LARGEST SOURCES OF LETHAL ARSENIC,
MAKING UP FOR THE DECLINE IN COPPER PRICES… THE
KNOWN EARLY ON’ DANGERS WERE
bolster the Morris lifestyle. Yet the mines themselves were thriving, and Morris junior accepted a directorship. By 1856 Devon Great Consols yielded nearly 30,000 tons of copper ore, which sold for £143,045 (around £8mnow). Dividend payments blossomed. As set out by Charles Harvey and John Press, Morris netted £741 in 1855, £715 in 1856, and £819 in 1857 in dividends – in modern values £42,000, £40,000 and £46,000. Healthy injections of hard cash fuelled the young Morris’s spending sprees – his pre-Raphaelite painter friends being key beneficiaries. After the 1850s, Devon Great Consol
dividends levelled off, then dwindled, then all but ceased. But it was only in 1877, the year he founded the SPAB, that Morris sold off the very last of his shares in the mine. By that time, the Morris family had, say Press and Harvey, harvested a total of £317,927 (circa £17.5m) from their original 1840s seed money.
ON the day in 1876 that he divested himself of his directorship of Devon Great Consols, Morris ceremoniously sat on his top hat – his rapidly increasing bulk ensuring that it would never again sit atop a head, venture capitalist or otherwise. But by 1877 the Devon Great Consols had long since ceased to earn large amounts of money, anyway. Morris’s last few shares brought in just £80. Having dissolved his own creative business venture, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co, two years earlier and set up Morris & Co, William’s need for ready cash was rarely as acute. Yet he was not about to starve. The preceding 20 years had left him handsomely copper-bottomed. But there was a darker side to this apparently
straightforward tale of investment and reward. There is, and probably always has been,
near-palpable glee among some critics of Morris and his political ideas that the great Socialist hero chirped about equality, justice and workers’ rights fromthe comfort of his extremely well-feathered
nest.Moreover, a more worrying suggestion, first aired a few years ago and joyously seized upon by some newspapers, is that some of Morris’s wealth was toxic: literally.
GREAT CONSOLS MINE HAD BECOME ONE OF THE WORLD’S
‘SOON, THE DEVON
of upwardlymobile households. Scheele’s Green, a copper hydrogen arsenite, was a deep, vivid pigment whose use became extremely widespread in the early andmid Victorian period, especially in wallpapers. Soon, the Devon
Great Consolsmine became one of the world’s largest sources of lethal arsenic,making up for the decline in copper prices. Poisonous beauty: copper was used in pigments, and its colourless
byproduct arsenic in pesticides and dyes. Below, raw copper as found
As ProfessorAndrew Mehargmade clear in a fascinating lecture onMorris and arsenic given at Kelmscott House last year, the dangers of arsenic to both the workers producing it and thosemany thousands of people who had chosen to wallpaper their houses was certainly known early on. The Lancet began a campaign against the use of arsenic in wallpaper in 1860. Four years later, a Parliamentary commission reported on the highly dangerous conditions prevailing in copper, tin and leadmines. In 1871 the BritishMedical Journal
reported that despite years of campaigning by health professionals,
arsenic-bearing wallpapers were still commonplace. Throughout the 1870s, the Times campaigned against arsenic mine conditions, indeed focusing upon Devon Great Consols, yet it wasn’t until 1883 that Morris&Co ceased using arsenic in its wallpapers. Legislation in the later
Victorian period removed the
direct threat fromarsenic poisoning, and conditions for workers gradually improved. It is extremely unlikely thatMorris was
Thousands of tons of mine waste were processed to extract arsenic – intensive work in which labourers were afforded only rudimentary protection from the lethal chemical, a few strips of cotton to block nostrils, rags to protect feet. Arsenic was used around the world as a
A
pesticide. Sulphide of arsenic, mixed with lime, was a traditional preparation for removing hairs from animal skins before use as leather in clothing and industry. Arsenic was a key component of new industrial dyes used in wallpaper now being produced on a vast scale to grace the living rooms and studies of thousands
s the market value of copper ore began to fall in the 1860s, mine-owners diverted their efforts to the systematic exploitation of a hitherto largely overlooked by-product of copper extraction: arsenic.
wholly unaware of the health concerns surrounding an industry, and indeed involving a specific venture, fromwhich both he and his family had long profited. ThatMorris’s “political phase” commenced in earnest only when he had severed his last links with his copper-and-arsenic investments is significant. If the SPAB founder’s subsequent
commitment to the new cause of social justice – with its pacifist, environmental and anti-capitalist overtones – were in part a kind of penance for his family’s dependence on the “dirtymoney” of copper and arsenic, its effect was farmore profound than a simple withdrawal of investment would have been, back in the 1850s or 60s. Great thinkers evolve.
Sources The City andMining Enterprise: TheMaking of the Morris Family Fortune, Charles Harvey/John Press, Journal ofWilliamMorris Studies, 1990. William Morris and Arsenic: Guilty, or Not Proven?,WilliamMorris Society lecture, 2010. William Morris, FionaMacCarthy, Faber and Faber, 1995. Workshop Receipts forManafacturers,Mechanics and Scientific Amateurs, Haldane, 1883.
Cornerstone, Vol 32, No 3 2011 57
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112