Wreckers Must Breathe (16 page)

I suggest you keep these interminable reports and publish them under the title of ‘Letters of a Special Investigator to her Employer.'

Yours,

S
HERLOCK
W
ESTON
.

 

Wire from Maureen Weston to Charles Patterson of the Daily Recorder dispatched from Hayle at 10.50 a.m. on September 13
:

Porter corroborates identity stop John Desmond Wilson known in Redruth prior flotation stop Something of rolling stone been prospecting various goldfields also tin Malay stop Writing arrival Saint Just—Maureen.

Wire from Charles Patterson of the Daily Recorder to Maureen Weston at the Post Office, St Just, dispatched from Fleet Street at 11.15 a.m. on September 13
:

Born Dusseldorf ninety four naturalized British twenty two stop Keep going—Patterson.

Letter from Maureen Weston, c/o Mrs Davies, Cap View, Pendeen, Cornwall, dated September 13
and received by Charles Patterson of the Daily Recorder on the afternoon of September 14
:

D
EAR
C
HARLIE
,

I'm feeling a little scared. Your special investigator is going down the mine tomorrow morning, and she's not the least bit keen. This is the most God-awful place. I've never seen these Cornish mining villages before—they're even worse than the Welsh. They're so drab and the coastal scenery is so colourful. Today, for instance, as I pottered around the cliffs looking at the mines, the sea was a brilliant turquoise blue with a white edge where it creamed against the cliffs. It reminded me of the Mediterranean, except that the coast here is much more ragged and deadly looking than anything I have seen before. From this I came back to Pendeen to make inquiries as to who had worked in Wheal Garth, and by comparison this little huddle of grey stone cottages is unbelievably squalid.

However, I have been quite lucky. I am installed in a little cottage half-way between Pendeen and Trewellard and clear of the depressing atmosphere of a mining village. But there is no opportunity to forget that I am in the mining district of Cornwall. There is open ground on the other side of the road and it is dotted with grass-grown slag heaps, piles of stones which were once miners' houses and ruined chimneys that acted as flues for the ventilation shafts of the mines. This is what I look out on from my bedroom window. And, believe me, when it rained this evening it looked a scene of utter desolation. It is getting dark now and I'm writing this by the light of an oil lamp. A sea mist has come up and the lighthouse at Pendeen Watch is moaning dismally. However, when it's fine it is possible to see right across to the cliffs, and I can just see the top of Cape Cornwall, which I gather is why the cottage is called Cap View. I feed in the kitchen with the family—mother, father, daughter aged seven, and an evacuee, male, aged five. And from the window there you look up the slope of the moors to the huge pyramid heaps of the china clay pits.

So much for the local colour. Now to the result of my labours. First thing I did on arrival was to locate the mine. Refer to your collection of Ward, Lock, and in the West Cornwall volume you will find it given as lying between mines Botallack and Levant, both now defunct. I have had quite an interesting prowl round. There is the remains of what looks like a miniature railway running for the better part of half a mile along the very edge of the cliffs. There is just the cutting left and an occasional wooden sleeper. In fact, but for the wooden sleepers, I should have said it was a water duct, for it is a definite cutting all the way. Maybe what I think are sleepers are old slats of wood that formed the framework for the wooden trough in which the water ran. Whatever it is, I think it once belonged to Wheal Garth. What I take to be the main shaft of the mine is about a hundred yards in from the cliff edge. There's a high stone wall round it that looks fairly recent. I climbed over and had a look down, lying flat on my stomach. There's a sheer drop of about a hundred feet to a lot of old pit props, and there's the sound of water dripping—most unpleasant! The cliffs here are simply pitted with these shafts. Each has its stone wall, but that is the only protection. Others have been filled, some have fallen in, and the scars of diggings and the mounds of old slag heaps are everywhere.

Your acquisitive little Maureen was seen making for the local with several small-sized boulders clasped to her bosom. Some of the stones on the slag heaps are beautifully coloured, but actually what I had got were several pieces of greenish rock flecked with gold. Optimism outran intelligence and I pictured myself opening up Wheal Garth as a gold mine.

