In the course of our GRIBBLE hunting, we have come across some interesting information which may help develop a better understanding of the times and environment in which the GRIBBLE's lived. Some of the more interesting snippets are shared here:
· Mining in Devon and Cornwall
For most of their history, Cornwall and to a lesser extent Devon, have been in turn, the world’s largest and most important producers of tin and the world’s most important and largest producers of copper. But mining is a precarious industry, and exhaustion of the ore-body or competition from more easily mined sources may convert boom to bust in a very short while, and when this happens, the miners have to move on or out.
Cornwall and Devon had almost a monopoly of world tin supplies from pre-historic times to the 1700’s, when other major deposits were found in Europe, and more recently in Malaysia, Australia and elsewhere; this competition combined with exhaustion of the available ore-body led to a protracted decline in the industry. However at the same time as tin mining was contracting, new technology was stimulating rapid expansion of copper mining, not only providing employment for the existing tin miners, but also creating a major new employment market.
The existence of copper in the two counties had been known since the 1500’s. However, difficulties of mining deep in hard rock prone to flooding were not overcome until steam pumps were introduced in the 1720’s. From then on, the scale of copper mining increased dramatically, and from 1750 to 1860 Cornwall with a later contribution from Devon, produced almost all the world’s commercial copper. In the 1820’s, the parish of Gwennap alone produced one third of the entire world supply of copper.
Around 1860 large easily mined deposits of copper were found in the USA, South America and Australia, and steam ships were becoming available as bulk carriers. Very quickly it became cheaper to ship foreign ore back to South Wales for smelting, or to smelt it on site, than to persist with the now inefficient workings of the progressively exhausting Cornish and Devon mines, and the Great West-Country Copper boom collapsed.
The copper boom had presented great employment opportunities, and there had been a general migration to Cornwall, particularly from Devon and South Wales. The population of Cornwall nearly doubled between 1700 and 1801, and nearly doubled again between 1801 and 1860. Miners have to be mobile so that when one pit closes they can move on to newer ones. This occurred towards the end of the boom, when the Devon Great Consols mine, the largest and richest of all the West Country mines, opened near Tavistock in Devon. Cornish miners migrated back to Devon to work it, but its life was short, and the sudden collapse of the boom in the 1860’s left thousands of hard-rock miners in both Cornwall and Devon without a living.
The miners who had flocked to Cornwall in the early part of the boom, some of whom had migrated back to Devon at the end, were now forced to migrate overseas. Experienced hard-rock miners were in demand all over the world where new deposits of all sorts of metals were being discovered, and they went to places like Nevada, Arizona and the Great Lakes area of the USA, Chile, Argentina, Peru and the other countries bordering on the Andes in South America, South Africa and Burra in South Australia, many of which were producing the cheap copper which forced the collapse of the industry in England.
As the copper mining industry of Cornwall developed, so the name Gribble started to appear in the mining region of Cornwall particularly around Redruth. At the time there were so few people of this name outside Devon that it seems reasonable to suppose that Gribbles from Devon joined the migration to Cornwall in the 1700’s to be part of the mining force. By 1850 there were almost as many Gribbles in Cornwall as there were in their native Devon. The mining Gribbles, having moved from their homes in the mid-1700’s, found themselves on the move again little more than 100 years later, but this time overseas, and now there are many more Gribbles in the USA and in Australia than remain in England.
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Please send your input, comments and suggestions by email to Jules Gribble or Michael Gribble.
Page Last Updated: 23 December 2003