Edwardian Farm (2010) s01e05 Episode Script
Episode 5
1 Here in Devon, in the tranquil Tamar Valley, is a port that once bustled with industry.
Now Morwellham Quay has been brought back to life as it would have been during the reign of King Edward VII.
Hooray! Yee-hee! (Rings bell) Archaeologists Alex Langlands and Peter Ginn, and historian Ruth Goodman, are living the lives of Edwardian farmers for a full calendar year.
So far they've started their arable concern by making lime fertiliser and attempted to plough using the latest Edwardian technology.
I think you could do with a push.
They've taken in livestock and ventured into market gardening and fishing.
Now it's January, and the team turn their hands to industries that once brought wealth to Devon - mining Well, I think we've learned one thing.
- Never grumble about farming again! - Yeah! and lace making.
I'm watching you.
Cos you won't earn your money if you're - I'm never gonna earn any money! not practising.
But will they be able to master them - Let's go.
- Yeah, let it go.
and win the race against time to get their crops sown? Wassail! Drink hail! You've just scared away evil from it.
Fixed.
Hurrah! Steady.
Good boy.
In Devon it's been the harshest of winters.
That's it, steady.
It is bitter.
Absolutely bitter.
This is ice rain that's coming down at the moment.
There's a big group of very, very, very hungry cows up there, desperate for us to dump this hay on the ground so they can get stuck in.
In winter, farmers need to feed their animals twice a day to ensure they survive until spring.
ALEX: This weather's foul.
Whilst it's good for killing off pests and vermin, it can be the ruin of a farmer.
Because ice on the ground means nothing will grow, so no food.
And these fellas would get mighty hungry if that was the case.
Right, that's it.
Walk.
Walk.
Their big project for the year is to grow a cereal crop.
For the last couple of months it's been on hold, delayed by the cold weather.
But if they don't get it in the ground soon, they'll have nothing to harvest next August.
The ground is still absolutely frozen solid.
It is as hard as rock.
And that means that ploughing is gonna have to be put off.
You know, this is the most stressful part of the year.
Let's hope this is the worst of the winter and that by Candlemass, which is in early February, it's all over.
Candlemass, the second of February, was seen as a watershed by the Edwardian farmer.
There are lots of great little rhymes about the weather at Candlemass time.
One goes, "If Candlemass be bright and fair, the half of winter's to come and mare.
" "Mare" meaning more.
Doesn't actually rhyme.
But what it's saying there is that if it's bright and clear on February, you're only half way through the winter and you've got the second half to come.
So if it rains on Candlemass, winter's over and the weather will improve.
If not, winter will have another bite.
It's just weather lore, but there is a bit of truth to it, you know.
I'm just starting to get a little bit worried about this now.
It's three weeks until Candlemass.
All Alex can do is hope this will mark a change in the weather so he can get a crop in the ground.
The farm was built in the 19th century to feed the people of Morwellham Quay, once a booming port and village.
Its wealth came from deep underground.
In 1844, the largest copper reserves in Europe were discovered here.
Thousands of tons of copper ore were mined then transported down the quay on this raised railway.
It turned sleepy Morwellham Quay into the busiest inland port in England.
Here in Morwellham, farmers often supplemented their income by working as miners.
Alex and Peter are heading down to the mines, along the old railway, with experts Rick Stewart and Phil Hurley.
- One candle.
Issued.
- One candle.
- And one lump of clay.
- And a lump of local clay.
- Right, so we slap that on there.
- Yep.
And this is what they would have used when this mine was in its boom years? Yeah, I mean candles are used from Roman times, right up to, sort of, 20th century.
- Right.
- It was a good, cheap form of light.
So aren't you chaps gonna get kitted up with some lamps? Candlelight? We're going for sort of the state-of-the-art Edwardian technology.
- Right.
- What we've got is a carbide lamp.
And these started appearing round about 1901, 1902.
- So these are bang-on the Edwardian period.
- This is cutting-edge Edwardian technology.
What you've got, open the thing up Got two chambers.
Can I hand you that, please, Phil? This bottom chamber contains the calcium carbide.
- Right.
- So I'm just gonna fill that up.
Can you hold that for a moment? Thank you.
Is calcium carbide anything like limestone? Yeah, basically, it's a by-product of some of the limestone industry.
That should do it.
And we will put the top compartment on.
So this top compartment's the water compartment.
- And we open this little needle valve up.
- Right.
That causes water to drip from the top chamber down onto the carbide in the bottom chamber.
- Which gives off acetylene gas.
- Right.
The gas comes out of this little jet and we get a flame, which is nicely reflected there.
And I suppose the great thing about this lamp is there's nothing to smash on there.
Exactly.
These things are bombproof, they really are, wonderful piece of technology.
Rick's taking them to explore the George And Charlotte Mine, just 100 yards from their cottage.
These mines produced nearly a million tons of copper a year, all dug by hand.
Miners would spend eight hours a day, six days a week, underground, working in these dark, airless conditions.
Risk of death was ever present.
Falling down a mine shaft was often fatal.
Right, this is what metal mining is all about.
You're probably familiar with coal mines, with horizontal seams of coal.
- Forget that.
This is vertical mining.
- Right.
So you've got a vertical ore body coming down through here.
That's the lode.
That's what the miners were after.
You can see how they've extracted it, installing timbers here, to stop this wall here, which is known as the hanging wall, joining this wall here, which is known as the foot wall.
As the miners dug ever deeper, there was another problem to overcome - flooding.
Wow! This is a pretty big waterwheel.
Yes, about 18-foot diameter.
Which, as these things go, is a small one.
- I mean - But what is it doing? Driving pumps.
We've got four more levels below us.
They're below river level, which is why we need to pump them.
- So it's pumping water? - Pumping water.
Yeah.
- So it's bringing water from outside in - Outside the mine.
to power the wheel, to pump the water out.
- Inside out! - Yeah.
But pumping water from the mines was costly.
So extracting the copper ore got more and more expensive.
This mine closed in 1869.
In the 1860s, a lot of foreign imports came in from North America and South Australia.
A lot of the more marginal mines, like this one, closed, this couldn't compete.
And those very, very small margins they were making just disappeared.
Large-scale, more efficient mines in North America and South Australia spelt the end for the copper mines of Devon and Cornwall.
But there were ways farmers here could still make money from the mines.
Oh! Wooh! Here we are.
Rick and Phil are keen to try out a long-lost process.
Is this water just coming straight out of the mine? Yeah, and this is flowing down through a lot of the old working areas of the mine.
Should have soaked lots of copper up from the surrounding rocks.
We want to try and get the copper out of the water so that it's something that we can make money from.
The Edwardians had an ingeniously simple way of extracting this copper.
The first job is to install a precipitation tank to capture water from the mine.
- So there we are.
- Poor Phil! Poor Phil! Phil is currently waist deep in muddied water, trying to organise a water flow.
- Here it comes.
- Oh! Oh-oh! I can see it! We have water.
RUTH: Hooray! Dribbly, dribbly, dribbly! Phil places rusty pieces of iron in the tank.
Now, Phil, I'm no scientist, so talk me through the very basic chemical reaction that's taking place here.
Because there's copper in the water, that's coming out of the mine.
That copper is going to change places with the iron oxide, the rust, that's on the surface of the metal.
So we're gonna end up with this metal coated with copper, and the rust is gonna come out into the water, simple as that, yeah.
Doesn't stick on very tight.
- It can just be scraped off.
- Wow.
- Let's fill this up.
- Have some more rust.
So was there much of this going on? Yeah, it's a fairly common process, I mean You know, you had small groups of guys doing just this sort of thing.
If there was copper there to be had, they would have it.
It's one of those things we've always thought of trying but never got round to.
So this is as much an experiment for us as it is for you.
It really is very sort of low-key, low-tech, metal recovery.
Now they must leave it for a few weeks to let nature take its course.
It's February the 2nd - Candlemass.
It's raining.
So according to the old rhyme, the worst of winter should be well and truly over.
And getting the animals through the harsh winter has had its upside.
I think because we're handling these guys twice a day, we're starting to build a real bond with them.
We're starting to know each other, trust each other, and hopefully when they go out and be adults in the field, they'll follow the bucket.
We won't have to chase them around everywhere.
They are so sweet.
Lovely creatures.
Soon it'll be spring and the farm will be teeming with new life.
Alex has invited Professor Ronald Hutton, an expert in folklore, to ensure a bountiful harvest in their cider orchard.
- Glad to be back.
- Great to see you again.
Ruth's daughter Eve has joined them for the ceremony.
Hiya! - A problem with your tree here? - Yeah.
Back in September, October time, we wandered down here, we had a single apple, and I think it was on this tree here, one single apple.
So we've got some real problems with our orchard.
OK.
This tree here is your team leader.
You encourage it, it gets the rest working.
- If we fix him, we fix the lot? - Yeah.
- How would you do that traditionally? - You've got to wassail it.
Now wassailing means singing, to your trees, or your animals, whatever you raise on your farm, to encourage it to do better in the next year.
Wassailing an apple tree is the real wassailing, the basic wassailing.
- First thing you do is you need a bowl.
- Oh, hang on, I've got one here.
Which makes it easier for us all to drink.
It's a sugar bowl but I didn't think that would matter.
- It doesn't.
- Jolly good.
Very cold, clear cider, isn't it? - OK, first thing to do is get some bread.
- Yeah.
Halve it.
Dip it in here to give your cider body.
And we put it in the apple tree.
And this will make the tree feel good, and will make the birds slightly drunk, in which case they'll sing all the more uproariously and make the trees feel good.
- And now let's get down to it.
- Step one out the way.
