William Trewin: 'Rhoda Mountjoy is my niece. She has been staying with me on a visit for about three weeks

River outing's on the Tamar received the royal seal of approval in the summer of 1856, following the end of the Crimean War, when Queen Victoria, her husband and children travelled on the streamer Gipsy from Plymouth to Morwellham, on their way to the Duke of Bedford's home at Endsleigh. No doubt some of the Honeycombes, if not working in the mines, were among the crowds who went to view and cheer their arrival. More than likely some of the Honeycombe girls, brought up as Wesleyans, were among the 200 'connected with the Gunnislake Wesleyan Chapel' who went on a river excursion to Plymouth that September - if they could afford the costs of the return trip: one shilling.

Bands often entertained the passengers on ship and shore, and there was dancing. 'Tea, fruit, cream, hot water and every kind of refreshment' were also generally provided. But toilet facilities were few, if they existed at all - a major problem when, as used to happen, a procession of five small steamers would deposit a thousand people on Calstock's quays in a day.

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In May 1854, a medical officer's report painted 'a picture of filthiness such as would scarcely be equalled in the rude hamlets of savage life'.

At the time of the Census of 1861, nothing had changed. It was not until the 1870s that Calstock's image and atmosphere were cleaned up and cottage tea-rooms flourished. Turner's idyll and that of the high summer of Victorian England met and emerged.

In 1861 Abraham Lincoln became President of the United States and the Civil War, began, when 11 states broke away to form the Southern Confederacy. Elsewhere, Victor Emmanuel was proclaimed King of Italy, and in Russia there occurred the emancipation of the serfs. In England, on 14 December, Prince Albert died in Windsor Castle of typhoid; he was 42.

In Calstock in 1861, the status of Ann Williams, ex-nurse and widow, had advanced; her occupation was now given as 'Proprietor of Houses'. There is no listing in this Census of William Honeycombe's second daughter, Mary Jane Ennor, nor of her husband John. By then they had emigrated to Australia. Nor is there any mention of Elizabeth Glasson's husband, Charles. However, it is more than probable that he had also emigrated, leaving his wife and two children (Charles, aged 11 ,and Mary, aged 9) in a cottage in Middle Dimson, next door to Elizabeth's father and mother, Will and Anne Honeycombe.

Will was 63 in 1861 and still working as a copper miner. His six surviving children were also employed in the mines, the five girls as copper dressers and young Samuel (14 in July that year) as a miner. The question is; where?

The Gunnislake Mine, the first of many to be tunnelled out of the Tamar Valley, had been wound down in 1842 and major pieces of machinery sold. Sunk to some 50 fathoms (300 feet) and drained by a single adit driven in from the river bank, it had produced ores during the Napoleonic wars that fetched almost £30 a ton, three times the average for copper ore at that time. It was restarted in 1865 but was abandoned within eight years. A few miles to the west was Gunnislake Clitters, begun about 1820, primarily by the Fox family of Falmouth. A much deeper mine, drained by an adit to 500 feet and then pumped out by a large water-wheel which was replaced by a 40-inch steam engine by

1864, its output increased, despite a county-wide depression. 80 people were employed there in 1870.

A few miles north of Gunnislake, in a tight bend of the river, lay the Hawkmoor Mine, whose first shaft was sunk in 1844. By 1859, the venture was only a modest success, employing 81 people, and in 1867, with copper ore prices falling fast, the company abandoned the lease and the three water-wheels operating there were sold, along with other equipment. As miners, and indeed all labouring classes, invariably lived close to their place of work, it is likely that the Honeycombes in the 1860s earned their daily bread in the mines at Gunnislake Clitters or Hawkmoor, although there were several others in the neighbourhood, like Drakewalls and Calstock Consols.

There was a family connection with Hawkmoor. Hannah Honeycombe, William's eldest sister (born in 1794) had married James Richards in 1804, when she was not yet 15. A copper miner, in due course he became manager of the Hawkmoor Mine. Perhaps he was instrumental in Hannah's younger brothers, William and John, obtaining employment there.

The Honeycombes may, however, have worked not in Cornwall but across the river in Devon, in the conglomerate of mines known as Devon Great Consols, hailed at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 as Europe's largest and richest copper mine.

The first shaft that was dug out in 1844 struck the back of a huge copper lode, 40 feet thick in places, running eastwards for almost several miles. As many major mines were opened up above it, and by 1850 over 1000 people were employed in them: 569 at the surface and 455 underground. By then, nearly 90,000 tons of copper from the mines had been sold, which brought the company a profit (after all expenses had been paid) of £300,000 and provided the Duke of Bedford, who owned the land, with some £44,000 in royalties.

The Duke was persuaded by the company to build cottages for some of the workforce at Wheal Josiah and Wheal Maria, as well as at Morwellham, on whose quays on the Devon side of the Tamar tons of copper ore were weighed and sampled.

