Thomas Tonkin

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Thomas Tonkin (1678-1742), was Cornish historian, topographer and MP born at Trevaunance, St Agnes, Cornwall.^[1]

He was born at Trevaunance, St Agnes, Cornwall, and baptized in the parish church there on 26 September 1678, the eldest son of Hugh Tonkin (1652–1711), landowner, and his first wife, Frances (1662–1691), daughter of Walter Vincent of Trelevan, near Tregony. His father served as vice-warden of the stannaries in 1701 and as sheriff of Cornwall in 1702. Tonkin matriculated from Queen's College, Oxford, on 12 March 1694, and was entered as a student at Lincoln's Inn on 20 February 1695. At Oxford he struck up friendships with Edmund Gibson, afterwards bishop of London, and, importantly for his future interests, with Edward Lhuyd, whose work has been regarded as the foundation of modern Celtic linguistic studies. Tonkin corresponded with Lhuyd between 1700 and 1708, when Lhuyd was working on aspects of the Cornish language.

Tonkin returned to Cornwall about 1700 and devoted himself to research into the history, topography, and genealogy of Cornwall. He is said to have become fluent in Welsh as well as Cornish. He married Elizabeth (d. 1739), daughter of James Kempe of the Barn, near Penryn, about 1710, although no exact date has been verified. It is reported that they had several children but the male line became extinct on the death of their third son, also named Thomas Tonkin.

Tonkin, at the time of his father's death, became faced with financial difficulties. He had discovered that his father and grandfather had spent large sums on improvements to their estates, especially on the erection of a quay at Trevaunance Porth, in Trevaunance Cove, to ship ore from the local mines. By 1710 Tonkin had spent a further £6000 on the quay's upkeep and he made attempts to raise money by seeking a patent for a weekly market and fairs at St Agnes but this was stopped by local opposition and he fell into debt. The quay at Trevaunance Cove was destroyed through lack of repair in 1730. Tonkin fell into the hands of a creditor and he lost a lawsuit against him and with it his family estates at Trevaunance. His later years were spent at his wife's estate in Gorran parish.

Partly through the influence of his in-laws, Tonkin won a by-election to represent the borough of Helston in the House of Commons from 12 April 1714 until 5 January 1715. However, he preferred to devote his time to academic pursuits. In 1737 he made a preliminary announcement of the publication of a three-volume history of Cornwall, priced at 3 guineas. He also planned to publish a collection of writings in Cornish, together with his own translations. Neither of these projected works was published; his lack of finances seemed the principal stumbling-block. His wife died at Pol Gorran, in Gorran parish, on 24 June 1739. Tonkin died at Gorran and was buried in the local church on 4 January 1742.

It is unfortunate that Tonkin's lifelong collection of material on the topography, natural history, parochial history, and language of Cornwall was never published during his lifetime. In spite of this, his contribution in gathering the literary fragments of the dying Cornish language played a major part in saving it from oblivion. In a letter to Lluyd, in which he criticized the poor standard of William Hals's Cornish dictionary, An Lhadymer ay Kernou, Tonkin commented that the Cornish language, at that time, was reduced to a small area of Cornwall. Moreover, the language had become corrupted and even native speakers were illiterate in it. At his death, Tonkin's manuscripts were bequeathed to his family. In 1761 the Cornish scholar Dr William Borlase managed to get access to Tonkin's manuscripts, of which he found nine volumes, and made a list of them, subsequently printed in the Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall (vol. 6, no. 21). On the death of Tonkin's niece Miss Foss in 1780, the manuscript of his ‘History of Cornwall’ became the property of Lord de Dunstanville, who published an edition of Richard Carew's Survey of Cornwall (1602), with Notes Illustrative of its History and Antiquities by Thomas Tonkin (1811). Lord de Dunstanville subsequently allowed Davies Gilbert to edit and embody the Tonkin manuscript in his Parochial History of Cornwall: Founded on the Manuscript Histories of Mr Hals and Mr Tonkin (4 vols., 1838). The manuscript was passed from Lord de Dunstanville to Sir Thomas Phillips and sold by Sothebys to a Mr Quaritch in 1898. Several owners seemed then to possess sections, and many of them, such as W. C. Borlase, had the good sense to donate them to the museum of the Royal Institution of Cornwall.

Because of its now fragmentary manuscript nature, and its incorporation into other works, Tonkin's major contribution to the study of Cornish historiography and Cornish linguistics has often been overlooked. The value of his collections was, however, well understood by the late eighteenth-century Cornish historian Richard Polwhele, who described Tonkin as ‘one of the most enlightened antiquaries of his day’