Good apple tree, we wassail thee, that thou mayest bud and that thou mayest blow and that thou mayest bare apples and oh! Hats full, caps full, three bushel barrels full! Hurrah! Hurrah! You just scared away evil from it.
Fixed.
And I'll thank you traditionally for being in company like this.
So you've made a wassail too, and I'll gladly sing to you, fortune bless you and bring you a jolly new year.
Fortune bring you a jolly new year.
- Cheers! - Bravo.
- Bravo.
- Wassail! ALL: Drink hail! - Wassail! - Drink hail! Two months ago, freezing conditions put paid to the ploughing.
Now the frosts are over, Alex and farmhand Megan Elliot can get the field ready to be sown with a crop.
Come on, boys.
Dig a furrow, Tom.
Ploughing returns the field to bare earth, and also mixes Alex and Peter's lime fertiliser into the soil.
It's good, actually, to be getting this lime ploughed in.
You know, that was such a back-breaker in itself.
It's great to actually see the damn stuff buried, to be honest.
Alex is using the Shires, Tom and Prince, to pull the plough.
Come on, Princey.
It's a complete joy to be out here.
The horses have really taken to this.
You know, this is a pair of horses that has never ploughed before, and look at them going.
Despite the invention of the tractor, there were more working horses in Edwardian Britain than at any time in history.
Come on, boys.
The Edwardian period is without doubt the dawn of the modern age.
It's the dawn of the motorcar, the aeroplane.
And for me it's just amazing that, despite all these innovations, farmers were still overwhelmingly using horses to plough, because still, in that age, they were the best for the job.
But Alex's joy is shortlived.
For about 30 seconds, I felt we were actually on top of this whole arable project.
We've hit an enormous stone.
Hitting the stone has broken the ploughshare, the blade that cuts the earth.
Basically that means we can't plough any more, or at least if we do it'll be messy.
Until Alex replaces the share, he can't do any more ploughing.
And now And now it's game over.
Come here, boy.
It's mid-February, a time of year when there was little money to be made from the land.
So the farmers are relying on other sources of revenue, like mining, to see them through.
It's a month since the precipitation tank was installed, and so far no copper has been produced.
But Rick and Phil know of another more immediate way Edwardians made money from abandoned mines.
This is a 19th-century miners' track.
Watch it, it's a wee bit slippy.
It's a lot harder with tools! ALEX: Come on Peter, we need those tools up here! Oh! Argh! Stop dragging your feet, man.
Rick's taking them to a disused mine shaft.
At the pithead is a pile of ore abandoned over a century ago.
As the ore comes out of the ground, it's tied up with loads of other minerals and things.
And the job was to break that all down with heavy hammers, to separate the good copper ore on one hand, from the waste rock on the other.
So you've dragged us all the way up the side of a very steep slope to come and - Stop whingeing.
- Smack a pile of rocks.
Exactly.
What we're doing was known as fossicking.
So we're going back over the old discarded material, and we're seeing if anything's been left that we can pick up and sell on.
This is really scavenging.
So somewhere in this pile could be your fortunes.
But for the inexperienced fossicker, distinguishing between valuable copper and other worthless metals is no easy task.
Nice.
- There.
- Let's see what we've got.
Anything? Yeah.
You can see a sort of brassy bit of mineral there.
- Now, that could either be copper - Yeah.
which is good - Yep.
Or it could be iron pyrite, fool's gold, which has absolutely no economic value at all.
A simple way to test.
Give it a scrape.
As you can see, it's scratching the surface of that.
Yeah.
That tells us that this is actually softer than the steel.
- Which means that's copper.
- That's copper? - Congratulations.
- So we've found - You have found copper.
- You've struck it rich.
- First time lucky.
- That's absolutely fine.
Now, find me a few tons of that, and we're laughing! - There's quite a bit there.
Look at that.
- Got a magnifying glass? Yeah! After a day at the spoil heap, Alex and Peter need to know whether what they're recovering is of decent quality.
- Ah, good morning, come on in.
- Hello, Mr Chilvers.
Its value depends on assessing how much copper it contains, a job that falls to the Quay's assayer, John Chilvers.
- So that's the bit that we want to test.
- Oh, right.
So what we need to do is what is known as assay this.
Right.
The whole process in here is to try and extract the copper from the copper ore, to see what percentage of copper we can get from it, then we know just how good the ore is itself.
Right.
Assaying was a crucial job, as it determined the percentage of copper in the ore.
If it contained less than 5%, it wasn't worth bothering with.
First John weighs out exactly 20 grams of crushed ore.
To that we've got to add chemicals which are known as fluxes.
Just the same way as you have flux when you're soldering, which allows the metal to run, we have these chemicals to do exactly the same, to allow the metals to separate out from the rock.
Right.
We can now place the crucible into the furnace.
Then we need to put the lid back on the top.
We can get the draw of air underneath the furnace there It's gonna go, whoosh! to get it up to temperature, because we need it above 1,000 degrees.
Woah! At this temperature, the copper melts, allowing it to flow out of the rock.
Check that we've got it nice and hot now.
Now.
And now I can touch it.
What you can see now is I've got this big lump of stuff here, which is called slag.
- I can throw that away.
- Right.
OK.
I can then measure my small bead of copper, which is now very, very tiny.
The 20 grams of ore contains just one gram of copper.
- That would be one-twentieth.
- 5%.
Which is 5%.
So, and that would be the grade of the copper ore.
And because there then was a standard price for copper ore, then I would sell it on the basis of 5%.
By the Edwardian age, the new electrical industry was demanding more and more copper for wiring.
Most of this was imported, but scavenging spoil heaps for copper ore was still a worthwhile, if exhausting, sideline.
Pub? - Pub.
- Pub.
It's late February.
Alex has repaired the ploughshare and finally finished ploughing the field back to bare earth.
But before he can sow the cereal crop, there's one more job to do - harrowing, to prepare the soil's tilth.
The tilth is essentially the pliability, the crumbliness of the soil, so that you can sow into it.
If you get it too shallow, you'll have the birds in there, all sorts of creatures will get into it and it'll weather away, the wind will blow the top off.
If you get it too deep, the seeds won't germinate and they won't come through.
This crop is crucial to their success.
So they've called on local expertise.
Mr Francis Mudge's family have grown crops here in Devon for generations.
Massive relief to have Mr Mudge here to give us a few pointers, and hopefully we'll get the horses going in a straight line, get the crop drilled into the ground.
- What do you think? - Yeah, it's looking all right, isn't it? You've got a fair tilth here.
If you can't bury your toe in it, it's not that good tilth, and the corn wouldn't be buried then, it would be on top.
But you've got a good tilth here.
OK.
With Mr Mudge's seal of approval, it's time to sow the crop.
In Edwardian Britain, wheat was no longer profitable because of cheap foreign imports.
So they grew other cereals instead.
Mr Mudge recommends a favourite among Devon's Edwardian farmers - oats.
Everything was done by horse.
There wasn't no tractors back in those days, or very little.
So they they grew oats as a main crop to feed their horses on.
So they're the fuel that is powering the horses which are really your form of transport and machinery of the day.
Oats was the main crop for that reason, really.
Keep your horses going.
Cos they done all the hard work, they did.
The oats will be sown using a state-of-the-art Edwardian seed drill.
I feel like the Ben-Hur of the agricultural world.
Go.
Just keeping my eye on all of the coulters, to make sure that all of these are in working order, and that they're all dropping seed.
All good, all fairly regular, all working.
That's fantastic.
By the Edwardian period, the bottom had truly dropped out of the market for wheat to make bread and for the home market, wheat was being imported from all over the world.
British farmers just couldn't compete, so they had to turn to another crop that they could make money from, and oats proved the answer.
With an enormous number of horses in the cities and towns, there's a viable marketplace.
Right, out of gear Finally they have their cash crop in the ground.
Down at the mine the precipitation tank has been left to do its work.
But after six weeks has it produced any copper? I can see a future in copper for us, Peter.
I think we might be lucky.
Aha! Ooh, ooh! Wow! - That's rather good, isn't it? - That's very good.
Oh, yeah, yeah, that's like copper, it is copper plating, right in that corner.
Look.
- Isn't that beautiful? - That is.
All this is, er, deposited copper.
- That's amazing, Rick.
That really is amazing.
- I'm exceptionally pleased with this.
- I always had faith in you, Rick.
- Never doubted you.
That's what I like to hear! So we just scrape this off, do we? - You scrape this off.
- Yeah.
And you keep scraping, and scraping, and scraping.
Oh, there it goes.
I'm slightly concerned about the volume of it, though.
I mean, I wasn't expecting huge copper ingots down here but, you know, an Edwardian, is he gonna make a lot of money out of that? Not out of this one piece, but if you multiplied this by sort of 100 to 200 times, and you just keep going back once a month, just scraping the copper off here, you know, it'll soon build up.
Look after the copper pennies and the copper pounds will take care of themselves.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So, Rick, this is gonna bring a few pennies in now.
But where's the real money to be made in mining here in the Edwardian period? You've really got two options.
- One, you can go abroad.
- Right.
If you don't fancy that, there's money to be made on that side of the river, down in Cornwall.
- In Cornwall? - In Cornwall.
Strange place.
Across the river in Cornwall, there was still money to be made from mining.
Not copper, but tin.
Tin was an important metal to the Edwardians, used in the canning of foods, for solder, and as an alloy in pewter, brass and bronze.
But if Alex and Peter are to become tin miners, they'll need the tools of the trade - picks and drills.
Morwellham's blacksmith, Simon Summers, is responsible for maintaining these tools.
Tools would break, get bent.
And the picks would get blunt so quickly.
With so many men working down there, it would be a full-time, full-on job for a blacksmith, just sharpening and hardening.
