Tehmina Goskar tehmina@goskar.com Pre-print: Made in Metal: Cornwall and South Wales Without copper, tin and iron human history would be unimaginable. These metals have sent instant messages around the world, canned our food and fought our wars. A vital episode in this metallic epic took place in Cornwall and South Wales. For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Cornish mining and Welsh smelting led the world in metal commerce. By Graham Sutherland’s lifetime the special relationship between these cousins was a fading memory, and the industrial landscapes of both had contracted into small islands of stubborn resistance that refused to accept entirely that they were the victims of their own global success. But some survived, and even thrived. This essay examines the metal industries, from mines to factories, in Cornwall and South Wales and explores their history before, during and after Sutherland’s time as a war artist. Copper: The special relationship c.1700-1870 Cornish scientist and entrepreneur John Henry Vivian (1785-1855) eloquently set out the intertwined relationship between the metal industries of Cornwall and South Wales in his description of the copper smelting process as practised at his copperworks in Swansea in 1823, ‘The ores are conveyed from Cornwall to Wales to be smelted on account of the supply of fuel, as not only carrying the smaller quantity to the greater, the ore to the coal, but because the vessels load back coal for the use of the engines of the mines.’1 The Vivians, originally from Truro, epitomised the special relationship. John Vivian, John Henry’s father, had been involved for many years in mining, including the Cornish Metal Company, which attempted to confront the smelters’ hold on the copper market and the wiliness of Welshman Thomas Williams who established the practice of monopoly and vertical integration (interests in all or key parts of the supply chain) for much of the 1780s and 90s. But the Vivians and others learned from this experience, and also the failed venture in copper smelting at Hayle. As soon as Thomas Williams’s monopoly came to an end around 1802 John Vivian set his sights on smelting, where the real money was made. He took over management of a long-established works at Penclawdd, on the Gower peninsula in 1800. By 1809 he and his son had attracted enough capital to set up the first, and probably best, planned copper smelter in the heart of the Swansea coalfield. The Hafod copperworks, with its own quays and wharves on the west bank of the river Tawe, and direct access to the deep-water port, opened in 1810 and was to continue smelting, refining and later rolling copper until 1980. The exchange of raw materials between these powerhouses of the metal industries is the leitmotif of the symbiotic history of Cornwall and South Wales for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Another is the exchange of people and skills. Other Cornish industrial and banking families like the Grenfells, Daniells, Foxes of Falmouth, and the Williamses of Scorrier followed in the Vivians’ footsteps and also became household names in South Wales. They dominated the copper smelting industry and also shaped the cultural and social lives of thousands of workers. The eponymous Trevivian, built by the Vivians for its workforce, and situated conveniently near the Hafod copperworks, was a well-planned industrial settlement still in a good state of preservation today, together with copper slag block walls marking out the gardens.2 Cornish miners were recruited at metal mines in mid- and north Wales for their expertise and instruction. They stayed, establishing Cornish communities here even into the Published, fully illustrated in: Paul Gough, Sally Moss and Tehmina Goskar, Graham Sutherland: from Darkness into Light: War Paintings and Drawings (Redcliffe Press, 2013). Tehmina Goskar tehmina@goskar.com twentieth century, seen in place names such as ‘Cornish Row’ and the foundation of unmistakably Cornish Bible Christian chapels. One example is Llywernog Silver and Lead Mine in Ceredigion (Cardiganshire) to which many Cornish miners moved when it had been leased to the Scorrier Williams family in 1825. Welsh iron too attracted the interest, finance and expertise of the Cornish. The Foxes of Falmouth, a Quaker business family, established the Perran Iron Foundry in 1791. On the site of a former tin smelting works situated in Perranworthal between Truro and Falmouth, the foundry manufactured amongst other things, boilers and the gigantic pumping and winding machinery employed at Cornish hard rock mines. A year later they took over the ironworks at Neath Abbey on the River Clydach in South Wales to produce pig iron for Perran Foundry.3 But by the turn of the nineteenth century they transferred the machine and boiler manufacturing works from Cornwall to Wales, bringing to Neath an international reputation as a supplier of machines and parts to the mining, smelting and nascent locomotive industries. It was from this springboard that the Foxes launched themselves into Welsh copper smelting in Swansea. This ebb and flow of expertise, money, workers and materials between Cornwall and South Wales is further illustrated by James Palmer Budd (1803-83) of Liskeard, east Cornwall. From 1825 Budd was in the employ of the Vivians. In 1838 he joined the Ystalyfera iron and tinplate works in the upper Swansea