Redruth to The Rand by Tim Koch

Picture: Kresenkernow.org

June 2025

Tim Koch has a great affection for Redruth Station as, had his great-grandfather Harry not boarded a railway carriage marked 'Southampton' from there sometime in the late 1890s, he would not have been born.

At first glance, the above postcard seems to show an unremarkable picture of a busy late-Victorian provincial railway station. However, closer inspection shows a large number of people, mostly women, standing behind the station railings, all seemingly there to wave farewell to those on the platform - who are mostly men. For most of us, the inscription on the bottom of the card, Redruth Ry Station. The weekly exodus to South Africa, does not make whatever the scene portrays any clearer.

In fact, the image is a striking representation of the Cornish Diaspora, the 18th and 19th century emigration of many thousands of Cornish people, many of them skilled miners driven abroad by the decline of local mining. In each decade from 1861 to 1901, around 20% of the Cornish male population migrated abroad – three times the average for England and Wales and 250,000 in total.

In her 1984 work on the diaspora, Gillian Burke classes three main periods of Cornish emigration: to North America in the 1830s, to Australia in the late 1850s, and to South Africa in the late 1880s and 1890s. 

Burke also noted two types of emigration, those who left with the intention of eventually returning home to Cornwall and those who left permanently. The latter was most common during the periods of the deepest depression within the Cornish mining industry as in the 1870s when the population of Cornwall fell by almost nine per cent.

John Nauright’s study of Cornish miners in South Africa has official figures from 1903 when 17,000 to 18,000 so-called 'Cousin Jacks' were working in 'The Rand' (Witwatersrand, i.e. the Johannesburg gold fields in the Boer South African Republic in the Transvaal). Thus, a quarter of the white workforce were Cornish.

Cornish miners were in particular demand as they were not the more common 'soft-rock' coal miners, they were skilled world leaders in releasing metals such as tin and copper embedded in hard rock such as granite, skills that the deep level South African mines needed. While this was reflected in the high wages that were paid, money was no compensation for the early deaths caused by inhaling silica dust.

The site, cornishmining.org holds that:

The sheer numbers of Cornish immigrants had caused a decline in the population of some Cornish parishes, which were now largely sustained by the miners’ remittances. An estimated sum close to £1 million a year was being sent from the Transvaal alone at the turn of the 19th century.

Sharron Schwartz on cousinjacksworld.com:

Whole communities across (Cornwall) came to rely on remittances, and families eagerly awaited the banker’s drafts headed with the magic words “Standard Bank of South Africa.” The shops did a roaring trade after the weekly South Africa Mail came in, prompting a local newspaper to remark, “We are all living in South Africa.” 

Schwartz again:

Such was the flow of (Cornish) people to its mining camps… South Africa came to be regarded as almost the parish next door. 

John Nauright:

Every Friday morning from 1890 to 1900 the up-train from West Cornwall included special cars labelled “Southampton”, the embarkation port for South Africa. An old Captain (mine foreman) told Bernard Hollowood when he was documenting his history of the (Camborne based mining equipment firm) Holman Brothers: 

“It was a rare sight. At Camborne station of a Friday the platforms’d be packed with a great crowd of people, laughin’, cryin’, shoutin’ and so on.  Then the train would steam in slowly and there'd be a great rush for the special carriages labelled “Southampton.”  Then there'd be kissin’ and shakin’ and she’d move out, leaving the womenfolk and the children wavin’ and sobbin’.”

So, while the postcard shows a typical Friday scene at Redruth, it would have been repeated at Camborne and possibly at St Erth and Hayle as well.

What of my great-grandfather, Harry Rusden? He is pictured above in Johannesburg in 1952 in a photograph showing four generations. Harry is awkwardly holding my brother, Christopher, while my father, Christo, and grandfather, (Charles) Grahame, look on. 

A family story suggests that Harry was a curmudgeonly Victorian patriarch. Allegedly, when he went to bed he turned off all the lights - even if there were still people left in the room.

I cannot pretend that my great-grandfather was really part of the diaspora as he did not face the choice of emigration or starvation. Born in 1873 to a wealthy and entrepreneurial Falmouth family (I’m not sure where the money went), an 1893 edition of the Falmouth Packet reported that he had been awarded a silver medal by the Mining Institute following his exams at what later became the internationally renowned Camborne School of Mines.

By 1897, The Packet had news that Harry had been admitted as an associate of the Chemical and Metallurgical Society of Johannesburg. Announcements of the birth of his two children in 1901 and 1907 had him as the chief assayer at the Ferreira Gold Mine, Johannesburg. He later built a rather splendid house in the city’s suburbs where he lived until his death in 1954.

In 1897, one of Harry’s younger brothers, Charles Edgar, also moved to South Africa where he was 'assayer and cyanide manager' at the Geldenhuis Estate Gold Mine, Germiston, south-east of Johannesburg. He met an unfortunate end in 1910 when he fell down the shaft of a mine that he part owned, the unpromising sounding Poverty Mine in what was then called Essexvale, Southern Rhodesia. The Cornish Telegraph’s report on the accident contained a piece of casual racism common for the time: Rusden… fell a distance of 67 feet, striking a native at the bottom of the shaft. But for that, he would have been killed instantly… 

Harry had temporarily returned to Cornwall to find a wife, as later did his son, my grandfather, Grahame. My mother broke with this practice when she married my father. He was South African and Afrikaans so it was a bold move on both their parts as it was only fifty years after the so-called Boer War (1899-1902) and so 'English' and Afrikaans South Africans did not usually mix. 

 It is interesting to note that, during the war, the Cornish had split loyalties. Some supported British Imperial interests and joined the 400 strong 'Cornish Brigade' to fight. However, other Cornishmen refused to go to war against the Boers. I suspect that this was partly because they identified with the Afrikaners (both were dour, insular and put upon by the English) and partly because they saw the war as an attempt by big business to gain control of the South African Republic’s Rand goldfields.

Sharron Schwartz: The Boer War split Cornish communities and also families in a manner much like Brexit has done today. 

Picture: Kresen Kernow

The Boer War saw the end of mass migration from Cornwall to South Africa and Redruth Railway Station was probably a much quieter place until 1914 when a new generation of Cornishmen took the up-train as the first step in an uncertain future. Two months into the First World War, 1914-1918, Cornish volunteers for “Kitchener’s Army” gathered at Redruth Station. How many would survive the next four years?

Thank you Tim for such a personal insight into such an impactful time in Cornish history.

I can only imagine the excitement mixed with dread of those men leaving Redruth and the land they knew so well, above and below ground, for a completely unknown destination. The same for people travelling now in search of a better life.

I had a tiny sense of it when I went to work in Cairo as an English language teacher in the nineteen eighties. Without a doubt I was both excited and fearful . Taking a taxi to Heathrow, the driver asked me where I was going. He visibly shuddered and emanated a sense of pity. He had been there in WW2 and described it as 'the armpit of the universe'. That wasn't an encouraging start... Anyway I stayed for three years and loved it but I knew I would never be someone who emigrated from Cornwall forever .