We do not immediately associate Newlyn with mining. The old gibe used by St. Just men ‘Thee dawn knaw no moor ‘bout mainan than a Boorian man’ might well have been applied to a Newlyn man or someone from the ancient parish of Paul as the inhabitants of St. Buryan. But it would in fact have been far from being entirely justified. It was not even quite true of Buryan, which had at least one little mine. Newlyn was involved not only in some mining, but also more importantly in smelting tin at Stable Hobba.
At the top of Chywoone Hill stands the house known as ‘Wheal Betsy’ and down to Belle Vue runs Adit Lane. In 1851 the Mining Journal reported Wheal Elizabeth as having ‘a large engine house recently erected, and other requisite buildings in progress towards developing the underground riches supposed to run through this extensive sett’. The shaft went 14ft under the ten-fathom level and a cross-cut was driven north. To the south a shaft with machinery worked by flat rods from the engine house was secured to five fathoms below adit. The Mine Captain wrote, ‘The former workers had a lode here two and a half feet wide and, judging from the arches left to support the ground, very rich in tin…’ But the mine did not last long. In March 1853 all the machinery and materials from the mine were offered for sale. The mine’s only lasting function was to supply water from its adit to the shoot in Adit Lane. It was typical of so many Cornish mining ventures. Anyone who found a lode went off in the true Celtic spirit of independence and developed it as a small undertaking. Very often the enterprise was short lived and as much, or more, was lost as was gained. To be profitable as a venture the mine had to be looking at several lodes, well capitalised and managed. Developing a mine with all its buildings and machinery to work one lode was usually a poor prospect.
A similar enterprise was Wheal Henry, established in 1828, on the site later to become Penlee Quarry, to work a copper lode. It went down about eighteen fathoms and raised 20 tons of ore, sold at £10 per ton. Then the purser went bankrupt. Thirty years later it was revived under the name of West Tolvadden, reaching down 30 fathoms and a little way under the sea. The chimney of the engine house for its 20inch cylinder engine survived into the 20th century.
A century after the second working of Wheal Henry, or West Tolvadden, Penlee Quarry became involved in exploring mineralisation at the other side of Gwavas Lake, at the Wherry Rocks, adjacent to Newlyn. There in the 18th century was a mine which had the distinction of being brought to an end by a ship. It was almost unique, because its shaft was sunk in the sea. Apart from tin the minerals present have been listed as uranium, copper, cobalt, lead, zinc blende and nickel. There was certainly some very rich tinstone. The idea of working this rather inaccessible ore-body, which had attracted attention since the early 1700s, was conceived by a poor working miner, Thomas Curtis of Breage. A shaft 20 fathoms deep was sunk 114 fathoms from the shore and worked by very crude methods in the summer months, starting in 1778. Curtis died in 1791 when the mine was just beginning to show a good return. His successors were emboldened to erect a rotary steam engine on the shore, which transmitted power by the common Cornish device of flat rods to a pump at the shaft. By 1798 the mine had sold £70,000 worth of tin in twenty years, which must have been a satisfactory return. But in that year there occurred a storm and an American vessel anchored in Gwavas Lake parted her cable and drove down on the headgear and the staging that carried the rods, effectively destroying them and the immediate prospects of the mine’s adventurers.
Newlyn nearly had another mine in the mid 1960s when Penlee Quarry built out a staging into the sea at Wherrytown to prospect the Wherry mine. Evidently it must have been established that the remaining ore-body, although possibly rich, did not offer a sufficient volume to warrant exploitation.
But in the course of history Newlyn’s principal contribution to the tin industry was at Stable Hobba at the end of the Coombe. The port of Penzance lies at the hub of a half circle of mining areas, and smelting works were early established on both sides of town. The Trereife works, as they were usually known, date back to before 1732. From 1732, William, and later Uriah, Tonkin ran the undertaking. In 1766 Ralph Hall & Co were looking for a sale and by 1805 the Batten family of Penzance were in control. About the middle of the century R R Michell, a Marazion mining entrepreneur, took over and rebuilt and enlarged the premises. After his death in 1872, T W Field, a Redruth mining adventurer and banker succeeded. But mining was on the decline in face of foreign competition and in 1891 he combined with the Consolidated Tin Smelting Company at Chyandour, involving Bolitho family interests. The writing was on the wall for Trereife and it closed in 1896. In 1912 it was followed into oblivion by the Chyandour works.
Trereife used the heraldic bird motif on its ingots, as a stamp. The origin of the Cornish smelting marks is obscure. The commercial history of the various companies, the doings of the cartels, a co-operative, and cartel breakers are a complex subject. R R Michell attempted to break a cartel by smelting 1,842 tons of tin in 1862, but later he was forced to join. For historical reasons smelters also became bankers.
The smelters used Penzance for the shipment of their ingots and mines used the same harbour for their coal and timber imports. In the period 1896-1902 the Levant mine tried Newlyn for their shipment of its copper ore. Copper was exported un-smelted.
Abridged and adapted by Margaret Perry from a series of articles written by the late John Corin in 1987 for publication in ‘Cross Keys’ the parish magazine of St. Peter’s Church, Newlyn. John Corin was a well known lifeboat historian but perhaps his best book, long out of print, was ‘Fishermen’s Conflict - The Story of Newlyn’ in which he wrote about his home port of Newlyn and its generations-long attempts to safeguard the fishing harvest in Cornish waters.
