Research volunteer Julia Webb-Harvey explores the pioneering composer Dame Ethel Smyth and her Cornish myths and stereotypes-inspired opera The Wreckers.

^{Image: Looking north from Church Cove (courtesy of Julia Webb-Harvey)}.

Ethel Smyth’s opera, The Wreckers, made history. Smyth was the first woman composer to have an opera performed in Covent Garden. The year was 1910, the same year that she joined the suffrage movement through the WSPU: Women’s Social and Political Union. A year later in 1911 she would compose The March of the Women, the anthem adopted by the suffrage movement. But before this, her passion project had been The Wreckers. 

2022: Glyndebourne Opera’s premiere

Set in a remote corner of Cornwall, the opera tells the tale of a God-fearing community living a desperate, precarious existence. Their only hope is the ships that are wrecked on their rocks. But when they start to cause those shipwrecks deliberately, murdering the crew for profit, it tears the villagers apart, setting in motion a tragedy that kills two of their own.”

Glyndebourne, 2022

This is Glyndebourne’s introduction to their production of The Wreckers. It is set at the end of the 18th century in an unnamed Cornish village, with the landscape a key aspect of the setting and mood of Smyth’s opera. The inspiration came directly from the Cornish coastline, from the cliffs, the fizz and hiss of the ocean, and the stories carried inland with the swirling mists of wreckers.

Origin story

In 1886 Smyth accompanied the Hippisleys on a walking holiday in Cornwall. The memory stayed with her ‘wrapped in a tissue of gold,’ and twenty years later she would draw on the seeds of memory to develop the opera. 

Smyth wrote evocatively about her visit to Pope’s Cave, Tresco on Scilly. It is the scene of the final act of The Wreckers and the rising tide brings with it the culmination of the themes of love and morality. Smyth describes Pope’s Cove as:

On entering it, just above the high water mark, you go downwards rapidly and alarmingly by an ever narrowing passage illuminated by torches, which are stuck at intervals in rings around the wall; the passage suddenly bends sharp to the left, and you become aware, by the growling of boulders apparently a few inches above your head, that you are under the sea; presently, to your great relief, the passage takes another turn, the rumbling ceases, and squeezing between two rocks at what seems to be the end of the cave, you behold an unearthly-looking little freshwater lake, on which floats Charn’s boat, while the waving torch of the guide reveals to you that the lake is full of goldfish (put there by the owner of the island, Mr Smith-Dorrien [sic.]) and that the goldfish are blind.”

Ethel Smyth, 1886.

Smyth visited Cornwall again, when she would lie on the clifftops to snare the sounds of the sea and the gulls to weave into the opera. Smyth was a prolific diarist but there is only a passing reference to the visit to Cornwall in 1886. The traces of Smyth’s life are not neatly held in one place but are scattered in eighteen (known of) locations (both in public and private collections). 

The Wreckers or Les Naufrageurs

The 2022 performance by Glyndebourne should perhaps have been billed “Les Naufrageurs”, the opera’s original title. The score was written by Smyth, and the libretto by Henry Brewster (heavily coached by Smyth) in French. The Wreckershad its debut in Leipzig in Germany in 1906, with Smyth leaning on her connections to get it performed. However, the score was cut to the fury of Smyth. According to Sophie Fuller, Smyth “took the extraordinary step of marching into the orchestra pit, removing all the parts and the full score, and catching a train to Prague, making further performances in Leipzig impossible.”

Fuller goes on to explain that the first staged performances in the UK, with the libretto translated into English as The Wreckers, was heard in June 1909, conducted by the young Thomas Beecham at His Majesty’s Theatre, London and underwritten by Smyth’s reclusive millionaire friend, Mary Dodge. The Wreckers was finally heard at Covent Garden in 1910.

In the last few years, The Wreckers has seen a resurgence. It was performed at Hall for Cornwall in 2006 by Duchy Opera, and since Glyndebourne’s production and a tied performance for BBC Proms, it has aired in Germany and the USA.

The importance of the Cornish setting in The Wreckers

Smyth gathered the inspiration in Cornwall and went back to ensure she captured the mood and movement in the score – but also the story. Each performance of The Wreckers has the opera set in Cornwall, true to its original setting and story. Director Melly Still in an interview with The Guardian in 2022, made this comment about the opera’s architects: ““Librettist Henry Brewster and Smyth were clear that they weren’t making this a piece about the Cornish people and wrecking specifically,” Still says. “For them it was a symbol of Britain and its insularity.”

Rather, Still stressed that the work reflected the defiant and unorthodox views of its creator. Smyth was a controversial figure in her day because she was an activist and a feminist. She was outspoken from childhood, refusing any alternative but to pursue music professionally. Eventually she wore her father down. Smyth was a suffragette who spent time in prison for speaking out about the vote. Smyth was determined to turn the stories she heard on her walking holiday into her art form, the opera.

Smyth’s diaries suggest that she was not only being place-specific but also was writing about the nature of Cornish people. She pours scorn over the Cornish: 

… And I knew that these Cornish savages had come to believe that like the Israelites in the Old Testament they were God’s Chosen People, whose right, nay, whose duty it was to plunder and extirpate less favoured peoples.”

The Memories of Ethel Smith.

