3 OF 3 
Eveline Clemo (née Polmounter)
3 of 3 portraits by Tricia Porter
© Tricia Porter
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Eveline Clemo (née Polmounter)
by Tricia Porter
bromide print, 1975
15 in. x 10 in. (380 mm x 254 mm)
Given by Brian Louis Pearce, 2001
Photographs Collection
NPG x88919
Sitterback to top
- Eveline Clemo (née Polmounter) (1894-1977), Mother of Jack Clemo. Sitter in 1 portrait.
Placesback to top
- Place made and portrayed: United Kingdom: England, Cornwall (sitter's home, Goonamarris cottage, Cornwall)
Events of 1975back to top
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Britain votes to remain part of the European Economic Community. In the Labour government's referendum, 67% of voters answered 'yes' to the question 'Do you think the UK should stay in the European Community (Common Market)?'Art and science
The rock band Queen release their epic single Bohemian Rhapsody which reaches Number 1 in the pop charts and stays there for nine weeks. It is the only single to have been a Christmas Number 1 twice, due to its re-release in 1991 following Freddie Mercury's death, and the promotional video is often regarded as the first real music video.International
The communist organisation, Khymer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, takes over Cambodia renaming it Democratic Kampuchea. Khymer Rouge began its policy of forcible relocating the urban population to the countryside and brutally purging those sectors of society considered by Pol Pot to be a potential threat to the revolution: Buddhist monks, people with education, disabled people, and ethnic minorities.Comments back to top
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Michael Spinks
17 February 2018, 20:37
Eveline Clemo, 1894-1977
Eveline Polmounter was born 9 January 1894 to John and Elizabeth Jane Polmounter at Goonvean Farm, ten miles west of St Austell in Cornwall. John Polmounter was a China-clay labourer and also manager of the company's farm. Eveline was the seventh of their eight children.
She married Reginald Clemo, also a China-lay labourer, on 5 July 1913. Her father died in 1915 and Eveline, Reginald, Eveline's widowed mother, and Eveline's disabled younger sister, Bertha, moved into one of the pair of tiny granite-block labourers' cottages on the southern edge of the clay works.
She lived there for the rest of her life. Their son, Reginald John, was born in 1916. Her husband was killed in 1917, part of a North Sea service flotilla, in the First World War.
Eveline was greatly admired locally, not only for the dignity she showed coping with widowhood and poverty, but for the sincerity of her spirituality (she was a regular attender at the nearby Trethosa Methodist chapel and was for many years a Sunday-school teacher there), and the steadfast way in which she looked after her mother and sister and son.
Her son, of course, better known as Jack Clemo, fell victim to both deafness and blindness, but went on to become an acclaimed poet. The photograph by Tricia Porter was taken in the Goonamarris cottage where Eveline lived. Tricia had accompanied her husband David Porter who had driven down to Cornwall to interview Jack Clemo for the magazine of the London Arts Centre Group which David Porter had helped to create.
At the end of her life Eveline Clemo published a brief memoir, 'I Proved Thee at the Waters, the testimony of a blind writer's mother'.
She died on 4 June 1977. Charles Causley was a great admirer of Eveline Clemo and amongst the eulogies given at her funeral, one focussing on the strength of her character and her Christian faith was given by the poet and critic Derek Savage.