01/7/16

Thursday Thought: Historical Fiction

Every time I give a book talk people come up to me afterwards and describe how much they enjoy reading historical fiction. Of course, some readers simply enjoy a jolly romp in four-poster beds where the heroine is divested of her elegant eighteenth century gown.

Others say that they find an historical novel an enjoyable way of learning about history and the way people lived in the past. This view is very much in tune with the current search by educators for ways to teach history in a more engaging way, including notions of “big history” where students are challenged to think about the fundamental issues of human existence by learning about the distant past. After all, as the cliché tells us, those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.

It gives me endless pleasure to talk to readers of The Miner & the Viscount and hear about their fascination with the amazing progress accomplished by their ancestors with tools that we consider primitive and systems that to us are cumbersome.

Just think of the ingenuity of Thomas Newcomen, the inventor of the steam engine, and the imagination of John Smeaton, the engineer who linked water wheels to steam engines to ensure plentiful power whether it was raining or the sun was shining. Then there is John Williams, the powerful mine captain who designed and built the Great County Adit, the ambitious drainage system that linked 60 mines across Cornwall. Imagine the strength and energy of the

Dangerous work

Dangerous work

miners who dug deep shafts through hard rock and under the ocean with hand tools to extract the tin and copper they had the skill to find. And picture the sheer brilliance in mathematics it took to make the essential scientific calculations by hand with standards that varied from place to place.

Here is an example and the story behind the story. To make my story authentic I dug up fascinating information, including a contemporary textbook on arithmetic for mining captains and engineers.

The following passage shows Edward Eliot’s determination to understand the numbers. He is attending his first cost book meeting after becoming an “adventurer” (an investor) in the Wheal Hykka mine.

The cost book system was characteristic of the management of Cornish mines before the limited liability company. The adventurers would meet every quarter and the Purser would present the accounts and share out any profit or loss. The disadvantage was that typically no reserves were maintained.

Eliot is a man after my own heart. He wants to dig into the details and understand how things work so that he can make intelligent management decisions. He quickly learns how much he has to learn, and is impressed by how much his underlings understand. Eliot is different from his partner Viscount Dunbargan whose only interest is the money coming to him.

How do you arrive at the correct weights and measures?” He dipped his quill into the ink and prepared to resume making notes.

John Williams gathered up the thread. “For one thing, the smelter won’t pay for wet tin stuff. So we accurately weigh out a sample of one pound of ore, then dry it over a fire and weigh it again. This gives us the neat weight, the percentage of reduction. Then we weigh the whole parcel wet in pounds and calculate the neat weight of the total by taking the percentage reduction.”

“What would be the weight of the whole parcel of tin stuff that you send off?” asked Eliot.

“It varies. We’ll give you a recent example. Look in your Assay Book, Penwarden, that’ll tell you,” said Williams.

“The last sample came from several kibbles, sir,” Addis said, reaching into his desk, pulling out the leather bound ledger and thumbing through the pages covered with his assistant clerk’s neat copperplate penmanship. He was not very quick at reading words yet but he could readily discern figures. “’Yes, ’ere ’tis. This last lot was one ton, five ’undredweight, three quarters, seven pounds and eleven ounces.”

“I see,” said Eliot, raising his eyebrows.

John Williams warmed to his subject. “The rule of thumb is that every pennyweight of black tin produced from a sample of one gill of ore, wine measure, will give a hundred pounds avoirdupois in one hundred sacks. Of course, that would be eighteen-gallon sacks, beer measure. Did I say avoirdupois? That’s tin. Copper produce is weighed in troy.”

“I see,” said Eliot again, scratching his chin. “At least I think I do. Wine measure, beer measure?”

“Oh yes, sir,” said Williams. “There’s thirty-two gills in a gallon, but a wine gill holds twenty-two percent more than a beer gill. Course, if you were asking about noggins, I’d say there are sixteen in a pint.” Eliot put down his quill and stared at Williams.

Willy Bunt’s jaw dropped. He was about to ask a question when Polkinghorne caught his eye and put a finger to his lips. Bunt kept his counsel but wondered whether someone clever enough could devise a simpler system. Bunt realized he must be educated, learn reading, arithmetic; he needed education to earn more responsibility in his job, get better wages. But how would he ever understand all the different standards and customs for different materials, even different parishes?

 

Read the Chapters

To read more about the challenges overcome by the mine managers every day, go to LINK and see Chapter 49 “Management” and Chapter 50 “Inventor”.

 

Book Talk

If you would like a talk for your group about the book or life in 18th century Cornwall, email me at cornishchronicle@gmail.com.

