1 day ago
6
‘I had no friends,” says Charlotte Banfield, a gold medal-winning world para surf champion. “And no interests. I was very depressed. It was all going to end very badly indeed for me.” Banfield – who has cerebral palsy, epilepsy and autism, and was being bullied at school – thought of taking her life. But then, aged 13, she was enrolled by her mum in a six-week surfing course run by the Wave Project, which helps to improve children’s confidence and ease their anxiety through riding breakers. It was a pivotal moment, not least because Banfield was about to be excluded from school.
Her first surf class was a disaster, though. “I ran away and locked myself in the car. I had a phobia of water. I couldn’t stand it on my skin.” But something – perhaps the sense that there was “no pressure” – brought her back. “When I went up on my first wave, I felt free for the first time in my life.” This liberation turned her life around. “I went back into education and, though I left school with no GCSEs, I got a masters in marine biology. Surfing gave me confidence.”
It gave her more than that – it gave her gold. Banfield’s medal-winning achievement is celebrated in Surf! 100 Years of Waveriding in Cornwall, an exhibition at the National Maritime Museum Cornwall (NMMC) in Falmouth, her home town. “It was an honour when I won a gold and beyond an honour to get mentioned in this museum,” says the 26-year-old as we chat in its cafe. “I used to come here on school trips. I remember hiding from teachers in the boats on display.”
Although surfing dates back thousands of years, and is particularly associated with Polynesians who settled in Hawaii about 400AD, the pursuit has become as much part of Cornwall’s heritage as pasties, piracy and painting. There is a Cornish word that helps explain why: “mordros”, meaning the ever-present sound of the sea. You don’t get that in Wolverhampton. Then there’s the light. “In Cornwall,” writes geographer Dr Sam Bleakley, “we are bathed in reflected light from the Atlantic.”
Bleakley, a European longboard champion and senior lecturer in cultural tourism at Falmouth University, curated the show at the NMMC. He says surfing is different in Cornwall, thanks to the soft sandy beaches that dot its 422 miles (680km) of surfable coastline from Bude to Falmouth. “You can ride in the shallows in a way that is different from the surf breaks of Polynesia,” he says. What’s more, this county is wide open to the Atlantic swell all year round. One of the great pleasures, says Cornish-born former pro Robyn Davies, is rising up on a wave that has travelled 4,000 miles across the ocean before smashing into Porthleven, Porthmeor, Penzance or Perranporth.
The history the show tells is of a Cornish surf culture rising on a tide swollen by foreign influences. What Bleakley calls the “tin-mining diaspora” witnessed surfing in Tahiti, Hawaii, west and south Africa – not least off Muizenberg near Cape Town, where Agatha Christie reportedly surfed in 1922. Boards and the surf bug came back with these travellers and, by 1937, the railways were advertising glorious, sun-drenched surfing holidays in the West Country.
During the second world war, US troops stationed at RAF St Mawgan near Newquay reportedly enchanted locals with their daredevil techniques. But it was four Australian lifeguards – Bob Head, Ian Tiley, John Campbell and Warren Mitchell – who revolutionised surfing in Cornwall when they arrived 63 years ago, astounding Newquay locals with their “hotdog surfing” on fibreglass longboards. To the sound of the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean playing from pirate radio stations, surfing became part of the swinging 60s.
Surfboard artisans sprang up, their slick creations now celebrated in the show. Among them is Chris “CJ” Jones who sculpted boards from wood, carbon fibre, paint and even recycled plastics. “They were and remain works of art,” says Stuart Slade, NMM’s director as he shows me around.
By the late 1960s, Newquay was being branded as Surf City – and Cornwall as Britain’s California. That said, surfing was once banned after feuding gangs of bodyboarders and longboarders (surfing’s equivalent of mods and rockers) brawled on the beaches of Newquay. Ostensibly the most chillaxed of pastimes, surfing became regarded by some as a violent threat to public order.
