On this day in Wembury — 11 March 1931
The St Austell Gazette carried a historical column titled Cornish Chips, recalling the seventeenth-century career of Edward Reade, a name once tied to both Cornwall and Wembury. Reade, together with Pierce Edgecumbe, had represented Camelford in Parliament during the turbulent years of 1640, when King and Commons stood on the brink of civil war. The article traced his family’s later links to Devon, noting that Reade’s wife, Grace, was the daughter of Sir Nicholas Calmady of Langdon, Wembury.
Langdon was already a long-established manor by then, its lands stretching toward the coast and the Yealm valley. The Calmady family were prominent royalists, their loyalty to the Crown costing them dearly during the wars. Through his marriage into that house, Edward Reade joined a network of gentry whose fortunes rose and fell with the politics of the time.
By 1931 the Gazette’s column looked back on him as a footnote of local history, but his name and that of Grace Calmady still echoed faintly through Wembury’s past. Their story was one of the many threads linking this quiet corner of Devon to the national upheavals that shaped seventeenth-century England.
(St Austell Gazette and Cornwall County News, 11 March 1931)