Cornish Mining and Migration

Some say of the Cornish miner
His home is the wide, wide world,
For his pick is always ringing
Where the Union Jack's unfurled

This lofty verse, penned by journalist Herbert Thomas in 1896, captures the truly global magnitude of migration. For by then many thousands of Cornish miners and their descendants were spread throughout the world and there was barely a hard rock mine anywhere that did not have a ‘Cousin Jack’ as a miner or captain, as these Cornish emigrants were dubbed. Some such as Henry Richard Hancock and Francis Oats became legends in their own lifetimes.

Writing about population change in the period referred to by historians as the ‘great migration’ (c.1815-1930), Cornwall has been described as an emigration region comparable with any in Europe (Baines, 1985). Figures estimate that the total of out-migrants from Cornwall was anywhere from a quarter to one half million during this period. In every decade from 1861-1901 some 20 per cent of the Cornish adult male population migrated overseas, three times the average for England and Wales. This migration has often been thought to be a response to a crisis in the fortunes of the mining industry that declined rapidly in the late nineteenth century, and when analysing the figures for population decline in many Cornish parishes it seems a logical conclusion to draw. The population of Tywardreath fell by 29 per cent between 1861 and 1871, St Just in Penwith by 27 per cent between 1871 and 1881 and St Cleer by 22 per cent between 1891 and 1901 (Payton, 1992).

Yet, startling though these figures might be, migration was nothing new to the Cornish people, who surrounded on three sides by the ocean, were well aware of the world beyond their own. Long before the ‘great migration’ Cornish fishermen made seasonal migrations to Newfoundland, Cornishmen served in the Royal and Merchant navies and men and women were to be found living in the eastern seaboard of the American colonies or as indentured servants on Caribbean plantations. Cornish miners too had been migrating as far back as the eighteenth century, initially moving eastwards within Cornwall from the western mining districts looking for the best wages and conditions. Later they moved to other parts of the British Isles and a group of Cornish miners had been recruited to inspect copper deposits near Lake Superior in Northern America in the 1770s. A mere foretaste of what was to come in the nineteenth century. Although migration was not unique to miners and their families - farmers, merchants and tradesmen also emigrated - it was mining that chiefly characterised the region’s migration flows and often facilitated the migration of people from other employment sectors.

Cornwall and west Devon was a region of technological innovation and acceleration. By the early nineteenth century it probably possessed the best contemporary European mining technology. Importantly, the region had begun to export its technology and capital that aided the migration of a skilled labour force. By 1815 a group of Cornish industrialists including the Vivians, and Grenfells, were acquiring a position of influence through their capitalisation of mining and smelting in South Wales and recruiting their labour force from Cornwall. But it was the export of high-pressure steam engines pioneered and modified by Trevithick and his contemporaries, to the silver mines of Peru in 1818, that marked the transatlantic migration to Latin America of the industrial revolution (Schwartz, 2002). Trevithick’s transatlantic enterprise heralded the beginning of a modern, integrated global mining economy, with its attendant capital and labour markets, paving the way for British capital investment in overseas mining companies in the early 1820s.

One third of the mining companies set up at this time in Latin America had Cornish Directors, including the highly influential Fox and Williams families who recruited their labour needs from among the local mining population. By the mid-1820s Cornish miners were to be found across Latin America, where the whole epic story of Cornish mining migration began. Here the Cornish miner learnt new skills in the mining and milling of gold and silver ores which resulted in the practical domination of the world’s mining industry by ‘Cousin Jacks’ for well over a century (Schwartz, 2001).

Trevithick’s venture also laid the foundation for the region’s world-class export market in mining equipment, particularly the Cornish engine which, accommodated in its characteristic engine house, came to mark diverse landscapes ranging from Cuba, Virgin Gorda and Central America, to Spain, Ireland, South Australia and South Africa. Without the introduction of the Cornish engine, deep lode mining in California for example, would have been delayed by nearly half a century (Lescohier, 1992). As the global metalliferous mining economy expanded in the nineteenth century, so too did opportunities for the migration of Cornish miners, engineers, artisans and ore dressers.

Enticed by the thoughts of higher wages and the chance to rise far higher and far quicker up the mining hierarchy overseas, they were some of the first hard rock miners in the United States, working lead deposits in Wisconsin and Illinois, as well as copper and lead deposits in northern Norway and Spain. Copper was discovered in South Australia, where between 1848 and 1888 thirty three Cornish engine houses were erected to house 23 imported engines (Drew and Connell, 1993), and in Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula in the 1840s. There were subsequent gold rushes in California in 1849 and British Colombia, Canada, and Victoria, Australia, in the 1850s and in New Zealand in the 1860s. Further mineral strikes across the Americas and Australia followed, as well as in the Caribbean, northern England, India, Malaysia, and south and west Africa. The discovery of diamonds in South Africa in the 1870s followed by the Transvaal gold rush a decade later created opportunities for significant migration from Cornwall in the three decades following the 1880s. South Africa in particular was considered almost the parish next door (Dawe, 1998).

