The Secrets of Edwardian Lace-Making | Edwardian Farm | Absolute History

here in Devon and the tranquil Tamar Valley is a port that once bustle with industry now more well and Key has been brought back to life as it would have been during the reign of King Edward the seventh archeologists Alex Langlands and Pete again that historian roof goodman are living the lives of Edwardian farmers for a full calendar year [Music] so far they've started their arable concern by making a lime fertilizer and attempted to plow using the latest Edwardian technology they've taken in livestock and ventured into market gardening and fishing now it's January and the team turned their hands to industries that once brought wealth to death mining know everywhere mophir never grumble about farming your daily and placement because you won't have your money I've never control any money if you're not practicing but will they be able to master them and win the race against time to get their crops what's a drink are you just scared away evil from it fixed [Music] [Music] in Devon it's been the harshest of winters yes a steady bitter absolutely bitter well 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 get stuck in in winter farmers need to feed their animals twice a day to ensure they survive until spring this weathers fouled and lost it's good for killing off pests and vermin it can actually be the ruin of a farmer because ice on the ground means nothing will grow so no food these fellas would get mighty hungry if that was the case 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 flowering 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 Candlemas which is in early February it's all over Candlemas the 2nd of February was seen as a watershed by the edwardian farmer there are lots of great little rhymes about the weather at Candlemas time there's one that goes if candle must be bright and fair the half of winters to come and mayor mayor meaning more doesn't actually rhyme but what is saying there is that if it's bright and clear on February that means you're only halfway through the winds when you've got the second half of the winter to come so if it rains on candle winters over and the weather will improve if not winter we'll have another bite no it's just where the law but there is a bit of truth to it you know I'm just starting to get a little bit worried about this now [Music] it's three weeks until Candlemas ball Alex can do is hope this will mark a change in the weather so he can get a crop in the ground [Music] the farm was built in the 19th century to feed the people of more well and key once a booming port and village [Music] it's wealth came from deep underground [Music] in 1844 the largest copper reserves in Europe were discovered here [Music] thousands of tons of Topiwala mind then transported down the key on this raised railway it turns sleepy morale and key into the busiest inland port in England [Music] here in more Wellum 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 one candle chute and one Olympic light made of local clay slap that on there yep and this is what they would have used when this mine was sort of in its boom years yeah no candles use from Roman times all right up to sort of 20th century right so you know it's good cheap forms light so what you chaps gonna get kitted up with some lamps well we're going for the state of the art at warden technology right what we've got is a carbide lamp and these started appearing round about sort of 1901 1902 this is cutting-edge Edwardian technology what got open this thing up got two chambers come on this bottom chamber contains the calcium carbide right so it's gonna fill it up thank you very much what is calcium carbide is it anything like limestone yeah basically it's a byproduct of the limestone industry should do it and we'll put the top compartment on its top compartment to the water compartment yeah 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 a settling gas right and the gas comes out and this little jet here we get a flame which is actually reflected there and I suppose the great thing about this lamp is there's nothing to smash on there exactly these things are bomb-proof they really are wonderful isn't technology [Music] Rick's taking them to explore the George and Charlotte mine just a hundred yards from their cottage these mines produce nearly a million tons of copper a year all dug by pound miners would spend eight hours a day six days a week underground working these dark airless conditions risk of death was ever-present falling down a mineshaft was often fatal this is what metal mining is all about so you probably familiar with coal mines so that's all horizontal seams of coal yeah forget that this is vertical mining so you've got a vertical or body coming down through here yeah that's the load that's what the miners are after and you can see how they've extracted it yeah installing Timbers here to stop this wall here which is known as a hanging wall yeah join this wall here which is known as the fault as the miners dug ever deeper there was another problem to overcome flooding 18 foot diameter which as these things go with a small woman doing thriving pumps basically we've got four more levels below us there below river level yep which is why we need to pump them pumping water in water yeah so it's bringing water from outside a mine to power the wheel under the water and all sides yeah the pumping water from the mines was costly so extracting the copper ore got more and more expensive this mine closed in 1869 are in 1860s you're sucking a lot of foreign imports coming from North America and South Australia a lot of the more marginal - like this one closed I think this couldn't compete and those very very small margins they're 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 the were ways farmers here could