OK, we're ready there now.
The first job is to sharpen the pick.
Quick clean on the end.
But I'm not gonna forge it any more than that now.
Finish the rest off with a rasp.
The tip of the pick is now sharp.
But it'll be blunt again in no time unless it's hardened, a process that required incredible precision.
We're just gonna put the tip in the fire, cos that's the only bit that we want hot.
I'm gonna quench the tip, just there, and keep that heat up here - that's our reservoir of heat.
Simon cools the tip to monitor the amount of heat that flows back into it.
We're gonna quickly come up onto the anvil, and then we wait for that reservoir of heat that you can see there to travel up.
As the heat travels back to the tip, it changes colour, and the colour tells the blacksmith how hard the metal's going to be.
Those colours have their different uses, and when we're cutting hot steel we look for a blue on the cutting edge.
And when we're cutting wood, say for an axe or a billhook, we're looking for purple on the cutting edge.
And with this pick, that's gonna be used for cutting stone, we're looking for a yellow on the tip.
And now you can see a blue purple coming up down here, but a bright yellow is just heading to the end.
So we just quench it.
Rapidly cooling the tip at the required colour hardens it.
Just see on the tip, we've got our yellow, our bright yellow, and then it comes back into like a bronzy colour.
Now that tip is hardened, ready for mining.
All we need now is a handle.
Miners spent eight hours a day underground, so they'd take a meal with them, in the form of a pasty.
Local ladies Sue, Iris and Julie have come to help Ruth make a batch for the boys.
Not that critical, really, is it, what you put inside a pasty? No, it's more or less what you've got.
You know, or what you can afford, I suppose.
Yeah.
So - Turnip.
- Turnip and onion.
- I'm gonna put the potato in first.
- You are? Yeah.
You chip it.
You don't dice it.
It must be chipped.
Chipped.
- You know what you mean by chipped? - Yes.
You don't? - It's sliced, a form of slicing.
- Yeah.
- In small pieces.
- Very small.
Yeah, and then it just cooks better.
Yeah.
- Cooks at the same time as everything else.
- Yeah.
And then we're onto our beef skirt.
Quite a lot of food in one pasty.
Now I can see why you say a complete meal.
Bit of seasoning.
Then it's over and crimp.
So - Turn.
- Turn, like a triangle.
- Yeah.
- Flatten this as you go.
Oh, I see.
- And this is the bit you call the crimp? - That's right, that's the crimp.
- And then - Looks lovely.
That looks really nice.
And, of course, when they finished the pasty, they used to throw the pastry away.
- Just throw it - The last bits they were holding? Once they've finished eating it, they'd throw it to the knockers.
What the heck are knockers? In my world, knockers are something a woman has! - They're little - Little folks.
Little folk that lived down the mines.
You had to keep them happy.
- Really? - Yes.
- People really believed it? - Yes.
- Yeah, they did.
- Yeah.
- They were very superstitious back then.
- Yes.
- Very superstitious.
- So they would throw them the Fabulous.
Right, well, let's get sorted.
We've got 30 more to make.
- Hello, Peter.
- Hi, Simon.
How are you? I'm all right, thank you very much, yeah.
So this looks unrecognisable as the tool I gave you.
Well, it's been serviced, basically.
You know, like, we've given it a really good clean up.
- And you've sharpened our drill bit as well? - Yeah.
Tom, would you like to bring the drill bit over? There, what we've done here is we've hardened the end.
You can see that yellow straw colour, right on the tip there, for cutting stones.
Hit it, twist it.
Tough work.
- Yeah.
Well, good luck with that.
- Thank you very much.
Are you gonna be carrying these on your own? Yeah, basically I got to pick up the tools, cos they're heavy, and Alex got to pick up the pasties.
Cos if I picked up the pasties, I might have eaten them on the way home.
- Cheerio, then.
- See you later.
There's a real hive of industry in here, Ruth.
- Look good, don't they? - Go on.
Straight in.
One hot pasty.
- Oh, and by the way - Yeah? Send your crusts down to the knockers.
My crusts down to the knockers? Should I be asking what that means? Don't eat the crust.
You must always throw them to the knockers down the mine, to keep the little people happy.
Right, the knockers.
Have you lot been drinking? Equipped with tools and pasties, it's time for the miners to cross the river into Cornwall.
Hello, chaps, how are you? All right? Good to see you, Joshua.
- How are you? - Very good.
They're being taken across by their old friend, Joshua Preston.
So what's it been like up here? Cos I haven't seen you lads for two or three months, I don't think.
- Well, it's been cold, wet and miserable.
- Yeah, it's been a harsh winter so far.
But if you're going underground, of course, you'll be nice and snug there.
These old boys will tell you.
It's nice and warm.
If not, we'll soon get you warm! - Right.
- Swing a pick or two! - So you've got some work lined up for us? - Oh, yeah.
All along the river, there's evidence of the valley's industrial heritage.
It's amazing.
A sort of lost industrial landscape, isn't it? In the Edwardian era, these lime kilns would have worked around the clock.
Now they're eerily deserted.
- Right.
- Wonderful.
- There you go, lads.
- Picks.
- Drill.
Carbide lamps.
- Thank you very much.
Boys, all the best.
Fred and I can get back to a little bit of salmon netting now.
- See if we can earn a little bob or two.
- Thank you very much.
- And away you go.
- Lead on, Rick.
- Lead on.
- Onward.
- Welcome to Cornwall, Peter.
- Yeah, I'm scared.
It's a terrifying place, it really is.
Rick's brought them to the King Edward Mine in Camborne, Cornwall virtually unchanged for over a century.
This plant, equipped with the latest in Edwardian technology, once extracted the metal from tin ore.
First, though, they must head deep underground, to mine the ore and learn the lost skills of the Edwardian miner.
The techniques we're gonna be using now are classic sort of 19th-century techniques.
Hand drilling, candles.
I think it's important that you guys try it.
- Yeah.
- Just to know sort of how hard it actually was.
Are you gonna use your lovely new picks to - Yeah.
make our hole? Where shall we go? Where looks good? Here? Edwardians used dynamite to blast the tin ore from the rock, but first holes had to be drilled to put the charges in - by hand.
What sort of speed are we looking for? Well, if you can put in about a three-foot hole in a couple of hours - (Laughs) I'll be impressed.
- Three foot.
- Right, OK.
Having said that, these guys were doing this competitively as well.
You know, at weekends, they might competitively drill.
And the record stands at about 13 minutes for six inches.
13 minutes for six inches? And that's in granite.
Which is harder than this.
So they'd spend six days a week working at it, and then Sunday - Exactly.
- Let's have a competition, guys! Right, Phil and I are off.
We'll see you later.
- See you later.
- OK, then, chaps.
So if I'm gonna go in there Missed it completely! Just pulled up short of your shoulder blade, Peter.
That's the reason I look this way, cos I'm just oblivious! OK, where are we at, then, Peter? Well, where I think we started making initial progress now we're getting there, but at a slightly slower rate.
Just think about the enormity of the hillsides around here.
- Yeah.
- Just the size of the hills.
The size of the cave we're in and the size of the hole we've just made in the time.
Life is not easy down the mine.
- No, I think we've learned one thing.
- Never grumble about farming again! Yeah! - Because we've actually made - Let's go for it.
Three.
Oh.
While the boys are mining, Ruth's going to try her hand at another of Devon's lost Edwardian industries - lace-making.
- Hello, Ruth.
- Hello.
- Do come in.
- Thank you very much.
Pat Perryman has been making Honiton lace for over 40 years.
You'd have a group of people - maybe together but sometimes in their own homes, of course - and one lady would make all the leaves, one would make all the certain flowers, but the more experienced ladies would collect together the pieces and they would do the assembly and join them together.
The Devon town of Honiton is world-famous for its intricate, delicate and beautiful lace.
Once half the inhabitants of East Devon were lace makers.
You have a nice bit of tension on this bobbin, and But its complexity made it incredibly labour-intensive.
You're talking nine to ten hours for a square inch.
- Taking the easy with the harder stitches.
- Really? So a cuff like that, which isn't a big thing, that's just one cuff on a blouse One, two, three ten, 11, 12, 13 - What, 200? 250 hours? - Yeah.
Gracious, I mean that is meant to be one cuff on a blouse, isn't it? So, I mean, I don't know, if you charged £10 an hour That's right.
- £2,000.
£2,500 for one cuff.
- I know.
But the husbands of the day, of course, bought their wives a lace instead of jewellery.
So the posher your lace, the more wealthy you were.
In the Edwardian age, every young girl in the Devon village of Honiton would have been taught the art of lace-making.
- You take this pair and the next pair.
- So it goes back over one - Yes.
- And those two over there.
Move that pair fractionally out of your way to remind you.
This craft goes back to the 16th century.
It involves weaving thread wound onto bobbins around pins pushed into a template.
Always right bobbin over left.
Never any different.
One, two, three.
I often say if you can count to three, you can do it.
Now you're gonna make what we call your edge stitch.
I'll show you for the very first time.
You'll be able to do it.
One.
Two.
Three.
You say this pair stays behind.
And this pair is going to travel back to the other side.
Don't turn your pillow.
Number two goes first.
It's a lifetime's work, really! It's becoming clear that this isn't a craft learned in an afternoon.
They would sit for eight to 12 hours a day.
Yeah, well you hear of lace schools, with tiny little children.
Yeah, five years old.
Eight in the morning till eight at night.
When the Education Act came in, in 1870, the government said all children must go to school.
But in Honiton it didn't happen till 1903.
- Really? - So Honiton defied This industry actually held up children's education all those years? - Yes.
- Prevented children getting schooling.
Because the parents said, "My Mary must make lace.
