to see Minack.
Pauline’s book abounds with heartwarming examples in the words of visitors who wrote to her after she put out an appeal for memories of Minack.
A repeated theme is that people wanted to find out if the story of Minack was real, and when they arrived they were satisfied that it was a true story. Sometime shy people would turn back, and return the following year and then find the courage to walk the winding lane.
From another memory:
Oh, look, I saved this excerpt as a reminder to read more about Howard Spring. It means so much more to me now that I have read his wife Marion’s wonderful memoir, Memories and Gardens.
I also gleaned the names of two other women who write memoirs about moving to a country life and now have those books in my possession to read next.
Pauline’s lovely description of the honeysuckle meadow, where eventually Derek and Jeannie’s ashes were laid…
….had me in tears, as often happened throughout this book.
It was now March 23 in my world of 2023 and I had only 250 pages to go. I could happily have read 1000 more. Skooter joined me for the rest of the reading.
Pauline addresses the revelations that Derek made about their marriage in his later books. (The third biography will also mention this.)
Pauline retells the gist of the story of each of the books, and I so relate to the story of The Ambrose Rock in which the property next door is almost sold to a developer.
The land has now been preserved as Oliver Land, a “place of solitude” for visitors who can find it, named after one of the Minack cats.
The book concludes with some poignant memories of people who visited the cottage after Derek had died and before it was let to Jane, who used to work for them years before and who moved there in 1998 and has continued to run a horticultural business there.
If you become as interested in the Minack books as I am, Pauline’s book can’t fail to please. I encourage you to buy it new, as I did.
Finally, after a long wait and total of three copies ordered just to get one, the third biography arrived on March 30th.
It was much more detached and not at all whimsical or emotional, and I had been wanting that sort of view, also. And yet, it became clear that David Power also loved the books and greatly liked both Jean and Derek.
I think that from the very beginning of their relationship in the mid 1940s, Jeannie softened Derek’s character and the arrogance born of insecurity.
Power says Derek was almost barred from the hotel until he learned to be more amiable! He has a good analysis of why Derek was that way.
Their quest to leave the city began. Apparently they knew, from words told them at the Lamorna Inn while they were vacationing, that there was an old cottage up along the Cornish cliff path.
They did take it on, and prevailed.
They were so poor… They depended on money from when they sold eggs from their chickens.
That brought back a clear memory of decades ago in Seattle when I was a housecleaner, living from one pay check to the next, and went to a job where they had forgotten to leave the key under the mat. I looked in the kitchen window and could see my check on the table, so I climbed in the open window, closely watched by their large dog, who fortunately proved his affection for me, and cleaned the house anyway.
The author goes deep into the relationships between Derek and the various carpenters and farm workers, all of which fascinated to me, especially how after some sort of explosion and estrangement, some people would return, apparently from fondness rather than financial need.
This reminds me of my mother: “With all employees, Derek insisted that he and Jeannie were to be known as Mr and Mrs Tangye.”
…and of the very embarrassing moment when I introduced a friend and co-gardener to her. My mother was about 77 years old and my friend and I were in our mid 40s. My friend said, “Would you like to be called Virginia or do you like Ginger?” And my mother briskly replied, “Call me Mrs. Johnston.” Mortifying!
The following is so very familiar to me, from the worker’s point of view:
And yet, Derek had…
The author touches on Derek’s politics:
No sympathy though, as I’ve noted in earlier posts, for women who couldn’t win the world through charm and “sex appeal” like Jeannie. (I don’t think Jeannie would have looked at it that way but I will never know.)
I very much love what Power, who had met with Derek, who was clearly smitten by the books, but perhaps not as sentimental as other readers, had to say about some of the revelations in this biography:
The author’s thoughts about Derek’s later revelations:
And later, I think this answers my burning question of “How did they find the time!”; I think Derek was just philosophising:
This was deeply touching….as like Jeannie I would want to be private in illness; her hospital room toward the end:
And (I think it was Pauline’s book that told of this part), I would be likely to put off a medical appointment for mysterious pain because it was inconvenient. I am a little muddled now about which biography revealed that she put off seeing a doctor till after work season. I so totally understand that.