But, according to Frank Booker: 'A great number of the miners made their homes in and around Gunnislake or Latchley... In 1862 a school for the miners' children was established by the company with 100 pupils in attendance, and about the same time a brass band was formed among the miners'. So was a choir.

Two years later the workforce numbered 1,250, of whom 10 were surface agents, 10 underground captains, 450 men and boys underground, while 136 men, 168 boys and 217 women and girls worked on the dressing floors; there were also 259 carpenters, sawyers, smiths, masons, engineers and labourers. Devon Great Consols covered an area of 140 thickly wooded acres. The miles of shafts and levels underground added up to 45 miles.

The girls employed on the surface were known as bal-maidens, whose task it was to break the ore into small pieces with long-handled hammers. It was rough work but not as damaging to the health as many other industrial

occupations of the time. At Devon Great Consols the girls sang hymns as they worked, and created a good impression on visitors. At other mines bal-maidens had a reputation for bad language and blasphemy.

A visit to a mine was described in The West Briton of 28 March 1862. 'The busy scene... is one of great interest. On the outskirts may perhaps be seen a great number of fine healthy children (boys and girls) of tender years, engaged at the buddle pits, or in jigging, screening, picking and dressing the ore; a little further on may be seen a number of stout girls and women, occupied in cobbing, breaking and assorting the ores; and here and there corps of men going to, or returning from, the shafts and adits. In the centre of this hive of industry is the account-house, replete with comfort and convenience for the mine agents, clerks and other officials... On quitting the account-house and visiting the changing -house of the working miner, how chilling is the contrast...'

Nonetheless, any disputes and walk-outs in the mines were over pay and hours, not working conditions. The average wage at Devon Great Consols was about 14 shillings a week. Bal-maidens received between a shilling and 1/3d a day.

Children got less; some were no more than eight years old and had, like their parents, to walk four or five miles to work and back again every day. On dark winter evenings they trooped along the hilly roads, holding candle-lit lanterns to light their way.

The West Briton of 1 May 1863 recorded 13 fatal accidents the previous week, nine in a runaway skip or truck that hurtled for 200 yards down a diagonal shaft to a dead-end.

Two months later the Honeycombes of St Cleer were struck by a mining tragedy. John Trebilcock had married Eliza Honeycombe, fifth daughter of John and Anne (he was a carpenter in St Clear), in February 1856 at the Tavistock Register Office. Both were 19. At the time she was a domestic servant. They moved to Chilsworthy near Calstock , and on 23 July 1863, John was killed when he fell down a mine shaft.

A John Honeycombe died in a mining accident eight years later. Again, he was one of the Honeycombes of St Cleer and worked in a nearby copper mine. Aged 24 he was killed in an underground explosion in September 1871 -three weeks after his marriage to a milliner, Emily Harry, in Liskeard.

The mines were no less fatal to some villagers. The open unguarded shafts of old workings, were a continuing cause of death to unwary women and children and drunken men. Over the years no less than 18 people were known to have fallen down a particular shaft near a pub in Gwennap. Recording this,

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On 8 January 1863, Anne Honeycombe died of dropsy at her home in Dimson; she was 57.

A few months earlier, in November 1862, her brother-in-law, John Honeycombe, had died of phthisis, a miners' disease that destroyed their lungs; he was 59.

John, a copper miner and Will's younger brother, had married Mary Ann Sanders at a register office in Plymouth in September 1845, when he was 43. At the time she was 25, and he was a labourer, living at 31 William St, Stoke Damarel. In the 1841 Census, John is shown as living with his sister Hannah, wife of James Richards, and their daughter; Hannah.

John and Mary Ann had three children: John, who was born in Calstock in October 1846 and died of convulsions a month later; and Caroline, born at Gunnisiake in March 1848. But the marriage seems to have been an unhappy one. For in the Census of 1851 John is once again living with the Richards family, not with his sister, but with his sister's unmarried daughter and her three children, while Mary Ann is living with her parents (who ran the Cornish Inn at Gunnisiake) and her three-year-old daughter, Caroline. Although Caroline bears the surname Honeycombe, Mary Ann has reverted to her maiden name, Sanders.

It is possible that the marriage broke up because of John's previous and continuing association with his sister's daughter, Hannah Richards, and that her three illegitimate children were his. The blood relationship would have prevented them from marrying, if not from cohabiting. Hannah, aged 39 in 1851 and described as a charwomen, was just nine years younger than her uncle, John.

No mention is made of either Hannah or Mary Ann or their children in the 1861 Census, although John Honeycombe is still in Gunnisiake, lodging with another family. What happened to Hannah and her children, to Mary Ann and Caroline Honeycombe? We do not know for sure. But it is possible that Mary Ann's association with another male Honeycombe was renewed.

