---

12th January 1851

Nellie Sloggett is not a name that many people recall, perhaps Nellie Cornwall or her more famous pseudonym Enys Tregarthen might ring some folklore story bells.

Nellie (sometimes known as Nell or Ellen) was born in Padstow on 29th December 1850, and was baptised on 12th January 1851. She was an only child to Sarah and Moses, her father was a sailor away at sea a lot, and unfortunately he died of a seizure when Nellie was only seven.

Her mother was a char woman and took in her nieces to help make ends meet. It was hard time for the whole family, however, things were going to take a turn for the worse for young Nellie.

At the tender age of 16 she was crippled from a spinal decease, so Nellie and her mother moved into her aunt Lavinia’s house on Cross Street. She was paralysed and mostly experienced life through the view from her bedroom window, however, she began to keep diaries about flowers, the changing seasons, and birds and other creatures, all observed from her bedside window.

Nellie and her mother Sarah lived with Lavinia and her Master Mariner husband, Charles Rawle, in Cross Street for the next 15 years, then moved to Marine Villa where Charles became a ship builder of some renowned. ‘Captain’ Charles Rawle, in 1881, was the owner of Padstow’s largest shipyard employing 27 men and 14 boys. This would have put the Rawle family as part of the gentry class in Padstow society at that time and this must have helped with Nellie’s literary ambitions. 

Another influence on her was a new Methodist preacher in town, Benjamin Gregory, who visited Nellie and the Rawle family, and taught her Greek, saying she had “exceptional mental gifts”. With his encouragement she developed a thirst for literary pursuits. Sadly Benjamin died within a year of his arrival in Padstow in 1876, but he had left a lifelong influence on Nellie, she later wrote “it was the opening of a new life for me; he helped me as no one else ever did; he helped me to gather up the fragments of my own broken life.”

This, and the security and stability of life with the Rawle family resulted in Nellie writing her first book, Daddy Longlegs and then His White Heath Flower under the name of Nellie Cornwall. These, and all the other books written as Nellie Cornwall, were children’s religious and folklore tales which gained her a relative amount of success.

Sarah, Nellie’s mother, died in 1894, but Nellie remained in Marine Villa until it was sold in 1905. It was at this time that she changed her pen-name to Enys Tregarthen. She collected Cornish folk tales and legends from the North coast of Cornwall and wrote them for a new audience, saving them from sure extinction.

The books, written by the ‘little cripple’ as she was known in Padstow, were widely appreciated: The Witch in the Well, The Piskey Purse, and House of the Four Winds (this would be one of a very young John Betjeman’s favourite books.) There was Legends and Tales of North Cornwall. In fact she published a total of 18 books.

Nellie lived out the rest of her life at Little Petherick, still collecting stories, ferociously reading and writing many unpublished manuscripts. She died at the age of 73 in 1923.

After her death the US writer Elizabeth Yates visited Padstow and was shown the manuscripts and it was she who edited and published three more ‘Enys Tregarthen’ books in the 1940s.

Nellies legacy lives on.

---

References:

Padstow Museum article on line

Mazed Tales article

Cornish Studies Resources article

Dr Simon Young for the Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics

Devon and Exeter Institution article