 

 

 

11/4/15

Thursday Thought: Tin!

West Cornwall, 1895. A once-glorious tin mine, on which the whole town has depended for generations, is on its last legs.

"Tin"

“Tin”

A weather-beaten opera company arrives to give a performance of Beethoven’s “Fidelio” in the town hall and finds itself tangled up in a scam to offload worthless shares in the mine. When the mine unexpectedly yields up new treasures, melodrama starts to spill over into everyday life, reputations crumble and any notion of fair play is abandoned.

The fate of the whole community rests on the courage of one feisty young maid.

Benjamin Luxon

Benjamin Luxon

Made in Cornwall and based on a true story, Miracle Theatre’s highly anticipated feature film stars Jenny Agutter, Dudley Sutton and Ben Luxon alongside Helen Bendell, Ben Dyson, Steve Jacobs, Dean Nolan, and Jason Squibb.

Ben Luxon enjoyed an international career as an opera star. He was a main attraction at last year’s International Gathering of the Cornish American Heritage Society. He lives in Sandisfield, MA, where he leads community theater.

 

08/13/15

Thursday Thought: More Synchronicity

Last week I told about Steve Hoskin of Boulder, Colorado, and his interest in genealogy and linking our Hoskin families. However, when we first met him he showed us a picture of his ancestral home in Perrancombe in Cornwall.

Sarah and I determined to find the house during our trip and take a photo for Steve. It was really hidden away, but we found it with the help of our new friends Anna and Mike Parris of nearby Trewellas. Where do they fit into the story? Well, I’ll tell you about that synchronicity next week.

Sarah sent the photos to Steve and here is his reply:
Steve Hoskin's ancestral  home.

Steve Hoskin’s ancestral home.

“Thank you so much for  the photos of my Grandpa Hoskin’s birthplace that was called Trusla until about 1937 when his cousins purchased it from the Duchy.
“It had been built on land leased from the Duchy of Cornwall for the span of 3 or 4 lives, and when Grandpa’s uncle died in 1933 his was the last life on the lease and it had to revert.
“It is grand that you have had such a welcome to Perranporth and environs. We did enjoy Richard’s book and the talk that he gave in Boulder.”
Like so many Cornish, the Hoskins emigrated to America to seek work in the mines. They had a blacksmith business and the first Perrancombe Hoskin to arrive in Colorado became captain of three gold mines in the Rocky Mountains owned by Belgian investors.

 

05/14/15

Thursday Thoughts: John Caddy

John Caddy

John Caddy

 

John Caddy grew up in Hibbing and Virginia, iron mining towns on the Mesabi Range of northern Minnesota. His great-grandfather, Tom Caddy, was one of the Cornishmen who came to Upper Michigan for the copper and iron mines in the 1870s and 80s after the collapse of hard rock mining in Cornwall. 

John describes himself as “an aging poet whose spirit is more lively all the time.” He first visited the land of his roots in 1992, performed his poetry and formed close attachments that led to his being made a Bard of the Cornish Gorsedh.

Here is one of his poems about Cornwall and the spirit of its miners. It was published in the book With Mouths Open Wide, New and Selected Poems in the section “Presences the Blood Learns Again”.  Learn more about John at http://www.morning-earth.org

 

COMING TO GRASS

Cornishman: a man at the bottom of a mine, singing.

They came to grass at the end of the day.
They climbed from the Dark to grass
and carried the Dark up with them.

After a long day of night with only
the head’s candle for light,
after aching hours of sledging iron
against candle-gleamed borer,

Grass was the surface they climbed to
through a thousand feet of Dark—
Over and over they pulled their weight up the rungs
as their hearts rang the ribcage,
to come up to light and grass-green,
but to carry Dark with them unseen.

Dark changed the strong men,
shortened their tempers, stubborned beliefs,
roughened their tongues—
Dark led them to think
they were the ones who could see.

But in the mine, in chapel, in pub,
Bearing this Dark is what taught them to sing.

05/8/15

Thursday Thoughts: Stellar Review

Another heart warming review. This one from an old school friend with high standards of writing, and indeed scholarship:

“I’ve spent most of the last few days reading ‘The Miner and the Viscount’, here in Normandy looking out on the sea and across to Jersey.

“It is a splendid read.  A tour de force.  I can only guess at the hours of writing.

“The  Piran story starts it off with a real bang, and I found everything thereafter deeply absorbing and believable as a portrait of life in that place and at that time.  I especially enjoyed the details of mining and of community festivities, your pictures of justice and authority, the class society and position of women, the difficulties of travel, and much else, convincing and informative.  And at the end, while the goodies win and the baddie gets his come-uppance, and there are prospects of huge social and economic improvements soon to come, private tragedy reminds us that for most people life was to remain a struggle, full of pain.  An absorbing read.

