Mining in this central part of Cornwall had been going on long before the Christian era with miners from what would become northwest France. There is evidence of the use of Cornish tin on bronze found in the Mediterranean exported from St Michael's Mount. The image is of early mining in northwest Cornwall.
The eighteenth century saw an acceleration in mining with the coming of the industrial revolution.
'The spot we are at is the most disagreeable in the whole county. The face of the earth is broken up in ten thousand heaps of rubbish, and there is scarce a tree to be seen.'
So wrote Mrs Watt to Mrs Boulton in 1777 when her husband was supervising the installation of one of his steam engines to pump water from a mine that was becoming inoperable. Samuel Smiles wrote of this in his contemporary account of Boulton & Watt noting that the engineer faced technical challenges, but also stubborn resistance from the Cornish. I explored in my post on St Austell the issue of mines flooded with water.
Another challenge for the mines was that of transporting ore from the rock face to places where it could be smelted. Here Janet Thomas, in her book The Wheels Went Round - the Story of Camborne Town, brings in the name Trevithick. By 1803 he had designed a tram engine which was being used in Wales and was introduced to transport ore between Portreath and Poldice. Trevithick also provided machinery for lifting the ore to to the mouth of the mine.
The area between Redruth and Camborne had from early times concentrated on the mining of copper, and production increased as, in the eighteenth century, the industrial revolution got underway. The metal workers of Birmingham were demanding more and more copper and the mine owners were all too happy to oblige. As elsewhere in the revolution, the workers missed out on good fortune and suffered dreadful working conditions and poverty for their families. Mechanisation into the nineteenth century went a small way to improve their lot with better ventilation and dust suppression of which I write more below. The first part of the nineteenth century saw a boom in production and by mid century Cornwall was supplying three quarters of the copper used in the world and half of the tin. This was big business.
In Redruth, William Murdock worked at supervising the installation of Boulton & Watt steam engines. In the evenings he experimented with the use of gas emitted from coal. He discovered that it could produce a bright light and from that he devised a scheme whereby his house could be lit by this gas. This demonstration convinced his employers of the viability of the process and he was commissioned to install gas lighting in their Soho works in Birmingham.
In Camborne, it was the Holman brothers which established a business in 1839 with a foundry capable of repairing massive beam engines. There followed a dust suppressing drill delivering a water spray to the drill bit; this became known as the Cornish Rock Drill. In the late nineteenth century they were manufacturing beam engines and by the twentieth century added compressors, pumping and winding engines; electricity took over from steam power. In its heyday, they were employing 3,000 men and women in Camborne and taking on 100 apprentices each year. The Camborne School of Mines was founded in 1888.
Notwithstanding technical developments, the world was not moving in Cornwall's favour, with better mining prospects, not so much gold in California, but copper in South Australia and Lead in Illinois. This triggered emigration of miners and their families and ensured that Cornish accents were heard wherever mines were being sunk.
For Holmans, the spread of mining to other parts of the world very simply meant first exports and then the establishment of Holman plants overseas. In 1961 the company had 2,500 employees and seven years later, under the encouragement of the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation, merged with Broom & Wade of High Wycombe to become International Compressed Air, later CompAir with headquarters in Slough.
South Crofty mine is being redeveloped by Cornish Metals.
Further reading:
- Janet Thomas, The Wheels Went Round - the Story of Camborne Town (Redruth: Dyllansow Truran,1987)
- Samuel Smiles, Lives of Boulton & Watt (Stoud: Nonsuch Publishing, 2007 originally published 1865)
- https://cornishstory.com/2021/02/10/holman-echoes-of-an-age/
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