Mark Steel's In Town

Mark performs from the Acorn Arts Centre in Penzance, Cornwall, where the locals revel in their remoteness, pilchards and pasties. Struck by the beauty of this rugged coastal town he is surprised to find a civil war raging...

This week, Mark is at the Acorn Arts Centre in Penzance, Cornwall, where he learns there is more to the town than pasties and pirates.

The first thing to strike him is just how remote Penzance and Cornwall is from the rest of England. A train journey to the town is an interesting thing in of itself. The locals seem to like their remoteness, and even dislike people from St. Ives for having a dentist.

Mark claims that Penzance is a proper seaside town, still with a fishing industry which catches all kinds of fish (the bad ones are given to cats and tourists). The town also has a triangular swimming pool which makes it difficult to do lengths.

He also talks about a quick cycle trip he took to Land's End where he came across a signpost saying how far away the town is to John O'Groats, New York and so forth. He decided to have a cup of tea and then take his photo next to the signpost. By the time he finished his tea, the signpost was gone. In order to have your photo taken by the signpost, it costs £10, and the people taking the photo leave at 5:30, taking the signpost with them.

Mark then talks about Cornishness itself, how he likes the Cornish flag (white cross on a black background). He then talks about Cornish nationalism, and how early trade unions where part socialist and part Cornish nationalist. In 1847, protesters waved the red flag with a pasty stuck on the end of the flag pole. Mark says that the Cornish political party Mebyon Kernow, and in 1964 a branch of the party was based in Nigeria.

In 1896, there was the Newlyn Fish Riots, near Penzance, which began after fishermen from Lowestoft broke the Methodist tradition of not fishing on Sundays. The people of Newlyn threw the Lowestoft catch back into the sea, so a Lowestoft fish dealer called Hobson asked the home secretary for a gunboat to be sent town. The rioters reacted by putting Hobson's office on wheels and dumping it into the sea.

Earlier, in 1595, an armed Spanish fleet arrived in Penzance and started to burn down the town. People fled and the Spanish took whatever they could find. The day afterwards, the people of Penzance vow revenge if they ever landed again. They have not done so as yet.

Penzance's most famous resident is the chemist Sir Humphrey Davy, inventor of the Davy lamp, but who started life as a poet, and acted as a proof-reader for Wordsworth. Amongst Davy's early work was his study of laughing gas, but his results sound like those of a stoned student.

However, Mark find a most disturbing side to Penzance, in the form of the civil war between those want to build a new ferry terminal in the town and those who think it will spoil the area. Both sides are passionate that they are right. Mark attempts to help by getting members of both rival factions to shake hands.