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Cousin Jacks remind us of the achievements of a great little nation


The weekly ‘exodus’ of mineworkers to South Africa from Redruth Railway Station, c. 1905 - Photograph courtesy of the Cornwall Centre Collection


The Hungry Forties was a decade of misery, well publicised with respect to Ireland that fell victim to famine caused by blight that devastated the potato crop upon which its peasantry survived. West Cornwall was similarly affected. The outbreak of revolution in Europe in 1848 led to a collapse in mineral prices, mine closures and consequent unemployment. Tenants unable to pay their rent due to the failure of the potato - their cash crop - were evicted from their smallholdings by callous landowners. Access to land was becoming more difficult, hence the building of rows of cottages in the growing mining settlements. This fuelled migration. Many families made use of free and assisted passages available to the able bodied poor and, in doing so, supplied the needs of the fledgling colonies of Australia and New Zealand. Moreover, the Cornish had skills in demand, for the discovery of copper in South Australia in 1841-2 signalled the development of commercial mining. This was closely followed by mineral strikes across this continent and in neighbouring New Zealand. Some of the largest expatriate Cornish communities in the world emerged ‘Down Under’ – Burra and Moonta in South Australia – with the complete panoply of Cornishness. By the 1850s, mineral strikes were underway right across North America which became an important migration destination for the


Cornish, especially the rich copper mines of Ontario and Michigan, and later, Butte Montana. Throughout Britain and Ireland there was scarcely a mine without its Cornish ‘Mining Captain’ - the Williams of Scorrier were making a fortune from their Irish mines in Wicklow’s Vale of Avoca. Indeed, ‘Cousin Jack’ could be found across Europe: mining copper under the midnight sun at Alten, in Norway’s Arctic Circle, to the lead mines of Linares in sun parched Andalucía, home to scores of Cornish engine houses. Economic hard times returned to Cornwall with a vengeance in the mid-1860s, as many famous old mines closed following the financial earthquake caused by the collapse of bankers, Overend and Gurney, and declining copper ore prices due to global overproduction. But the writing had been on the wall for years as Cornish mining lagged behind its competitors in terms of technological development and output. Things would have been considerably worse for Cornwall had it not been linked to transnational mining communities connected by dense migration chains underpinned by the ‘Cousin Jack’ network and informal social linkages within Methodism and Freemasonry. This gave employment options not just to mineworkers, but also to those who serviced the burgeoning overseas mining communities. People left in droves.


For more information please visit www.cornishmining.org.uk/mycornwall


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