THIS week’s selection of extracts from The Commercial, Shipping & General Advertiser, The Penryn & Falmouth Advertiser and The Borough Times, supplied by Penryn Museum.

From February 1895:

Advertisement: Wm Bullmore has for sale good Parlour and Kitchen Coals. Orders received at the store, Commercial Road, Penryn.

Advertisement: Falmouth Hospital. Week ending February 11th, 1895. Number of patients 5. Discharged 3. Died 1. All contribution of vegetables, fruit, flowers, periodicals etc will be thankfully received at the hospital. C Masson Fox, Hon Sec.

Advertisement: For sale - A Perambulator with latest improvements. Apply R Moore, New Row, Mylor.

From January 1920:

Mr Donald Rundle, of Penryn, (an ex-Service Officer), has been appointed Assistant Master at the Weymouth Technical and Engineering School.

From May 1931:

On Wednesday evening, Mr Richard Williams, aged 20, of Viaduct View, Tremough, gave a splendid display of weight-lifting. He lifted an iron bar, weighing over 2cwt, six times while lying flat on the ground, and the same bar he drew from his shoulder over his head to the ground. With one hand he raised 114lbs, and at the same time 56lbs with the other hand.

At the annual meeting of Falmouth Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday, the council regretted to report that the arrivals at the port were below those of 1929, and that the depression in shipping showed no sign of improvement.

When it was reported at a meeting of Falmouth Town Council on Tuesday, that applications had been received for the purchase of one of the Berkeley Cottages, and recommended by the committee that the property be let, Mrs Hosking said the council had decided to sell the properties, and she believed in encouraging the working man to buy his own house. Mr J Donovan said that as one interested in what was best for the working man, he was of the opinion that communal ownership was preferable.

In his “Tour of the Whole Island of Great Britain” Daniel Defoe - the bicentenary of whose death fell recently - devotes the last section of the first volume to his impressions of Cornwall as he saw it at the time, now more than 200 years ago. Of Penryn the author says: It is a very pleasant, agreeable town, and for that reason has many merchants in it who would perhaps otherwise live at Falmouth. The water supply was conveyed through the streets in wooden pipes and received into cisterns at intervals. In addition almost every house had its own supply of spring water, a garden, and an orchard.