Brenda Wootton

Brenda Wootton (née Ellery) (10 February 1928 – 11 March 1994) was a British folk singer and poet and was seen as an ambassador for Cornish tradition and culture in all the Celtic nations and as far as Australia and Canada. Early life Brenda Ellery was born in London, during a brief few months when her Cornish-born parents were there looking for work, but was back home in Cornwall at 6 months old. She grew up in the fishing village of Newlyn. In 1948 she married John Wootton, a radio engineer from Wolverhampton, and their daughter Susan was born in 1949. They lived in Sennen, then Penzance, with Brenda running a bed and breakfast business and very involved in amateur dramatics. In 1964 she switched careers and helped her brother Peter Ellery set up his Tremaen Pottery business - becoming a director and running the family shop in Penzance, Tremaen Craft Market. She first found her voice as a young schoolgirl, singing in chapel choirs and village halls in the remote communities of West Cornwall. Brenda became active on the Cornish music scene in the early 1960s, taking over the recently formed Count House Folk Music Club at Botallack near St Just in 1967, to found her own Pipers Folk Club, at St Buryan, Cornwall. She was later able to move Pipers back to the Count House, and subsequently into Penzance at the Western Hotel. Singing career In 1973 she was introduced to Richard Gendall, who taught her two songs in Cornish to sing at that year's Pan Celtic Festival in Killarney in Ireland, and she welcomed the opportunity to sing in Cornwall's own language, Kernewek, pledging to sing at least one song in Cornish at every concert. Richard wrote over 460 songs for Brenda, over 140 of them in the Cornish language. In 1974, Brenda handed Tremaen Craft Market over to daughter Sue to manage, and turned professional as a singer.