Remember that two years earlier Will and Anne and six of their children (Ann, Hannah, Eliza, Louisa, Samuel and Harriet) were all living in Middle Dimson, next door to Elizabeth Glasson, Will's eldest daughter, and her two children. William, the Honeycombes' eldest son - he would have been 27 then -is not named. In fact, were it not for the Census of 1841 and 1851, we would have no knowledge of his existence. For no record of his birth, marriage or death has been found. He appears in the Census of 1841 (aged eight) and disappears after his listing (aged 17, and a mine labourer) in the Census ten years later.

But in April 1890, a Mary Ann Honeycombe dies in Totnes in Devon, at Turnpike Lane Cottage, aged 70. Her death certificate describes her as the widow of a William Honeycombe. Which William? Evidently this Mary Ann had

a daughter, for in 1919 a Mary Honeycombe, a servant, born about 1864, dies in the Totnes workhouse. Which William was her father? The candidates are few. Probably it was William the younger, copper miner, born about 1834, who is only recorded in two of the Censuses for Calstock.

This William was 20 when Mary was born; but Mary Ann was 34. The question here is: Was she the Mary Ann Sanders, who married John Honeycombe in 1845 and left him after the birth of her daughter, Caroline, in 1848? Did she then take up with John's nephew, William, and produce his child in 1854? Did she actually marry him? Or do we have another Mary Ann?

There are no answers to these tantalising questions. We do not know whether William the younger fathered any child or married any Mary Ann. After 1851 he disappears. Did he go to Australia, like four of his sisters and his young brother, Samuel? Or to America before the Civil War began? Or was he somehow involved in the Crimean War that began the year of Mary's birth?

In the Census of 1871, there are only three Honeycombes living in Calstock at 25 Lower Drive - Will Honeycombe, miner, a widower aged 73, and two of his daughters: Hannah, unmarried, aged 31 and Harriet, likewise, aged 21. Hannah was in fact 32 in 1871 and Harriet 22.

Harriet married in September that year, in Tavistock. Her husband was a mason, Joshua Welch. Will died of 'natural decay1 at Dimson in Calstock in November 1874; he was 76. A Mary Ann Martin was present at his death. Another Mary Ann? And where was Hannah? Gone, it seems, like all his children.

Gone also were thousands of Cornish men and women, driven out by the slow demise of the mining industry. Rising production costs as mines went deeper, the deterioration and drying up of once rich copper bodes, and competition from newer richer mines in Chile, Michigan, and Australia, all led to the curtailment and closure of Cornish mines, and such an exodus, of miners and other skilled worker, that had not been seen in Britain since the Potato Famine in Ireland.

The West Briton reported in May 1867 that over 7,000 miners had left the county the previous year: among them 1,600 to America; 670 to New Zealand and Australia; and over 1,000 to other mines in Scotland and the North of England. Some 1,200 left the Liskeard and Callington districts.

In May 1871 the paper noted: 'The tide of emigration has again set in in the mining districts. Young men of every class are preparing to join their brethren in America or elsewhere'. It blamed 'the low rate of wages' and 'the reduction of hands continually taking place' and concluded: There appears to be a general feeling of depression among the labouring class - a longing to be off somewhere, anywhere'. The 48 shillings a month that might be earned in West Cornwall was 48 a week in the factories of northern England, and thither 2,750 people removed themselves from the Redruth and Gwennap districts between 1868 and 1871. Others ventured overseas. In 1872, 200 miners and their families left the West en route for Brisbane. Whatever the destination, trainloads of Cornwall's boldest and best departed monthly from town and

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It was not until November 1901 that all work ceased in the mines; and within a few years the biggest copper mine in Europe had all but vanished from the map: its buildings demolished, its shafts filled in, its railway dismantled, its multifarious equipment, including 11 water-wheels, 10 steam-engines, 60 wagons, miles of flat-rods, pipes and other machinery were all sold, much of it as scrap, which locals claimed was bought by Germans and turned into guns and shells used in the First World War. The Duke of Bedford's woods grew thick and tall over the ruinous ground pitted with hollows, and were silent again after 55 years, except when a ducal pheasant drive disturbed their whispering shade.

Will Honeycombe had witnessed the rise and fall of the mining industry, the dawn of Empire, of the age of steam and its wondrous inventions, and the depopulation and decay of his homeland. The Cornwall he had known in his youth was another world, ancient, rural. When he died it was turning towards this modern age, sliding into torpor and tourism.

Old Will was the last of all the male Honeycombes to die in the parish of Calstock. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Calstock Churchyard, two miles from the house that bore his name, and within yards of a church window that would one day serve as a memorial to the owner of that house, never to him and his.

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Ifl 0. Samuel and his Sisters

Who was the first of this family to go there?

