Bennett family from St Just in Penwith, Cornwall

This short history builds on the research undertaken by Jessie Evans and Debbie Robinson who generously shared their work 10 years ago and got me started exploring the Bennetts family.

To begin, a bit of background on John Bennetts and Elizabeth Williams. They were married at St Buryan, the home of Elizabeth Williams, in 1801, a village about 5 miles south of St Just. John was a tin-miner for much of his life(although Ann Williams marriage certificate lists his occupation as sailor and son Hugh's marriage certificate has his occupation as gardener so it is likely he stopped working as a miner later in life.) The family moved between villages in and around St Just for the next 60 years.

The family appear to have moved around spending some years living in St Just, some time living north of St Just at Carnyorth, and then living for the best part of 50 years in the little hamlets on the fringe of the Cot Valley, a mile to the south-west of St Just. This area between St Just and the sea is quite small, barely a few hundred metres separating the hamlets and the local mines, all within sight of the town of St Just. (there is an amazing panoramic photo of the area connected to my Ancestry tree). At least four different mines were working along the edges of the Cot Valley in the early C19th, some of these mines, such as Wheal Hermon, had been operating for centuries. The main hamlets in which the Bennett family lived included Bethorne (Bosorne) and Carralack on the northern side of the valley, Letcha on its southern edge and Bosavern Mills down at the head of the Valley.

An overview of tin-mining around St Just

Internet websites on Cornish mining provided the following brief overview of tin mining around St Just. Mining in Cornwall dates back to between 1000 and 2000 B.C. when Cornwall is thought to have been visited by metal traders from the eastern Mediterranean. They named Britain, the 'Cassiterides' - 'Tin Islands'. Cornwall and the far west of Devon provided the majority of the United Kingdom's tin, copper and arsenic. Originally the tin was found as alluvial deposits in the gravels of stream beds, but eventually underground working took place. Tin lodes outcropped on the cliffs and underground mines sprung up as early as the 16th century.

However it was in the 19th century that mining reached its zenith, before foreign competition depressed the price of copper and later tin, to a level that made Cornish ore unprofitable. At its height, the Cornish Tin Mining Industry had around 600 steam enginesworking to pump out the mines.

The areas around St Just has been mined for tin and copper for around 2000 years, however volume production started around 1820. In some places the workings extended a mile out under the sea. Despite being an intensive process of hard physical labour in often poor conditions, it was the first choice occupation for most Cornish men and women due to the generally better wages on offer. Mine workers usually spent around eight hours a day underground.

 The small town of St. Just, where the Bennetts had lived for at least a few generations, is all that evolved as an urban centre. Mining families like the Bennetts carried on working the fields whose boundaries had been laid out hundreds of years previously. By the mid 16th century miners were working the alluvial tin deposits in the valleys to the north and south of the town, plus many of the coastal lode outcrops, including the Cot Valley and the nearby cliffs a mile to the south of St Just close to where the Bennetts family lived for the early part of the C20th.

Life for mine workers and their families was undoubtedly tough. Not only were they working for low wages and living off a poor diet, but the dust and fumes from difficult working conditions deep underground meant that miners were often considered old by their 40s. John Bennetts died of consumption in 1835 at the relative old age of 59. Consumption was a diagnosis given to any chronic lung condition that resulted in chronic coughing, breathing difficulties and weight loss and was a common ailment of Cornish miners. 
Their home life wasn’t any easier either. Miners had to learn to cope with poor health, whilst diseases such as cholera and typhoid stalked many of the new mining villages and towns with their lack of sanitation, uncertain water supplies and overcrowded homes. Many of the cottages in the Cot Valley do not get running water until the 1960s! 
Mining was frequently a family affair. In the early 1800s, women and children were working in the mines as well. Young women took work as bal maidens, dressing ore at surface. Using special hammers, they would carefully select and crush the ore to a manageable size before further processing. Children were soon involved in the tough world of work too and in 1839, there were 7,000 children employed in Cornish mines. By eight or nine, a miner’s son or daughter was old enough to make their contribution to their family's limited income. Until the age of 12, children worked mainly above ground doing menial jobs such as sweeping or, perhaps, tending the tin buddles or settling strips.

