Mine to Die

This is a marvellous read - local history with a personal voice to add interest - even, I imagine, to people who have never even visited West Cornwall. Rob Donovan's prose style is direct, punchy and clear - a rare quality in the writing of serious local history, as indeed is the affordable price. A political rather than technical or geological focus in a book on mining history is likewise both rare and welcome. There is plenty of full-blooded emotion here, untainted by sentimentality or ancestor-worship. The political implications are made clear - but any parallels to the present-day? Well, that's for the reader to work out. If all that sounds like your sort of thing, and you don't mind a forthright left-of-centre perspective, I think you'll love this book

https://robdonovan.blogspot.com/2024/10/my-mine-to-die-2024-reviewed-in-local.html

Rob Donovan has a knack for taking you along on his literary journeys. When you read this latest book of his - which surely anyone with a connection to Cornwall in general and mining in particular should do - you can feel and taste the dirt. The dirt caused by mining itself but also by the exploitation of the miners. My ancestors, like so many others, left Cornwall to make a better life for themselves. They succeeded in doing so, but so many others stayed behind and paid the price……on all fronts. A well researched book making use of historical newspaper articles and many other sources, e.g. visits to the actual mining sites.

Profit at what cost? This is the question Rob Donovan explores in Mine to Die, which is on the surface a history of mining in Cornwall. However, much like the mine shafts and tunnels running beneath the Cornish countryside, there is more here than first meets the eye. Underpinning this well-researched and compellingly presented history is an invitation to the reader to weigh the evidence presented therein and consider the question: how many lives are we-- as individuals or a society-- willing to sacrifice in pursuit of profit? After reading these harrowing tales of lives lost too soon, and widows and orphans left behind, you may be inclined to agree with the author that even one is too many. I know I do.

Rob Donavan here writes history at the tinface. Through the recorded experiences of youngish, Cornish tin miners and their families, the reader is confronted with a dramatic illustration of Donovan’s main thesis: in an economically and politically hierarchical society, profits are valued more than people. Against the backdrop of British Empire (thus British, even Cornish, investment in, for example, Malayan tin mining), World War (and the presumption by the major powers from the beginning of hostilities of the need to possess the greater “bank” of working class “cannon fodder” in order to outlast all others), economic Depression (and whom it most affects adversely) and so on, Donovan weaves his tale of the effects of the pursuit of personal wealth by the few upon the health and even life expectancy of the many. The hymn-chanting of surviving chapel goers in the awful, silent, underground aftermath of the Levant man-engine disaster provides a background dirge to the resultant attempts to seek compensation, and justice for affected individuals, families and communities. Where might an overriding morality or spirituality – rather than institutionalised religion that reflects and reinforces the prevailing social (dis)order – cause pause for thought and a different perspective concerning what a fair distribution of wealth might look like and how the value of people over profits might be economically expressed? The quotations are powerful; the naming of the frequently dead makes the records audible. Donovan’s argument is sustained, angry at times, wistful at others. Mine to Die hints at a refrain belonging on the lips of the Cornish poor – tin miners in peacetime, trench builders in wartime, but in both their fated or preordained lot: to die. Mine to Die asks if the Cornish tin mining industry had to expire in the way it did. Mine to Die implies that, with a change of moral perspective in the hearts of the wealthy and powerful, there might have survived a mine – to live.