ART FOCUS
A history of fishing in Cornwall, at Falmouth Art Gallery. You might recognise ‘Hevva’ as a Cornish language word, most commonly seen in the sweet and sticky hevva (or heavy) cake. It actually means ‘shoaling’, ‘swarming’ or ‘flocking’, and was the traditional call used by the ‘huer’ to rally fishermen to their boats once pilchards (aka Cornish Sardines) had been sighted. Hevva! Hevva! at Falmouth Art Gallery explores the highs and lows of fishing in Cornwall, from the days when it employed whole communities to more recent times, when consumers barely think about how their dinner ended up in their shopping trolley. The exhibition was inspired by the story of Fred Stephens (1832-1908), a legendary ‘huer’ who spotted shoals of fish at Cadgwith for over 40 years. An obituary in the Illustrated Western Weekly News on April 25, 1908, described Mr Stephens in his prime as "the tallest and broadest-shouldered man that Cadgwith n 58 |
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could produce,” and “a strict Sabbatarian - nothing would induce him to go on the cliffs on a Sunday”. It goes on to tell how one night, Fred dreamed of a large shoal of pilchards in his fishing stem. His wife ridiculed the idea and told him to go to sleep, whereupon he dreamed the same dream twice more and determined to take action. He went to the cliffs and waited for morning light, upon which he found that his stem was indeed full of pilchards, enough to keep the boats busy for a week, thus ending a fallow period that had left Cadgwith close to starvation. Fred Stephens is the great-great-greatgrandfather of Falmouth Art Gallery’s access and interpretation manager, Donna Westlake. When plans were made to host an exhibition themed around Cornwall’s fishing industry, dipping into the gallery’s ever-popular collection of artworks by Charles Napier Hemy and the Newlyn
Issue 73 | August - September 2022
School, well-connected Donna was the natural choice to curate it. “I’m a Cadgwith girl with a lot of relatives in the area, many of whom have fished,” she said. “Fred’s story has been passed down through the generations, so I took as my starting point the pilchards he would have fished when the industry was at its peak.” Fishing has been a vital source of food and income since people first settled on the Cornish coast from about 8,000 BCE. It is still a key contributor to the Cornish economy and a celebrated part of Cornish life, steeped in tradition and heritage. As such, it has inspired artists for centuries. The Newlyn School painters settled in the town not for the light, but because the tough working lives of local fishing families gave them plenty of subject matter. Stanhope Forbes, known as ‘the Father of the Newlyn School’, rented studio space