Beyond the towns and villages, mining families often lived in granite or cob cottages on smallholdings with, perhaps, three to five acres of land to tend. This brought a degree of self-sufficiency where families could grow their food and perhaps keep a pig. This describes the experience of the Bennett family that mostly chose to live outside the main town in small hamlets in the Cot Valley. A number of John and Elizabeth’s children moved back into St Just in the second half of the C19th living in terraces or rows of cottages. Here gardens were small or sometimes replaced by courtyards – offering little opportunity to supplement their diet with garden produce.
Accommodating big families in damp overcrowded cottages with a lack of adequate sanitation meant a daily struggle. Sleeping arrangements were often complicated with several children sleeping in one bed. There would be no indoor water supply or bathroom – the lavatory being an earth closet outside – and the only heat came from an open fire. In damp, overcrowded cottages, diseases such as typhus, typhoid, measles, smallpox and diphtheria were widespread. Methodism encouraged pride and thrift, meaning that a miner’s home was usually clean, his children as well fed as possible and their clothes, although old, laundered and neatly patched. 

Another reason for avoiding the larger towns was that Cornwall’s mining towns and villages were rough places where rioting, fighting and heavy drinking were commonplace. Mine workers often met in local pubs or ‘kiddleywinks’ (beer shops) to split their monthly earnings. Gambling, singing and heavy drinking often ensued, leading to ‘Maze Monday’ when men were still too inebriated to turn up for work. Too much drink on payday was often the cause of disturbances, which led to Temperance Societies in some towns setting up Coffee Taverns as an alternative to the pubs. This experience significantly shaped the life of one of John and Elizabeth’s sons, Hugh Bennetts, who became a crusader for the Temperance Movement after his emigration to New Zealand.

Census returns show the parish population of St Just increased from 2,779 in 1801 to 9,290 in 1861, with the greatest growth occurring between 1831 and 1841, when mine workers made up one third of the local population. The boom was short-lived, and the decline set in during the 1860's when most of the area's copper mines had closed and by 1900 the population had halved with miners and their families emigrating to get work. It is this process that will become the focus of the rest of this story.

The decision to emigrate

There is an interesting symmetry about the life choices of the children and grandchildren of John Bennetts and Elizabeth Williams. This story will focus on the destinations of their nine children. The four eldest daughters all married and chose to stay in Cornwall. Each of their husbands worked in the tin and copper mines around St Just. One son, Thomas William Bennetts probably died relatively young in St Just. The other four children, two sons and two daughters, all married and chose to leave Cornwall and start new lives on the other side of the world. The symmetry doesn’t end there! The two sons, John and Hugh, plus a niece, Susanna, emigrated to the South Inland of New Zealand, mostly around Christchurch. The two daughters, Louisa and Ann, followed by at least a few of their nephews, Francis John Warren, Thomas William Bennetts and Hugh Bennetts Grenfell, emigrated to Victoria, Australia. Of them all, only Thomas continued to work as a miner.  

Staying in Cornwall

Eldest daughter Elizabeth Williams Bennetts was named after her mother. She married William Thomas, a local tin miner on the 24 March 1832 at the parish church in St Just. Interestingly, sister Margaret married another local miner, William Grenfell, on the same day! Elizabeth had a son and five daughters. The eldest son William has not been traced after 1851 and the family story is that he emigrated to America. Of the daughters, at least two also emigrated. Elizabeth and her husband lived most of their lives at Letcha Cottage. Elizabeth lived to a ripe old age of 78.

Second daughter Margaret and her husband lived in the neighbouring hamlets of Carralack and then Bossowall, close to where William Grenfell worked as a miner. They had 11 children over the next 20 years so their miner’s cottage must have been quite a squeeze! William Grenfell died in his early 40s and Margaret continued to live at Carralack raising her 7 surviving children as a widow. Records would indicate that Margaret’s mother, Elizabeth, must have come to live with her daughter to help raise the children. Mother Elizabeth, died at Carralack in 1861 and a few months later Margaret also died in 1862. Her youngest son Richard was still only 10 years old. Of Margaret’s children, one son, Hugh Bennetts Grenfell, emigrated to Victoria.