valley. A decade later he pioneered methods of reusing waste gases in the hot blasting process of iron smelting, improving efficiency, and therefore profits.4 In the 1850s he erected a forge, tin houses and tinplate mills at the site and by 1866 these iron works were one of the largest in the world, employing 5000 people in the works and associated mines, only surpassed by Dowlais in the heart of Welsh iron country in Merthyr Tydfil.5 The works used local iron ore and coal to manufacture iron products. Tinplate, with its core of Welsh iron, later steel, and coated with Cornish tin is another revealing paradigm of the Cornish-Welsh metal industries. Ystalyfera was a workhorse of an iron and tinplate works, continuing production into the twentieth century and during the Second World War but ending soon after. Although much of the traffic in expertise and labour was one-way, from Cornwall to South Wales, and the remains of a Cornish presence in Welsh industrial landscapes are certainly more tangible than those of the Welsh in Cornwall, we get occasional glimpses of Welsh industrialists taking an interest in their Celtic cousin. One very early example is Robert Morris who was responsible for putting Swansea on the copper smelting map in the 1720s. His letterbooks describe a journey he made in June 1727 to Redruth (‘Put back twice by contrary winds’) accompanied by a refiner called Thomas David. He wanted David to become an assayer for him in Cornwall—to research and test ores for their composition and metal content—but ‘could not persuade him to live with his family out of Wales.’6 He visited the copper mining districts of Redruth and Truro as well as the nascent industrial ports of Hayle on the north coast and Falmouth on the south. This journey and indeed his comments in other letters and notes, which were compiled into an unpublished history of Welsh copper smelting by his son 50 years later, demonstrate Morris’s intelligence and interest in Cornish mining so he could more effectively run his copper concern at Llangyfelach in Swansea. This excursion must have taken the form of a diplomatic mission for he came with a special gift, a clock made at his copperworks, for the miners of Rosewarne in the Gwinear district. Published, fully illustrated in: Paul Gough, Sally Moss and Tehmina Goskar, Graham Sutherland: from Darkness into Light: War Paintings and Drawings (Redcliffe Press, 2013). Tehmina Goskar tehmina@goskar.com This mild form of industrial colonisation did not seem to overly bother the South Walian citizenry. In 1857 and 1886 public subscription in Swansea raised enough money to erect two monumental bronze statues to the Vivians of Truro, one to John Henry Vivian and the other to his son and business heir Sir Henry Hussey Vivian (1821-94), who was successively MP for Truro and then Swansea. No doubt a modicum of Cornish copper ore, brought to life by the skills of the Welsh smelters, produced some of the red metal for these memorials. All the while the familiar outline of Cornish engine houses, UNESCO World Heritage icons of mining technology, still studding the post-industrial landscapes across the world, are silent paragons of the prowess of Welsh coal miners without whose labour nothing could have worked. Alongside these vignettes a thousand other examples may be cited. The newspapers of Cornwall and Wales such as Swansea’s The Cambrian and the Royal Cornwall Gazette reported in detail current metal and ore prices and listed the vessels and the cargoes which plied the coastal trade of the Celtic Sea and Bristol Channel back and forth from the network of small Cornish ports such as Portreath and Devoran to Swansea, Neath, Llanelli (Burry Port) and Cardiff. Cornwall needed Welsh coal and iron to work the engines of the metal mines. South Wales needed Cornish copper, tin and other minerals for smelting and producing semi-manufactured goods such as tinplate. Cornish entrepreneurs developed extensive business interests in Wales initially to bolster their own businesses back home but later to ensure Cornish minerals became an indispensible part of the supply chain. But without Welsh industrial organisation, smelting and refining expertise, and access to markets no one could profit. Remarkably, by Sutherland’s lifetime it was two Cornish-founded copper firms that were the last standing vestiges of the special relationship in the Lower Swansea Valley. In 1927 Yorkshire Imperial Metals (a joint company of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) and Yorkshire Metals) had absorbed British Copper Manufacturers, an amalgamation of the two old patriarchs of the copper industry, Vivian and Sons and Williams, Foster and Co. which itself had taken over Pascoe Grenfell and Sons in the 1890s. And it was in the mid- to late 1920s that the last bar of Welsh smelted copper rolled off the production line, in which there may have been a sentimental quantity of copper raised from the last operating Cornish copper mine at Levant in the St Just district. By the late 1890s Levant Mine was yielding copper ore only as a by-product of tin and arsenic.7 Neighbouring Geevor Tin Mine, which created such an impression on Sutherland in 1941-42, had by 1919 taken over the deep undersea workings of Levant Mine, which was eventually ‘knacked’ (closed down in Cornish parlance) in October 1930.8 Copper and coal perhaps most poetically illustrate Cornwall and