We have seen that Cornish mines employed 30 per cent of the male labour force in 1861. But they also employed several thousand women on the surface, breaking up rock, washing it or picking out ore from rock. There were over 5,000 of these, known as bal maidens, across Cornwall, amounting to just under nine … Continue reading Bal maidens
Category: mining
Digging for riches: not just miners but quarriers
Most modern employment classifications treat mining and quarrying as a single economic sector. So how many more workers did clay extraction and quarrying add to the mining and quarrying sector in 1861? The answer is not that many when compared with the dominant mining for copper, tin, lead and other minerals. While metal mines accounted … Continue reading Digging for riches: not just miners but quarriers
Victorian Cornwall’s leading sector: metal mining
There was no question about Cornwall’s leading economic sector in the mid-1800s. In terms of income, productivity and employment it was metal mining. The early 1860s marked the peak of Cornish mining. Deep copper mining had broken out of its eighteenth-century heartland west of Truro in the 1810s, first to mid-Cornwall in the 1810s and … Continue reading Victorian Cornwall’s leading sector: metal mining
Gwennap and the 1801 insurrection: Part 2
By March 1801 the price of food in the market towns of Devon had reached an unbearable level. Residents began to adopt the by now familiar tactics of the food riot – imposing a maximum price at the markets and touring local farms with the aim of ‘encouraging’ farmers to send more grain to market. … Continue reading Gwennap and the 1801 insurrection: Part 2
Camborne-Redruth: Cornwall’s Central Emigration District
The Redruth RD of the nineteenth century included within its bounds the central mining district. Named such because of its geographical centrality in the emerging eighteenth century industrial region of west Cornwall, the central mining district was also the most prolific producer of tin and copper ore from the early 1700s onwards. Fittingly, after the … Continue reading Camborne-Redruth: Cornwall’s Central Emigration District
The steam engine, more on Gothic Cornwall and the Cornish dialect
The fourth in my series of one sentence (sometimes two) summaries of recent academic work on Cornwall ... Mary O'Sullivan follows the money and tells us why the miners who were demonstrating in 1787 had a better grasp of economics than some mines adventurers of the time. Joan Passey is attracted by the 'Cornish Gothic' … Continue reading The steam engine, more on Gothic Cornwall and the Cornish dialect
Gothic Cornwall, daffodil pickers and mining heritage
Impress your friends with your wide knowledge of recent academic work on Cornwall ... Tanya Krzywinska and Ruth Heholt claim that Cornwall has inspired Gothic novelists and explain the composition of 'Gothic Cornwall', simultaneously exciting and disturbing, attractive yet terrifying. Constantine Manolchev presents the narrative of a daffodil picker from Bulgaria working on a Cornish … Continue reading Gothic Cornwall, daffodil pickers and mining heritage
Lelant: disturbing the order of things
Why does a parish with a name that begins with an L appear between Tywardreath and Veryan? Did I omit it by mistake last year? No, it’s because Lelant appears in the census as Uny Lelant and is listed as that in my migration database, which I was too lazy to amend. Uny or Euny … Continue reading Lelant: disturbing the order of things
Tywardreath: from Fowey Consols to the Great Western Railway
Tywardreath, between St Austell and Fowey, had seen its population soar after the formation in 1822 of the Fowey Consols copper mine from three older ventures begun in 1817. This mine boomed in the 1830s, attracting workers from a wide area. In the late 1830s and early 1840s the value of Fowey Consol’s output peaked, … Continue reading Tywardreath: from Fowey Consols to the Great Western Railway
Stithians: Cornwall, Columbus and Cumbria
With Stithians, we arrive at a more industrial parish. Found on the north-eastern edge of the Carnmenellis uplands south of Redruth the parish of Stithians in the nineteenth century included mines in the north and quarries to the south. In 1861 the mines predominated, accounting for around a half of Stithian’s working men and many … Continue reading Stithians: Cornwall, Columbus and Cumbria
Cornish studies resources 