At the pub I find a most admirable and intelligent landlord. Note the style of Pepys! I order a gin and lime, dump my little pieces of rock on the bar and ask if the bright stuff is gold. Whereupon my drink is delivered to me with a huge guffaw and a smell of stale beer. ‘Aye, that's raight foonny!' he says. He hails from the North in case you hadn't noticed my spelling. ‘That's moondic, that is. Arsenic deposit. Ee, we allus gets a laff oot o' t' visitors wi' moondic. They arl think it's gold.' He produced a piece of rock from the back of the bar that shone like solid gold only the look of it was rather more metallic. This was a lovely example of mundic. Then he showed me a piece of what they call mother tin from a new lode that had just been struck at Geevor. The whole village, incidentally, now seems to live on Geevor. It's the only mine for miles around that is still working.

I know what you're muttering to yourself—when is this so-and-so woman coming to the point? Well, here it is. The landlord recognized the picture of Tubby. As soon as he sees it, he says, ‘Ee, 'a knaw 'im raight enoof. That's Toobby Wilson, that is.' Then over a pint of mild and bitter he gives me the low down on the mine.

Wheal Garth is what they call a wet mine, or rather it was in the old days. Its hey-day appears to have been about 1927–28. Tin was around £240 a ton at the time and they were working on a three-foot wide seam of mother tin. Profits of Wheal Garth for 1928 were something like £200,000. This was on a capital of some £60,000, the mine having been bought for a song in 1925. That's the way with these Cornish mines, derelict one year and then some small speculating prospector strikes a seam and a fortune is made. Apparently this seam ran out under the sea. That was why it was a wet mine. It resulted in very bad silicosis. In the words of the landlord, ‘Nae boogger laiked t' place.'

Then in November, 1928, the undersea workings collapsed and a whole shift—thirty-two men—were trapped and killed. It was, I understand, one of the worst disasters in the history of Cornish mining. An inquiry was held and it was found that a huge underwater cavern, which ran into the face of the cliff immediately above the galleries leading into the undersea workings, extended much deeper than had been thought. Thus, instead of having, as they thought, some twenty feet of solid rock above the underwater galleries, there had only been some three feet. The cave was known of course to the engineers and divers sent down when the galleries were first cut in 1916. But the sand that filled the bottom of the cave had proved deceptive. Frankly I doubt whether the engineers took full precautions. Owners are notoriously free with the lives of miners, and 1916 was a year in which every effort was being made by the Cornish mines to meet the demands of the war machine. There might be a story in that for you later—How Cornwall is Feeding the Tinplate Industry. As far as I can gather no effort was made by the company that took over in 1925 to check the safety of these galleries. They were in fact safe enough at the time. It was only when they came to widen them in order to lay a small railway and so increase the output of the mine that they collapsed.

You are probably wondering at my preoccupation with the mine rather than with Tubby Wilson. I must admit that when I last wrote you my idea in coming down here was simply to check up on the man and see if I could find out whether any other suspicious persons had contacted him at the mine. What decided me to pay close attention to the mine itself was the talk I heard at the mineowners' club in Redruth last night. Apparently Tubby Wilson and his activities at Wheal Garth had always been something of an enigma to some members. The point to remember is that these boys have been in the business for years. They know how to run a mine. They know what to look for and what to go out for without involving themselves in terrific costs. When Noye, the local editor, collected a few of his particular cronies—big men in the tin business, as he told me—round the bar and explained that I worked for the
Recorder
and wanted information about Wilson, they were only too ready to discuss the business. When Tubby Wilson floated his company and opened up Wheal Garth, the price of tin was falling sharply. And they naturally thought that what he was going to do was drive another shaft and run fresh galleries out to pick up the undersea lode beyond the spot where the old workings had ceased, so by-passing the danger area. The only thing was, they thought his capital insufficient for the job. They told him this, but he throws a wide guy act and says he's got other ideas. Well, these other ideas are apparently to go for the shore end of the lode. Now this is a bum idea and they tell him so. The lode was discovered only about twenty feet from the sea and some thirty feet below sea level. The shoreward end was worked out before ever they started on the undersea section. Moreover, prospecting work was carried out over a wide area at the shoreward end in a fruitless effort to discover the continuation of a lode. The boys at the club told him he'd be throwing his money away if he started looking for that end of the lode. His reply was that he had an idea. Well, his idea was to sink a new shaft about a hundred yards back from the cliffs dead in a line with the cave, then he throws new galleries out until he meets the cave which apparently extends some two hundred yards inland. Then he begins to cast about in a big semi-circle with broad adits running off every few yards into the cave. Then he casts inland in two great drives at each end of his main gallery. Then he runs adits off opposite the ones he has run into the cave. Then he tries a higher level. Then a higher level still. Then he goes bust and the mine closes down.

