Vanessa Beeman

Vanessa Beeman was born Vanessa Hocking in Nairobi and at a younger age lived in Tanzania. Her father Kaspar Hocking was employed as a Government entomologist in East Africa.

When visiting Cornwall she stayed with her paternal grandfather, Sidney Hocking, who was Cornish and had Henry Jenner's A Handbook of the Cornish Language among his Cornish book collection. 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, Nigeria.

After her marriage to Robert Beeman she and her husband came back to Cornwall in 1986 to be near her parents. 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. In 2006 she became the Grand Bard of the Gorseth Kernow, with the bardic name of "Gwenenen". Vanessa Beeman's home is at Constantine, Kerrier, where there are also four other Cornish bards.

Kaspar Hocking (b. 1913) has translated Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days into Cornish.