This was her story of Cornwall that she wrote into the narrative of her opera. Smyth wrote that she had, “been haunted by impressions of that strange world of more than a hundred years ago; the plundering of ships lured on to the rocks by the falsification or extinction of the coast lights; the relentless murder of their crews…”

In her reflections on the stories that haunted her, Smyth questions whether she picked up the story of the two lovers – or whether it came to her in her sleep. She concludes, “I cannot say, but I fancy the hint of such a legend must have been given me by someone in Cornwall.” Smyth wanted to check for herself, and in 1902 she “ran down to Cornwall once or twice” to cross-question oldest inhabitants, and “glean tales told them by their forebears (which may or may not have been gospel but certainly fitted well into the picture!)” She claims that one or two antiquarian-minded clergymen gave her more “reliable accounts of incidents in the past,” some of which reappeared in the completed libretto of The Wreckers. She cites the comic chorus after Chapel at the end of Act 1. 

‘Cornish savages’

I believe that Smyth intended to set the libretto in Cornwall about the ‘Cornish Savages’, she fought over the story and pushed Henry Brewster in the writing to hold onto the moral issues raised. At the same time, I believe she does widen them out to the human condition.

The opera is about poverty, morality and love and the audience becomes a wider circle of chorus in making judgement on the morality of the love story of the opera. In the exchange of letters with Brewster in the writing of the script, Smyth was provocative: “However they act, compromisers or sentimentalists like the English are all for protesting in theory against moral fluidities,” and would “an ‘all for love’ character like Thirza would not stick in Nonconformist English throats?”

She wanted to push buttons. Still is right, Smyth was defiant and unorthodox. 

Addressing the myth of the Cornish wrecker

Even if Smyth had intended The Wreckers not to be about the Cornish people, which I find hard to reconcile given Smyth’s own words, at one level it doesn’t really matter. Any artform, once released into the public domain is no longer the artist’s only – it belongs to the public too. The artist doesn’t get to determine what the impact is, or what the treatment will be. The themes and stereotypes in The Wreckers are strong and big, and Smyth is not the first person, or the last, to pick over the issues of wreckers and wrecking by the Cornish.

My PhD ground is JMW Turner’s Cornwall, and two of his paintings have wreckers picking over the jetsam of wreck (Pendennis Castle and Entrance to Falmouth Harbour, 1816 and Entrance to Fowey Harbour, 1827). In Turner’s Fowey painting, I think that Turner has painted wreckers on the shoreline near the scene of wreck, people holding torches. The same motif appears in a third of his Cornish paintings, Turner’s Longship’s Lighthouse with Land’s End (1835), the same flame of torch light on the cliffs as in the distant lighthouse. The theme of wrecking would have come inshore on the same mists and from the same stories in the inns and harbours around Cornwall. 

This painting by JH Eddy hangs in the Museum of Cornish Life. The painting shows a woman, her coat billowing in the wind, holding a lantern. Another person is bent over in front of her. It’s unclear where they are, but there are cliffs behind them and in front, a frothy sea. There is no ship, wrecked or otherwise. According to the catalogue record, the woman in the painting was the painter’s wife. The painting is unfinished as the woman died of consumption.

It hung in the offices of Eddy’s Shop in Helston. I wonder why Eddy chose to depict Cornish Wreckers, I wonder when it was painted (he lived 1880-1953) and I wonder why he chose to memorialise his wife as a wrecker. Perhaps it was painted around the time that Daphne Du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn (1936) was published, and that she is more hero than villain. 

Unpicking the myth

There is a tension in the stories from the past that perpetuate the ‘othering’ of the Cornish. In her book, Cornish Wrecking 1700-1860 (2010), Cathryn Pearce’s scholarly examination unpicks the myths from the practices. She dismantles the myths comprehensively, finding that there is no single piece of evidence to suggest that the deliberate luring of ships ever happened. The plot at the heart of The Wreckers is based on story, it is folkloric. 

According to Pearce, many of the folkloric Cornish histories (such as Henderson or AK Hamilton-Jenkin) quote Oppenheim’s chapter in Victoria County History of Cornwall (1906), but this was based on a fictionalised account of a wreck that took place in 1681 on St Agnes.

The rise of the Victorian trend for the Gothic and an antiquities revival were perhaps a perfect storm for the invention of the Cornish Wrecker. Undeniably, Smyth heard those stories and spun them into a different art-form. In Jamaica Inn, Du Maurier puts the barbaric practice of wrecking at the centre of her book. 

Perhaps the story-telling is the ingredient from a long tradition of Cornish droll-telling later picked up in literature. Ultimately, it seems, it is fake news. Whatever the grains of truth from the past, the Cornish Wrecker has been made real and as Pearce concludes, quoting Du Maurier, “It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.”

Postscript: The Wrecker and wrecking

Pearce’s book is a wonderful examination of Cornish Wrecking, in which she considers the range (and history) of wrecking practices with The Wrecker at one end of a spectrum and beach-combing at the other. Here she ponders that perhaps the stories have been told to embellish the fact that wrecking (the gathering of spoils of wreck) as a practice hides the shame of highly impoverished coastal communities. That is the subject for another day. 

By Julia Webb-Harvey.

References

Smyth, Ethel (2009). The Memories of Ethel Smyth. London: Faber & Faber.

Pearce, Cathryn (2010). Cornish Wrecking, 1700-1860: Reality and Popular Myth. Woodbridge: Boydell Press.