“Congratulations.”

http://wp.me/p4LySx-bq

03/25/15

Thursday Thoughts: Megaliths

Cornwall is rich in neolithic monuments. The famous Cheesewring is near the village of Minions, which was once a tin and copper miming center. The village is some 3 miles from Liskeard, my birthplace.

How was this extraordinary structure created? Was it an example of the engineering feats of our ingenious Celtic ancestors? There is a simpler explanation. The Cheesewring was formed when the saints and the giants were both inhabiting Cornwall. The giants had lived there longer and were annoyed by the saints moving in and ‘taking over’; putting more stone crosses up, making wells holy and taking too many tithes (taxes) from the harvest.

One day St. Tue heard the giants discussing the best way of ridding the county of the saints so he decided to challenge the leader (Uther) to a trial of strength. This took the form of a rock throwing contest and if the saints won then the giants would have to renounce their wicked ways; but if the saints lost then they would have to leave Cornwall, never to return. Uther was a champion rock thrower whose specialty was balancing larger rocks on top of smaller ones, and St. Tue was very small so in theory there should have been no doubt about the result.

After gathering twelve flat rocks of varying sizes Uther took first throw. The rock landed about 100 feet away towards Stowe’s Hill. St. Tue picked up a rock, looked to the skies and suddenly the rock felt as light as a feather in his hand. He cast it toward the first thrown rock and it landed neatly on top. So they continued until there was only one rock left and it was St. Tue to throw. This too landed perfectly on the pile and, not wanting to admit defeat, Uther suggested that they throw ‘one more for luck’.

He picked up a huge stone and using all his strength threw it. It fell short of the pile, rolled back down the hill and landed at the saint’s feet. As the saint prayed for holy intervention an angel, visible only to him, appeared and carried the stone to the pile. Placing it neatly on the top the angel then vanished and the saints had won.

Uther promised to mend his ways and so did most of the other giants, although some went into the hills muttering about revenge.

Cheesewring

Cheesewring

03/5/15

Thursday Thoughts: The Patron Saint of Cornwall

March 5th is St. Piran’s Day and the Cornish celebrate it with enthusiasm! Piran is the patron saint of tinners and of Cornwall. The legend of St. Piran is a great favorite. I chose it for the Prologue of The Miner & the Viscount. The story speaks to Cornwall’s mystical origins rooted in the Celtic culture and language and to the importance of tin. Piran, or Pyran (Cornish: Peran) was an early 6th-century Cornish abbot and saint, supposedly of Irish origin. It was Piran’s demise and miraculous escape that gives him legendary status.

According to many contemporary accounts, Irish heathens, perhaps Druid priests, tied Piran to a mill-stone and rolled it over the edge of a cliff into the stormy Irish sea. However, I don’t believe the artist got the details  quite right, because actually Piran was spreadeagled on the millstone. It must have really hurt!

St. Piran

St. Piran

Anyroad, the storm immediately calmed and Piran floated safely over the water to land upon a sandy beach on the Cornish coast that became known as Perranporth. Happy St. Piran’s Day!

02/11/15

Thursday Thoughts: Cornwall’s Trade with South Wales

Cornish Story www.cornishstory.com is the outreach program of the Institute of Cornish Studies at the University of Exeter in southwestern Britain. It explores the story of Cornwall and the Cornish overseas in the past and present. They are developing a research project on the historic maritime connections between Cornwall and South Wales. This will be interesting to follow. Coal from south Wales plays an important part in my story. It fuels the new-fangled steam engines in the mines. In Chapter 52 the great inventor John Smeaton drives with the mine captain’s son, Jemmy, to get spare parts for the engine. By the way, Smeaton designed and built the lighthouse on the hazardous Eddystone reef off the southeast coast of Cornwall.

As they drove along the crooked track towards St. Just, they came across a large number of heavily laden mules in a train traveling towards them. They were carrying panniers strapped to their backs. The drovers gave them a cheerful wave.
“Look at all them mules, scores of them. What are they carrying?” asked Jemmy
“Mining coals,” said Smeaton. “Won’t be long before we get more steam engines installed, and there’ll be hundreds of them bringing coal from the Cornish ports, shipped by sea from south Wales. I’ve designed and built all kinds of contraptions for t’ coal mines, far away as Yorkshire. Coal’s being used more and more. Lot of money being made from coal. Dirty stuff to handle; still, where there’s muck there’s brass. That’s what we say in Yorkshire.”
Jemmy had to listen carefully when Mr. Smeaton spoke. He was quite difficult to understand, not like the Cornish. It must be because he was a furriner, from way up north in Yorkshire. Jemmy noticed that when Mr. Smeaton said brass it sounded clipped, short, not like his dad who said brass with a long a, took more time over it. Odd, and instead of saying “the,” Mr. Smeaton said “t”, but Jemmy was too polite to say anything.
“I wish I could be an inventor like you, Mr. Smeaton,” said Jemmy wistfully. “Must be very in’erestin’, thinkin’ up new things, tryin’ things out, and seein’ the world.”
Mule train

