William’slucky strike
Good fortune with an investment in West Country copper mining created the Morris family fortune–and so set in motion the extraordinary artistic and political machine that was William Morris. Without copper cash, would there ever have been a SPAB? But a dark side to the mines is now widely
acknowledged.Robin Stummer tells the story
metalworking was a craft that the SPAB’s tireless founder did not ever attempt seriously. Nor did he ever toil in a mine. The Morris link with metal arose purely through the sweat-free begetting of money – shamelessly large heaps of it. In a neat irony that would have amused
T
Morris, at least on one of his less grumpy days, the extraordinary explosion of artistic vision, radical politics and socially progressive creativity which only such wealth could ignite was in no small part the product of one of the most unremittingly grim and dangerous industries of the nasty 19th century: copper mining. West Country copper mines had been busy
since the 18th century, but local engineers and mine owners suspected that, with investment fromthe City of London through its coteries of stove pipe-behatted venture capitalists, there were vast fortunes to be made. Keen to join the dash to copper was successful
Top (left),William Morris aged 41, the year he resigned as a director of the family’s mine venture in south Devon. Top (right), the mine site now, a large, overgrown area which still bears warnings of arsenic pollution. Above, Victorian miners in theWest Country. Hardships abounded
here is a possibility – and not that remote a one – that a fair slice of themetal currently being pilfered from historic buildings around Britainmay have passed through the hands ofWilliam Morris. Not literally, of
course.Architectural
City financierWilliam Morris senior. In the early 1840s he became a key element in a consortium set up to invest in coppermining on land owned by the Duke of Bedford, near Tavistock in south Devon.Work began inAugust 1844. TheVictorian golden age was copper-fringed.
Demand for themetal grew, it seemed, by the hour. The expanding railways consumed it, the new steamships too. For decades the Royal Navy’s fighting vessels had been copper- bottomed. The army consumed copper in armaments and
fittings.Agriculture demanded derivates of copper for new chemical treatments and pesticides. Rapidly expanding telegraph networks used thousands ofmiles of copper wire. Builders used copper for roofs, fittings and exterior paint; artists for pigments, craftworkers for dyes, plumbers for the new-fangled bathrooms and water closets becoming standard inmiddle class homes. Copper sulphate was widely used as a disinfectant. Until 1860,Victorian pennies were made of pure copper, and fromthat year the new bronze pennies were still 95 per cent copper. By 1850more than 100 coppermines were
operating in the SouthWest, withmost of them earningmore than £100,000 (£5.8min modern terms) per year. Fortunes weremade by themine owners and the consortia which backed them.
Cornerstone, Vol 32, No 3 2011 55
JOHN LAWRENCE
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