Out & About Yn-mes hag a-dro
Cornish tin mining rallied in the 1870s and early 1880s, during which time the old copper mining town of Redruth reinvented itself as a service and residential centre for ‘new money.’ Much of this wealth was created by ‘migrapounds’ flooding in from US mining camps, the gold mines of Kolar, India, and the tin fields of Malaya. Cornish stockbrokers, the Wicketts, had large investments in the latter. However, it was South Africa, the name on everyone’s lips, which provided the lion’s share of remittances before WW1. Facilitated by cheaper and speedier passages by rail to English ports and steamer to Cape Town, thousands of ‘Birds of Passage’ travelled to and from the gold mines ‘on the Rand’ where wages were significantly higher. People rushed into the banks of the main towns to cash their remittance cheques after the weekly South Africa Mail arrived; the tills in Cornish high streets rang loudly and businesses did a roaring trade. Some families had never had it so good and spent as never before, openly flaunting their wealth, widening the income gap with non-migrant families who stoically resorted to ‘getting by and making do’. ‘We’re living on South Africa,’ sounded a local newspaper, a country that was viewed almost as the parish next door.
But this was not to last. WW1 marked a watershed; many Cornishmen were conscripted only to perish in the trenches of Europe, sundering those migration networks that had long been the lifeblood of Cornwall. Cornish mining engineering was now viewed as outdated and antiquated, its cutting edge long blunted by emerging industrial giants, the USA and Germany; the Cornish found themselves gradually displaced by labour from other nations in the coming decades. Yet, the global spread of Cornish engine houses, chapels, gravestones, pasty shops and place names, not to mention a vibrant and vocal Diaspora of over six million descendants of those Cousin Jacks, remind us of the achievements of a great little nation, marked as much for its migration as for its skills in hard rock mining.
1850
Cornish miners go to Brittany to work tin mines.
1853
Cornish miners arrive in Alabama from Tennessee and revive mining
1855
Copper discovered in Namaqualand, South Africa.
1858 Fraser River gold rush, BC, Canada.
1859 Gold discovered in Colorado attracting Cornish miners.
1860
Gold mining in Russian attracts Cornish miners.
1866 Alluvial gold found on the Inangahua River, West Coast, South Island, New Zealand.
1867
Diamond and gold mining attracts Cornish miners to South Africa.
1870
A Cornish miner discovers a rich bed of nitrate in the Atacama Desert, Latin America.
1871
Cornish miners migrated to Tasmania. 1876
Butte Montana emerges as a significant producer of copper attracting Cornish miners.
1881
Cornish miners head to mines in Honduras and Ecuador.
1885
Cornishman oversees the development of the Arauco coal fields of Southern Chile.
1933 A branch of Holman’s of Camborne opened its ‘Cornwall House’ in Tadoradi in the Gold Coast, West Africa.
All material © Cornwall County Council/ World Heritage Site Office 2006.
Empire Mine, California - Shift Change © Sharron Schwartz For more information please visit
www.cornishmining.org.uk/mycornwall 69
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