We can't afford for her to go to school.
" But in 1903, Devon county stepped in.
And it was a half a day.
It was a compromise.
Children did the three hours in the morning and lace in the afternoon.
And then in about 1960 it was an after-school activity.
So it was within the school day up until 1960.
- Until 1960? - I know we're out of our time, yeah.
- I am really quite shocked by that.
- Yeah.
So I'm watching you.
Cos you won't earn your money if you're - I'll never earn any money at this rate.
if you're not practising.
- Are you there yet? - Nowhere near.
- Pretty exhausted, to be honest.
- I'm tired.
Well, fortunately help's at hand.
During the Edwardian period you got increased mechanisation in mining.
So, for example, this is a compressed air rock drill.
- Right.
- So this does what you're doing - Yeah.
using compressed air.
The compressed air rock drill was a British invention that came into its own in the Edwardian age.
A steam engine outside the mine compresses the air, which is then carried in pipes down to the rock face.
In theory, this should have made life easier for the Edwardian miner.
In practice, there was a downside.
Pre-First World War, none of these drills had any form of dust suppression.
Right.
So you're gonna end up breathing in a lot of dust.
OK.
So if you're drilling into material like quartz and things like that, you're gonna have a very, very short lifespan.
They earned themselves a really gruesome nickname.
What? These early, unsuppressed drills were known as widowmakers.
- So we're working with the widowmaker.
- We are working with the widowmaker.
Erm, there, that's it.
Yeah.
Are you ready? Ready? This is the most nervous I have been for anything we've ever done.
I'm the one with my hands on the drill bit here! OK.
- (Air hisses) - Air coming in.
This drills deeper in a minute than a hand drill can in an hour.
- There you have it, gentlemen.
- Bring back hand drilling.
This kept mining going into the Edwardian period.
Right.
People were able to open up ore deposits a lot faster and were also able to exploit them faster.
So this is basically the saviour of west of England mining.
Right.
Phew! - Do you know what to do next? - I've lost it completely! - A pairing and a twist three.
- Oh, right.
Yeah.
OK.
Back at Morwellham, things are not going well for Ruth.
There's so many things about this I find really quite sort of This is why it's a long-term learning process.
I think you might need to come at least once a week for about a year.
- That's how long it takes? - To learn your basic basics.
- Oh, God! - Yeah, I know.
So there's no chance for me as an Edwardian adult, with all these other sort of With four or five children and a husband, and There's no way you could take up lace-making and make some pin money.
No.
I don't think this is the cottage industry I should be relying on to pay the rent! Maybe just for relaxation! By the Edwardian period, cottage industries like lace-making were dying out, leaving many women with no income of their own.
Expensive, hand-made lace just couldn't compete with the cheap factory-made variety.
But Ruth's discovered another way Edwardians made money from the Honiton lace industry.
It was apparently extremely common to send your lace out to specialist cleaners.
And many of these were just women in their own homes who were just known to be good at it.
Oh, gosh.
Gosh, I've been trusted with a really great piece here.
Honiton lace is extremely delicate, and if washed loose in water, it would distort and be ruined.
Now I'm just gonna drop that in nice and flat and I want that to soak.
So lace cleaners would carefully wrap it into a linen parcel.
Eww! There is a bit of a greyness in the water, so I obviously am shifting something.
Now the lace must be dried.
Looks like the parcel business worked.
Look how nice and flat and well looked after it is.
The reason for this process was to sort of set it back into a perfect shape, so that when it comes off here, it will hold absolutely pristine.
This may seem like a huge amount of work to wash something.
But I've been counting these motifs and working it out.
If one person did it, this is over a year's worth of work in this piece of lace.
Over a year.
So if you think about that in modern wages.
Jeepers! I am so scared of getting this wrong! If I damage this.
Gosh.
All right, let's lower her off.
Down in the tin mine the holes are drilled.
Rick's demonstrating how Edwardians would have blasted the rock from the face using dynamite.
The first thing we need is a couple of feet of fuse.
If you cut me a two foot length of that.
Now, this is what the Edwardians would have called safety fuse.
- Right.
- And that gives you a timed burn.
Right.
So in a minute, that stuff should burn about two feet.
So that'll give us a minute to get out of here.
- A minute? Is that it? - That's plenty of time.
Right, next thing to do is crimp on a detonator.
This detonator contains an explosive called fulminative mercury.
- Sorry, what was it called? - Fulminative mercury.
Fulminative mercury.
I hope you're taking notes here, Peter.
And next stage is the dynamite itself.
Put that charge into that hole like that.
Now push that down to the bottom of the shot hole.
Yeah.
Right.
What we need now is some clay.
- Er, plenty of that.
- There's some on my hat.
This basically stops the charges blowing out.
To get the explosion sort of to go into the rock, we need to block up the hole.
Ready for firing.
- I suggest you guys make yourself scarce.
- Right, we will do.
It was nice knowing you.
Firing! (Explosion) The miners have earned themselves a spot of lunch.
This is a nice comfy spot, Rick? Legend has it that the crust was used as a handle to protect the pasty from dirty hands.
But Rick's having none of it.
The best way to do it is just get a bag, or a rag or something, and just wrap it round it.
Keeps it nice and clean.
And you can eat the whole thing quite happily.
And there's none of this nonsense about throwing your crusts away.
So no throwing the crusts to the er knockers, then.
Ooh, no.
Ooh, no.
Too good to waste.
Right, chaps, I think it's back to work for us.
The team are taking their blasted rock to the King Edward Mine's processing plant to extract the tin.
First it's assessed to see how much tin it contains.
It's a job for the assayer, Tony Clarke.
- I can see you're enjoying that, Peter! - Yeah, very much so.
As the assayer, everyone's looking at you to be as fair as possible in determining the tin content of this.
That's right, because the tin content of this determines how much you get paid for the amount of ore that you've brought up.
- Did the guy who did this job diddle the miners? - No.
Well, put it this way, the bias was always slightly in favour of the management.
Yes.
And are you paid by the management? I am.
- Right, OK.
- (They chuckle) To assess the powdered rock, Tony uses water any a vanning shovel.
We now manipulate it and throw the heavy tin ore up the shovel.
The heavier particles respond more.
- Right.
- So they go further up the shovel.
Yeah? You see it move up there? That's the tin in your ore.
There's plenty in there.
It's well worth treating.
But don't forget that you would have had to pay for your candles.
- Yeah.
- Blasting powder.
All costs, prior to stamping, you're responsible for.
Right.
We could actually find ourselves in debt.
You could, actually.
Yeah.
Tony's analysis shows that their rock contains 3% tin, enough to make extracting the metal worthwhile.
So the team are delivering their consignment to plant manager Nigel McDonald for processing.
- Hello there.
- I'm Alex.
- How do you do, Alex? - I'm Peter.
Breaking up the rock was a laborious job done by women, known as bal maidens.
At the turn of the 19th century, we would have had probably 20 to 30 bal maidens working on this cobbing floor behind us.
- So all around here.
- All around here.
They would break up the large rocks in order to be able to feed them to the processing plant.
And hand sorting all of the good material from the bad.
Once it's been broken up, machinery takes care of the rest.
Heavy stamps turn the rock into powder which is then filtered, allowing the tin granules to be separated, using this shaking table.
The King Edward Mine once processed thousands of tons of rock a year.
Now it's the only surviving example of an Edwardian processing plant.
Ruth's come to see the machines that replaced many local workers.
This is, you know, quite obviously a really modern machine for, say, 1905.
- This is absolutely the cutting edge, isn't it? - Yes, that's right.
So how many people is this replacing? This is probably replacing four or five people.
Five jobs gone.
You're a fab machine but that's a lot of money not coming into families, isn't it? Exactly.
And those people would probably have been women? - Young women, mostly.
- Young women and boys.
- Bal maidens.
- Yeah, they would have been the bal maidens, who would be mothers and daughters of the miners who were underground, and the young boys, before they were old enough to actually go underground.
They probably wouldn't go underground much before the ages of 11, 12.
It's completely changing the whole work ethic of the mining industry.
- And the whole social sort of - The social structure that goes around that.
The process is complete.
The miners came into the factory with rock containing 3% tin, but what have they produced? So what percentage is that now? Probably about sort of 60% to 65%.
And you can see it's rather reluctant to move around in the water, which indicates that it's quite heavy and quite good grade, which can be smelted to produce the tin metal.
- Yeah? - So that's what all the work's been worth.
Tin mining was still big business in Cornwall well into the 20th century.
The last mine closed in 1998.
After a hard day's work, there's a chance to reflect.
Thank you.
Bearing in mind that you are trainees, Phil and I are taking most of what we earned.
Which isn't much! It's almost as lucrative as lace making! I think we'll stick to the farming.
But you've got to bear in mind, this was an industry that was dying.
So if you guys wanted to make a living out of it, you'd probably have to supplement it, say, with your faming.
- Yeah.
- Or go abroad.
That's your options basically? So you're getting huge groups of Cornish miners going to all the four corners of the earth.
The skills that built all these New World mining camps - South Australia, North America and South Africa - that came from Cornwall, and it was a saying, the definition of a mine is a hole in the ground with a Cornishman at the bottom of it.
- And that's not far from the truth.
- Mining has been absolutely fascinating.
I didn't realise there was so much history concealed under these hills.
- Yeah.
It's been a real adventure for us.
- Excellent.
So here's to mines and miners.
Cheers.
Oh the farmers work around the fields, their legs tied up with hay And the miners they work underground, and never miss a day Oh a mining we will go, boys, a mining we will go With picks and shovels in our hands, a mining we will go And we all work out with Lizzie, and when the bower's nagged We all live in the engine house and make the best of that Oh, a mining we will go, boys, a mining we will go With picks and shovels in our hands, a mining we will go Oh, yeah!
