Hello to you from Sark on this beautiful August evening inthe Channel Islands.
While on holiday in Sark this week, I stumbled across a book in the local post office: “Silver
Mining On Sark” by David Synnott, which describes an ill-fated mining operation on
the island between 1836 and 1847.
I love this about books. Books are distilled knowledge. And you find these old books sometimes
that contain stuff that has never been uploaded to the internet. And this book's got a wonderful
story to it with a wonderful moral.
“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”, runs the old French saying. Apologies
for my pronunciation. It applies to mining, it seems, as much as anything.
We may not use canaries any more; mines are powered by diesel and electricity, instead
of horse and manpower; helmets have torches instead of candles and there is underground
lighting; and a higher premium is placed on human life than in the early 1800s, when workers
were much more disposable.
But the game is exactly the same: you’re trying to extract metal from rock and sell
it at a higher price than you mine it for.
The tricks of the trade, the scams, are the same too.
So let me tell you the story of Sark’s silver mine.
Sark, by the way, is a tiny island about two miles square, located between Guernsey and
Jersey in the English Channel – much closer to France (25 miles) than England, which is
over 200 miles away.
Remains show the island was inhabited in Neolithic times, but for many periods in the island’s
history there was nobody here at all. Today it has around 500 residents. There are famously
no cars on the islands – only tractors, horses, bikes and mobility scooters – and
no street lights, giving you probably the best view of the night sky in Europe.
It’s famous for its harsh, windswept landscapes with sheer cliffs and jagged rocks. It still
has a feudal lord – who, by the way I beat at table tennis – and its own parliament.
Here is a prehistoric tomb from the Bronze Age. It's a dolmen. Two supports on either
side and a flat rock on top. On this magnificent headland looking out to the south. And there
are what some rabbits have to say on the matter. Less impressed that me.
In the early 1800s the language spoken here – the patois – was similar to Old Frankish.
Very different from the Cornish spoken by the miners who would soon settle there.
If you take a boat trip round the island, there are visible copper salts leaching in
the cliffs – I'll upload a phot - and that visible copper no doubt explains its appeal
during the Bronze Age – and it was these visible salts that attracted prospectors to
the island in the early part of the 19th century.
The Cornish at the time had one of the most evolved mining cultures in the world (also
dating back to the Bronze Age), and they were operating mines as far afield as Argentina,
North America (especially California, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Virginia – in
Chesapeake they even have a Cornish accent) and South Africa, where they operated the
world’s largest copper mine at Okiep, 300 miles north of Cape Town.
Even the great Mark Twain – he of “a mine is a hole in the ground with a liar standing
next to it” fame – was of Cornish descent.
In 1835, funded by an English mining adventurer called John Hunt – adventurer is a far better
term than entrepreneur, is it not? – a team of Cornish miners arrived on the island in
1835 to mine the copper.
They started mining here on the cliffs below me.
They found lead and silver nearby, and began mining that too. And, so raising money in
Guernsey and London with lots of promises of future riches, was Sark’s Hope Mine built.
They should have called it the No Hope Mine – what was prospering in 1839 went badly
wrong. How?
In the age old tradition of mining, management misled the shareholders. When the ore body
was clearly not enough to support the mine, the mine captain deceived where possible to
keep the game going.
Management had a vested interest in doing so, even if it was no longer profitable. Some
two hundred Cornish workers were employed by the mine, together with their wives (who
may also have been employees – “bal maidens”, they were known as) and their families. Sark’s
population soared to 790, the highest ever recorded.
As they chased ore, expanding the mine with the promise of finding more silver, mine veins
extended 800 yards and 300 feet out to sea.
There's the remains of an old chimney. They were mining 300 feet out to sea in that direction.
It's calm but it can get very rough.
They were mining 20 fathoms – 120 feet – below sea level. You can imagine the noise in those
tunnels when there’s a storm blowing overhead, waves crashing and all the rest of it. Imagine
how terrifying. They actually had quite an ingenious device in play should the mine ever
flood that would save the mine and some of its occupants. There were still many who
died.