South Wales’s interdependence although as we have seen tin and iron played their role too. But Sutherland was neither to observe nor experience this. So let us take a look at the state of the metal industries when copper had faded to place in context some of the legacy of mining and metal working that Sutherland portrayed in his war art. Iron and steel: Faded industrial glory and wartime offensive c.1880-1945 Towards the end of the nineteenth century the maturation of international markets in cheaper and better quality metals, metalliferous ores and concentrates, the removal of import tariffs, the migration of mining, smelting and engineering expertise abroad, and the establishment of open markets on the London Metal Exchange in 1877 all created a hostile environment for these two progenitors of the metal industries. But the slump Published, fully illustrated in: Paul Gough, Sally Moss and Tehmina Goskar, Graham Sutherland: from Darkness into Light: War Paintings and Drawings (Redcliffe Press, 2013). Tehmina Goskar tehmina@goskar.com suffered across British heavy industry in the 1890s was by no means the end of them. The early twentieth century was characterised in Cornwall and South Wales by consolidation: of fewer firms, fewer sites that specialised in products made to order, and those that survived to serve the war effort had to be adaptable enough to close down and restart production from year to year. This was the case with Geevor Tin Mine in 1921-22 and 1931-32 and several of the South Wales pig iron foundries which scaled down production or partly closed throughout the depression years of the 1930s. Government intervention in this decade, a form of proto-nationalisation, was prompted by the trade unions to curb the possibility of a producer’s monopoly in unstable economic times. This took the form of financial investment to soften some of the cut-throat existence of the British mining and metal industries by alleviating cash flows, placing quotas on production levels to prevent over-supply, and guaranteeing some form of living wage for workers. Although the Swansea Valley was probably home to the most diverse and densely situated heavy industries in Britain, from ceramics to steel and coal to chemicals, it was copper that had always defined the town colloquially known as Copperopolis. By contrast, the iron mining and smelting zone of South Wales occupied the heads of the valleys or Blaenau, crowned by Merthyr and its Dowlais iron and steelworks. Before the introduction of the Bessemer process of smelting in blast furnaces (by introducing a shock of hot air into the furnace) pig iron was converted to wrought iron by the centuries-old puddling process. In Swansea open-hearth steel production was favoured, developed for the first time at William Siemens’s Landore steelworks in 1869. Sutherland would not have witnessed this method of steel production at its spiritual home as the works closed down within 20 years, leaving a small foundry which operated until the 1980s. However, the open-hearth process, which was the simplest way to achieve the high melting point required for producing steel from a range of sources from pig iron to scrap metal, continued at later twentieth-century works. The introduction of Bessemer’s method gave rise to the slow move from wrought iron to steel production, and following this, the shift of the steel industry from the valleys towards the coast. Dowlais, which had been one of the biggest ironworks in the world, produced steel from 1865 until it closed in the 1930s. The artificial boost to metal production during the First World War radically changed peacetime trading patterns, particularly in pig iron – the raw material that fed the Welsh steel industry. By the early twentieth century the South Wales iron smelters, like the copper smelters several decades previously, were already reliant on foreign iron ore imports, prompting relocation to new sites near major ports. What little pig iron was still being produced tended to supply integrated steelworks.9 The modern centres of the steel industry that Sutherland knew were found at Llanelli, Swansea and Briton Ferry in the west and Port Talbot, Cardiff and Newport in the east. In 1930 Guest Keen, who had been running the works at Dowlais in its various manifestations since 1831 as well as later steel works in Cardiff, merged with Baldwins who ran the steelworks and rolling plant at Port Talbot amongst other sites in Margam and Briton Ferry. This amalgamation created the British Iron and Steel Co., also known as GKB. By 1935 Dowlais’s now aged plant was abandoned entirely and the company concentrated on starting a new modern works at East Moors, Cardiff, which had the added advantage of a deep water port. The workers who moved from Dowlais still called this the Ifor or Ivor works after Ivor Bertie Guest, one of the old company’s progenitors. All that was left at the old site was one blast furnace brought back into action in 1937 to Published, fully illustrated in: Paul Gough, Sally Moss and Tehmina Goskar, Graham Sutherland: from Darkness into Light: War Paintings and Drawings (Redcliffe Press, 2013). Tehmina Goskar tehmina@goskar.com supply pig iron to ‘Dowlais by Sea’ as East Moors was colloquially also known.10 Its sister site at Port Talbot was to become synonymous with modern British steel production. Emily Talbot of Margam, on whose land the works were