Was it Will's second daughter, Mary Jane, who had married John Michael Stephen Ennor, in Plymouth St Andrews in November 1850? They were both 23 then; he was a labourer; she made a mark; both their fathers were said to be labourers.

In the Census made the following year both are living at Lower Dimson, near Calstook, and John is now described as a copper miner, as is his father James Ennor, a widower aged 62. He was living at Collycliff with an unmarried son, William Ennor, a small farmer (10 acres) aged 27, and a widowed daughter, Fanny, aged 25, who had apparently reverted to her maiden name. Both Fanny and William were born in Tavistock. So was their younger brother, John MS Ennor.

It seems that he and his father, James - both labourers late in 1850 but copper miners in 1851 - had newly become copper miners, and that this had brought John and Mary Jane Ennor back to Calstock, to lodge within 400 yards of her family at Middle Dimson.
Her father, Will Honeycombe, and two of his children, William and Ann, were mine labourers in 1851, and most probably the Honeycombes and the Ennors all worked across the river in the mines run by Devon Great Consols, which in 1850, six years after the first shaft was sunk, were employing a workforce of over a thousand.

Of the other mines operating in the area at the time, one had temporarily closed (Gunnislake Mine); another, the Hawkmoor, employed 30 men, and a third, Gunnislake Clitters, about 100, as did another mine across the river, Bedford United, where work had restarted in 1841. Hawkmoor and Devon Great Consols had both been opened up three years later. But at the latter production had forged ahead, making Devon Great Consols the biggest employer in the area, a position the company held for over 50 years.

In the next Census for Calstock, made in 1861, no Ennors are recorded. Mary Jane and John have gone. But the Honeycombes, bar one, are still at Middle Dimson, and all of them - father, mother, five daughters and a son, Samuel, are working in or at a copper mine.

The eldest son, William, is not now on the list. By this time he would have been 27. As there is no record of his marriage, anywhere in England or at any time, it seems that he not only left the district but went abroad. Perhaps he emigrated, to America or Australia. Or joined the army or navy and became involved in the Crimean War (1854-55) and died overseas. We also have no record of his death. Nor do we have any record of his birth. Were it not for the

two references in the Censuses of 1841 and 1851, we would not know of his existence. But after 1851 he disappears.

Although the Ennors are also missing frorq the 1861 Census for Calstock, we know they were there two years later. For in Anne Honeycombe's death certificate for January 1863 the informant is given as 'JMS Ennor, Present at Death, New Bridge, Calstock'. His wife, Mary Jane; was still with him. We can be sure of that, as they both appear next in Australia, in 1867. In February of that year, as we shall see, Mary Jane and John MS Ennor were witnesses at the wedding of one of her younger sisters at Clunes in Victoria.

So they must have emigrated some time after January 1863 (when John provided the details of his mother-in-law's demise), and at least three months before they attend the wedding, ie, before November 1866. Shipping lists may one day provide the exact date.
Was Mary Jane Ennor the first of William's children to emigrate? Perhaps. But she was by no means the last. And she may have made the perilous voyage with a married sister, the eldest of the Honeycombe girls.

This was Elizabeth Hannah, who married Charles Thomas Richard Glasson, a labourer, at Plymouth St Andrews, in September 1846. The fact that she was not yet 19 (and possibly pregnant) may explain the wedding away from home. His father, Richard, was a yeoman. Neither Elizabeth, who made her mark on the marriage certificate, nor Charles, appear in the Calstock Census of 1851. But she does in that of 1861, along with two children. Then aged 33, she is described as married, specifically as a 'copper miner's wife'. She is living in Middle Dimson, next door to her parents, sisters and young bother Samuel. Her son Charles, aged 11, works in a copper mine, and her daughter, Mary aged 9, is a scholar. Where is her husband, Charles?

The ages of her children (11 and 9) and the fact that she had but two, would seem to indicate that after the birth of the daughter, Mary, in 1852 or 53, the father was absent from the scene. He is still absent in 1861. Did he also emigrate? Was it soon after the birth of Mary, his second child? Perhaps in 1853? The Australian gold-rush began in 1851. Was Elizabeth Glasson waiting for her husband to send for her, or for his return? Did she join him sometime in the 1860s? We know that by the time of the 1871 Census she was no longer in Calstock.

The answers to all of these questions is very probably Yes. For a search of the Australian BMD Index in 1989 revealed that Eliza Hannah (not Elizabeth) gave birth to a baby boy at Morrisons in 1864. Three other children followed, the last in 1870. In each case the father was Charles Glasson. Eliza, as we must call her now, clearly rejoined her husband a year or so after 1861, undoubtedly taking her first two children with her and probably travelling with Mary Jane and John Ennor. And if the first child of their reunion was born in Australia in 1864, it would seem highly likely that she arrived there in or before 1863.