Helena Charles

Charles was born in Kolkata, India in 1911. Her mother, Constance Mary Tyacke, was from Helston. Tyacke died in Kolkata in 1917, when Charles was 3. She attended Heathfield School, then Oxford University. She also took a social studies certificate at Bedford College, London. Charles was a dedicated Christian socialist and worked with the Industrial Christian Fellowship and dedicated much of her life to voluntary work. After the outbreak of World War Two, she joined the London Ambulance volunteer service. Horrified by the Holocaust, she became a committed Zionist and worked for the British Association for the Jewish National Home in Palestine, authoring several pamphlets for them. 

Moving to Cornwall in the late 1940s, Charles turned her sights to the Cornish revival. In 1949, she became the Cornish representative on the Central Committee of European Communities and Regions. She learned Cornish and helped found Mebyon Kernow, initially as a pressure group, under the slogan ‘Cornish jobs for Cornish people’. She became the group’s first chairperson and was elected under Mebyon Kernow policies, though not its name, to a seat on Camborne-Redruth Urban District Council in 1953. However, she lost her seat in 1955 and her more separatist position caused tensions with members who had been part of the Celtic revival and saw Mebyon Kernow’s role as cultural. Charles personally found the movement to be ‘passive’ and ‘anachronistic’. She was succeeded as the chairperson of Mebyon Kernow by Cecil Beer in 1957.

This is not to say she thought Cornish cultural revival to be unimportant. Cultural revival was central to the initial programme of Mebyon Kernow and in 1950, she organised a group of actors to perform the medieval play Bewnans Meriasek in Cornish at the Celtic Congress. It went on to be performed in several places in Cornwall and was Cornwall's entry to the Festival of Britain in 1951. Sanders also founded and edited the monthly magazine New Cornwall. She became a member of Gorseth Kernow under the Bardic name of Maghteth Boudycca ('Daughter of Boudicca') in 1953 and organised residential courses in the Cornish. 

She married Guy Sanders, a sculptor, in Cornwall in 1959. On a holiday to Venice in 1964, she was distressed by the number and condition of the stray cats there. She founded the Anglo-Venetian charity Dingo with Mabel Raymonde-Hawkins, which neutered and treated cats in Venice. Her husband became a licensed gondolier to help raise funds for the charity. She also founded the Cornish Christian Fellowship for Animals and Cornwall Cat Rescue. 

Following her husband’s death in 1985, she moved to Haddenham, near Cambridge. She died there in 1997.

Sources

Deacon, B., Cole, D., Tregidga, G. eds. (2003) Mebyon Kernow and Cornish Nationalism. Cardiff: Welsh Academic Press

Myer, V. G. (1997) ‘Helena Charles: Cats of Venice preserv’d’ The Guardian, 18 June, p. 28

Thomas, C. (2013). Gathering the Fragments: The Selected Essays of a Groundbreaking Historian. Redruth: The Cornovia Press

Williams, D. (2014). Following 'An Gof': Leonard Truran, Cornish Activist and Publisher. Redruth: The Cornovia Press