Mule train

08/28/14

Thomas Newcomen

I am pleased to welcome a guest blogger, Susan W. Howard, now of San Jose, CA., and a descendant of the illustrious Hornblower family of Cornwall. This link will take you to the biography of Joseph Hornblower  http://penwood.famroots.org/joseph_hornblower.htm

Susan gave a talk about her researches at the Cornish Gathering in Milwaukee. She has written this brief portrait of Thomas Newcomen, who is credited with being the inventor of the atmospheric steam engine, which would “do the work of five horses.” One was built at the Wheal Vor mine as early as 1710 and by the time my story opens in 1760 as many as 70 were at work in Cornwall. The engine worked by injecting cold water into the steam cylinder to create a vacuum. The later designs of the Scotsman James Watt and the great Cornishman Richard Trevithick used the energy of expanding steam.

              The Newcomen Engine

The Newcomen Engine

Thomas Newcomen, inventor of the atmospheric steam engine, was a modest and devoutly religious man who left behind few records of his life. Some eighteenth century scientists such as Royal Society member John Desaguliers had difficulty in giving Newcomen credit for his invention. Desaguliers wrote that the engine that began pumping water from the mines at Coneygree colliery near Dudley Castle in Staffordshire in 1712 came about “very luckily by accident.” Newcomen in fact did possess the intellectual capacity and practical experience to build the engine. He relied upon his close-knit circle of fellow Baptists to supply help and needed expertise. Among them were John Calley, Humphrey Potter, and Joseph Hornblower, who built Newcomen engines in Cornwall. Newcomen may have begun building an engine at Wheal Vor in Cornwall as early as 1710; the Royal Cornwall Museum gives him credit for a machine built there in 1716.

Thomas Newcomen was born in Dartmouth, Devon in 1664. He became an ironmonger and while in his early twenties he visited mining regions in the West Midlands and Cornwall to sell and to manufacture metal tools and small household items. No record of an apprenticeship survives, but bills for ironmongery and purchases of bulk iron have been found. Letters written by his contemporaries do contain references to Newcomen and the steam engine. Two of Newcomen’s own letters have survived, and as far as can be discovered, no portrait of him was made. Apparently he began experimenting with steam engines in the mid-1690s. The extent that the ideas of other inventors or scientists influenced his work is a matter of conjecture. Inventor Thomas Savery had already been granted a patent for a “fire engine,” so Newcomen joined in a partnership with him to build an engine suitable for pumping water from the mines. Eventually more than 2,000 atmospheric steam engines were built. Newcomen was also a lay preacher, a trustee of the Netherton Baptist chapel (near Dudley) and an Overseer of the Poor. After his death in 1729 at the London home of fellow Baptist Edward Wallin, Newcomen was buried in Bunhill Fields, a nonconformist cemetery in London; the location of his gravesite, like so many of the details of his life, remains unknown.

Note: Desaguliers quote from L.T.C. Rolt and J. S. Allen, The Steam Engine of Thomas Newcomen, (Landmark Publishing, Ashbourne, Derbershire, 1997) 46.

07/24/14

Try the first chapter!

My new book is turning out to be a great adventure. So thrilling for an author! Readers around the world tell me they find The Miner and the Viscount really interesting, a great story filled with fascinating characters, a page turner, as one reader put it.

Of course, I want everyone to read it. But you probably want to judge the book for yourself. Here’s my offer:

Sign up for my Newsletter and I will send you the first chapter of The Miner and the Viscount.  It’s an easy way to be introduced to the characters and plot of my book. If you like it and decide to buy a copy, you can easily do so right on my website.  If you decide to pass, no problem. But by getting my newsletter, I’m hoping you will soon change your mind and come around to purchasing a copy.

The Newsletter, by the way, is intended to share information and answer questions from readers wanting to know more of the background of the story, Cornwall itself, and the exhilarations (and travails) that went into writing the book.

Here’s the link to the newsletter/free chapter sign-up: http://eepurl.com/XMEor Be sure to check the box indicating you’d like me to send you the chapter.

Many thanks!