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| Digging Beneath the Headstones |
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Page 1 of 3 Digging beneath the headstones I suppose anyone who has done any family history research can, at some stage, be found looking around churchyards, reading the headstones and wondering about the folks that lie beneath. One story that came my way recently ends up in the churchyard of St Euny Parish Church, Redruth. This fascinating tale relates to the Coombe and Gribble families, and is a chapter shared with me by their grand daughter, author Pamela Ellen Ferguson of Austin, Texas, from her memoirs-in-progress entitled The Cornish Cactus.  Victoria Gribble Coombe and Cecil Coombe (senior), circa 1930s Northern Rhodesia. Both families were mining stock, it was in their blood. Cecil Coombe’s mining work had already taken him from Cornwall to places like Rangoon, India and the gold fields of South Africa before he settled in the Copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia. He became underground manager of the Nkana mine. His wife, Victoria, and children Pansy, (Pamela’s mother), Inez and Cecil junior joined him there in the late 1920s. Victoria was a Gribble before her marriage. Her father, Samuel Gribble, a builder, had died young. Her mother, Julie Ellen Gribble, later acquired the Miners Arms in Camborne in a vain attempt to keep her son-in-law Cecil from his mining excursions across the world. Pansy met her future husband Louis Ferguson in the Copperbelt. He was a mining man, but not a Cornish mining man. He was an American, a geology graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. He came to Northern Rhodesia and for a while worked under Cecil senior. Their differences were as chalk and cheese. A diehard old crust of a Cornishman, steeped in generations of mining experience and a young university graduate, it was surely a case of light the fuse and retire to a safe distance when these two disagreed! |
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