EMILY Maude Clemens was born in 1856 above her father’s Tailor & Mercer shop in Fore Street, Liskeard. She attended school until her mid-teens, when she began work as a Draper’s Assistant in her father’s shop, which by then had moved to Lower Lux Street.

On February 2, 1877 the Cornish Times reported on an ‘Alarming Fire at Liskeard’, it was in Mr Clemen’s shop on a night when he was away from home. Mrs. Clemens and her younger children escaped the smoke and flames, but her eldest daughter, 20-year-old Emily Maude, was stranded in her bedroom overlooking Lower Lux Street. When Police Constable Edey arrived at the scene Emily had opened her window and she ‘called to him that she would jump for it and he, with great presence of mind and strength, encouraged her in the venture. She did so, and he caught her in his arms and landed her on her feet, the height was between 10 and 12 feet.’

Emily went on to open her own Toy & Fancy Goods shop, at 27 Pound Street, where she lived above the premises with an Assistant, her niece Olive Clemens. Another fire, but not so destructive, occurred here in July 1903. It was reported in the Royal Cornwall Gazette that ‘damage to the extent of about £10 was done’.

Emily never married and when she died on May 28, 1914, her ‘effects’, with a value today of about £80,000, were left to her eldest brother Edwin Geach Clemens. Another brother, Richard Nettle Clemens, was reported in the Cornish Times as a ringleader in the disruption of Emily Hobhouse’s Peace Meeting in Liskeard Public Hall in July 1900.

By Brian Oldham, Liskeard Museum volunteer and Bard of the Gorsedh Kernow