originally built in 1900, was partly responsible for the establishment of a steelworks here which took advantage of its seaward position. It originally specialised in processing (re-melting) pig iron to supply open-hearth steel production, which in turn supplied the tinplate industry. Tinplate production remained in South Wales throughout its history. In 1906 Port Talbot was acquired by Baldwins of Swansea who also owned several other iron, steel and tinplate works including the Landore foundry. Across all its works Baldwins’ output by the mid1930s was astonishing, producing nearly one million tons each of pig iron and steel ingots, 2.6 million tons of tinplates, and a bewildering array of chemicals from naphthalene salts to carbolic oils all in six-figure tonnages.11 British ore production for most major metals was at an absolute minimum before the war. Foreign ore was in most cases superior in metal content and contained fewer impurities which made smelting and refining a less efficient process. Iron was no exception in spite of increasing production of steel. However, during the Second World War, iron ore production temporarily increased in Wales, almost exclusively supplying integrated steelworks or closely allied ones. The price of foreign iron ore did not rise much in itself but the associated costs of conveying wartime freight and insurance rose six-fold.12 The main problem of smelting home ores was its mineral content. Being generally low in iron metal content and high in phosphorus required more fuel and took a longer time to process. Scrap, of course, was another source of raw material feeding wartime steel production upon which a maximum price was set to offset equally high transport costs. When Sutherland walked amongst the furnaces at Port Talbot its mills were specialising in producing sheet steel. Most steelworks had altered their production lines to specialise in producing the raw materials for war such as armour and bullet-proof plate as well as engineering-grade steel. Throughout the war discussions continued, as they had done from 1935, about thoroughly modernising Port Talbot to install an American-style continuous strip mill for the manufacture of very wide sheet and plate to meet with the modern demands for the automotive and construction industries.13 At the end of the war steel firms in South Wales were subject to almost enforced rationalisation and specialisation. £60 million had already been invested in new plant during the war so the vested interest in the iron and steel industries outshone those in other metal industries. Traditionally steel businesses diversified as they grew older, producing and manufacturing a wider array of products to plug into more markets. To many the post-war amalgamations and quota systems went counter to the natural instincts of industrial businesses. GKB was one of four firms contracted to make rails, each with a quota. Before the war there had been eleven.14 Again with government encouragement, Baldwin’s amalgamated with Richard Thomas, who owned the most successful tinplate plant at Ebbw Vale in 1945, and a new plant was established at Port Talbot with a linked cold reduction mill at Llanelli.15 Steel and tinplate were therefore to remain the staple of the South Wales metal industries in the post-war years. Graham Sutherland arrived in a Cardiff steelworks in the autumn of 1942 to find a stark contrast to the humid and intense working of a deep tin mine, punctuated by the white noise of pneumatic rock drilling and the periodic lowering and raising of rock and men. Published, fully illustrated in: Paul Gough, Sally Moss and Tehmina Goskar, Graham Sutherland: from Darkness into Light: War Paintings and Drawings (Redcliffe Press, 2013). Tehmina Goskar tehmina@goskar.com Any kind of smelting and refining is very hot, very noisy and very smelly, and a 24-hour activity seven days a week. At a 1940s steelworks these factors multiplied and so did the scale. Sutherland’s particular interest in the slag ladles, gigantic bucket trains conveying on rails the molten waste away from the blast furnaces, have a quality of making the workers in the pictures seem like characters from an industrial version of Gulliver’s Travels. This slag was no longer dumped to form unnatural hills and mountains in the Welsh valleys but used in new twentieth-century industries such as cement manufacture and road building. The Cardiff works also housed open-hearth furnaces like those at Swansea and were newly installed during the war.16 However, like Port Talbot, they never produced enough steel to feed the company’s own rolling mills.17 This limitation in capacity at the outset of modernisation was to beset almost all British steel production in future decades and led to a reliance on imported steel itself. By this period Cornish iron foundries which produced goods such as street furniture were at best minor consumers of Welsh iron and steel although more work needs to be done to understand the purchasing patters of firms such as W. Visick and Sons of Devoran, Oatey and Martyn of Wadebridge and W. Sara and Sons of Redruth. The principal consumers of iron and steel in Cornwall were engineering firms such as Holman Brothers of Camborne which had started life in the late eighteenth century as founders but weathered the decline in mining activity towards the end of the nineteenth century by modernising the industry’s engines