Portrait of Mary Tavy’s Wheal Friendship Mine: Part 1 – Rachel Evans, 1846

This blog, in two parts, uses the journals of two ‘outsiders’ visits to Wheal Friendship to develop a portrait of this globally important mine, using their observations to glimpse the mine landscape and the people who worked it. Both accounts barely feature in research published about the mine, yet both have valuable insights and different perspectives to offer. They complement the dominant geological, engineering and financial accounts of the mine, providing instead, social and cultural and landscape reportage.

The first of the two Wheal Friendship ‘portraits’ I want to share is by local walker and writer Rachel Evans in her book ‘Home Scenes’, published in 1846. Despite a chapter of her book being allotted to Wheal Friendship, she is not included amongst the 38 authors cited on the Historic Environment Record for the mine.

The second narrative, which I will discuss in Part 2, was published in a French magazine called ‘Le Tour du Monde’ in 1865, based on the account of Louis Simonin and colleagues who visited in 1862. Like Evans, Simonin’s article is not well-known. This is understandable. The article is in French, in a French journal, in an article titled as being about Cornish mines, and which, until relatively recently, would only have only been available in hard copy. Thanks to digital accessibility, it is now possible to discover and translate the remarkable account. What is particularly special about this French ‘portrait’ is that it includes a number of detailed images of the mine, providing an invaluable early visual impression of its works.

Background

Before we get to the ‘portraits’ by Evans and Simonin (in Part 2), let’s first establish a bit of background about the mine, and the context in which the visits took place. To do this I am going to use the most detailed source for the mine – Mike Brown’s excellent and lively ‘The Rise and Demise of a Dartmoor Mine – The Wheal Friendship Minute Books & Ledgers 1816-1875’, published in 1995.

Wheal Friendship and Wheal Betsy – for they were both part of the same mine initially – was an early 19^th century success story. This was thanks to the involvement of the engineer John Taylor, who took over the operation in 1796, transforming its fortunes. This was in no small part to his engineering nouse in relation to the use of water power, setting up a myriad of leats, and constructing the Tavistock canal to ultimately reduce the mine’s transport costs. After initial success, fluctuations in copper prices, the ability to tap into new profitable copper lodes, and an episode of financial mismanagement meant that, up to the 1850s, Wheal Friendship experienced ups and down.

Profits were not great in the 1840s and 1850s as a search for more ‘congenial’ deposits yielded only poor-quality ore. Explorations were made by pushing north and westwards from Taylor’s sett, and driving down to ever greater depths, with Taylor’s Shaft reaching 210 fathoms by the 1850s; that is a whopping quarter of a mile, or 388 metres below the surface. In 1851, the mine needed to negotiate a renewal of a lease for ground owned by the Buller family towards the south side of the works. As part of the negotiations, the limits of the mining sett were re-defined, extending operations on this ground. By 1853, new trials were underway, aided by decent copper prices.

Unfortunately, no account books survive for the period 1854 to 1863, but when they start up again, for financial year 1864-65, it is clear that the fortunes of the mine had briefly turned a corner, and the mine was once again flourishing.

The success was due to the opening of a new shaft and lodes, called Bennett’s Shaft and Bennett’s Lode, in the Buller sett, and recorded in the AGM (p30)

 ‘… the valuable nature of these discoveries, which had opened up to us a new field of operations … capable of renewing the importance and prosperity of this celebrated mine.’

Wheal Friendship AGM, quoted in Brown, 1995

As is the want with mines, notorious for the turbulence of their riches, profits once again pivoted downwards from the mid 1860’s. In 1874 the company was liquidated, ushering in a final phase under new ownership as an arsenic mine.

Both visitors – Evans and Simonin – appear to have visited when the mine was flourishing. Evans visited in the early 1840s, before a couple of decades of stagnation, whilst the French trio sought out the mine in the 1860s when things were on the up, with a period of underground expansion, investment in new machinery and equipment, and sizeable profits. Both would therefore have seen Wheal Friendship at its booming and bustling best, when the owners and the workers would have good reason to celebrate and show off their mineral operations.

Rachel Evans’s Visit c. 1843

Rachel was a Tavistock school teacher who liked to walk and write about her ambulations, compiling these in her book ‘Home Scenes’, published in 1846 (Hudswell, 2024 – John Hudswell is currently writing a book about Rachel). Her account of Wheal Friendship is unusual, in that it describes a time when 270 visitors descended on the mine; people who she said loved to look upon ‘the great and learned of the earth‘. She doesn’t provide a date for this mass gathering of mining geologists, but I suspect it was in 1843, as it was in this year that several works mentioning the mine were published (see HER, undated).

