Henry Jenner

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Henry Jenner

Henry Jenner FSA (1848-1934) was a Celtic scholar, Cornish cultural activist, and the chief originator of the Cornish language revival.

Jenner was born at St Columb on 8 August 1848. He was the son of Henry Lascelles Jenner, who one of two curates to the Rector of St. Columb Major. In 1869 Jenner became a clerk in the Probate Division of the High Court and two years later was nominated by the Primate at Canterbury for a post in the Department of Ancient Manuscripts in the British Museum, his father then being the Rector of Wingham, a small village near Canterbury.

His earliest interest in the Cornish language is mentioned in an article by Robert Morton Nance entitled "Cornish Beginnings", ^[1]

When Jenner was a small boy at St. Columb, his birthplace, he heard at the table some talk between his father and a guest that made him prick up his ears, and no doubt brought sparkles to his eyes which anyone who told him something will remember. They were speaking of a Cornish language. At the first pause in their talk he put his query... "But is there really a Cornish Language?" and on being assured that at least there had been one, he said Then I'm Cornish- that's mine!

Plaque at St Columb Major

In 1874 Henry Jenner continued his interest in Celtic languages, and in 1875 he read a paper to the Philological Society in London, his subject being the Manx language. The following year he read another paper on the subject of the Cornish language at Mount's Bay. In 1877 he discovered, whilst working in the British Museum, forty two lines of a medieval play written in Cornish around the year 1450.

In 1903 he was made Bard of the Breton Gorsedd, and he founded the first Cornish language society, "Cowethas Kelto-Kernuak". The following year he took Cornwall's application for membership of the Celtic Congress, then meeting in Caernarfon. His Bardic name was Gwas Myghal ('Servant of Michael').

Shortly afterwards he published his Handbook of the Cornish Language and the Cornish Revival was born. His version of Cornish was based upon the form of the language used in West Cornwall in the 18th century, although his pupil Robert Morton Nance would later steer the language revival towards mediaeval Cornish.

A tory and a committed Jacobite, Jenner and his wife were involved with the Order of the White Rose (OWR), a society of Stuart sympathizers of which he was chancellor, conducting the order's rituals. (The Jenners first visited Scotland in 1892, and Scots Gaelic was one of his many languages.) He also actively supported The Royalist, a journal which ran from 1890 to 1905, and organized several exhibitions at the New Gallery, Regent Street, including the Stuart exhibition in 1889: it was said that Queen Victoria snubbed him because of the legitimist views promoted by these exhibitions. He withdrew from active involvement with the OWR before the First World War but remained fervently royalist and right-wing.

In 1909 he and his wife Kitty^[2] retired to Hayle, his wife's home town, and in January 1912 he was elected as the Librarian of the Morrab Library, a post he held until 1927. He also served as President of both the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society and of the Royal Institution of Cornwall.^[3] He died on 8 May 1934. Before he died, he said: "The whole object of my life has been to inculcate into Cornish people a sense of their Cornishness."