The boys I spoke to thought he must have spent in all four times the nominal capital of the company. He employed forty men on the job and an engineer who came down from London and didn't know a thing about Cornish tin mining. They think he was nuts. What do you think?

Anyway, that's why I'm fussing over the mine. I'm also interested in this engineer from London—long lean fellow with horn-rimmed spectacles, thinning hair and what is thought to have been the makings of a Scotch accent. The name is Jesse Maclean. See what you can get?

It was the landlord who put me on to Alf Davies. Davies is a Welshman, whatever, and was foreman of the Wheal Garth under Maclean. I thanked him and asked whether it would be possible to have a look over the mine. He said it was closed, but that Alf Davies would be able to tell me all about it.

Davies is a proper little Welsh miner, short and broad, a bundle of muscle and vitality, with false teeth and a sour glum-looking face beaten brown by the wind. But for all his glumness, he's got a sense of humour and smiles sometimes. When I asked him after tea this afternoon whether he could take me down Wheal Garth he said, ‘Indeed and I'd like to, but look you the mine is closed.' I said there must surely be some way in and offered him a fiver for his trouble—please note for expenses! I saw him hesitate, for he is on the dole now, and then he said, ‘Well, if you're so anxious that it's worth that much to you to go down a lousy mine like Wheal Garth I can't stop you. But there's no dependence on the old workings whatever and it's rough going, by damn it is.' I said I didn't mind, so it's all fixed up. In due course I'll let you know what happens. I must admit I haven't the faintest idea what I'm expecting to find. It's just that I'm curious.

Yours,

M
AUREEN
.

 

Transcript of code wire from Detective-inspector Fuller to Superintendent McGlade at Scotland Yard, dispatched from Penzance at 3.15
p.m. on September 13
:

All information John Desmond Wilson mine owner and gold prospector please stop Formed Cornish Coastal Wilson Mines Ltd April thirty seven—Fuller.

Transcript of a code wire from Superintendent McGlade to Detective-inspector Fuller at police station, Penzance, dispatched at 5.55
p.m. on September 13
:

Wilson born Dusseldorf ninety four naturalized British twenty two stop No police record stop
Daily Recorder
made similar inquiries today stop Intelligence officer meeting you in morning—McGlade.

Letter from Maureen Weston posted at Penzance on the evening of September 14
and received by Charles Patterson of the Daily Recorder on the Friday afternoon
:

D
EAR
C
HARLIE
,

Further to my report of September 13, I have examined the mine and quite frankly the experience was not a pleasant one. For one thing, you've no idea how eerie the place was. It reeked of water and the air was pretty stale. For another, my guide seemed to become rather uneasy when we reached the lower levels. I know that must sound silly—it does to me now I am sitting writing about it in the cosy warmth of my little bedroom. But, believe me, it is unpleasant enough going down a discarded Cornish tin mine without your guide getting scared. Perhaps ‘scared' isn't quite the right word. ‘Puzzled' might be better—and yet he was more than just puzzled. He was quite confident when we started. After all, it was his mine, so to speak. But there are all sorts of funny noises in those empty galleries. The drip of water echoes and is magnified. There are strange creaking sounds where old props are taking a strain, queer glimpses of pale light where old shafts come down, the sound of falling stones, the weird echo of one's own footsteps going up one gallery and coming back at one down another, and at the lower levels a faint roar as of water falling. I didn't worry much about all these weird sounds until I sensed that Alf was uneasy. Then these sounds became so magnified in my imagination that at times I could have sworn we were being followed and at other times that the roof of the gallery was coming down.