and equipment, and then adapted them to meet demand from around the world. Holmans became part of international industrial vocabularies from Canada to China, Russia to India, and Spain to Australia. The modernisation of mining industry machinery was partly prompted by problems encountered in coal production. Output of high-grade steam coal from the South Wales coalfield was at its lowest point just before the Second World War, compounded by inefficiency, a decline in the quality of the coal, and from the 1940s, an increasing preference for oil for firing engines of ships and locomotives, and electricity and compressed air to power drills and other machines. Holman Brothers made sure two such innovations were launched into the engineering stratosphere. The first was the socalled Cornish rock drill, an automatic percussive drill originally developed in the USA for quickly penetrating mountain sides and hills for railroads and canals in the 1850s.18 Machine drilling had by the 1880s been adopted by metal mines from Roskear to Rio Tinto. Although there were competing manufacturers of rock drills at this time Holmans became twentieth-century machine makers par excellence. The second innovation, which emerged in the 1880s, was the compressed-air engine, a replacement for the gigantic steam-powered beam pumps and winders. In 1887 Holmans erected a massive air compressor for the prolific Dolcoath Mine in the Camborne district. This was soon followed by a similar one installed at East Pool Mine to power its whim – the winding beam engine responsible for raising ore from the shafts and lowering men into them – also known as Michell’s Whim which can be seen ‘working’ today.19 Further gigantic compressor engines followed, including one at Levant Mine in 1901 which was installed in an engine house just as magnificent as those built for the old steam pumping engines, complete with a decorated 100-foot chimney and Gothic cupola made from concrete. Graham Sutherland would have appreciated James Holman’s wisdom that, ‘a good compressor was like a good picture it needed a good frame…’20 Sutherland, being an admirer of machines from his apprentice days on the Midland Railway, would have surely been deeply fascinated by the Holmans’ cathedral-like No. 1 Published, fully illustrated in: Paul Gough, Sally Moss and Tehmina Goskar, Graham Sutherland: from Darkness into Light: War Paintings and Drawings (Redcliffe Press, 2013). Tehmina Goskar tehmina@goskar.com and No. 3 works in Camborne, and would certainly have found one of the earliest examples of industrial preservation a striking subject when the last beam whim installed in Cornwall at Michell’s shaft in East Pool was saved from the wartime scrapyard in 1941. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Holmans began experimenting with a compressed-air propelled gun. By the autumn of 1939 the ‘Holman Projector’ was born and became a successful, if crude, anti-aircraft weapon, capable of firing anything from Mills bombs to Molotov Cocktails.21 The projectors were fitted to patrol boats and ships across the British coast with navy and merchant crews travelling to firing ranges on the north Cornish coast, and indeed in Cardiff, to be instructed in their use. From 1942 Holmans were also commissioned to manufacture vital parts for tanks, aircraft landing gear and other guns. Unlike so many other British producers and manufacturers of metal and metal goods, the success of Holmans’ work and products during the war, and their precocious involvement in the export markets before it, meant they adapted quickly to peacetime conditions, focusing now on providing iron and steel components, machines and parts for the post-war boom in housing and civil engineering. Tin: The survivor c.1930-1998 Sutherland’s reportage of Cornish mines documented both a requiem and a renaissance in mining. Cornish tin had suffered, as copper had several decades before, from failing ore reserves and overwhelming competition from better quality foreign imports, first from Australia in the 1870s, then from Malaya (part of the British Empire) and finally Bolivia from 1895 to 1914. In fact tin mining in Cornwall has always been a gambler’s game. Apart from the geological possibility of finding deep tin lodes underneath worked out copper ones, there were few certainties. Over the longue durée tin mining in the Duchy was only a fraction as profitable as copper mining, and, more often than nostalgia suggests, it was catastrophically unprofitable. There was a brief revival in the price of tin in the early 1920s which stimulated new speculation and wild forays. Several small enterprises came and went without reaching anything approaching commercial viability. Only very few Cornish mines could adapt quickly enough to the constant fluctuations in world markets. The end of a mine meant the great water pumping apparatus once powered by Welsh coal and iron was turned off and the underground earthscape of shafts and tunnels, which Sutherland found both challenging and alluring, were silenced by a flood. The closures of Dolcoath and Levant mines in 1930 marked a watershed between the old guard and the more efficient, and luckier, survivors. It was a bitter blow to the global esteem enjoyed by Cornish mining for the previous two centuries. So in the midst of the beginning of the Great Depression two Cornish mines remained commercially operational, at