Mary Ann Prout -
Her Family and Background

St Agnes, on the north Cornish coast, about four miles south-west of Perranporth and about five miles north of Redruth, was a very different place in the early 1800's from the tourist town of today. A walk today down Stippy-Stappy to Trevaunance Cove will reveal the hummocks and hillocks of tin or copper mine spoil, derelict chimneys, and mine shafts. The area must have been an industrial landscape, with the sound of blasting, echoing with the throb of pumps, and probably covered in dust and mud.

Mining was the economic mainstay of Cornwall in the 19th century. In some areas, at least one person in four gained their living from mining or from one of the ancillary industries, such as blacksmiths, tallow chandlers, ropemakers, mule drivers, carters, gunpowder manufacturers and carpenters.

Although some mine owners became wealthy, mining was no get-rich-quick occupation for the workers. In earlier days much of the digging and crushing was carried out manually, and up to the 1870s, when rock drills were introduced, holes for blasting were bored by hand, and the ore wheeled in barrows to the nearest shaft and hauled to the surface.

The mines were badly ventilated, sanitation was minimal, and the fug and heat caused by the burning of hundreds of tallow candles (the only lighting), the fumes from exploding gunpowder and the mass of sweating humanity, often a thousand feet below ground, and sometimes under the sea, must have been appalling. Danger, too, was ever present- from rock falls, from blasting accidents, from falling from one of the succession of vertical ladders that led up from the depths of the mine. Chest ailments and heart diseases were commonplace, many did not survive to reach middle age.

Mining, and especially tin mining, had flourished in Cornwall since the days when the Phoenicians sailed in to trade, perhaps even earlier. Great-great-great grandfather, (of Valerie Gale) Richard Pearce was probably a miner, or at least engaged in some ancillary trade. We know that his son, Thomas, born 1789, was a cordwainer (a leather worker/shoemaker) and he may have learned his trade from his father.

On 24th December, 1827, when he was 38, Thomas married 28-year old Mary Ann Henwood at Gwennap. Their first child, a girl, was born exactly nine months later, and died the same day, un-named. Mary Ann Pearce (nee Henwood), my great-great grandmother, is the first family member of whom we know anything apart from their name and when they died. She went on to bear five more children, all of whom survived to adulthood. Thanks to her grand-daughter's diary we have an account of her death in 1878 at the age of 77. Thomas, her husband, died in 1845 when James, the youngest child, was five.

These were the 'Hungry Forties'. The Corn Laws of 1815, which had kept the price of bread and flour high, were not repealed until 1846. Wages were low (in the region of ten shillings a week for a miner, and less for many others) and prices were high. Sugar in 1841 cost eight pence a pound; tea was between six and ten shillings a pound.

Ann (known as Nancy), the second born, was 16 when her father died and the two elder boys, John and Thomas Henry Pearce, were 12 and 11. Until new regulations were made in the 1870s, boys as young as ten, or even younger, worked underground. Girls and women, were employed in large numbers working in rough sheds and outside, dressing and preparing the ore after it was brought up.

Somehow Mary Ann succeeded in raising her family, only to have most of them disperse far and wide, to Australia and Mexico, as soon as they were grown. James died in Pachuca, Mexico in 1896, but not before he had fathered a daughter, Mary Ellen Pearce, who comes into the story later. Mary Trewartha, the younger daughter, stayed in Cornwall, married a man called Thomas and had a daughter, Annetta. She was buried in Illogan in 1906 (aged 69).

But it was the elder daughter, Nancy, my great-grandmother, born 26th December, 1829, who married John James Prout in 1849 and allied the Pearce and Prout families. It is in snatches from the diaries of her daughter, Mary Ann, written between 1877 and 1881 that we get our first real glimpse of the family. Mary Ann's father, John James Prout, born in the year that Napoleon died on St.Helena, was the youngest child of Abraham Prout, a mine agent (i.e. an overseer) who died in 1820, four months before John James was born, leaving yet another widow to rear her family alone, three girls aged 13, 11 and 8 and two boys, Abraham aged six and the new babe.

The population of England, about 9 million at the end of the 18th century when John's father, Abraham, was born, was rising rapidly. By the time John James married in 1849, it had risen to 25 million, largely owing to improvements in public health and the elimination of some of the worst plagues.

In the first decades of the 1800's Cornwall was producing two-thirds of the world's copper, but Chile and the New World were fast catching up. By the late 1860's the Cornish copper industry was collapsing and hundreds of men from all over Cornwall, and sometimes their families too, were sailing overseas to seek a living in the Americas with their lure of gold, silver and limitless farming land. It has been estimated that, over a hundred year period, between 250,000 and 330,000 left, making Cornwall one of the chief emigration centres of Europe, rivalling Italy and Ireland.

The Prout family bible records that John James's eldest sister, Elizabeth, died in Australia in 1862, aged 55, Abraham, the eldest boy died in Grass Valley, California in 1867, when he was 53 and John James, the youngest child, may have been overseas too before he married Ann (Nancy) Pearce in 1849, when he was 28. There was certainly little to stay for in St. Agnes at that time, with the mines in the doldrums and farming the shallow soil always a hand to mouth occupation.

Those families left behind in Cornwall suffered hard times indeed, until remittances from overseas could begin to reach them. Those who could not look for support from other family members were forced to take Parish Relief and that may be why John James took his wife Nancy and their two small children, John Pearce, (born 1857) and Mary Ann (born 1861) with him when, at some time in the mid 1860s, he went to Mexico, returning in 1872.

John James Prout was back in St. Agnes in 1876, carrying on a business as a coal merchant. A Truro solicitor's bill for £3.17s.4d. for court proceedings against a defaulting client, has survived. The debt was for £8.12s.0d. and the court verdict gave the plaintiff, £8.0s.0d., equivalent to several months wages for a labourer. Today a net gain was £4.2s.8d.

Next chapter - Mary Ann's Father
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Alan Taylor
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Created on
2nd July 2004