General equipment could be brought in from Guernsey, but the speciality stuff had to
be acquired from Cornish suppliers, with the effect that Guernsey and London shareholders'
capital made its way to the “picks and shovels” suppliers in Cornwall .
Management would go on jollies to Guernsey for their count house dinners, a tradition
they had brought over from Cornwall – dinners which acquired legendary status for their
extravagance – where news of the mine would be delivered to shareholders. (IN Cornwall
count house is the mine office, where the managers worked and where the miners were
paid.)
Mining has a long and rich history of this. I remember the boom of the 00s and you would
see management of non-producing exploration companies living it up at the Savoy, driving
Ferraris to expensive lunches and dinners. Who’s paying for it all?
The cost of dinners would be buried in the company accounts. I'm speaking about Cornwall
now. One outadventurer - shareholder - noted that he couldn’t see the spirits from a
recent count house dinner in the accounts. The bursar, or what we might today call the
CFO, declared that the spirits are there, you just can’t see them.
There was a long Cornish habit of swindling “outadventurers” – investors – from
London. It seems they took the habit with them to Sark. Of course, sometimes mines work
- and everybody makes a lot of money. That’s the same lure that draws people in and will
always draw people in. it's when they don't that things go wrong.
That’s not to say working mines was easy. Many lost their lives to it – 20% of Cornish
miners were killed or incapacitated before they reached 40, so Cornwall became known
as the county of widows. If you saw someone’s window open in Cornwall in winter, it’s
likely that the occupier was a former miner gasping for air as his lungs were so damaged
from breathing in the dust of thousands of gunpowder explosions.
As things went wrong in the early 1840s, the Seigneur of Sark – the feudal lord – borrowed
money to try and keep the business going. But in 1847 the business finally collapsed.
The Seigneur lost a lot more than his shirt. He died a year later, crushed with debt. His
creditor, one Marie Collins, foreclosed on the debts and his son lost the fiefdom to
her.
The son, Peter Carey, would become “a low life scamp”, to quote the (probably biased)
archive of the Seigneurie. Sark got a new Seigneur - a Dame actually - and that same
family retains the fiefdom to this day. The mine has never been reworked or re-explored.
Now it’s all grown over.
The moral of the story is don't use leverage to invest in silver mines.
Irony of ironies, in Guernsey there is still a record of all the money paid out to shareholders,
but those that recorded the company’s income have been “lost”.
Still, the episode had some long-term effects on the island
For a period there was an influx of capital. Prosperity with the boom then depression with
the buest. It brought Methodism to the island from Cornwall, a school for girls and a doctor.
It kick-started the tourist industry. The area around the mine – previously just heath
– began to be farmed. The English language came to the island.
The houses that were built for the mine workers housed the Sarkese for many decades to come.
Apparently because they weren’t built by the Cornish, but by the locals – so they
were built with more longevity in mind
There's a wonderful passage by a local Edgar Barnes in 1890, ““In this spot centred
anticipations never to be fulfilled, and hopes doomed to dire disappointment. At the bottom
of the mine lie buried the fortunes of an ancient family, the hard earned savings of
people who had little to spare, and the wasted energies of hundreds of stalwart men who had
hoped to share in the wealth which their efforts were to have won. And now all has vanished,
as if it had never been, save that there still remain – ghostly monuments of failure – the
shafts and the chimneys and the ruins of the various offices.”
This is a story that has played out many times through the history of mining, and still plays
out today. Investors – caveat emptor.
And if you're interested in buying silver or gold I'll put a link int he comments to
a dealer I like. It's safer than mining.
Thanks very much for watching please subscribe to the channel.
And also look out for my show on weights and measures, I'm doing a run in London at the
end of the month. It's basically a re-run of my Edinburgh Show. I'll put a link in the
comments
Cheerio - I'll leave you with some shots of the view