still make money from the mines here we are Rick and Phil are keen to try out the long-lost process this is water just coming straight out of the mine is it yeah this is flowing down throat through a lot of the old working areas of the mine should have soaked lots of copper up from the surrounding rocks right we want to try and get the copper out of the water so that it's something that we can make money from the edwardian have an ingeniously simple way of extracting this copper the first job is to install a precipitation attack to capture water from the mine Phyllis cut currently like waist-deep in muddy water trying to organize a water flow here he comes [Applause] [Music] Phil places rusty pieces of iron in the tank now I'm no scientist so you're gonna have to talk me through the very basic chemical reaction is taking place here well because there's copper in the water you're 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 well you're gonna end up with this metal coated with copper and the rust is gonna come out into the water simple as that yeah it doesn't stick on very tight right and just be scraped off Wow so is there as much of this going on then yeah it's a fairly common fairly common process I mean it has small groups of guys doing just this sort of thing I mean if there was like that be had they would have it it's one of those things we've always thought of trying little fuck-around too so this is as much an experiment for us it is for you it really is there is a low key low tech metal recovery now they must leave it for a few weeks to let nature take its course [Music] it's February the second Candlemas it's raining so according to the old rhyme the worst of winter should be well and truly over 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 side of orchard Ruth's daughter Eve has joined them for the ceremony 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 watered okay this tree here is your team leader you encourage it it gets the rest working we fixed him we fixed the log yup but how would you go about doing that traditionally then you got to wassail it now wassailia means singing to your trees or your animals whatever you raise in your farm to encourage it to do better in the next year what sing an apple tree is the real what's ailing the basic what's ailing right you know I just think you need a bow oh hang on I've got one here which makes it easier for us water is a sugar bowl but you know I didn't think that would matter too much it doesn't okay first thing to do is get some bread yeah Harve it dips in here to give your side of body and we put it in the apple tree and this will make the tree feel good and will make the bird slightly drunk it case they'll sing all the more uproariously and make the trees feel good and now let's get down to it good apple tree we wassail thee that thou mayst bard and that thou mayst blow and that thou mayst bear apples and no hats full caps full three bushel barrels for her are you just scared away evil from its fixed and I'll thank you traditionally for being in company like this so you've made all wah sale - 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 [Applause] wha say Oh drink what sale [Music] two months ago freezing conditions put paid to the plowing now the Frost's are over Alex and farmhand Megan Elliott can get the field ready to be sewn with a crop plowing returns the field to bare earth and also mixes Alex and Peter's lime fertilizer into the soil it's good actually to to be getting this lime plowed in you know that was such a backbreaker in itself it's great to st cedar the damn stuff varied to be honest alex is using the Shires tom and Prince to pull the plow it's a complete joy to be out here horses have really taken to this you know this is a pair of horses there's never play out before and look at him going despite the invention of the tractor form all working horses in Edwardian Britain than at any time in history the Edwardian period is without doubt the dawn of the modern age is the dawn of the motorcar the aeroplane for me it's just amazing that despite all these innovations farmers are still overwhelmingly using horses to plow because still in that age they were the best for the job but Alex's joy is short-lived 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 plowshare the blade that cuts the earth basically that means we can't plow anymore or least we if we do it'll be messy until alex replaces the share he can't do anymore ploughing now and now it's game over [Music] it's mid-february a time of you and 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 it Williams made money from abandoned mines this is a nineteenth-century miners track watch it it's a wee bit slippin it's a lot harder a tools come on Peter we need those tools up here ah dragging your feet man Rick's taking them to a disused mineshaft at the pit head is a pile of all abandoned over a century ago as the ore comes out the ground it's tied up with loads of other minerals and things and the job was to break that all down with or heavy hammers to separate the good copper on one hand from the waste rock on the other so you've dragged silver up side for very steep slope to come and stop whinging smack a pie rocks place exactly what we're doing with it was nice Foster King 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 someone this part could be your fortunes but for the inexperienced fossick er distinguishing between valuable copper and other worthless metals is no easy task nice they're the only way to go anything yep you can see it's not a brassy bit of mineral there yeah now that could either be copper yeah which is good yeah or it could be i'm pyrite Fool's Gold which has absolutely no economic value at all it's a simple way to test give it a scrape and she can see it's scratching the surface of that yeah that tells us