It is probably fair to say that Dorothy (Dolly) Pentreath is amongst the most famous characters in the whole of Cornwall and certainly one of its most well-known women. Born in 1692 in the little fishing village of Mousehole, she was the daughter of the fisherman Nicholas Pentreath and his wife Joan.
Dolly is often described as being the last native speaker of the Cornish language but this is not entirely true, as there were others recorded still using the language after her death. It would be more accurate to say that she was the last ‘monoglotic’ speaker of Cornish, meaning that it was said that she did not understand any language other than Cornish – that it was her mother tongue.
Dolly began selling fish for her father at the age of 12 and it is supposed that at that time many Cornish fishermen and women still used the language to communicate with each other and with the Breton fishermen that used the local harbours. It is thought that Dolly did learn some English later in life through necessity, but Cornish remained her main way of communicating.
The legacy of Dolly Pentreath
Dolly was ‘discovered’ in 1768 by Daines Barrington, a historian and antiquarian, who had decided to see if he could find the last speaker of Cornish while on a tour of Cornwall. He claimed that he had come across her by chance in Mousehole, still working as a fish seller, and heard her speak “in a language which sounded very like Welsh”.
Daines wrote that two old women standing nearby laughed when Dolly spoke to him, “Upon this I asked if she had been abusing me, to which they answered, ‘very heartily’ because I supposed she could not speak Cornish.” He wrote that Dolly was short in stature, bent with age, and then about 87 years old. She was apparently still walking six miles each day on her rounds hawking fish and was “very vigorous, although deaf”.
In 1775 Daines published a report of the encounter in the journal Archaeologia in an article entitled “On the Expiration of the Cornish Language.” After this Dolly became something of a local celebrity and famed for cursing at passersby in Cornish when she became angry with all the attention! Dolly was very poor all her life and when too old to hawk fish was maintained partly by the parish and partly by fortune telling and by “gabbling in Cornish” for tourists.
Dolly was the last speaker of the Cornish language
One of her favourite phrases was to call people “an ugly, black toad” – “kronnekyn hager du” and apparently, many of the other folk living in Mousehole at that time could still understand her, even if they didn’t use the Cornish language themselves.
Dorothy Pentreath died in Mousehole in December 1777, where a plaque can be seen on a wall close to Keigwin Manor at the site where her cottage once stood, and she was buried at St Pol de Leon’s Church in Paul.
A large granite monument in honour of Dolly was erected against the wall of Paul Churchyard in June 1860. It was paid for by Prince Lucien Bonaparte, a nephew of the famous French Emperor, who was a passionate student of languages and had once had the Song of Soloman translated into Cornish. The prince was keen to commemorate the passing of this ‘Grand Dame’ of the Cornish language. But one can’t help but wonder what Dolly would have made of her continuing fame today, nearly 250 years after her death!