As a life writer, I find the process of uncovering the stories behind the dry facts of parish records and census returns a fascinating one, but I have learned to ask not just who this person was or what they did, but where did their story happen? Geography is often critical to the arc of a life.

Take the example of my seafaring ancestor Sharrock Dupen, who in 1835 moved his family from the Fal estuary to the north Cornish port of Hayle. With the coming of the age of steam, the Falmouth packet station was already losing its place as the hub of all news and mail from across the globe. Hayle, on the other hand, was a boom town at the heart of England’s Industrial Revolution. It was the main port for the tin and copper mines of west Cornwall and home to the two biggest iron foundries in the world. But few now remember that glorious past as they drive through the town on their way to the beaches. Places as well as people can be lost to history.

In the 1830s Hayle was to assume an even greater importance with the inauguration of a steamship service along the north coast to Bristol, connecting Cornwall to the rest of England. The wooden paddle steamer Herald needed a ship’s steward, one of many new roles created by the age of steam. As well as pocketing a share of each passenger’s fare as his fee, the steward was responsible for selling food and drink on board, and for a man of entrepreneurial spirit there was ample opportunity for profit. This was the job that took Sharrock Dupen to Hayle and transformed not just his prospects but those of his many children. I found that I could not tell their story without also exploring the history of the town.

Hayle had doubled in size over the previous twenty years, with a population approaching 4,000. Harvey’s foundry, shipbuilding business, and ropewalk employed nearly 800 men while several hundred more were employed by the Cornish Copper Company. The two businesses were long-standing competitors who had disputed territory and access rights for years, more than once mustering mobs of labourers on the river bank to shout insults and brandish shovels and other improvised weapons at each other. But in the end it was Harveys that prevailed. Henry Harvey was the son of a blacksmith turned iron founder and mine merchant, who manufactured the pipes, pumps, and engine parts needed by the mines and shipped in supplies of coal and timber. In many ways Hayle was his creation. In 1843 Harveys won a commission from the Dutch government to construct an engine to drain the seventy square miles of Haarlem Mere and protect the cities of Amsterdam and Leiden from the risk of flooding. With a cylinder twelve feet in diameter and a piston nineteen feet long, the Leeghwater was the biggest steam engine ever built. After it was successfully installed, orders followed for two more. The size of the task was almost inconceivable. It was estimated that even when all three were in place it would take thirteen months to pump the billion tons of water from the lake. In 1849 when the Cruquius, a proud descendant of the original Newcomen beam engines used to drain the Cornish mines, was finally completed, it surpassed the Leeghwater as the biggest steam engine in the world.

Meanwhile, after the success of the Herald, a larger steam packet was commissioned to respond to increased demand when the Great Western Railway finally reached Bristol from Paddington. Sharrock Dupen moved to the Cornwall and later to the final ship to be built for the service, the Cornubia. But after Brunel’s bridge over the Tamar opened in 1859, the paddle steamers found it increasingly difficult to compete with the expanding railway network and the Cornubia was sold in 1861, a year after the death of Sharrock Dupen. It marked the beginning of a slow decline.

The Cornish mines were starting to close, although there was still a market overseas for pumping machinery. But in 1867 the successors to the Cornish Copper Company sold off their waterfront premises to Harveys and a year later the Copperhouse foundry was closed, with the loss of several hundred jobs. That side of the town was essentially put up for sale. 300 houses and gardens were auctioned off, followed by the engine works, shipbuilding yard, gasworks, and another 140 houses. The Copperhouse foundry was demolished in 1875 and although Harveys supplied engines to drain the railway tunnel that was being opened up under the river Severn, it was the shipyard that had become the biggest employer. By the end of the century Harveys’ foundry was dying too, making annual losses that would lead to its closure in 1903. Nearly 600 jobs disappeared and with few alternatives in the local area, a newspaper advertisement offered reduced rail fares from Hayle to Liverpool for anyone wanting to travel to America. Cornwall had by then lost around one third of its population to emigration and was, so it was said, surviving on remittances from overseas. The Dupen family too had scattered across the globe and their name now survives only on a few gravestones in the churchyard.

For more about the Dupens of Hayle, see my website https://victorianlives.wordpress.com

My book about the family, A Cornish Cargo, is available on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cornish-Cargo-history-Victorian-seafaring-ebook/dp/B08FG9YG4D/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3J83YFC2OH0VQ&dchild=1&keywords=a+cornish+cargo&qid=1598804735&sprefix=a+cornish+%2Caps%2C1195&sr=8-1

In 2007 Hayle was recognised as a World Heritage site and a heritage centre was set up in Harveys’ old offices https://www.hayleheritagecentre.org.uk

The Cruquius engine also has its own museum https://www.haarlemmermeermuseum.nl/en/cruquius-museum--world-largest-steam-engine

The history of the two foundries is told in Edmund Vale’s The Harveys of Hayle (rev. ed. 2009) and W. H. Pascoe’s CCC, the History of the Cornish Copper Company (1983). I found the Hayle Historical Assessment (English Heritage and Cornwall County Council, 2000) invaluable in tracing the history and geography of Hayle.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the British Association for Local History (BALH). Any content provided by our contributors is of their own opinion and is not intended to malign any individual, group, organisation, or entity.