This is one of the many tensions explored in the show. Surfing is both a tourist money spinner and counter-cultural lifestyle. It has also involved the Californication of Cornwall, pitting swinging surfers against strait-laced stuffed shirts. Ever since surfing became an Olympic sport in 2020, another tension has become clear. Is waveriding, like skateboarding or BMX-ing, fundamentally a sport whose essentially rebellious nature can only get lost in the competition for medals or world records?
Whatever the answer, Cornwall has become a breeding ground for world champions and industries that recognise surfing’s therapeutic benefits and wish to make it a sport for all. On that last point, I am struck by the displays of surf couture in the show, from wet suits so tight they’re almost fetish wear, to a loose-fitting, body-covering surfing hijab designed by local firm Finisterre.
Bleakley’s nicest conceit is to tell the story of the past 100 years through 100 surfboards. One is a coffinboard, so named because in the 1920s the first bodyboards were made by carpenters who specialised in coffins. There’s a photo of one being held by a female surfer at Fistral beach in 1926, sticking it to West Country patriarchs who deemed surfing unsuitable for women.
By contrast, there’s a wall of gleaming lacquered boards, one designed by Damien Hirst, whose former partner, California-born Maia Norman, is a keen surfer. Hirst’s designs were auctioned in 2003 for the campaign group Surfers Against Sewage. Nearby, we encounter a surfboard found in a Newquay garden and dusted off for the show. Once the world’s longest board, it’s 37ft long and looks like the kind of thing Team GB would use if the six-person bobsleigh ever switched to the sea.
For all the show’s surf positivity, Banfield’s rise suffered setbacks, not least in 2021 when a seizure hit during a surf competition in California. “It was so humiliating,” she says. “I was underwater for a minute and couldn’t move. My body felt so heavy. I had to be helped by another surfer.”
Worse was to come. “I was banned from competition until I got my epilepsy under control. That made me incredibly depressed. I went to a very dark place. I tried to take my own life. It was very clear to me that the ocean had kept me sane. When I go in the water, my mind becomes completely calm.”
Happily, with some coaching and medication adjustments, Banfield was able to start competing again. Last year, she won another gold at the world championships. “I still have bad days,” she says. “When I do, I get my surfboard, get my wetsuit, get in the car and go.”
Davies, many times national surfing champion, echoes this sentiment. “Surfing’s almost a spiritual experience. It’s humbling – because you find out very quickly that you can’t master nature. But the very present danger is also an adrenaline rush. The epitome of this is when you get barrelled.” Eh? She cups her fingers to show me: barrelling means riding inside a hollowed-out breaking wave. “Time seems to extend. You feel like you’ve been in there for ages when it’s scarcely been seconds. It’s pure stoke. Epic.”
It also sounds quite dangerous. “It is – but then surfing is dangerous and exhilarating at the same time. There aren’t many sports where you could be eaten by a wild animal. I’ve seen sharks, which is scary. And, in Mexico, I’ve been very close to whales breaching.” This is when they propel their bodies out of the water and land back on the surface with explosive force. Davies lists more dangers: “Seals have nibbled my toes.” That doesn’t sound too scary, I say. “They were really big seals,” she replies.
Then there was the time she wiped out at Pipeline in Hawaii, a reef break notorious for rip currents and underwater caves. “I hit bottom and pushed off with my feet – only to hit rock. I thought I was going to drown, until I saw a gap and managed to swim to the surface.”
A car crash ended Davies’s competitive career, but she still longboards and insists that it’s never too late to learn. “I taught an 80-year-old woman whose dream it was to stand on a board. She did it! I’m not saying it’s easy, though. When you swim out to where the waves are, through foaming white water, it’s hard – but it’s worth it. I’ve never felt a connection with nature like it. I’ve never felt so good as when I’m surfing.”
Surf! is at the National Maritime Museum Cornwall, Falmouth, 28 March to January 2027.