Now Morwellham Quay has been brought back to life as it would have been during the reign of King Edward VII.
Hooray! Yee-hee! (Rings bell) Archaeologists Alex Langlands and Peter Ginn, and historian Ruth Goodman, are living the lives of Edwardian farmers for a full calendar year.
So far they've started their arable concern by making lime fertiliser and attempted to plough using the latest Edwardian technology.
I think you could do with a push.
They've taken in livestock and ventured into market gardening and fishing.
Now it's January, and the team turn their hands to industries that once brought wealth to Devon - mining Well, I think we've learned one thing.
- Never grumble about farming again! - Yeah! and lace making.
I'm watching you.
Cos you won't earn your money if you're - I'm never gonna earn any money! not practising.
But will they be able to master them - Let's go.
- Yeah, let it go.
and win the race against time to get their crops sown? Wassail! Drink hail! You've just scared away evil from it.
Fixed.
Hurrah! Steady.
Good boy.
In Devon it's been the harshest of winters.
That's it, steady.
It is bitter.
Absolutely bitter.
This is ice rain that's coming down at the moment.
There's a big group of very, very, very hungry cows up there, desperate for us to dump this hay on the ground so they can get stuck in.
In winter, farmers need to feed their animals twice a day to ensure they survive until spring.
ALEX: This weather's foul.
Whilst it's good for killing off pests and vermin, it can be the ruin of a farmer.
Because ice on the ground means nothing will grow, so no food.
And these fellas would get mighty hungry if that was the case.
Right, that's it.
Walk.
Walk.
Their big project for the year is to grow a cereal crop.
For the last couple of months it's been on hold, delayed by the cold weather.
But if they don't get it in the ground soon, they'll have nothing to harvest next August.
The ground is still absolutely frozen solid.
It is as hard as rock.
And that means that ploughing is gonna have to be put off.
You know, this is the most stressful part of the year.
Let's hope this is the worst of the winter and that by Candlemass, which is in early February, it's all over.
Candlemass, the second of February, was seen as a watershed by the Edwardian farmer.
There are lots of great little rhymes about the weather at Candlemass time.
One goes, "If Candlemass be bright and fair, the half of winter's to come and mare.
" "Mare" meaning more.
Doesn't actually rhyme.
But what it's saying there is that if it's bright and clear on February, you're only half way through the winter and you've got the second half to come.
So if it rains on Candlemass, winter's over and the weather will improve.
If not, winter will have another bite.
It's just weather lore, but there is a bit of truth to it, you know.
I'm just starting to get a little bit worried about this now.
It's three weeks until Candlemass.
All Alex can do is hope this will mark a change in the weather so he can get a crop in the ground.
The farm was built in the 19th century to feed the people of Morwellham Quay, once a booming port and village.
Its wealth came from deep underground.
In 1844, the largest copper reserves in Europe were discovered here.
Thousands of tons of copper ore were mined then transported down the quay on this raised railway.
It turned sleepy Morwellham Quay into the busiest inland port in England.
Here in Morwellham, farmers often supplemented their income by working as miners.
Alex and Peter are heading down to the mines, along the old railway, with experts Rick Stewart and Phil Hurley.
- One candle.
Issued.
- One candle.
- And one lump of clay.
- And a lump of local clay.
- Right, so we slap that on there.
- Yep.
And this is what they would have used when this mine was in its boom years? Yeah, I mean candles are used from Roman times, right up to, sort of, 20th century.
- Right.
- It was a good, cheap form of light.
So aren't you chaps gonna get kitted up with some lamps? Candlelight? We're going for sort of the state-of-the-art Edwardian technology.
- Right.
- What we've got is a carbide lamp.
And these started appearing round about 1901, 1902.
- So these are bang-on the Edwardian period.
- This is cutting-edge Edwardian technology.
What you've got, open the thing up Got two chambers.
Can I hand you that, please, Phil? This bottom chamber contains the calcium carbide.
- Right.
- So I'm just gonna fill that up.
Can you hold that for a moment? Thank you.
Is calcium carbide anything like limestone? Yeah, basically, it's a by-product of some of the limestone industry.
That should do it.
And we will put the top compartment on.
So this top compartment's the water compartment.
- And we open this little needle valve up.
- Right.
That causes water to drip from the top chamber down onto the carbide in the bottom chamber.
- Which gives off acetylene gas.
- Right.
The gas comes out of this little jet and we get a flame, which is nicely reflected there.
And I suppose the great thing about this lamp is there's nothing to smash on there.
Exactly.
These things are bombproof, they really are, wonderful piece of technology.
Rick's taking them to explore the George And Charlotte Mine, just 100 yards from their cottage.
These mines produced nearly a million tons of copper a year, all dug by hand.
Miners would spend eight hours a day, six days a week, underground, working in these dark, airless conditions.
Risk of death was ever present.
Falling down a mine shaft was often fatal.
Right, this is what metal mining is all about.
You're probably familiar with coal mines, with horizontal seams of coal.
- Forget that.
This is vertical mining.
- Right.
So you've got a vertical ore body coming down through here.
That's the lode.
That's what the miners were after.
You can see how they've extracted it, installing timbers here, to stop this wall here, which is known as the hanging wall, joining this wall here, which is known as the foot wall.
As the miners dug ever deeper, there was another problem to overcome - flooding.
Wow! This is a pretty big waterwheel.
Yes, about 18-foot diameter.
Which, as these things go, is a small one.
- I mean - But what is it doing? Driving pumps.
We've got four more levels below us.
They're below river level, which is why we need to pump them.
- So it's pumping water? - Pumping water.
Yeah.
- So it's bringing water from outside in - Outside the mine.
to power the wheel, to pump the water out.
- Inside out! - Yeah.
But pumping water from the mines was costly.
So extracting the copper ore got more and more expensive.
This mine closed in 1869.
In the 1860s, a lot of foreign imports came in from North America and South Australia.
A lot of the more marginal mines, like this one, closed, this couldn't compete.
And those very, very small margins they were making just disappeared.
Large-scale, more efficient mines in North America and South Australia spelt the end for the copper mines of Devon and Cornwall.
But there were ways farmers here could still make money from the mines.
Oh! Wooh! Here we are.
Rick and Phil are keen to try out a long-lost process.
Is this water just coming straight out of the mine? Yeah, and this is flowing down through a lot of the old working areas of the mine.
Should have soaked lots of copper up from the surrounding rocks.
We want to try and get the copper out of the water so that it's something that we can make money from.
The Edwardians had an ingeniously simple way of extracting this copper.
The first job is to install a precipitation tank to capture water from the mine.
- So there we are.
- Poor Phil! Poor Phil! Phil is currently waist deep in muddied water, trying to organise a water flow.
- Here it comes.
- Oh! Oh-oh! I can see it! We have water.
RUTH: Hooray! Dribbly, dribbly, dribbly! Phil places rusty pieces of iron in the tank.
Now, Phil, I'm no scientist, so talk me through the very basic chemical reaction that's taking place here.
Because there's copper in the water, that's coming out of the mine.
That copper is going to change places with the iron oxide, the rust, that's on the surface of the metal.
So we're gonna end up with this metal coated with copper, and the rust is gonna come out into the water, simple as that, yeah.
Doesn't stick on very tight.
- It can just be scraped off.
- Wow.
- Let's fill this up.
- Have some more rust.
So was there much of this going on? Yeah, it's a fairly common process, I mean You know, you had small groups of guys doing just this sort of thing.
If there was copper there to be had, they would have it.
It's one of those things we've always thought of trying but never got round to.
So this is as much an experiment for us as it is for you.
It really is very sort of low-key, low-tech, metal recovery.
Now they must leave it for a few weeks to let nature take its course.
It's February the 2nd - Candlemass.
It's raining.
So according to the old rhyme, the worst of winter should be well and truly over.
And getting the animals through the harsh winter has had its upside.
I think because we're handling these guys twice a day, we're starting to build a real bond with them.
We're starting to know each other, trust each other, and hopefully when they go out and be adults in the field, they'll follow the bucket.
We won't have to chase them around everywhere.
They are so sweet.
Lovely creatures.
Soon it'll be spring and the farm will be teeming with new life.
Alex has invited Professor Ronald Hutton, an expert in folklore, to ensure a bountiful harvest in their cider orchard.
- Glad to be back.
- Great to see you again.
Ruth's daughter Eve has joined them for the ceremony.
Hiya! - A problem with your tree here? - Yeah.
Back in September, October time, we wandered down here, we had a single apple, and I think it was on this tree here, one single apple.
So we've got some real problems with our orchard.
OK.
This tree here is your team leader.
You encourage it, it gets the rest working.
- If we fix him, we fix the lot? - Yeah.
- How would you do that traditionally? - You've got to wassail it.
Now wassailing means singing, to your trees, or your animals, whatever you raise on your farm, to encourage it to do better in the next year.
Wassailing an apple tree is the real wassailing, the basic wassailing.
- First thing you do is you need a bowl.
- Oh, hang on, I've got one here.
Which makes it easier for us all to drink.
It's a sugar bowl but I didn't think that would matter.
- It doesn't.
- Jolly good.
Very cold, clear cider, isn't it? - OK, first thing to do is get some bread.
- Yeah.
Halve it.
Dip it in here to give your cider body.
And we put it in the apple tree.
And this will make the tree feel good, and will make the birds slightly drunk, in which case they'll sing all the more uproariously and make the trees feel good.
- And now let's get down to it.
- Step one out the way.
Good apple tree, we wassail thee, that thou mayest bud and that thou mayest blow and that thou mayest bare apples and oh! Hats full, caps full, three bushel barrels full! Hurrah! Hurrah! You just scared away evil from it.
