The Writing Desk of Jack Clemo

The writing desk of Jack Clemo is a humble piece of furniture, less impressive than the desks of St Austell cohabitants Sir Arthur Quiller Couch and Daphne du Maurier. It is a small bureau with three simple drawers underneath. No room for clutter, no need for ornament. It is plain and cramped, as it had to be. Clemo did not have his own study, but sat squashed in the corner of the living room, writing while village children, evacuees and visitors drifted in and out. Jack would hand the children old drafts of manuscripts to draw on or to practise their homework. It was a rented four-roomed, two-bedroomed clay workers’ cottage, which housed not only Jack and his mother, but also her sister Bertha and usually two or three children through the 1940s and 50s. When they first moved in, during the First World War, the Clemos fetched their water from a pump down the road at Goonamarris, or from the spring when the pump ran dry. It was not until the 1930s that a tap was fitted to the outside of the garden wall, and not until 1968, when Jack was 52 and due to marry, that he and his mother thought about getting a toilet attached to the house.

It was at this desk that Clemo wrote Wilding Graft, his award-winning clayscape romance, as well as his striking autobiography, Confession of a Rebel, and the poetry for which he is now best remembered, including The Map of Clay, Cactus on Carmel, The Echoing Tip and Broad Autumn. His volatile emotional history all played out here, with the photographs of romantic attachments and lost loves propped up on its top, beneath the portraits of Browning and Powys. He would write his emotionally charged diaries here, as well as long, intense and argumentative religious love letters to potential partners, such as those sent to Eileen in 1949. Clemo’s correspondence was extensive and important to him, his only connection with the life outside of the villages. He was already deaf and unable to join in normal conversation, and by the time he was writing to Eileen, the view out of the window over the road, field and works, was blurring palely as his eyesight was beginning to fail. In later years, when he was blind, Clemo’s mother would sit beside him, much as Ruth sits beside him here in the photograph, writing out correspondence in capital letters into the palm of his hand.

It was also at this desk that Jack greeted the Beat poet Kenneth Rexroth, as well as Charles Causley, George MacBeth and Lionel Miskin, who painted Clemo several times in front of it, slouching lugubriously. Most people who visited Clemo recall their first impression of him, small, silent and hunched at his bureau.

The top photograph, taken by Paul Broadhurst for the Cornwall Courier, shows Ruth and Jack Clemo in 1980. You can see the modern electric fire covering the old coal and wood fireplace, for which Jack used to go out gathering smutties on the Slip as a young man. Over the fire is a 1979 painting, made by a friend of Jack’s foster-sister, Betty Penver, and over the desk to the right is a photograph of Billy Graham, whose missions had so impressed Clemo in the 1950s. On the top of the desk is a newspaper article with a headline about the BBC film recently written and directed by Norman Stone, dramatizing Clemo’s early life. It was made at the end of 1979 and shown on Good Friday, 1980. Just out of sight, behind Jack’s shoulder, is a miniature of the 1957 clay bust of Clemo that is now kept in the Royal Cornwall Museum.

The Clemos were splitting their years at this time between the cottage at Vinegar Point and the Peaty house at Weymouth, and Ruth had constructed a similar space and desk at which Clemo could work in their suburban seaside retreat. When they finally moved, in 1984, they left the little bureau behind, with a good deal of other unneeded furniture. For the past twelve years, the desk has been kept in the Jack Clemo Memorial Room at Trethosa Chapel, a lovingly constructed and maintained space that has disappeared with the chapel’s closure. Wheal Martyn Museum and Park at Carthew, near St Austell, have taken the bureau now, though years of being stored in the cold and damp mean it requires some sensitive conservation work. The second image above, taken by Matt Shepherd of the BBC, shows the bureau's current condition. The lid is tied shut because one hinge is missing while the other is damaged and weak. The left lid-support, which pulls out, has a pin working as a handle, and the damage to the top drawer is evident. There are similar details of wear and damage all around the piece, inside and out, and as this year marks the twentieth anniversary of Clemo’s death – on 25^th July – we thought it would be a good idea to get it restored and out on permanent display. It has been estimated that £300 will do the job and we’re appealing for donations. Feel free to get in touch with me or with Wheal Martyn if you might like to contribute.

Clemo remains overlooked and undervalued, and the display of his writing space might be a good way for many new people to engage with him and his work. It is an evocative piece of literary and Cornish history and seems to reflect the poverty of his upbringing and the unusualness of his story. It could also be considered a neat symbol of that juxtaposition between the tininess of his worldly experience, the reduced landscape and his sensual enclosure, and the immense personal vision and talent with which he wrote.

Update: Following our brief media campaign, the £300 target has been reached and surpassed. Any further donations will go towards the accompanying bookcase, which is also in the photograph (top) and held by Wheal Martyn.

Top photograph courtesy of Paul Broadhurst and the Special Collections Library, University of Exeter. Bottom photograph courtesy of Matthew Shepherd/BBC Online.