Vanessa Beeman (Gwenenen)

Vanessa Beeman was not born in Cornwall, but in Nairobi, and the family spent most of her childhood in Tanzania. Whenever they returned to the UK, they stayed with her paternal grandfather, Sidney Hocking, who was proudly Cornish and had Henry Jenner's A Handbook of the Cornish Language amongst his many books on Cornwall. Later, she studied prehistory at Manchester and Liverpool, and for a Post Graduate Diploma in Education in Wales before teaching at a school in Truro, going on to a post with the Federal Department of Antiquities in Nigeria, and afterwards to teach at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria.

In 1986, she and husband Robert came back to Cornwall to be near her parents, and she and her father joined Hilary Shaw's Cornish Class in Penryn. The language was a fascination from the beginning, and she and her father Kaspar Hocking became Bards in the same year.

After seven years working at St Mawes Castle, she now works as company secretary for her husband's engineering business.