Geevor and East Pool, attempting with varying degrees of success to adapt to their brave new world. South Crofty re-joined these in 1931 when operations recommenced after a hiatus. All three focused on tin, arsenic and other sought-after minerals such as wolfram (tungsten ore).22 To place the precarious business of Cornish tin mining in context, by 1860 Cornwall, Malaysia and Indonesia produced about one-third each of the world’s black tin—the concentrated form of cassiterite (a tin bearing mineral) after separation and dressing, i.e.crushed and ground ready for smelting and refining. By 1930 Cornwall was the world’s smallest major producer at 1.5% with Malaysia dominating, followed closely by Indonesia and Bolivia. Published, fully illustrated in: Paul Gough, Sally Moss and Tehmina Goskar, Graham Sutherland: from Darkness into Light: War Paintings and Drawings (Redcliffe Press, 2013). Tehmina Goskar tehmina@goskar.com Unlike copper ore which was sent to South Wales for smelting, Cornish tin was produced at home – smelting and refining tin is a far less complex process than that of copper requiring less fuel and fewer stages. Tin smelting was what brought wealth to Cornwall, or more precisely, to the small number of tin magnates who monopolised the activity. Tin smelting also underwrote Cornish and not a little bit of international banking and finance. The name Bolitho, for example, is both synonymous with smelting and banking and continued to be long after tin smelting had ceased. Only a few years after copper smelting had ended in South Wales, tin smelting was also to end in Cornwall. Following the merger of all remaining firms into the Cornish Tin Smelting Co. Ltd. in December 1929, it was acquired as a whole by an international conglomerate which almost immediately took the decision to stop smelting in Cornwall and concentrate on this activity in the north of England near Liverpool and Yorkshire, and in the Far East. On 10 August 1931 the furnacemen tapped out the last molten tin at the Seleggan smelter near Carn Brea, and the fires were put out, ending centuries of continuous commercial smelting of this most Cornish of metals.23 By end of the 1930s, of three major Cornish mines of note, Geevor was a modern enterprise both in business and operational terms, adopting modern machinery and methods, many of which can still be viewed by visitors today. East Pool and Agar Mine was the least profitable, beset by inefficiency, lack of investment, poor yields and failed expansion. It only employed half the number at both Geevor and South Crofty at 225 employees.24 South Crofty was the richest of these but not without its problems. In 1939 a major strike, descending into riots, threatened to end South Crofty there and then. The Transport and General Workers’ Union, representing just 234 of its 435 employees, had called a strike over pay in the summer.25 The employers never recognised the union. Pickets were nevertheless set up at the entrance to the mine and in Pool village. Tensions between unionmen and non-unionmen broke out into violence, against each other and the police. Cornish export ports were warned by the union not to accept ‘black leg’ cargo, as was the receiving port of Liverpool. Determined to get the black tin out for smelting or face ruin South Crofty arranged to have it shipped to a Dutch smelter via the derelict harbour at Gweek on the Helford River. Only the outbreak of war in September ended the feud and focused minds. War meant imports and re-exports of tin virtually ceased. Like iron and steel the artificial demand created in wartime provided a pause in the mania to continue mining at all costs—for what else was there? East Pool in particular was in receipt of government subsidy before the war, backed on the hope of rising tin and wolfram prices. As a safety policy, this turned into direct government aid in wartime, particularly after the loss of British Malaya to Japanese forces in 1941, at which point there were serious concerns about future sources of the white metal. Before this point the main recipient of Cornish tin was the USA for the government’s stockpile, which was to feed the governmentowned smelter in Texas City. At the beginning of the war demand increased because aluminium was reserved for military use particularly for aircraft construction so tin and its alloys were being substituted for everything from foil to milk bottle tops. In fact 1200 tons of tin were consumed per year just in bottle caps.26 A day after the Pearl Harbour attack in December 1941 the UK Ministry of Supply published the Control of Tin (No. 3) Order which decreed that all persons holding tin in the UK had to place it at the disposal of the Minister. The order also initiated a fierce programme of tin conservation. Tinplate was prohibited in the use of advertising Published, fully illustrated in: Paul Gough, Sally Moss and Tehmina Goskar, Graham Sutherland: from Darkness into Light: War Paintings and Drawings (Redcliffe Press, 2013). Tehmina Goskar tehmina@goskar.com novelties, ornaments, toys, musical instruments, kitchen utensils and certain sizes of container. Solders of tin-lead alloys were ordered to have their tin content reduced, even to the detriment of properly functioning electronics. The normal tin content of ball bearings, which were extensively used in all sorts of vital factory machinery, was halved, regardless of the risk of