This is exactly what I imagine it would feel like to visit Oliver Land:
I would sit on Ambrose Rock and weep with joy and poignancy.
A most astonishing moment occurred at the end. The author shares the final page of Jeannie’s memoir, Meet Me at the Savoy, and I had the blazing, unachievable, fierce desire that I could read another version of the chronicles of Minack as written by Jeannie.
So far, the only copies of her once best-seller memoir that I have found for sale range from $75 to $141! Eventually, I hope to add it and her three novels to my collection.
Reading these three biographies helped me to process my Minack obsession, which has brought me a lot of joy and also brought me a lot of pain and angst that I was never there and that I will never meet Derek and Jeannie.
A complex man that’s for sure, who certainly shared many of his time’s prejudices. Not unusual, I suppose. I was struck by your story of the women firing a man because he occasionally stood up to look at the sky. What. The. Heck. Glad she didn’t treat you that way, but I can see why you decided not to work for her anymore.
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To the writer goes recorded history. It would be interesting to read the story through Jeanne, to have a more rounded picture of the Minack chronicles. On a tale where it took two to have a story, it is disconcerting to have so strongly, one voice. But….perhaps that dominance, that claim to voice….is part of the story.
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I think it is. There were a few more passages that I saved for me (can’t post too many excerpts) that backed up that Derek was pretty possessive. Jeannie was strong willed and I wonder if part of what made their relationship work was their love for Minack as well as for each other. It took two of them to make that place profitable, and eventually it took the writing of books to make it successful. In my opinion as an outsider, of course.
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Thank you for all your book reviews and comments. I appreciate you take on books and, thanks to the Timberland Library, I often follow up by reading what you recommend.
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Thank you! I’d be very interested to know what you think if you read any of these.
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John le Carré’s delicate diction, sophisticated syntax & elaborate plots made him emperor of the espionage genre. But did he have more Achilles heels than toes? Do read https://theburlingtonfiles.org/news_2022.10.31.php & note that Beyond Enkription is raw & matter-of-fact compared to the emperor’s epics.
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As someone who did meet Derek, sadly not Jeannie as she had passed by the time I found his books, I can say that he was a fascinating man and well beyond his time. I feel it is unfair to sy he made rascist remarks as in his time and you cannot judge that looking back but have to be in that time to understand that to him things were as they are a ‘fact’ which is very hard for us looking back at that time as we believe they should have known better. But like everything if you have access to knowlege you should know better..without that you don’t. I used to visit him several times a year for several years prior to his death in 1996. He was astute in his understanding of people and that came with the time of his past work and his meeting people who visited Minack. His books have meant much to many who are unwell or seeking answers and several I know have found new beginnings in determining their own fate and left the ‘rat race’ I was one of those..travelling 600 miles from my home in Sussex to a Scottish island. Since then I have devoted many an hour talking with fans who want to visit or chat about the books and was an Associate Trustee for Oliver land which is now under Cornwall Wildlife Trust. I have set up several facebook pages and a website along with a massive collection of memorabilia which I plan to bequeath to a suitable Museum that I hope will enable to legacy of their work both literary and the nature reserve they left for future generations.
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Thank you so much for you illuminating comment. I wish so much I had known of his books when I was in Cornwall in 1975. I would have made a pilgrimage. I was SO close because I was actually at the Merry Maidens just down the road.
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the website for more information on The Minack Chronicles is https//minack.info and I am happy to help anyone with any queries regarding the books Derek or Oliver land, particularly if you plan to visit.
Facebook page is http://facebook.com/friendsofminack
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Biographies are gifts that keep on giving, offering endless opportunities for discovery, reflection, and growth with each new story we encounter.
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