Many streets in this neighbourhood are named in honour of past Commanders-in-Chief of Devonport, but the name Pym has local associations that go back long before the ‘port of Devon’, as it became, was even conceived.
John Pym, the MP for Tavistock, was a childhood friend of Sir Francis Drake (nephew of his famous namesake) and he it was who, along with John Eliot in 1628, presented Charles I with the Petition of Right a document the King was forced to accept. He was also one of the Five Members that the King tried to arrest two years after Parliament was recalled after an eleven year break, in 1640.
King Pym, as he came to be known, died at the age of 59 in 1643, after having taken the lead in collecting taxes to fund an army to fight for the Parliamentarians in the Civil War.
Pym Street itself dates from the middle of the nineteenth century and was fully laid out by 1852 when the new Keyham Steamyard (North Yard) at Morice Town was being completed.