Fixed.
And I'll thank you traditionally for being in company like this.
So you've made a wassail too, and I'll gladly sing to you, fortune bless you and bring you a jolly new year.
Fortune bring you a jolly new year.
- Cheers! - Bravo.
- Bravo.
- Wassail! ALL: Drink hail! - Wassail! - Drink hail! Two months ago, freezing conditions put paid to the ploughing.
Now the frosts are over, Alex and farmhand Megan Elliot can get the field ready to be sown with a crop.
Come on, boys.
Dig a furrow, Tom.
Ploughing returns the field to bare earth, and also mixes Alex and Peter's lime fertiliser into the soil.
It's good, actually, to be getting this lime ploughed in.
You know, that was such a back-breaker in itself.
It's great to actually see the damn stuff buried, to be honest.
Alex is using the Shires, Tom and Prince, to pull the plough.
Come on, Princey.
It's a complete joy to be out here.
The horses have really taken to this.
You know, this is a pair of horses that has never ploughed before, and look at them going.
Despite the invention of the tractor, there were more working horses in Edwardian Britain than at any time in history.
Come on, boys.
The Edwardian period is without doubt the dawn of the modern age.
It's the dawn of the motorcar, the aeroplane.
And for me it's just amazing that, despite all these innovations, farmers were still overwhelmingly using horses to plough, because still, in that age, they were the best for the job.
But Alex's joy is shortlived.
For about 30 seconds, I felt we were actually on top of this whole arable project.
We've hit an enormous stone.
Hitting the stone has broken the ploughshare, the blade that cuts the earth.
Basically that means we can't plough any more, or at least if we do it'll be messy.
Until Alex replaces the share, he can't do any more ploughing.
And now And now it's game over.
Come here, boy.
It's mid-February, a time of year when there was little money to be made from the land.
So the farmers are relying on other sources of revenue, like mining, to see them through.
It's a month since the precipitation tank was installed, and so far no copper has been produced.
But Rick and Phil know of another more immediate way Edwardians made money from abandoned mines.
This is a 19th-century miners' track.
Watch it, it's a wee bit slippy.
It's a lot harder with tools! ALEX: Come on Peter, we need those tools up here! Oh! Argh! Stop dragging your feet, man.
Rick's taking them to a disused mine shaft.
At the pithead is a pile of ore abandoned over a century ago.
As the ore comes out of the ground, it's tied up with loads of other minerals and things.
And the job was to break that all down with heavy hammers, to separate the good copper ore on one hand, from the waste rock on the other.
So you've dragged us all the way up the side of a very steep slope to come and - Stop whingeing.
- Smack a pile of rocks.
Exactly.
What we're doing was known as fossicking.
So we're going back over the old discarded material, and we're seeing if anything's been left that we can pick up and sell on.
This is really scavenging.
So somewhere in this pile could be your fortunes.
But for the inexperienced fossicker, distinguishing between valuable copper and other worthless metals is no easy task.
Nice.
- There.
- Let's see what we've got.
Anything? Yeah.
You can see a sort of brassy bit of mineral there.
- Now, that could either be copper - Yeah.
which is good - Yep.
Or it could be iron pyrite, fool's gold, which has absolutely no economic value at all.
A simple way to test.
Give it a scrape.
As you can see, it's scratching the surface of that.
Yeah.
That tells us that this is actually softer than the steel.
- Which means that's copper.
- That's copper? - Congratulations.
- So we've found - You have found copper.
- You've struck it rich.
- First time lucky.
- That's absolutely fine.
Now, find me a few tons of that, and we're laughing! - There's quite a bit there.
Look at that.
- Got a magnifying glass? Yeah! After a day at the spoil heap, Alex and Peter need to know whether what they're recovering is of decent quality.
- Ah, good morning, come on in.
- Hello, Mr Chilvers.
Its value depends on assessing how much copper it contains, a job that falls to the Quay's assayer, John Chilvers.
- So that's the bit that we want to test.
- Oh, right.
So what we need to do is what is known as assay this.
Right.
The whole process in here is to try and extract the copper from the copper ore, to see what percentage of copper we can get from it, then we know just how good the ore is itself.
Right.
Assaying was a crucial job, as it determined the percentage of copper in the ore.
If it contained less than 5%, it wasn't worth bothering with.
First John weighs out exactly 20 grams of crushed ore.
To that we've got to add chemicals which are known as fluxes.
Just the same way as you have flux when you're soldering, which allows the metal to run, we have these chemicals to do exactly the same, to allow the metals to separate out from the rock.
Right.
We can now place the crucible into the furnace.
Then we need to put the lid back on the top.
We can get the draw of air underneath the furnace there It's gonna go, whoosh! to get it up to temperature, because we need it above 1,000 degrees.
Woah! At this temperature, the copper melts, allowing it to flow out of the rock.
Check that we've got it nice and hot now.
Now.
And now I can touch it.
What you can see now is I've got this big lump of stuff here, which is called slag.
- I can throw that away.
- Right.
OK.
I can then measure my small bead of copper, which is now very, very tiny.
The 20 grams of ore contains just one gram of copper.
- That would be one-twentieth.
- 5%.
Which is 5%.
So, and that would be the grade of the copper ore.
And because there then was a standard price for copper ore, then I would sell it on the basis of 5%.
By the Edwardian age, the new electrical industry was demanding more and more copper for wiring.
Most of this was imported, but scavenging spoil heaps for copper ore was still a worthwhile, if exhausting, sideline.
Pub? - Pub.
- Pub.
It's late February.
Alex has repaired the ploughshare and finally finished ploughing the field back to bare earth.
But before he can sow the cereal crop, there's one more job to do - harrowing, to prepare the soil's tilth.
The tilth is essentially the pliability, the crumbliness of the soil, so that you can sow into it.
If you get it too shallow, you'll have the birds in there, all sorts of creatures will get into it and it'll weather away, the wind will blow the top off.
If you get it too deep, the seeds won't germinate and they won't come through.
This crop is crucial to their success.
So they've called on local expertise.
Mr Francis Mudge's family have grown crops here in Devon for generations.
Massive relief to have Mr Mudge here to give us a few pointers, and hopefully we'll get the horses going in a straight line, get the crop drilled into the ground.
- What do you think? - Yeah, it's looking all right, isn't it? You've got a fair tilth here.
If you can't bury your toe in it, it's not that good tilth, and the corn wouldn't be buried then, it would be on top.
But you've got a good tilth here.
OK.
With Mr Mudge's seal of approval, it's time to sow the crop.
In Edwardian Britain, wheat was no longer profitable because of cheap foreign imports.
So they grew other cereals instead.
Mr Mudge recommends a favourite among Devon's Edwardian farmers - oats.
Everything was done by horse.
There wasn't no tractors back in those days, or very little.
So they they grew oats as a main crop to feed their horses on.
So they're the fuel that is powering the horses which are really your form of transport and machinery of the day.
Oats was the main crop for that reason, really.
Keep your horses going.
Cos they done all the hard work, they did.
The oats will be sown using a state-of-the-art Edwardian seed drill.
I feel like the Ben-Hur of the agricultural world.
Go.
Just keeping my eye on all of the coulters, to make sure that all of these are in working order, and that they're all dropping seed.
All good, all fairly regular, all working.
That's fantastic.
By the Edwardian period, the bottom had truly dropped out of the market for wheat to make bread and for the home market, wheat was being imported from all over the world.
British farmers just couldn't compete, so they had to turn to another crop that they could make money from, and oats proved the answer.
With an enormous number of horses in the cities and towns, there's a viable marketplace.
Right, out of gear Finally they have their cash crop in the ground.
Down at the mine the precipitation tank has been left to do its work.
But after six weeks has it produced any copper? I can see a future in copper for us, Peter.
I think we might be lucky.
Aha! Ooh, ooh! Wow! - That's rather good, isn't it? - That's very good.
Oh, yeah, yeah, that's like copper, it is copper plating, right in that corner.
Look.
- Isn't that beautiful? - That is.
All this is, er, deposited copper.
- That's amazing, Rick.
That really is amazing.
- I'm exceptionally pleased with this.
- I always had faith in you, Rick.
- Never doubted you.
That's what I like to hear! So we just scrape this off, do we? - You scrape this off.
- Yeah.
And you keep scraping, and scraping, and scraping.
Oh, there it goes.
I'm slightly concerned about the volume of it, though.
I mean, I wasn't expecting huge copper ingots down here but, you know, an Edwardian, is he gonna make a lot of money out of that? Not out of this one piece, but if you multiplied this by sort of 100 to 200 times, and you just keep going back once a month, just scraping the copper off here, you know, it'll soon build up.
Look after the copper pennies and the copper pounds will take care of themselves.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So, Rick, this is gonna bring a few pennies in now.
But where's the real money to be made in mining here in the Edwardian period? You've really got two options.
- One, you can go abroad.
- Right.
If you don't fancy that, there's money to be made on that side of the river, down in Cornwall.
- In Cornwall? - In Cornwall.
Strange place.
Across the river in Cornwall, there was still money to be made from mining.
Not copper, but tin.
Tin was an important metal to the Edwardians, used in the canning of foods, for solder, and as an alloy in pewter, brass and bronze.
But if Alex and Peter are to become tin miners, they'll need the tools of the trade - picks and drills.
Morwellham's blacksmith, Simon Summers, is responsible for maintaining these tools.
Tools would break, get bent.
And the picks would get blunt so quickly.
With so many men working down there, it would be a full-time, full-on job for a blacksmith, just sharpening and hardening.
OK, we're ready there now.
The first job is to sharpen the pick.
Quick clean on the end.
