Join Dr Sharron Schwartz for an online talk on ‘The parish next door’, about Cornish mineworkers in South Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The talk will take place online on Tuesday 20 August at 3pm, via Zoom.

About the talk:  About the talk: For several decades from the 1850s, South Africa was a major destination for Cornish mineworkers. From the copper mines of Namaqualand, the diamond mines of Kimberley, to the Gold Rush in the Witwatersrand, the Cornish were at the very forefront of development. Such was the flow of people to its mining camps, that South Africa came to be regarded as almost the parish next door. Communities throughout Cornwall became reliant on remittances, and events occurring in South Africa were keenly felt back home. This was a time when Johannesburg had a Cousin Jack Corner, and the Redruth singer, Fanny Moody, sang Trelawney to thousands of her countrymen and women. The Jameson Raid and the Boer [South African] War tested loyalties within Cornish communities, and elections in the Mining Division were fought on issues occurring ‘On the Rand’. However, all that glitters was not gold, for the Cornish miners paid a high price to send remittances back home in the shape of the debilitating lung disease, miner’s phthisis. The legacy of Cornish contact with South Africa is still deeply carved into the hearts of countless families and is evident in the superb industrial archaeology of Namaqualand.

About the speaker:  Sharron Schwartz, born and bred in Redruth, received her doctorate at the University of Exeter on the Cornish in Latin America. She set up the Cornish Global Migration Programme in the late-1990s, was the documentary researcher for the Cornish Mining World Heritage Site Bid and Leverhulme Research Fellow in Migration Studies at the Institute of Cornish Studies. She is the author of a number of scholarly articles and books, including Lanner a Cornish Mining Parish (1998), Voices of the Cornish Mining Landscape (2008), Mining a Shared Heritage: Mexico’s ‘Little Cornwall’ (2011), and The Cornish in Latin America: Cousin Jack and the New World (2016). She manages the website cousinjacksworld.com and has visited numerous areas of Cornish interest worldwide, including South Africa.

Book your free tickets now over on our Ticket Tailor event page!

If you are unable to make this online talk live, it will be recorded and added to our YouTube channel a few weeks after the talk.