Across the world distinctive Cornish communities flourished. Wrestling matches were organised, carol choirs and brass bands formed to perpetuate the songs and hymns of Merritt and Broad, and pasties and saffron cake became ‘local’ delicacies. The presence of ‘Cousin Jack’ was further hinted at through the built environment of chapels and Cornish-style cottages, as well as monumental inscriptions in cemeteries recording the names of deceased natives of "Cornwall, England". Moonta, Pachuca, Randfontein, Calumet, Grass Valley and Johannesburg became household names, while the Yorke Peninsula became known as Australia’s ‘Little Cornwall’. In 1894 it was noted that over 60 per cent of the 6,000 population of Grass Valley, California, was from Cornwall, while an estimated 25 per cent of the white workforce in the Transvaal before the Boer War was estimated to have been Cornish (Burke, 1984).

Dense transnational links were forged between the mining communities of Cornwall and west Devon with those overseas. This was due in part to the proliferation of letters and also the regular comings and goings of a labour force that became increasingly mobile with the improving communication and transport systems of the latter nineteenth century. In fact, the evolution of speedier and cheaper passages aboard ocean liners witnessed a rise in lone male migrants – ‘birds of passage’ - who spent time in mining fields overseas between return trips to Cornwall.

After mining decline in particular, many former mining communities across the region were sustained by financial remittances sent home by migrant workers, often to female relatives who headed households in their absence. It has been estimated that a sum close to a million pounds a year was flowing into Cornwall around 1900 from the Transvaal alone (Deacon and Payton, 1993). But this did not lead to a total culture of poverty and dependency, for the money was spent in local shops or invested in town and village projects, including schools, hospitals, places of worship and municipal buildings.

Significant numbers of migrants returned with the financial wherewithal to purchase land, set up a business, or invest in local industries, thereby stimulating and diversifying the region’s economy. Tourism, the economic mainstay of modern Cornwall, was initially developed by ‘migrapounds’ from the gold, silver, copper, and nitrate fields of South America, invested by a group of entrepreneurs including Sir Robert Harvey, George Hicks, Sampson Waters and John Jose. These men had returned to Cornwall nouveaux riches.

Many return migrants came back with enough money to buy a home which they named to immortalise their time overseas. Some examples include ‘Balaghat Villa’, ‘Huasco House’ and ‘Akankoo Terrace’, all in the Redruth district, named for India, Chile and the Gold Coast respectively, ‘Benoni Villa’ at Pendeen, named for South Africa, and ‘Nevada Villas’, Par, after the state of that name in the USA. Moreover, Cornwall’s connection with the wider mining world did not automatically decline with the failing fortunes of its own mining industry. Investment by Cornish entrepreneurs in Malaysian mining was responsible for the opening of the Malaysian Tin Dredging Company’s headquarters at Redruth in 1891. Importantly, the money earned through dealings in such foreign ventures was sometimes reinvested in Cornish tin mines.

The conclusion of the First World War marked the beginning of the end for significant overseas Cornish mining migration. Cornish workers were increasingly being replaced by labour native to the new metalliferous mining regions of the world, while Cornish engineering was perceived to be outdated, having lost much of the energy and innovation that made it so prized a century before. Yet the transnational links have not been severed with the passage of time, and if anything, have witnessed something of a revival aided by a booming interest in genealogy. International Cornish societies and groups exist in North America (34), South Africa (1) and Australia and New Zealand (15), as well as in England, with the London Cornish being one of the most important and long-running.

Cornish mining’s contribution to the development of overseas communities is being acknowledged. The Pendarvis Cornish Restoration at Mineral Point, Wisconsin, celebrates the cultural significance of Cornish miners and their uniquely constructed dwellings. Recordings have been made of the ancient Cornish hymns and folk songs of the Grass Valley Carol choir, brought to California by immigrant Cornish miners (McKinney, 2001). Engine house restoration has been undertaken by the South Australian government and conservation and management plans are in place to stabilise and maintain the Cornish engine houses and mining heritage in the Real del Monte, Mexico, Virgin Gorda, and County Wicklow, Ireland. Some Cornish towns are twinned with those overseas, including Mineral Point, Nevada City and Grass Valley, linked with Redruth, Penzance and Bodmin respectively. Camborne and Redruth are hoping to twin with Real del Monte and Pachuca in Mexico while St Just in Penwith is looking to establish links with Burra, South Australia. Such connections continue to highlight the international significance of a region as much noted for its substantial migration as for its skills in hard rock mining and steam engineering.

Cornish Mining and Migration

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