But I'm not gonna forge it any more than that now.
Finish the rest off with a rasp.
The tip of the pick is now sharp.
But it'll be blunt again in no time unless it's hardened, a process that required incredible precision.
We're just gonna put the tip in the fire, cos that's the only bit that we want hot.
I'm gonna quench the tip, just there, and keep that heat up here - that's our reservoir of heat.
Simon cools the tip to monitor the amount of heat that flows back into it.
We're gonna quickly come up onto the anvil, and then we wait for that reservoir of heat that you can see there to travel up.
As the heat travels back to the tip, it changes colour, and the colour tells the blacksmith how hard the metal's going to be.
Those colours have their different uses, and when we're cutting hot steel we look for a blue on the cutting edge.
And when we're cutting wood, say for an axe or a billhook, we're looking for purple on the cutting edge.
And with this pick, that's gonna be used for cutting stone, we're looking for a yellow on the tip.
And now you can see a blue purple coming up down here, but a bright yellow is just heading to the end.
So we just quench it.
Rapidly cooling the tip at the required colour hardens it.
Just see on the tip, we've got our yellow, our bright yellow, and then it comes back into like a bronzy colour.
Now that tip is hardened, ready for mining.
All we need now is a handle.
Miners spent eight hours a day underground, so they'd take a meal with them, in the form of a pasty.
Local ladies Sue, Iris and Julie have come to help Ruth make a batch for the boys.
Not that critical, really, is it, what you put inside a pasty? No, it's more or less what you've got.
You know, or what you can afford, I suppose.
Yeah.
So - Turnip.
- Turnip and onion.
- I'm gonna put the potato in first.
- You are? Yeah.
You chip it.
You don't dice it.
It must be chipped.
Chipped.
- You know what you mean by chipped? - Yes.
You don't? - It's sliced, a form of slicing.
- Yeah.
- In small pieces.
- Very small.
Yeah, and then it just cooks better.
Yeah.
- Cooks at the same time as everything else.
- Yeah.
And then we're onto our beef skirt.
Quite a lot of food in one pasty.
Now I can see why you say a complete meal.
Bit of seasoning.
Then it's over and crimp.
So - Turn.
- Turn, like a triangle.
- Yeah.
- Flatten this as you go.
Oh, I see.
- And this is the bit you call the crimp? - That's right, that's the crimp.
- And then - Looks lovely.
That looks really nice.
And, of course, when they finished the pasty, they used to throw the pastry away.
- Just throw it - The last bits they were holding? Once they've finished eating it, they'd throw it to the knockers.
What the heck are knockers? In my world, knockers are something a woman has! - They're little - Little folks.
Little folk that lived down the mines.
You had to keep them happy.
- Really? - Yes.
- People really believed it? - Yes.
- Yeah, they did.
- Yeah.
- They were very superstitious back then.
- Yes.
- Very superstitious.
- So they would throw them the Fabulous.
Right, well, let's get sorted.
We've got 30 more to make.
- Hello, Peter.
- Hi, Simon.
How are you? I'm all right, thank you very much, yeah.
So this looks unrecognisable as the tool I gave you.
Well, it's been serviced, basically.
You know, like, we've given it a really good clean up.
- And you've sharpened our drill bit as well? - Yeah.
Tom, would you like to bring the drill bit over? There, what we've done here is we've hardened the end.
You can see that yellow straw colour, right on the tip there, for cutting stones.
Hit it, twist it.
Tough work.
- Yeah.
Well, good luck with that.
- Thank you very much.
Are you gonna be carrying these on your own? Yeah, basically I got to pick up the tools, cos they're heavy, and Alex got to pick up the pasties.
Cos if I picked up the pasties, I might have eaten them on the way home.
- Cheerio, then.
- See you later.
There's a real hive of industry in here, Ruth.
- Look good, don't they? - Go on.
Straight in.
One hot pasty.
- Oh, and by the way - Yeah? Send your crusts down to the knockers.
My crusts down to the knockers? Should I be asking what that means? Don't eat the crust.
You must always throw them to the knockers down the mine, to keep the little people happy.
Right, the knockers.
Have you lot been drinking? Equipped with tools and pasties, it's time for the miners to cross the river into Cornwall.
Hello, chaps, how are you? All right? Good to see you, Joshua.
- How are you? - Very good.
They're being taken across by their old friend, Joshua Preston.
So what's it been like up here? Cos I haven't seen you lads for two or three months, I don't think.
- Well, it's been cold, wet and miserable.
- Yeah, it's been a harsh winter so far.
But if you're going underground, of course, you'll be nice and snug there.
These old boys will tell you.
It's nice and warm.
If not, we'll soon get you warm! - Right.
- Swing a pick or two! - So you've got some work lined up for us? - Oh, yeah.
All along the river, there's evidence of the valley's industrial heritage.
It's amazing.
A sort of lost industrial landscape, isn't it? In the Edwardian era, these lime kilns would have worked around the clock.
Now they're eerily deserted.
- Right.
- Wonderful.
- There you go, lads.
- Picks.
- Drill.
Carbide lamps.
- Thank you very much.
Boys, all the best.
Fred and I can get back to a little bit of salmon netting now.
- See if we can earn a little bob or two.
- Thank you very much.
- And away you go.
- Lead on, Rick.
- Lead on.
- Onward.
- Welcome to Cornwall, Peter.
- Yeah, I'm scared.
It's a terrifying place, it really is.
Rick's brought them to the King Edward Mine in Camborne, Cornwall virtually unchanged for over a century.
This plant, equipped with the latest in Edwardian technology, once extracted the metal from tin ore.
First, though, they must head deep underground, to mine the ore and learn the lost skills of the Edwardian miner.
The techniques we're gonna be using now are classic sort of 19th-century techniques.
Hand drilling, candles.
I think it's important that you guys try it.
- Yeah.
- Just to know sort of how hard it actually was.
Are you gonna use your lovely new picks to - Yeah.
make our hole? Where shall we go? Where looks good? Here? Edwardians used dynamite to blast the tin ore from the rock, but first holes had to be drilled to put the charges in - by hand.
What sort of speed are we looking for? Well, if you can put in about a three-foot hole in a couple of hours - (Laughs) I'll be impressed.
- Three foot.
- Right, OK.
Having said that, these guys were doing this competitively as well.
You know, at weekends, they might competitively drill.
And the record stands at about 13 minutes for six inches.
13 minutes for six inches? And that's in granite.
Which is harder than this.
So they'd spend six days a week working at it, and then Sunday - Exactly.
- Let's have a competition, guys! Right, Phil and I are off.
We'll see you later.
- See you later.
- OK, then, chaps.
So if I'm gonna go in there Missed it completely! Just pulled up short of your shoulder blade, Peter.
That's the reason I look this way, cos I'm just oblivious! OK, where are we at, then, Peter? Well, where I think we started making initial progress now we're getting there, but at a slightly slower rate.
Just think about the enormity of the hillsides around here.
- Yeah.
- Just the size of the hills.
The size of the cave we're in and the size of the hole we've just made in the time.
Life is not easy down the mine.
- No, I think we've learned one thing.
- Never grumble about farming again! Yeah! - Because we've actually made - Let's go for it.
Three.
Oh.
While the boys are mining, Ruth's going to try her hand at another of Devon's lost Edwardian industries - lace-making.
- Hello, Ruth.
- Hello.
- Do come in.
- Thank you very much.
Pat Perryman has been making Honiton lace for over 40 years.
You'd have a group of people - maybe together but sometimes in their own homes, of course - and one lady would make all the leaves, one would make all the certain flowers, but the more experienced ladies would collect together the pieces and they would do the assembly and join them together.
The Devon town of Honiton is world-famous for its intricate, delicate and beautiful lace.
Once half the inhabitants of East Devon were lace makers.
You have a nice bit of tension on this bobbin, and But its complexity made it incredibly labour-intensive.
You're talking nine to ten hours for a square inch.
- Taking the easy with the harder stitches.
- Really? So a cuff like that, which isn't a big thing, that's just one cuff on a blouse One, two, three ten, 11, 12, 13 - What, 200? 250 hours? - Yeah.
Gracious, I mean that is meant to be one cuff on a blouse, isn't it? So, I mean, I don't know, if you charged £10 an hour That's right.
- £2,000.
£2,500 for one cuff.
- I know.
But the husbands of the day, of course, bought their wives a lace instead of jewellery.
So the posher your lace, the more wealthy you were.
In the Edwardian age, every young girl in the Devon village of Honiton would have been taught the art of lace-making.
- You take this pair and the next pair.
- So it goes back over one - Yes.
- And those two over there.
Move that pair fractionally out of your way to remind you.
This craft goes back to the 16th century.
It involves weaving thread wound onto bobbins around pins pushed into a template.
Always right bobbin over left.
Never any different.
One, two, three.
I often say if you can count to three, you can do it.
Now you're gonna make what we call your edge stitch.
I'll show you for the very first time.
You'll be able to do it.
One.
Two.
Three.
You say this pair stays behind.
And this pair is going to travel back to the other side.
Don't turn your pillow.
Number two goes first.
It's a lifetime's work, really! It's becoming clear that this isn't a craft learned in an afternoon.
They would sit for eight to 12 hours a day.
Yeah, well you hear of lace schools, with tiny little children.
Yeah, five years old.
Eight in the morning till eight at night.
When the Education Act came in, in 1870, the government said all children must go to school.
But in Honiton it didn't happen till 1903.
- Really? - So Honiton defied This industry actually held up children's education all those years? - Yes.
- Prevented children getting schooling.
Because the parents said, "My Mary must make lace.
We can't afford for her to go to school.
" But in 1903, Devon county stepped in.
And it was a half a day.
