Mining and Migration

Alone of the counties of south western England Cornwall witnessed significant migration in the period dubbed The Great Migration (c1815-1930), losing some 20% of its adult male population overseas in every decade from 1861-1901; three times the average for England and Wales. With a population that never exceeded 500,000 in the nineteenth century, Cornwall lost anywhere between a quarter to half a million people, making it an emigration region comparable to any in Europe. Today there are over 6 million people of Cornish descent worldwide.

The extraordinary story of Cornish migration is inextricably linked to the rise and subsequent decline of its mining industry. Skilled Cornish miners had been migrating from the 1700s within Cornwall and then to other parts of the British Isles. This was a mere foretaste of what was to come, for in the early 1800s the expansive, dynamic industrial region of Cornwall and west Devon possessed the best contemporary European mining know-how and had begun to export its technology, capital and skilled labour.

Industrial giants - the Vivians and Grenfells - had acquired a strong stake in mining and smelting in South Wales before 1815, but it was the export of highpressure steam engines perfected by Trevithick and his contemporaries to the silver mines of Peru in 1814-18 that marked the transatlantic migration of the industrial revolution. This heralded the beginning of a modern, integrated global mining economy with its attendant financial, labour and technological markets. It paved the way for British capital investment in overseas mining enterprises from the early 1820s. This expanded the frontiers of the British Empire, both formal and informal.The introduction of the latest technology in areas devoid of industrialisation necessitated the export from Cornwall of everything from steam engines and boilers to ropes and crucibles together with the staff to mine, process, organise and administer these enterprises. As a result, the global mining industry was heavily influenced by Cornish miners for almost a century.

The Cornish rehabilitated abandoned mines across Latin America in the 1820s, and were the first real hard rock miners in the USA. They worked lead deposits in Wisconsin and Illinois and copper and lead deposits in Norway and Spain in the 1830s, as well as copper fields in South Australia and in Michigan in the 1840s. Without the introduction of the Cornish engine, deep lode mining in California after the 1849 gold rush (e.g. Grass Valley and Nevada City) would have been considerably delayed. Further mineral strikes across the Americas (e.g. at Bisbee and Tombstone in Arizona and the Cornish town of Virginia City in Nevada) and Australasia followed, as well as in the Caribbean, northern England, India, Malaysia and Africa. The discovery of diamonds in South Africa in the late 1860s followed by the Transvaal gold rush a decade later created opportunities for significant migration from Cornwall in the three decades following the 1880s. In 1905 there were some 7000 Cornish miners on the Rand in South Africa.

The Cornish did not just export their technology, they also took their culture with them. Distinctive Cornish communities with their nonconformist chapels, traditional food and leisure activities - such as Cornish wrestling - flourished on virtually every continent. The Cornish even brought football to Mexico, playing the first game in Pachuca in 1900. The Yorke Peninsula became known as Australia’s ‘Little Cornwall’, with the Cornish constituting over 42% of migrants to South Australia by 1865. In 1894 it was noted that over 60% of the 6,000 population of the gold mining town of Grass Valley, California, was from Cornwall. In the Transvaal, prior to the Boer war, an estimated 25% of the white workforce was Cornish. By the late nineteenth century migration had resulted in a pronounced population decline in many Cornish parishes which were only sustained by financial remittances from miners abroad; a sum close to a £1,000,000 a year was flowing into Cornwall around 1900 from the Transvaal alone. Some of this money was used to build or extend places of worship, municipal buildings and housing, as well as to diversify an economy stricken by mining decline. Foreign house names given to the homes built or bought by return migrants may still be seen across the region. The region’s connection with the wider mining world did not automatically decline with the failing fortunes of its own mining industry. Investment by Cornish entrepreneurs in Malaysian mining was responsible for the opening of the Malaysian Tin Dredging Company’s headquarters at Redruth in 1891.

The First World War disrupted migration networks and marked the beginning of the end for significant migration as Cornish miners were increasingly replaced abroad by native labour.