Words to Cousin Jack by Show of Hands: https://www.flashlyrics.com/lyrics/show-of-hands/cousin-jack-01 (written in 1999)

This land is barren and broken,
Scarred like the face of the moon
Our tongue no longer spoken
The towns all around face ruin
Will there be work in New Brunswick?
Or will I find gold in the Cape?
If I tunnel way down to Australia
How will I ever escape?
Where there’s a mine or a hole in the ground
That’s what I’m heading for that’s where I’m bound
Look for me under the lode or inside the vein,
Where the copper, the clay, where the arsenic and tin
Run in your blood they get under your skin
I’m leaving the county behind and I’m not coming back
So follow me down Cousin Jack.

The soil was too poor to make Eden,
Granite and sea left no choice
Though visions of heaven sustained us,
When John Wesley gave us a voice
Did Joseph once come to St Michaels Mount?
Two thousand years pass in a dream
When you’re working your way in the darkness,
Deep in the heart of the seam.
Where there’s a mine or a hole in the ground
That’s what I’m heading for that’s where I’m bound
So look for me under the lode or inside the vein,
Where the copper, the clay, where the arsenic and tin
Run in your blood they get under your skin
I’m leaving the county behind and I’m not coming back
So follow me down Cousin Jack.
I dream of a bridge cross the Tamar
It opens us up to the East
In my dreams I see English living in our houses
I see Spanish fishing in our seas

Where there’s a mine or a hole in the ground
That’s what I’m heading for that’s where I’m bound
So look for me under the lode or inside the vein,
Where the copper, the clay, where arsenic and tin
Run in your blood and under your skin
I’m leaving the county behind and I’m not coming back
So follow me down Cousin Jack.

The Cornish were deep level experts, hence in demand all over. My father-in-law’s family moved from Cornwall to work seams that ran under the sea near Newcastle. There’s a wonderful collection of letters sent from all over the world with donations for the miners’ chapel in Truro cathedral. Royal Cornish Institute has them, I think. https://www.royalcornwallmuseum.org.uk/our-collection/courtney-library

There was a group of Chilean Refugees in Birmingham used the band name Caliche in the early 80s. Used to play at one or two of our protest gigs. (Little guilt trip – every tune sounded the same to me but they all appeared to be about a poor peasant boy.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHr94m6Vfu4&feature=youtu.be

There was mining of the caliche – rock ore – which was then crushed, boiled, and dried, to extract the nitrates salts which were then bagged up and (mostly) sold to farmers in UK, Europe and the US. One day I will write a book about it!

The links for the Cornish may well have been through tin mining which was in Bolivia and which expanded massively as Cornwall’s tin was becoming exhausted. There is a good website mapping the Cornish émigrés to South America: https://projects.exeter.ac.uk/cornishlatin/mapsandgraphs.htm

To my surprise they went all over South America including to Chile and Peru.

Cousin Jack by Show of Hands is a great song, catching the feel of the migrant miner. Recruitment into jobs abroad was often through families and Cornish men would address each other as Cousin Jack. One of Cornwall’s most famous sons, Richard Trevithick, took his steam engines to mine silver in Peru in 1816. The Cornish migrants were responsible, in part, for the spread of Methodism to South America and I wonder whether any were Huguenots. https://www.cornwallheritagetrust.org/timeline/industry-in-cornwall/

Thank you Monique. The stout little groom was probably older than he looks to our modern eyes but still child labour. There is another picture of him on Poroto which reminded me of Thelwell’s cartoons of children on horseback, his little legs barely reaching the stirrups which are large wooden bell-like contraptions…as you can see in the picture above.

Yes…conceit is an interesting word…perhaps a horse wasn’t seen as a status symbol, in the same way as the Ford Cortina was to Essex man. But with running costs and maintenance thrown in, then as now, it would be the equivalent of a sizeable chunk of salary – so for a young person – very handy.