It was a compromise.
Children did the three hours in the morning and lace in the afternoon.
And then in about 1960 it was an after-school activity.
So it was within the school day up until 1960.
- Until 1960? - I know we're out of our time, yeah.
- I am really quite shocked by that.
- Yeah.
So I'm watching you.
Cos you won't earn your money if you're - I'll never earn any money at this rate.
if you're not practising.
- Are you there yet? - Nowhere near.
- Pretty exhausted, to be honest.
- I'm tired.
Well, fortunately help's at hand.
During the Edwardian period you got increased mechanisation in mining.
So, for example, this is a compressed air rock drill.
- Right.
- So this does what you're doing - Yeah.
using compressed air.
The compressed air rock drill was a British invention that came into its own in the Edwardian age.
A steam engine outside the mine compresses the air, which is then carried in pipes down to the rock face.
In theory, this should have made life easier for the Edwardian miner.
In practice, there was a downside.
Pre-First World War, none of these drills had any form of dust suppression.
Right.
So you're gonna end up breathing in a lot of dust.
OK.
So if you're drilling into material like quartz and things like that, you're gonna have a very, very short lifespan.
They earned themselves a really gruesome nickname.
What? These early, unsuppressed drills were known as widowmakers.
- So we're working with the widowmaker.
- We are working with the widowmaker.
Erm, there, that's it.
Yeah.
Are you ready? Ready? This is the most nervous I have been for anything we've ever done.
I'm the one with my hands on the drill bit here! OK.
- (Air hisses) - Air coming in.
This drills deeper in a minute than a hand drill can in an hour.
- There you have it, gentlemen.
- Bring back hand drilling.
This kept mining going into the Edwardian period.
Right.
People were able to open up ore deposits a lot faster and were also able to exploit them faster.
So this is basically the saviour of west of England mining.
Right.
Phew! - Do you know what to do next? - I've lost it completely! - A pairing and a twist three.
- Oh, right.
Yeah.
OK.
Back at Morwellham, things are not going well for Ruth.
There's so many things about this I find really quite sort of This is why it's a long-term learning process.
I think you might need to come at least once a week for about a year.
- That's how long it takes? - To learn your basic basics.
- Oh, God! - Yeah, I know.
So there's no chance for me as an Edwardian adult, with all these other sort of With four or five children and a husband, and There's no way you could take up lace-making and make some pin money.
No.
I don't think this is the cottage industry I should be relying on to pay the rent! Maybe just for relaxation! By the Edwardian period, cottage industries like lace-making were dying out, leaving many women with no income of their own.
Expensive, hand-made lace just couldn't compete with the cheap factory-made variety.
But Ruth's discovered another way Edwardians made money from the Honiton lace industry.
It was apparently extremely common to send your lace out to specialist cleaners.
And many of these were just women in their own homes who were just known to be good at it.
Oh, gosh.
Gosh, I've been trusted with a really great piece here.
Honiton lace is extremely delicate, and if washed loose in water, it would distort and be ruined.
Now I'm just gonna drop that in nice and flat and I want that to soak.
So lace cleaners would carefully wrap it into a linen parcel.
Eww! There is a bit of a greyness in the water, so I obviously am shifting something.
Now the lace must be dried.
Looks like the parcel business worked.
Look how nice and flat and well looked after it is.
The reason for this process was to sort of set it back into a perfect shape, so that when it comes off here, it will hold absolutely pristine.
This may seem like a huge amount of work to wash something.
But I've been counting these motifs and working it out.
If one person did it, this is over a year's worth of work in this piece of lace.
Over a year.
So if you think about that in modern wages.
Jeepers! I am so scared of getting this wrong! If I damage this.
Gosh.
All right, let's lower her off.
Down in the tin mine the holes are drilled.
Rick's demonstrating how Edwardians would have blasted the rock from the face using dynamite.
The first thing we need is a couple of feet of fuse.
If you cut me a two foot length of that.
Now, this is what the Edwardians would have called safety fuse.
- Right.
- And that gives you a timed burn.
Right.
So in a minute, that stuff should burn about two feet.
So that'll give us a minute to get out of here.
- A minute? Is that it? - That's plenty of time.
Right, next thing to do is crimp on a detonator.
This detonator contains an explosive called fulminative mercury.
- Sorry, what was it called? - Fulminative mercury.
Fulminative mercury.
I hope you're taking notes here, Peter.
And next stage is the dynamite itself.
Put that charge into that hole like that.
Now push that down to the bottom of the shot hole.
Yeah.
Right.
What we need now is some clay.
- Er, plenty of that.
- There's some on my hat.
This basically stops the charges blowing out.
To get the explosion sort of to go into the rock, we need to block up the hole.
Ready for firing.
- I suggest you guys make yourself scarce.
- Right, we will do.
It was nice knowing you.
Firing! (Explosion) The miners have earned themselves a spot of lunch.
This is a nice comfy spot, Rick? Legend has it that the crust was used as a handle to protect the pasty from dirty hands.
But Rick's having none of it.
The best way to do it is just get a bag, or a rag or something, and just wrap it round it.
Keeps it nice and clean.
And you can eat the whole thing quite happily.
And there's none of this nonsense about throwing your crusts away.
So no throwing the crusts to the er knockers, then.
Ooh, no.
Ooh, no.
Too good to waste.
Right, chaps, I think it's back to work for us.
The team are taking their blasted rock to the King Edward Mine's processing plant to extract the tin.
First it's assessed to see how much tin it contains.
It's a job for the assayer, Tony Clarke.
- I can see you're enjoying that, Peter! - Yeah, very much so.
As the assayer, everyone's looking at you to be as fair as possible in determining the tin content of this.
That's right, because the tin content of this determines how much you get paid for the amount of ore that you've brought up.
- Did the guy who did this job diddle the miners? - No.
Well, put it this way, the bias was always slightly in favour of the management.
Yes.
And are you paid by the management? I am.
- Right, OK.
- (They chuckle) To assess the powdered rock, Tony uses water any a vanning shovel.
We now manipulate it and throw the heavy tin ore up the shovel.
The heavier particles respond more.
- Right.
- So they go further up the shovel.
Yeah? You see it move up there? That's the tin in your ore.
There's plenty in there.
It's well worth treating.
But don't forget that you would have had to pay for your candles.
- Yeah.
- Blasting powder.
All costs, prior to stamping, you're responsible for.
Right.
We could actually find ourselves in debt.
You could, actually.
Yeah.
Tony's analysis shows that their rock contains 3% tin, enough to make extracting the metal worthwhile.
So the team are delivering their consignment to plant manager Nigel McDonald for processing.
- Hello there.
- I'm Alex.
- How do you do, Alex? - I'm Peter.
Breaking up the rock was a laborious job done by women, known as bal maidens.
At the turn of the 19th century, we would have had probably 20 to 30 bal maidens working on this cobbing floor behind us.
- So all around here.
- All around here.
They would break up the large rocks in order to be able to feed them to the processing plant.
And hand sorting all of the good material from the bad.
Once it's been broken up, machinery takes care of the rest.
Heavy stamps turn the rock into powder which is then filtered, allowing the tin granules to be separated, using this shaking table.
The King Edward Mine once processed thousands of tons of rock a year.
Now it's the only surviving example of an Edwardian processing plant.
Ruth's come to see the machines that replaced many local workers.
This is, you know, quite obviously a really modern machine for, say, 1905.
- This is absolutely the cutting edge, isn't it? - Yes, that's right.
So how many people is this replacing? This is probably replacing four or five people.
Five jobs gone.
You're a fab machine but that's a lot of money not coming into families, isn't it? Exactly.
And those people would probably have been women? - Young women, mostly.
- Young women and boys.
- Bal maidens.
- Yeah, they would have been the bal maidens, who would be mothers and daughters of the miners who were underground, and the young boys, before they were old enough to actually go underground.
They probably wouldn't go underground much before the ages of 11, 12.
It's completely changing the whole work ethic of the mining industry.
- And the whole social sort of - The social structure that goes around that.
The process is complete.
The miners came into the factory with rock containing 3% tin, but what have they produced? So what percentage is that now? Probably about sort of 60% to 65%.
And you can see it's rather reluctant to move around in the water, which indicates that it's quite heavy and quite good grade, which can be smelted to produce the tin metal.
- Yeah? - So that's what all the work's been worth.
Tin mining was still big business in Cornwall well into the 20th century.
The last mine closed in 1998.
After a hard day's work, there's a chance to reflect.
Thank you.
Bearing in mind that you are trainees, Phil and I are taking most of what we earned.
Which isn't much! It's almost as lucrative as lace making! I think we'll stick to the farming.
But you've got to bear in mind, this was an industry that was dying.
So if you guys wanted to make a living out of it, you'd probably have to supplement it, say, with your faming.
- Yeah.
- Or go abroad.
That's your options basically? So you're getting huge groups of Cornish miners going to all the four corners of the earth.
The skills that built all these New World mining camps - South Australia, North America and South Africa - that came from Cornwall, and it was a saying, the definition of a mine is a hole in the ground with a Cornishman at the bottom of it.
- And that's not far from the truth.
- Mining has been absolutely fascinating.
I didn't realise there was so much history concealed under these hills.
- Yeah.
It's been a real adventure for us.
- Excellent.
So here's to mines and miners.
Cheers.
Oh the farmers work around the fields, their legs tied up with hay And the miners they work underground, and never miss a day Oh a mining we will go, boys, a mining we will go With picks and shovels in our hands, a mining we will go And we all work out with Lizzie, and when the bower's nagged We all live in the engine house and make the best of that Oh, a mining we will go, boys, a mining we will go With picks and shovels in our hands, a mining we will go Oh, yeah!