St Just can be found on the westernmost edge of the Cornish peninsula jutting into the Atlantic. In the 1800s it was sometimes said that the next parish to its west was America. This wasn’t just whimsy as St Just in the nineteenth century was anything but a remote, out of the way place. It … Continue reading St Just in Penwith: next stop, America
Category: emigration
St Ive: riding the rollercoaster
Outside Cornwall the east Cornish parish of St Ive is liable to be confused with the better-known St Ives in the west. But St Ive experienced a much more dramatic change in the Victorian period than did the stereotypically picturesque St Ives. Within the space of one generation St Ive had been transformed from an … Continue reading St Ive: riding the rollercoaster
St Gluvias: return migration at Penryn
As we saw in the previous blog in the case of Eliza Bennett, short stays overseas were by no means unknown in Victorian Cornwall. Temporary sojourns in North America seem to have been particularly prevalent in the Penryn district. Often these involved stonemasons and quarrymen, presumably taking advantage of higher wages in American quarries when … Continue reading St Gluvias: return migration at Penryn
St Erth: two emigrants to Australia
St Erth was a parish that in the 1800s included part of the industrial town of Hayle. Near the northern limits of the parish could be found Hayle Foundry, Cornwall’s biggest engineering foundry in the 1800s. By the middle of the nineteenth century around one in seven of St Erth’s men were foundry workers or … Continue reading St Erth: two emigrants to Australia
St Erme: two-stage migration
Now hosting one of Truro’s commuter villages, St Erme was a rural parish in the 1800s. Although a mainly farming parish it provides us with a classic example of two-stage migration. This involved moving first to an industrial region of northern England or Wales before then departing overseas. The process of two-stage, or indirect, emigration … Continue reading St Erme: two-stage migration
St Cleer: to stay or not to stay, that is the question
Whether to stay overseas or return to Cornwall was a question that many Cornish emigrants grappled with. Some seem to have found it very difficult to answer. The engine of St Cleer's long-forgotten industrial boom times was South Caradon mine. Its remains stand as brooding testimony to its short 50 year existence, to the riches … Continue reading St Cleer: to stay or not to stay, that is the question
St Blazey’s millinery millionaire
In mid-Cornwall just east of St Austell, two out of every three families in the parish of St Blazey in 1851 were dependent on the mining industry for their daily bread. Unfortunately, the local mines, mainly exploiting copper reserves, were not best placed to weather the crisis that hit Cornwall’s copper mines in 1866. By … Continue reading St Blazey’s millinery millionaire
St Agnes: travels and travails
The generation born around 1850 in St Agnes could have had little inkling of the economic disaster that lay in store for them. In 1851 71 per cent of the adult men of the parish worked on and in the tin and copper mines of the parish, one of the most intensive concentrations of miners … Continue reading St Agnes: travels and travails
Redruth: America’s 51st state
Redruth had been at the heart of Cornwall’s central mining district in the 1700s. In the days of copper, it was surrounded by the riches of Gwennap to the east and the mines of Illogan to the west. As copper faded after the 1860s and the centre of Cornish metal mining shifted westwards towards Camborne’s … Continue reading Redruth: America’s 51st state
From Probus School to India
In the summer of 1857 some native cavalrymen at Meerut, 40 miles north east of Delhi in India, rose in revolt against their British officers. The troops, employed by the East India Company had been enraged by rumours that evangelical British officers were plotting to replace Hinduism, Islam and other native religions with Christianity. Meanwhile, … Continue reading From Probus School to India
Cornish studies resources 