that this is actually softer than me steel right which means that's copper that's copper congratulations guys so we found you found copper first you've struck it rich I'm lucky all need to do is find me a few tons of that and we'll affan it's quite a bit there I mean magnifying glass yeah after a day at the spoil team of Alex and Peter need to know whether what they're recovering is a decent quality well good morning come on mr. Chalmers its value depends on assessing how much copper it contains the job that falls to the keys assayer John Chilvers so that's the really the bit that we want to test know what we need to do is what is known as a say this right and the whole process in here is to try and extract the copper from the copper or see what percentage would have copper we can get from it and then we know just how good the ore is itself as saying was a crucial job as a determined the percentage of copper in the or if it contained less than 5% it wasn't worth bothering with first John weighs out exactly 20 grams of crushed all to that we've got to add some chemicals which are known as fluxes just the same way as you have flux when you're soldiering 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 layer underneath the temperature because we need to get this above at this temperature the copper melts allowing it to flow out of the rock we've got it nice and hot night now I can touch it but what you can see now is I've got this big lump of stuff here which is called slag ya can throw that away right okay and measure my small bead of compound very very tiny yes the twenty grams at all contains just one gram of copper that would be one twentieth Phi K which is 5% so and that would be the grade of the copper all right and because there then was a standard price for copper ore then I would sell it on the basis of 5% by the Audion age a 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 [Music] it's late February alex has repaired the ploughshare and finally finished plowing 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 soils till the tilt essentially the pliability the crumbly mess of the soil so that you can sew into it you get it too shallow and you'll have the birds in there you'll have all sorts of creatures getting into it a little weather away the wind will just blow the top off you get it too deep of course seeds won't germinate they won't come through this crop is crucial to their success so they've called on local expertise mr. Frances Mudge's family of grown crops here in Devon feed generations massive relief tap mr. mudge here to give us a few pointers and hopefully we get horses going a straight line get the crop drilled into the ground what do you think you've got a fair kill fear if you can't bury your toe in it it's not that good old tales in the corn wouldn't be buried then it would be on top but you've got a good kill seal okay with mr. muddy 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 favorite among Devon's Edwardian farmers oats everything was done by or sawano me no tractors back in those days were very little so they built as a main crop to feed their horses on so they're the fuel that is powering the kind of that the horses which are really your form of transport and machinery of the day goat was the main crop for that reason really for them keep keep down keep your horses going and fulfill their donald the old weren't very good the oats will be sown using a state-of-the-art Edwardian seed drill I feel like the ben-hur of the agricultural world [Music] [Music] [Applause] just keep my eye on all of the cultures is to make sure that all of these are in working order and a tall drop in 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 and police pharmacies 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 [Music] finally they have their cash crop in the ground [Applause] [Music] down at the mine the precipitation tank has been left to do its work but after six weeks has it produced any copper see a future in copper for us Peter I think we might have been lucky that is all this is deposited copper that's amazing so we just scrape this off to me will you scrape this off and you keep scraping and scraping and scraping slowly concern about a volume of it no 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 no I know this one piece but if you multiply but this bias or 100 to 200 times and you keep going back yeah once a month yeah just scraping the copper off here yeah yeah it'll soon build up look after the copper pennies and the copper pounds will take care of themselves like this is gonna bring a few pennies in yeah but where's the real money to be made in mining down here in the Edwardian period but you really want to option 1 you can go abroad right if you don't fancy that money's been made on that side of the river down in Coleman in Cornwall calm strange place [Music] across the river in coal war there was still money to be made from mining not copper but tin 10 was an important metal to the Edwardians used in the canning of food for solder and as an alloy in pewter brass and bronze but if Alex and Peter to become tin miners they'll need the tools of the trade picks and drills more Willems blacksmith Simon summers is responsible for maintaining these tools tools would break you get then and the pics would get blunt so quickly you know so many men working down there so it'd be a full-time full-on job blacksmith just sharpening and hardening okay we're ready there now the first job is to sharpen the pic on the end I'm not gonna Forge it any more than that now finish the rest off with the brass the tip of the pick is now sharp but it'll be blunt again in no time unless it's hardened the process that required incredible precision we're just gonna put the tip in the foyer because that's the only bit that we want hot okay you're just 