Posthumous Controversy
The former Cornish home of Jack Clemo was demolished by the Goonvean China Clay Company on 6 September 2005 to make way for new laboratories. This provoked much anger both locally and from fans of the poet, who had lived most of his life at the cottage except for his last 10 years after having moved to Weymouth in 1984.
Dr Philip Payton, director of the Institute of Cornish Studies in Truro, said he would like to see the cottage as a museum. "You cannot think about Jack Clemo without thinking about the china clay country. And you cannot think about the china clay country in any serious sense without pondering about Jack Clemo. To obliterate the cottage would be to erase from the landscape of Cornwall. He is hugely important in a Cornish context and also as an international poet. He is one of the greats. There is something about Jack Clemo's cottage that says so much about him as a person. It is so humble and in such a bleak place and it speaks volumes about his disabilities and achievements."
Alan Sanders, secretary of the Jack Clemo Memorial Room at Trevosa Chapel, said: "On a personal and literary level this cottage was highly important. I have known this cottage all my life so I am deeply saddened. A lot of people are still keen on Jack's work and will be very disappointed." Mr Sanders said the company had ignored requests to keep the cottage although he accepted it was within its rights and had broken no planning rules in demolishing the cottage. A scale model of the cottage has subsequently been created and can be seen in the Trevosa Chapel museum.
Read more about this topic: Jack Clemo
Famous quotes containing the words posthumous and/or controversy:
“Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often caress the great, but the children of the great: it is a hall of the Past.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)