St Austell on the south coast of Cornwall nestled among the mountains of the moon, or so it looked from the back of my mum's cottage. This belay a far more muscular past; St Austell with other parts of Cornwall provided the raw material for much of Britain's industrial revolution. The mountains were of course spoil heaps from china clay extraction; much earlier the mounds would be the waste from tin and copper mining. There is evidence of tin and copper working in Cornwall from the Bronze Age; not unreasonable given that bronze is an alloy of the two metals.
Early tin mining in Cornwall was near the surface and never below a level at which a build up of water in the mine could not drain into the sea. In time attempts were made to pump water using water wheels and so enabling deeper digging. The mines would sometimes run out under the sea and miners told stories of hearing the sound of waves above them.
Queen Elizabeth I introduced German miners to work new copper mines and George I encouraged more Germans given their experience of working in deep mines with hard rock.
Thomas Newcomen made the vital breakthrough of the invention of the atmospheric steam powered pump which meant that mines could go even deeper. The first was introduced into the Polgooth mine near St Austell which at one time employed 2,000 people. Mine owner, Charles Rashleigh, built the harbour at Charlestown enabling the shipping of copper ore to be smelted in South Wales. Tin was smelted locally.
The steam engines of Boulton and Watt were introduced to reduce costs as the price of tin and copper fell. I write more about these in my blog on Camborne. There were boom times - 1856-1864 for tin, but by the end of the century other countries were undercutting Cornish produce and miners emigrated in large numbers to mineral rich places including India.
For St Austell, the existing trade of mining kaolin was to restore prosperity and prolong it for a good number of decades. The Chinese had for a thousand years or more manufactured porcelain of a whiteness and hardness far superior to any English pottery. The secret to their process was closely guarded until Marco Polo brought details back to Europe. In Cornwall it was a Kingsbridge chemist by the name of Cookworthy who in 1746 found clay and and stone deposits near St Austell and an industry was born. Josiah Wedgwood experimented with a Watt steam engine to extract the kaolin by means of pumping water and then sieving and drying. Wedgwood was joined by Minton and Spode in acquiring interests in china clay and stone setts. In time a large number of small concerns were busily occupied in supplying a market hungry for porcelain.
As was the way with industrialisation, small concerns joined others to become bigger, culminating in 1919 with the formation of English China Clays. By this time science had made its presence felt and more advanced technology was introduced: electricity in place of steam, centrifugal pumps and power hoses. The port of Par had been built and enabled the export of a million tonnes a year. The production of kaolin leaves a residue of fine sand which can either be dumped or used. ECC bought two companies which became Selleck Nichols and Williams which manufactured prefabricated industrial buildings from precast concrete using the waste sand. Kaolin wasn't only being used for making porcelain, it was part of paper making and an illicit use was to whiten flour.
In 1999 English China Clays was bought by the French Imerys which now has interests in other extractive industries across the UK:
- Kaolin is still produced in Cornwall with a reserach laboratory at Par
- Ball clay is extracted in Devon around Newton Abbot and Wareham in Dorset
- Calcium carbonate is extracted at Stoke on Trent, Lostock in Cheshire and Beverley in Yorkshire
- Calcium aluminate is extracted at Thurrock in Kent
Further reading:
Cyril Bunn, The Book of St Austell (Buckingham: Barracuda Books, 1978)
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