Rachel’s first description of Wheal Friendship is on foot, when it comes into view, as she walked over the hill from Tavistock to Mary Tavy’s Lane Head. Her initial emotions to the wasted landscape and inferior homes of its workers, seems one of repulsion:

‘Can any scene be more desolate than the one now presented? The frowning and arid waste of Blackdown is broken by immense heaps of refuse thrown up from the depths below. A few bare unsheltered cots of the miners only serve to exhibit still more plainly the dreary aspect of the spot.‘

In other respects, her tone is more admiring, tinged with awe, at the impressive engines and machines powering the mine:

‘The mighty steam engine with its steel works as bright as any drawing-room grate, is for ever raising and depressing its heavy arms, one bearing a ponderous weight of stones, the other drawing from below the superfluous water, which would otherwise fill up the recesses of the mine.‘

Her conflicting sentiments of horror and fascination combine when contemplating the landscape from the road above Wheal Betsy (only separated from Wheal Friendship in 1837) where, with an industrial gothic timbre:

‘… curiosity was excited by a grand chimney crowning an eminence of Blackdown, which is carried up from the smelting-house below, in order to convey away the mephitic vapours, which it is expedient to have driven windward. It is curious in crossing the moor at night to look down upon the long wreaths of smoke and flame, which pour along the sides of the valley from these works.‘

No mine description is complete without one of its nationally record-breaking assets being shown-off. Evans plays this boasting role, vicariously, yet poetically. Significantly, describing the giant wheel as being housed in a shed, she says all the visitors were marched to:

‘… the largest water-wheel in the kingdom, which is 150 feet in circumference, 50 feet in diameter, and 11 feet across the hoop, turns the works, and assists in drawing the ore from the mine. A shed protects the wheel from the storms of winter, or other injury within its gloomy shades I have stood with awe and delight, watching the solemn progress of the gigantic machine, and admiring the small rainbows formed by streams of sunshine gilding the falling water which in its rapid course throws a perpetual shower around.’

Most of Rachel’s attention goes, not to the mine, but to observing the middle-class ‘earth’ enthusiasts she is visiting with. Rachel, obviously not part of the mining community, also positions herself in her writing as separate from her companions, describing them as the visiting ‘literati’. She is set apart, watching amusedly, noticing their faltering and awkward responses to the unfamiliar and challenging conditions of Friendship.

In one incident she describes a ‘fastidious beau‘, clearly incongruous and ill-suited to the conditions, who was hesitating because he didn’t know how best to descend into the mine by a slippery ladder whilst holding his candle.

‘”Us carries un’ tween our teeth, or sticks un in our hair”, observed a wag amongst the Cornishmen hard by. “Then I must decline any such proceeding”, said the horrified gentleman, as he stalked with disgust away’

Rachel clearly delights in the humour of the blunt, mocking Cornish miner (for there were a great many Cornishmen working in the Devon mines), at the expense of the unseasoned coxcomb. She appears to have taken much entertainment from the day because next she is chortling when a group of the ‘tourists’ emerged from their adventure inside the mine.

‘what laughter resounded through the vale, as they came sheepishly forward, one by one, with dingy faces, and strange attire, scarcely daring to appear before the criticising eyes of the ladies, and the merry jeers of their comrades.’

One of the gentlemen was so perturbed by his filthy appearance that he washed his hands and face in a neighbouring stream, before approaching the spectators. ‘Unlucky trial!‘ Rachel exclaims, with a clear smile on her face, for the hapless man had cleansed himself in waters of the ‘yellowest hue‘, adulterated by passing over the mine mundic, and now the unfortunate creature had an appearance ‘ten times worse than it was before‘.

Remarks

Rachel, who is not a mine expert, brings an uncritical eye to the mine, its works and workers. Although she distances herself from them, she pokes fun at her fellow middle-class companion visitors, perhaps this criticism flowing because she understands them; she knows these types of men. Problematically, the mine workers, in her chapter, are all but invisible. What we do gain is a clear sense of the negatively affective qualities of the mine landscape and its machinery as experienced by Rachel – desolate, frowning, arid, waste, broken, heaps, refuse, dreary, depressing, heavy, ponderous, mephitic, gloomy. She is touched by another reaction though, that of awe, as expressed through words such as mighty, bright, curious, and delight; ultimately leading to inspiration, and her finding of beauty in elements of its workings.

In Part 2 we will look at a different account to that given by Evans. Rachel Evans was a local. But, as a middle-class woman and not a geology or mining expert, she was an interloper. In Louis Simonin’s journal we will see a man who, as a mining engineer, understood the mine operation, and yet, as a foreigner, he was also able to offer an external outsider’s perspective.

References

Brown, M. 1995. The Rise and Demise of a Dartmoor Mine – The Wheal Friendship Minute Books & Ledgers 1816-1875. Transcripts & Guides for Dartmoor Researchers, Volume 9. Dartmoor Press.

Evans, R. 1846. Home Scenes or Tavistock and its Vicinity. Simpkins and Marshall, London and J.L. Commins, Tavistock.

HER, Undated. Wheal Friendship Mine, Mary Tavy. MDV4185. www.heritagegateway.org.uk/

Hudswell, J. 2024. ‘Rachel Evans of Tavistock (1812 – 1883): Poet, Author and Teacher’. Tavistock History Society, 10th Sept 2024.

Sargent, F.G. 1992. Tavy St. Mary parish: a kaleidoscopic history and guide.

Simonin, L. 1865. A Trip to the Cornish Mines. La Tour du Monde, first semester, pp 353-400.

Simonin, L. 1869. Undergound Life; or Mines and Miners. Translated, Adapeted to the Present State of British Mining and Edited by H.W. Bristow, F.R.S. Chapman and Hall, London.