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 [Music] then 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 color and the color tells the blacksmith how hard the metals going to be those colors have their different uses and when we're cutting hot steel we look for a blue on the kind edge and when we're cutting woods say for instance acts or billhook we're looking for purple on the cutting edge and with this actual pick is going to be actually used for cutting stone we're looking for a yellow on the tip 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 of the required color hardens it just see on the tip we've got our yellow our bright yellow and then it comes back into like a a bronzy color now that tip is hardened ready for mining all we need now as a handle [Music] - spent 8 hours a day on the ground so they 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 bullies not like critical really is it when you put inside a pasty no more that's what you've got you know what do before expose yeah so turn it turn it pan onion ha gonna put the potato in first ear first you dip it you don't dice it it must be chipped you know what you mean by chips it's slice to form of slicing yeah in small pieces very small yeah and then it just cooks better yeah cooks through quick at the sanatorium anything else yeah probably beef skirt quite a lot of food in one pastries now I can see where you say a complete meal bit of seasoning and it's over a crimp so turn turn like a triangle yeah flatten this as you go and I see and this is the bit we call the crimp that's right that's the trim that looks really nice and of course when they finished the pasty they used to throw the pastry way just a little bit see the lastly yeah the pastry crust so once they finish dekes in it they throw it to the knockers that live down the wine shop to keep them happy really superstitious but yes very fabulous right well let's get sorties we've got 30 more to make [Music] alright son I'm alright thank you very much yeah so this looks it's unrecognizable it's a tool I gave you it's been serviced basically you know I care we've we've given it a really good clean up and you've you've sharpened our drill bit as well yeah I have yeah um would you like to bring the drill bit over there what we've done here is we've um hardened the end you can see that yellow straw color right on the tip there for cutting stones it's it twists it yep well good luck with that thank you for you're gonna be carrying these on your own yeah basically I got to pick up the tools cuz they're heavy and it's got to pick up the pasties cause if I picked up the pasties there's a real high limb industry in here Ruth look good then eh well I'm by the way yeah send your crusts down to the knockers but my crusts down for the knockers should I be asking me don't eat the crust Yost always throw them to the knockers down the mine people leaving to keep them happy why the knockers equipped with tools and pasties it's time for the miners to cross the river into Cornwall hello chat so good to see you how are you very good [Music] they're being taken across by their old friend Joshua Preston what's it been like up here because I haven't seen you that's for two or three months so I don't think well it's been cold wet and miserable been a harsh winter so far but if you go in underground of course you'll be nice and snug there these old boys will tell you that swinging a pick or two all along the river there's evidence of the valleys industrial heritage amazing 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 picks drill carbide lamps very much boys all the best Fred and I can get back into a little bit of something I didn't know and so if we can earn a little bulb or two thank you lead on welcome to Cornwall Peter no no I'm scared terrifying place Rick's brought them to the King Edward mine in Campbell 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 vo and learn the lost skills of the Edwardian miner techniques we're gonna be using now as classics or 19th century techniques or my hands willing candles I think important you guys try it yeah just to nose or how hard it actually was you can use your lovely new picks then - yeah yeah where should we go head audience use dynamite to blast the tin ore from the rock but first holes had to be drilled to put the charges in by hand if you can put in through about three-foot hole in a couple of hours I'll be impressed three foot having said that I mean these guys were doing this competitively as well said no weekends yeah they might competitively drill and the record stands at about 13 minutes for 6 inches and that's in granite is harder than this so they spend six days a week working at it and then Sunday exactly let's have a competition guys right well thankfully we're off we'll see you later right I'm gonna go in there [Music] [Applause] [Music] mr. completely just pulled up short of your shoulder by their video well that's why I look this way because I just oblivious okay where we at there Peter well where I think we started making initial progress now we're getting there but there's some slightly slower rate you just think about the enormity of the hillsides around here it's 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 mind no I think that one thing never grumble about farming you're dying yeah [Music] while the boys are mining Ruth's going to try a hand at another of Devon's lost at wooden industries lace-making [Music] Perryman has been making huntin 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 joining together the Devon town of Honiton is world famous for its intricate delicate and beautiful lace once half the inhabitants of East Emily were lace makers Robin and but its complexity made it incredibly labor-intensive you're talking nine to ten hours per square inch taking the easy with the harder stitches really