User:Andrewpool/sandbox

Peter Aubrey Seymour Pool (16 March 1933 – 18 May 1996)

Solicitor; Cornish Historian and Scholar; author of several books on the history of Cornwall and its language; MA (Oxon); Bard of the Cornish Gorsedd 1955; Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries 1967; President Royal Institution of Cornwall 1974-6.

A scion of a Cornish industrialist family, Peter Pool was born in Eaglescliffe Co Durham, where his father was working as a research engineer with ICI before returning to the family firm in Hayle in 1940, when it was heavily involved in manufacturing munitions. He was educated at St Erbyn’s, Penzance; Brickwall, Kent; and Keble College, Oxford; followed by articles with a  firm of London solicitors. There he joined the London Cornish Association, learnt Cornish by correspondence with Robert Morton Nance, the second Grand Bard of the Cornish Gorsedd. Meanwhile, in 1955 he had become a Bard of the Cornish Gorsedd, at the time the youngest to do so, and took the name of Gwas Galva.

Returning to Cornwall, first with a firm in Bodmin and then setting up his own practice in Penzance, Peter Pool became immersed in Cornish activities. He served on the Council of the Cornish Gorsedd, became a respected archaeologist, taking part in many digs, some with Professor Charles Thomas, with whom he wrote The Antiquities of West Penwith. He was a research fellow in History at the Institute of Cornish Studies and also helped to establish the Cornish Language Board of which he was its first secretary.

When the revival of Cornish was still being treated with some suspicion or derision, as a young academic Peter Pool espoused the cause of Cornish with enthusiasm. Cornish is now taught as a GCSE subject, is accredited by the Institute of Linguists, and studied by hundreds of students in Cornwall, Europe, and by emigrant Cornish and others round the world.

In 1965, Peter Pool married Audrey Humphris, a Celtic/Cornish enthusiast, and moved to Zennor, where he immersed himself in its history and became an authority on the parish, publishing The Life of Henry Quick, the peasant poet of Zennor, and editing The Diary of James Stephens, a Zennor farmer, which was one of the first Cornish books to deal with agricultural life in the last century. After moving back to Penzance, he researched and published The History of the Town and Borough of Penzance in 1974, and in 1988 was made an Honorary Freeman for his services to the town.

For many years Peter Pool served the Cornish community as director of the family firm of manufacturing engineers, as Chairman and Librarian of the Penzance Library, Vice-President of the Celtic Congress, President of Penzance Old Cornwall Society, and legal adviser to many organisations. From 1974 to 1976 he was President of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, and as Editor of its journal was twice awarded the Henwood Medal for research. Peter Pool was trenchant in his opinions, and one of his last booklets was The Second Death of Cornish (1995), where he attacked others who believed that Unified Cornish, the language as formulated in the 1920s by Robert Morton Nance, needed drastic and sweeping changes. It was a strong plea for careful and considered research first. While some did not agree with his stance, most have respected his scholarship. He was a founder member of Agan Tavas ("Our Tongue"), an organisation promoting Unified Cornish.

Peter Pool is buried in the churchyard at Zennor, the heart of his beloved Cornwall, near the grave of Robert Morton Nance and under the shadow of Carn Galver, from which he took his bardic name. There were no children.