Cornish mining: a socio-economic overview

Cornwall has been described by historians as being one of a handful of early dynamic, thrusting regions which lay at the margins of the British industrial revolution, and noted for its culture of ingenuity, particularly in relation to the development of steam technology (Hudson, 1981, 1989; Pollard, 1973; Richards, 1993).

Copper was to Cornwall what cotton was to Lancashire. Its production grew phenomenally during the 18^th century, and by 1770 the value of the copper industry had outstripped all other national industrial sectors. Huge fortunes were made, so much so that in the early eighteenth century Cornwall probably had more newly rich than most other English counties. Banking and commerce were stimulated, Cornish ‘capitalists’ developing risk-sharing and cartels, within the copper industry, before many other  industrial regions (Rule, 1992; Deacon, 1998).

By the early 1800s, Cornish mines were among the largest enterprises anywhere in Europe and very much in the vanguard of the industrial revolution, not simply in terms of technological development, but also in capitalisation, the promotion of joint-stock companies, the development of an increasingly structured workforce including specially paid senior management, and the sheer numbers of people involved (Burt, 1995). Cornish investors rapidly began to diversify their capital into smelting and other industries, both at home and abroad, heralding the migration of the technology and labour of the region, initially to other areas of the British Isles, but rapidly thereafter overseas. Cornwall was quickly becoming the hub of a rapidly expanding global metalliferous mining economy (Schwartz, 2001).

Copper mining had mainly been confined to the area west of Truro during the early nineteenth century, but the industry was dynamic and spread rapidly to east Cornwall and the Tamar Valley during the following decades. By 1851 over a century of specialisation in mining had resulted in an occupational structure dominated by extractive industries, Cornwall having a higher degree of occupational specialisation than industrial areas such as the coal mining region of South Wales or the north west of England textile region. In 1861 the Redruth Registration District had the second highest percentage of men in any English or Welsh Registration District for employment directly in mining (Deacon, 1998).

Such economic specialisation, together with regional labour and capital markets, gave rise to distinctive regional cultures and complex yet fluid identities. During the early nineteenth century, Cornish miners had constituted a semi-independent proletariat with significant access to smallholdings held under the three lives system, by no means a common form of land tenure in Britain, and to non-commodity methods of production (Deacon, 1997). These helped to subsidise the real costs of mining by keeping tribute wages low. Occupationally homogenous communities of ‘independent’ mining families co-existed with the webs of deference woven by the old landed classes and a rising merchant bourgeoisie that had made their money through and because of mining, but whose dispersed interests obscured their role as a capitalist employing class.

The importance of mining to a burgeoning sense of regional identity is exemplified by the growth of dialect literature, which gave Cornwall the work of J.T. Tregelles: a mine purser, and the evocative poetry of W.B. Forfar and John Harris. It is also exemplified in the widespread allegiance to Methodism in all its schismatic hues, in particular by miners and its popular Revivalist nature was perceived as quintessentially Cornish (Rule, 1971; Burke, 1981; Deacon, 2001). By 1824, one in nineteen of the county’s inhabitants was a Methodist member and the high number of surviving chapels bear witness to the impact of Methodism on the region.

As the nineteenth century progressed, Cornwall and west Devon became more exposed to the practises and cultures of other industrial regions. The tribute system was increasingly being abandoned in favour of more strictly regulated tutwork with fixed contracts. Reduced access to smallholdings, a result of pressures placed on the finite resource of land through enclosure of common land, coupled with the potato blight of the late 1840s, helped to accelerate the breakdown in a traditional way of life that had underpinned the early phase of Cornish industrialisation. Families, progressively more dependent on the formal wage economy, became increasingly proletarianised, urbanised and like their counterparts in other industrial regions of Britain. Trade unionism and strike action became more common. During the late nineteenth century, cultural forms introduced from mature industrial regions such as the Welsh valleys and the north of England were wedded to ‘traditional’ Cornish forms to produce a culture of mine and chapel, an identity centred on industrial pride which prized thrift, hard work and respectability, fostered by Methodism in particular. New cultural forms included spectator sports such as soccer and rugby, male voice choirs and brass bands, and a hybridised working class culture was forged which remains to the present day (Deacon, 1997, 1998, 2001; Deacon and Payton, 1993).

However, Cornwall and west Devon were not destined to progress from the margins to become one of the core industrial regions of Britain, but became increasingly peripheralised. The absence of economic diversification into other industries such as copper smelting, or the ability to maintain a competitive edge in heavy engineering and metal manufacture produced an economy that was overspecialised and over-dependent on mining (Payton, 1992; Perry, 2001). The decline in mining could have had far more serious repercussions for a region that was not witnessing population loss caused by migration, as mine after mine closed in the 1860s and 1870s throwing thousands out of work. One could speculate that had Cornwall and west Devon not lost a significant proportion of its population - up to a third of the youngest and most dynamic people in some communities between 1871 and 1881 - a critical mass might have been achieved that would have kick-started an economy that was attempting to diversity into horticulture, food processing, china clay manufacture and tourism. Deprived of population growth, the towns of Cornwall and west Devon did not expand as did those in other industrial regions and none could boast a population greater than 10,000 by the late nineteenth century. No single urban centre of regional dominance emerged as a result, and Cornwall’s small towns remained the focus of their immediate locality, politically and culturally fragmented and often locked in bitter inter-town rivalries (Perry, 2001).

These profound economic changes were mirrored by equally profound cultural ones, as lost industrial pride and prowess were followed by introversion as communities relied on the remittances from overseas which helped to prevent widespread poverty. However, some of this money was wisely invested in economic diversification, community regeneration schemes and municipal building, but it did not hide the fact that an economy reliant on remittances for future growth coexisted uneasily with an emerging culture of fatalism, of getting by and making do (Schwartz, 2002). Stoicism in the face of adversity was only leavened by the vague but persistent hope that Cornish mining might yet revive.

The frailties of an economy that was incomplete, overspecialised and so linked to a single industry has been held responsible for the deep socio-economic depression that spanned much of the period from the late nineteenth century to the inter-war years of the twentieth century (Payton, 1992). Yet although mining was never again to dominate the region’s economy, it has left an indelible mark on the people of Cornwall and west Devon, aspects of whose identity are closely allied to the culture which evolved during industrialisation. Brass bands, male voice choirs, rugby, Methodism and the icon that is the Cornish engine house, remain markers of pride in the modern Cornish identity, particularly amongst Cornish communities abroad.

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