Bal Maiden - Industrialisation and The 19th Century Copper Boom

Industrialisation and The 19th Century Copper Boom

At the end of the 18th century the copper mining industry of North Wales centred around Parys Mountain declined, and the depression in the British copper market ended. As the price rose, the Cornish mines began to reopen. By this time, the Industrial Revolution had begun, bringing with it new attitudes towards organisation and efficiency. While the mine managers of the 18th century generally treated bal maidens as useful only for breaking and sorting ore, the managers of these new mines sought to use all their employees as efficiently as possible.

We went off on Wednesday to the mines, which were quite a new scene to me and the whole process is very curious and interesting, the boys pushing the little carts full of ore on rails. The little girls washing and picking out the best parts, the bigger ones beating it with hammers all the time, thirty nine in a row, was a very pretty thing. They were all singing hymns which sounded so beautiful, and they looked so blooming and healthy from being so much in the air, so different from the appearance of the manufacturing classes in Glasgow.

Lucy Fitzgerald (wife of explorer George Francis Lyon) describing Gwennap, December 1825

While 18th century metal mines had worked on the principle of adult men digging the ore and women and children picking and cobbing the ore ready for smelting, in the new large-scale mines of the early 19th century working practices changed. The strenuous underground work was still carried out by male workers, as was breaking large rocks with heavy hammers ('ragging'). In copper mines, very young girls, and sick and injured older women, carried out the simple work of picking. Girls in their late teens forced the broken ore through a broad mesh to sort the ore ('riddling'), and used hammers to break the large chunks of ore left by the riddling process into smaller chunks. Girls in their mid-teens cobbed the resulting chunks, separating the valuable ore from waste rock. Grown women would carry out the heavy manual labour of breaking rocks with hammers ('spalling'), of crushing sorted ore to small grains ready for smelting ('bucking') and of transporting ore between various pieces of apparatus. An experienced bal maiden working as a spaller would produce approximately one ton (2240 lb; 1016 kg) of broken ore per day, depending on the type of stone. In the tin mines, in which ore could be crushed far more finely than copper before smelting, cobbing and bucking did not take place. Instead, the chunks of spalled ore were mechanically stamped to fine grains, and washed into a series of collecting pits to separate the coarse 'rough' from the fine 'slimes'. The resulting rough and slimes were separated out on large wooden frames ('buddling' and 'framing' respectively), to extract the tin ore from the surrounding dust and grit.

Following the introduction of the mechanical ore crusher in 1804 the tasks traditionally carried out by bal maidens began to be mechanised. Despite this, the rapid growth of the mines in comparison to the slow spread of mechanisation meant the number of bal maidens appears to have risen steadily, although statistics for the number of women employed in the mines in the early days of industrialisation are incomplete and a few are contradictory.