Some say of the Cornish miner His home is the wide, wide world, For his pick is always ringing Where the Union Jack’s unfurl’d.
the highly skilled and itinerant Cornish miner who conquered the global hard rock mining industry. According to Cornish mining lore, there wasn’t a hole in the ground anywhere in the world that didn’t have a Cousin Jack at the bottom of it. By the turn of the twentieth century, virtually everyone from a mining background in Cornwall had a relative, or knew of someone, who had gone overseas to work. Migration, often seen as the ‘crown of Cornish achievement,’
T
hese triumphant lines of verse, written in 1896 by Cornish journalist, Herbert Thomas, encapsulate the sense of pride engendered by the worldwide travels of ‘Cousin Jack,’
is deeply ingrained within the Cornish psyche now as it was then. Cousins within families separated for generations by the tyranny of time and space, reach out to each other via family history societies and the world wide web to reconnect, explore their lineage and celebrate their Cornishness. And what a story many have to tell! For an area that covers less than 1,365 square miles and a population that never exceeded 375,000 in the 1800s, it is remarkable that the Cornish have stamped their mark so indelibly on one industry and propagated their mining culture in many far flung places. From their ‘pastes’ in Pachuca, Mexico and Grass Valley, California; their Methodist chapels in Moonta, Australia and Wisconsin, USA; to the extant Cornish engine houses facing majestically seawards at Allihies, west Cork and on the other side of the world at Kawau Island, New Zealand, traces of the Cornish are everywhere. The stories of their endeavours are the very stuff of Hollywood and run the gamut of human emotion.
For more information please visit
www.cornishmining.org.uk/mycornwall
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