John Davey

John Davey or Davy (1812–1891) was a Cornish farmer who was one of the last people with some traditional knowledge of the Cornish language. According to Henry Jenner, the level of his ability in the language is unclear, but was probably restricted to a few words and phrases. A song attributed to Davey's memory, the "Cranken Rhyme", is not known from any earlier source and is notable as possibly one of the last survivals of Cornish literary tradition.

History Davey lived in the hamlet of Boswednack in Zennor parish. A farmer who served as a schoolmaster in Zennor for a period, he reputedly learned his Cornish from his father. He died in 1891, aged 79, taking his knowledge with him.

John Hobson Matthews mentions Davey in his History of St. Ives, Lelant, Towednack, and Zennor, published in 1892, the year after Davey's death. In a chapter discussing Cornish and the evidence of its late survival in the region, Matthews indicates that Davey had had some knowledge of the tongue, could decipher local Cornish placenames, and could "converse on a few simple topics in the ancient language". However, Robert Morton Nance amended Matthews' spelling into a comprehensible form, and offered a translation. By Nance's emendation, the song is a brief piece of humour, comparing the fertility of the rocky fields of Cranken unfavourably to a road.

A memorial plaque at Zennor church was erected by the St Ives Old Cornwall Society. The inscription describes Davey as "the last to possess any traditional considerable knowledge of the Cornish Language", and contains a Cornish quotation from the Book of Proverbs: "The words of wise men are as a deep pool, a flowing stream – a fountain of life".

There is some evidence that at least three individuals with some knowledge of Cornish outlived John Davey: Jacob Care of St Ives (d. 1892); Elizabeth Vingoe of Higher Boswarva, Madron (d. 1903 and who taught at least some Cornish to her son); and John Mann, who was interviewed in his St Just home by Richard Hall (Elizabeth Vingoe's nephew) in 1914, when Mann was 80. He told Hall that, when a child in Boswednack, Zennor, he and several other children always conversed in Cornish while at play together. This would have been around 1840–1850. They would certainly have known Cornish speaker Anne Berryman (1766–1854), also of Boswednack.