Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Remarkable condition for a first edition copy. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> This is particularly true of the period after 1873 to some extent the greatest yet most tragic period of Cornish tin. It is perhaps inevitable that the earlier period with its romantic over-tones of bal- maidens and ‘grass captains’ in tall hats of lavish count-house dinners and legendary profits has been given the greater prominence in what has appeared to date but in chronicling the full history of the industry there should also be told the more sombre tale in the later years when Cornishmen toiled in the lengthening shadows of the Straits and Bolivian tin giants. Then there were the grim realities of enforced emigration of ankylostomiosis and of such things as dangerously cheap dynamite in the battle for survival both of the industry and the men within it. The story of how Cornwall from being the world’s premier tin field in 1872 was reduced in half a century almost to extinction by foreign competition is not a happy one although it will be found that these years of depression have an interest and a melancholy fascination all their own. Nor can it be said that the history of Cornish mining during this time in the last century is at all well known and it is probable that in these pages even those who have been connected with the industry will find much that is new. On the companion industry of tin smelting which rose and fell in concert with Cornish mining even less of substance has been written. The names of such men as Daubuz Batten Bolitho Grenfell Michell Bain and Teague and the smelting-houses they controlled-Trereife Carvedras Treloweth Trelissick Portreath Pen- poll and the rest are here rescued from un- deserved obscurity.