failure. With such limitations primarily affecting the more significant industry of tinplate production, perhaps the most important consequence was the adoption of the electrolytic process to tin steel plates. This allowed for a much thinner coating of tin to be used without the loss of performance.27 But tin conservation alone was not enough and so national (government) attention was again focused on the remaining Cornish mines. Geevor Tin Mine, where Sutherland spent much of his time in Cornwall, experienced a new lease of life during the Second World War. Each year saw a series of improvements in the on-site treatment of the lower grade ores that the mine was producing. A new slimes plant in November 1939 allowed for particle level recovery of tin metal from the pulverised ore. In March 1940, an electric locomotive was installed on the twelfth level of the mine to haul six to seven truck trains with five tons of ore. The following year a concentrates regrinding unit and new floatation cells were brought in to improve further the output of black tin. By March 1942 Geevor had been scheduled under the Essential Work Order guaranteeing purchase of all output by the Ministry of Supply.28 However, the main problem limiting the full potential of the three major tin mines in the 1940s, and indeed afterwards, was a shortage of skilled labour. Part of the problem was the long-term emigration of skilled miners and engineers away from Cornwall, and part was the severe contraction of mine output in the inter-war years. In the manager’s report of 1941 the decrease in black tin output was directly linked with the shortage of skilled labour. The Ministry of Supply permitted the firm to assign ‘optant’ status to its workers in a bid to keep them at the mine rather than get conscripted into military service. By 1943, as the mine had come under the auspices of the government’s Non-Ferrous Minerals Development Control, 70 new unskilled workers were taken on, including women. But the shortage remained, and in the same year both Geevor and South Crofty applied for the co-option of Italian prisoners of war to supplement the labour force.29 Even at ailing East Pool 24 POWs were employed. The workforce problem persisted into the post-war years and Geevor and South Crofty kept on the exiled Polish miners who had been taken on earlier. Geevor and South Crofty remained profitable after the war largely because they had each embraced some form of modernisation. But time was up at East Pool and Agar Mine. Only the temporary loss of tin sources from British Malaya which caused rising prices, and ongoing government funding of otherwise uneconomic operations, postponed a permanent end to the mine earlier in the 1940s. In spite of desperate attempts at raising funds for further exploration no more government assistance was forthcoming and the mine company went into receivership in 1947, ending 138 years of almost continuous production.30 In 1948 the Cornish Mining Development Association was formed to oversee a permanent revival in mining, led by the final stand partnership of Geevor and South Crofty.31 Throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, under an air of exuberant optimism, a number of prospectors undertook expensive diamond drilling exercises across Cornwall and even Dartmoor to find out if older workings could be economically re-exploited with modern methods. The price of tin was kept high under the International Tin Agreement which propped up all Cornish and Malaysian tin production after 1956. The International Tin Council was set up to buy up surplus tin to keep prices Published, fully illustrated in: Paul Gough, Sally Moss and Tehmina Goskar, Graham Sutherland: from Darkness into Light: War Paintings and Drawings (Redcliffe Press, 2013). Tehmina Goskar tehmina@goskar.com and the supply chain steady. This had implications for non-mining operations too. While Geevor and South Crofty were still profiting from underground operations Wheal Jane, near Chacewater, which had been worked on and off since the mid-eighteenth century, started to develop methods to recover tin from old mine spoil during the war. Owing to the relatively comfortable environment created by the International Tin Agreement Wheal Jane was to revert to full mining operations in 1969, with full ore processing facilities on-site. By this time the mine was run by Rio Tinto Zinc. The International Tin Agreement expired in 1985 which led to a swift terminal decline in commercially-viable Cornish mining. Tin plating, which ensured global demand for this resilient metal, that had for nearly three centuries worked so beautifully in partnership with iron and steel to clad, contain and construct, was slowly replaced with synthetic polymers and cheaper, more plentiful aluminium. Geevor and Wheal Jane went in quick succession in 1991. South Crofty held out until March 1998. But these names live on today for other reasons. Each embarked on starkly contrasting after-lives, in themselves a fascinating comparison of post-industrial possibilities. Fragile landscapes of deindustrialisation Industrial sites and landscapes in South Wales and Cornwall share not dissimilar experiences in the early twenty-first century world. A combination of heritage, further consolidation and responding to the new needs of the metal industries have ensured their retention in our cultural memories. Following decades of