Jamaica Inn - History

History

It is often commonly thought that the inn takes its name from the smugglers who smuggled rum into the country from Jamaica and stored it at the inn. However, the name of the inn is actually said to derive from the important local Trelawney family of landowners, of which two family members served as Governors of Jamaica in the 18th century.

The inn was built in 1750 and extended in 1778 with a coach house, stables and a tack room assembled in an L-shaped fashion. The inn became a smugglers' stopping point while they used approximately 100 secret routes to move around their contraband. Originally, the half-way house was alone on this part of the moor, but later a church, parsonage, and school were added by Mr. Kodd, the proprietor of the land, satisfying the area's residents.

According to narrated story, piratical gangs operated on the coast of Cornwall during early 19th century. Cornwall has been very aptly described as the “haven of smugglers” in view of its topographic features of “rocky coves, sheltered bays, tumultuous waves and wild and untenanted landscapes”. The pirates ensnared ships to this coast line by tricking them with use of beacon lights, which they purposefully installed on the shores of the coast. Once the ships hit the rocky coast, they were wrecked and looted by the pirates.

By 1847, Francis Rodd of Trebartha Hall, who had been High Sheriff of Cornwall in 1845, was building a chapel at Bolventor to accommodate those who lived in the Jamaica Inn area. In 1865, Murray wrote that the inn was frequented in the winter by sportsmen and offered only rudimentary accommodations.

The current building still includes the extension of a coach house, stables and a tack room added in 1778. The inn was owned for a period by the novelist Alistair MacLean.

The Jamaica Inn’s past notoriety as the pirates' den was known to Maurier three years before she wrote her book, when she had lived in the inn, and on the basis of which she had spun her popular novel the “Jamaica Inn”, which was adopted into a melodramatic film of the same name made by Alfred Hitchcock. Before living in the inn, she had resided in Fowey estuary, known earlier as Foreside, a house in Bodinnick and subsequently in Menabilly. She described the nocturnal activities of a smuggling ring based at the now celebrated inn, "portraying a hidden world as a place of tense excitement and claustrophobia of real peril and thrill.” It should be noted though that in Du Maurier's novel, the Jamaica Inn is not functionable as an inn with many guests it had in reality, but was solely the home of the landlord and a rendezvous and storagehouse for smuggling. In the popular film made by Hitchcock in 1939 with the pirate's story line, the heroine’s role of a young girl who encounters the gangsters in the Jamaica Inn as “Lady Vanishes” was played by Maureen O’ Hara in her debut appearance while the main role of the ugly and fierce leader of the pirates was played by Laughton. The young girl finds out that her uncle is a member of the gang, and an young man accused of treason is about to be hanged. She soon cuts the noose around the young man and assists him to escape through the backdoor.