sure so a cuff like that which isn't very a big isn't a big thing that's just one cuff on a blouse one two three what 200 250 hours yeah gracious I mean that is meant to be one cuff on a blouse isn't it yeah so I mean I don't know if you charge 10 pounds an hour that's 2,000 pounds two and a half thousand pounds for one cuff let the husband's of the day of course brought their wives a lace instead of jewelry so the pottery or lace the more wealthy you were in the Edwardian age every young girl in the devin village of Honiton would have been taught the art of lace making [Music] exactly move that pair of fractionate if 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 bogging over left never any different one two three I often say if you came 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 next time you'll be able to do it one two three you say this past days behind and this pair is going to travel back to the other side don't turn your pillow number two first fast its lifetime's work really it's becoming clear that this isn't a craft learnt in an afternoon they would sit for eight to twelve hours a day yeah well you hear the icicles don't you with tiny little job yeah five years soldiers on 8:00 in the morning to late at night when the education I came in in 1870 the government said all children must go to school but in Holland it didn't happen till nineteen hundred and three this industry actually held up children's education all those years yes prevented children get going because the parents said my Mary must make place 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 yeah but yeah I am really quite shocked by that yeah yeah so I'm watching you because you were on your money if you're I'm never gonna learn any money in Israel I'm not practicing right you there yet no yeah pretty exhausted to be honest yeah well fortunately helps at hand chummy Edwardian period you started getting to increased mechanization in mining so for example this is compressed air rock drill 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 neared Wardian 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 awardee and minor in practice it was a downside free First World War none of these drills had any form of dust suppression right so you're going to end up breathing in a lot of dust so if you're pulling in some tea or like or some things like that you're gonna have a very very short life stuff they don't have the ridge crucem nicknamed these early unsuppressed rules are known as widow-makers we don't make up yeah we're working with a widow we are working with a Widowmaker [Music] redick's most nervous I've been anything we've ever done my hands will be here okay [Music] [Music] this drills that I haven't drilled there you have it gentlemen bring back handling this kept mining going into the Edwardian period right if you were able to open a deposits a lot faster and also able to exploit them faster so that this is basically to save Europe for West of England mining right do you know what you're going to do next okay back up more Wellum things are not going well for ruse I mean there's so many things about this I find it really quite sort of this is why it's a long-term learning learning process so I think you might need to come at least once a week for about a year to learn your basic basics yeah I know so there's absolutely no chance of me as an Edwardian adult with all these other sort of with four or five children husbands there's no way you could take up lace-making and actually make some pin money not really I don't think this is the cottage industry I should be relying on to pay the rent maybe later by the Edwardian period cottage industries like lace-making were dying out leaving many women with no income of their own expensive handmade lace just couldn't compete with a cheap factory main variety the Ruth's discovered another way edwardian z' made money from the hunnit & 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 huntin lace is extremely delicate and if washed loose in water it would distort and be ruined I'm just gonna drop right in nice and flat and I want that to soak so lace cleaners would carefully wrap it into a linen parcel you there is a bit of the grayness in the water - obviously I'm shifting something now the lace must be dried nice and well looked after in is the reason for this process just to sort of set it back into a perfect shape so that when it comes off here it will hold absolutely pristine and it's amazing that a huge amount of work to wash something but I've been counting these motifs and working it out it has got to be if one person did it this is over a year's worth of work in this piece of lace over the year so if you think about that in modern wages chambers I'm so scared getting this row back i damaged this [Music] let's lower off down in the tin mine the holes are drilled Rick's demonstrating Howard Ward Ian's would have blasted the rock from the face using dynamite first thing we need is a couple of feet of fuse you cut me at a two-foot length of that now this is what it was really call safety fuse right and that gives you a timed burn right right so in a minute that stuff should burn about two feet so a minute a minute a minute is that it that's plenty of time right next thing to do is rip on a detonator this detonator contains explosive called fatherless mercury so what they call four minutes of mercury fulminate of mercury stage itself yeah right all we need now some play plenty of them on one hand this basically stops the charges blowing out to get the explosion to get down to the rock we have to blow up at the home ready for firing I suggest you guys make yourself scarce what we will do [Music] the miners have learned themselves a spot of lunch oh yeah 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 but do it just sketch bag or a rag or