dereliction and reclamation, the heritage of copper in Swansea is now being used to inspire the regeneration of the Lower Swansea Valley, ironically creating a partnership between Swansea University – founded on the wealth of the Cornish Vivians in the 1920s – and Swansea Council, who became the final owners of their ruined copperworks at Hafod and neighbouring Morfa founded in 1831 by the Williamses of Scorrier.32 Port Talbot remains a beacon, albeit fading, of a modern British steelworks, now owned by Indian industrial magnates the Tatas. But the vagaries of an interdependent industry such as steel and tinplate still affect production and profits today. In 2011 Tata had to cease production at their tinplate works in Llanelli because poor harvests that year meant much less food for canning.33 Both Geevor and East Pool mines and the Cornish hard rock mining landscape are now internationally recognised as UNESCO World Heritage sites and are self-styled industrial heritage attractions. In contrast the Wheal Jane Group has embraced environmental and science-led regeneration to give a future to the old mine site. It now hosts, among others, expert laboratories commissioned to analyse materials, minerals and ores from around the world. South Crofty still keeps a hand in mining, and the future prospect of mining. After closure the site and its workings were taken over by Western United Mines, part of a complicated group of subsidiaries and investors. In 2013 UNESCO clashed head on with South Crofty, which is now situated in the World Heritage Site, at the prospect of the company’s announcement that mining would recommence. The situation remains unresolved but in a bizarre twist, at the withdrawal of funds from a major investor, Western United Mines went into administration on 26 June. ‘Twas ever thus. Published, fully illustrated in: Paul Gough, Sally Moss and Tehmina Goskar, Graham Sutherland: from Darkness into Light: War Paintings and Drawings (Redcliffe Press, 2013). Tehmina Goskar tehmina@goskar.com 1 Vivian, J. H. (1823). ‘An account of the process of smelting copper as conducted at the Hafod Copper Works, near Swansea’, Annals of Philosophy, vol. 5, p.113 (113-124). 2 Hughes, Stephen, (2000). Copperopolis. Landscapes of the Early Industrial Period in Swansea, revised 2008 (Aberystwyth: Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales), pp.170-71. 3 Miskell, Louise (2002). ‘Separate spheres? Rethinking the history of the metalliferous industries in South Wales’, Welsh History Review, vol. 21, p.257 (249-270). 4 Ibid., p.263. 5 Davies, John Henry (1967), History of Pontardawe and District (Llandybie: C. Davies). 6 Miskell, Louise, ed. (2010). The Origins of an Industrial Region. Robert Morris and the First Swansea Copper Works, c.1727-1730 (Newport: South Wales Record Society), p.85. 7 Barton, D. B. (1968). A History of Copper Mining in Cornwall and Devon (Truro, D. Bradford Barton), p.92. 8 Corin, John. (1992). Levant. A Champion Cornish Mine (Camborne: The Trevithick Society), p.54. 9 I am grateful to Robert Protheroe-Jones, Curator of Heavy Industry, National Waterfront Museum, Swansea (Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum Wales) for the overview of the state of Welsh iron and steel in the inter-war years. 10 Carradice, Phil, (2013). ‘East Moors Steelworks, Cardiff’, BBC Wales. Accessed online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/wales/posts/East-Moors-Steelworks-Cardiff (29 July 2013). 11 ‘Baldwins. A powerful and self-contained iron and steel group’, an abridgement reproduced from: British Commerce and Industry 1934. The Post-War Transition 1919-1934, vol. 1 (London: Russell Square Press, 1934). Accessed online: http://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Baldwins:_1934_Review (15 July 2013). 12 Burn, Duncan, (1961). The Steel Industry, 1939-1959: A Study in Competition and Planning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p.23. 13 Ibid., pp.80-81. 14 Ibid., pp.175-76. 15 Ibid., pp.81-82. 16 Ibid., p.14. 17 Ibid., p.184. 18 Carter, Clive and Peter Joseph, (2012). From Holman Brothers to CompAir. The Story of Camborne’s Engineering History, Second edition. (Camborne: The Trevithick Society), pp. 23-41. 19 Ibid.,pp.43-73. 20 Ibid., p.61. 21 Ibid., p.134-49. 22 Barton, D. B. (1967). A History of Tin Mining and Smelting in Cornwall (Truro, D. Bradford Barton), pp.26379. 23 Ibid., p. 278. ‘Recreational’ tin smelting has been taking place in Cornwall since then, mainly from alluvial tin or the remaining supplies of tin ingots after South Crofty’s closure in 1998. 24 Ibid., p.282. 25 Ibid., p.281. 26 Hedges, E.S., (1964). Tin in Social and Economic History (London: Edward Arnold), p.46. 27 Ibid., pp.47-48. 28 Noall, Cyril, (1983). Geevor (Pendeen: Geevor Tin Mines), pp.105-6. 29 Ibid., p.107. 30 Barton, History of Tin Mining, p.283. 31 Ibid., p.285. 32 ‘A World of Welsh Copper’. Accessed online: http://www.welshcopper.org.uk (16 July 2013). 33 Bawden, Tom, (2011). ‘Tata idles tinplate works as canning demand declines’, The Independent, 14 September 2011. Accessed online: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/tata-idlestinplate-works-as-canning-demand-declines-2354283.html (16 July 2013). Published, fully illustrated in: Paul Gough, Sally Moss and Tehmina Goskar, Graham Sutherland: from Darkness into Light: War Paintings and Drawings (Redcliffe Press, 2013).