Fowey

During WWI my German grandfather Karl (later anglicised to Charles) Holm, who was at the time working as a merchant seaman on an English ship, was interned in Cornwall. He met a local girl from Fowey when she looked after him in the hospital when he was needing some health care during the time he was interned. They eventually married and raised three boys Eric, Frank and Terry in Cornwall. They emigrated to New Zealand during the depression to Taramakau settlement on the West Coast of the South Island to stay with a relative there….but that’s another story. My mother was the kiwi of the family, born on the West Coast.
We went to Fowey – I don’t know why, I wanted to see where she had come from. It’s a fishing village on a beautiful estuary. We looked around a church but no signs of family names.




The place was heaving with tourists.







I was shopping for souvenirs for my cousins. I told the shopkeeper that my grandmother had come from there.
“What was her name?”
“Florence Dowrick. Her mother’s name was Passmore.”
“Which part of Fowey was she from?”
“She lived in the country, from what I’ve been told, near Fowey.”
“Well she wasn’t from Fowey then, was she.”
There’s no answer to that.
Later in the day we went to St Austell, another place where we have family connections and saw a wonderful shipwreck museum in a place called Charlestown.










The kids hired remote-controlled boats and had races outside the museum.













We drove back past tumuli and clay china pits, so big you could have flung Fowey into the middle of them.