something just right around it keeps it nice and clean and means you keep the whole thing a plea none of this nonsense about throwing away so no no throwing the crusts to the knockers oh no no took it to waste my traps or things are back to work for us the team are taking their blasted off to the King Edward mines processing plant to extract the tin first its assessed to see how much tin it contains it's a job for the assayer Tony Clark I can see you enjoying that Vita as the SA of everyone's looking at you to be as fair as possible yep in determining that the tin content 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 to be able to did all the more now you know well put it this way the bias was always slightly in favor of the management yes and are you paid by the management I am okay amazing to assess the pounded rock Tony uses water and a vanning shovel we now manipulate it and throw the heavy tin ore up the shovel the heavier particles respond more so they go further up the shovel right yeah you see it move up there that's the tin in your horse so there's plenty in there it's well worth treating but don't forget you would have had to pay for your candles hmm 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 three percent tin enough to make extracting the metal worthwhile so the team of delivering nur consignment to plant manager Nigel McDonald for processing breaking up the rock was a laborious job done by women known as bowel maidens at the turn of the 19th century we would had probably 20 to 30 bal mins working on this Cobbing floor behind us and rights all around here yet all around here and there would be breaking up the large rocks in order to be able to feed them to the processing plant of my town and hand sorting all of the good material from the bad yep okay once it's been broken up machinery takes care of the rest [Music] heavy stamps too in 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 in here now it's the only surviving example of an Edwardian processing Routh's come to see the machines that replaced many local workers this is you know obviously a really modern machine to say 1905 is absolutely the cutting edge is no slots 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 you know that's a lot of money not coming in two families and then exactly and those people would probably have been women one day yes young women young women and boys Layton's yeah they will be the ball melons there would be mothers and daughters of the miners who were on the ground and the young boys before they were old enough to actually go on the ground they probably wouldn't go underground much before the ages of eleven twelve yeah it's completely changing the whole work ethic of the mining industry and the whole social is under social structure that goes around back that process is complete the miners came into the factory with rock containing 3% 10 what what are they produced I hope centers use that 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 greige can be smelted to produce the tin metal yeah so that's that's what all the works been worth [Music] ten mining was still big business in Cornwall well into the 20th century the last mine closed in 1998 [Music] [Applause] after a hard day's work there's a chance to reflect my new out straight knees so Phil and I taking the lion's share to the farm got bad mind this was an industry that was dying so if you guys want to make a living out of it yeah you've probably supplemented a with your farming yeah or go abroad that's your option yeah a sigelei so doing huge in groups will come to miners it's going to all the four corners of the earth the skills that built all these you know new world mining camps South Australia North America and South Africa that came from Cornwall and was a saying you know the definition of mine is a hole in the ground with a Cornish from the bottom of it and that's not far from the truth I have to say mining has been absolutely fascinating I didn't realize it was so much history concealed under these hills yeah it's been a real adventure for us so here's the mines and - Cheers [Music] the miners they work under will never miss today we will go we will go we pick some shovels in the house of mine we will go make the best Oh mining we will go we will go with picks and shovels in our hands we will go next time on an audience on one single day in the life of the Edwardian farmer from first thing in the morning my own raps lately bursting through the day [Music] and into the night Dana life of an Edwardian farmhouse

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 532,940

Keywords: history documentaries, quirky history, world history, ridiculous history, edwardian, edwardian farm, health and safety, dangerous edwardian, edward vii, edward vii documentary, edwardian period, british history, living in a farm, dangers of 20th century

Id: xZdMiFW7s4M

Length: 58min 46sec (3526 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 30 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/alwen]

(40:32 if you want to jump to the lace part)

And here we go again: "...weaving thread, wound onto bobbins, around pins, pushed into a template..."

We're never getting away from that, are we? I sure would like to see someone try to make lace that way some time: put all those pins in there and wind the threads around them.

[u/Inappropriateangel]

I do love Ruth and her enthusiasm in using period methods to create and understand the past. She got me interested in lace and led me to discover so many different kinds and styles of lace making on youtube.

[u/somegenerichandle]

She's an amazing historian! I had forgotten about this, but I am pretty sure i watched this series.

[u/shehasafewofwhat]

This was fascinating- I had no idea that lacemaking was so dependent on child labor, and that school reform was part of the decline.