Honour Vingoe
born Eddy
about 1848 to 1921aged 73
Bal maiden at Botallack from about eleven; later laundress
- Born
- about 1848, St Just in Penwith
- Died
- 4 March 1921, St Just in Penwith
She went to the mine at eleven to pick and dress copper ore on the surface, which is what thousands of Cornish girls did. She left it when she married and she took in washing for the rest of her life. She was a widow for twenty four years and she buried a husband, a son-in-law and a grandson, and she is the reason three of her grandchildren could read.
Accomplishments
- Kept seven households of laundry single-handed1897
From her husband death in 1897 until she was past seventy. Over 5,000 bal maidens worked in Cornwall in 1861 and the last were laid off in the early 1920s; laundry was where a great many of them went.
- Taught her daughter and two granddaughters to read
At the kitchen table on Sundays, which is where three generations of this family learned.