Next daughter, Mary Williams Bennetts life tells a similar story to her older sisters. She too married in 1832, a busy year of weddings for the Bennetts family. Her husband, John Bone was also a miner. Living in Bosorne and then Carralack, Mary had six children before dying prematurely in 1846 barely 33 years old. Her husband John remarried a few months later and the family relocated to the town of St Just where they lived in a miner’s cottage in Pleasant Row. His second wife had a number of other children.

Fourth daughter, Eliza, married Frances Warren and had three sons. The family lived in a miner’s cottage in North Row, St Just before relocating a mile to the east of St Just in the 1840s. Frances worked as an agricultural labourer for the next two decades around Tregeseal and Bosvargus. He was the witness on his mother-in-law’s burial record in 1862 as none of her own sons were alive or living in Cornwall by this time. Later in life Eliza and Frances moved back into St Just and Frances continued to work as a labourer and her eldest son, Charles, was working as a blacksmith before he decided to emigrate to Victoria. She too lived to a good age of 79.    

Leaving for Australia

Where the lives of the older daughters were very settled, marrying young to local miners and settling in neighboring hamlets, the youngest two daughters faced different prospects and challenges. Both Louisa and Ann Williams Bennetts appear to have left home at a relatively young age to work as domestic servants. Louisa’s whereabouts during this period has not been confirmed but the fact that she married a farmer from St Buryan, her mother’s home town, and that the wedding took place in Penzance, suggests that she was working either in the larger town of Penzance or on a rural property nearby. Ann Williams Bennetts was certainly working as a domestic servant in Penzance at the time of the 1841 census. Louisa married a widower, John Gwennap, with two young children in 1843 at Penzance. John Gwennap was a farmer but what happened next is not entirely clear. It would seem that at some point in the 1840s Joh and Louisa along with her sister Ann and brother John all ended up in Swansea in Wales. Louisa and John certainly had a son of their own, Thomas, in 1846 (the location of Thomas’ birth is also confusing as the 1851 census has St Austell as the birthplace of both Thomas and his mother Louisa but I suspect a transcription error and doubt this is correct) and Louisa’s young stepson Charles died in Swansea, Wales in 1848. John Gwennap is the informant on the death record. He likely died quite soon after. To add to the mystery, brother John Bennetts married Sarah Prentice, a girl from Penzance at some point prior to 1847. Their two children are both born in Swansea in 1847 and 1850. I also suspect Ann Williams Bennetts lived in Swansea for a period as it explains how she met her husband who was from the nearby town of Neath in south Wales. Quite why they all went to Swansea is not clear to me at this stage.

By 1850, Ann Williams Bennetts had moved north to Birkenhead in Cheshire and married James Thomas, a stonemason from Neath, Wales at Holy Trinity in Birkenhead. The 1851 census reveals that Ann and James were living with her brother John and his wife Sarah at 2 Cleveland Place, Birkenhead. Louisa is definitely a widow and an annuitant (living off her late husband’s inheritance) and, with her son Thomas, was living around the corner in Brook Street, Birkenhead. The following year Louisa married widower Captain George Phillip Stevens, a sea captain from Liverpool. His first wife had died and he had two sons. George worked for the Temperance Line and was captain of the 'Jane Greene', a cargo vessel moving goods between Liverpool and Australia. About this time both sister’s familes moved to Toxteth Park in Liverpool across the Mersey. John Bennetts family cannot be traced at this stage. They may have returned to Cornwall or emigrated to New Zealand some time in the 1850s. John certainly remarried in Christchurch in 1862 and his first wife and two children are nowhere to be found.

It would seem that the families of the two sisters, Louisa and Ann, made plans to emigrate to Victoria, Australia. James travelled first, probably in late 1854 (a shipping record has not yet been found likely because he travelled on a cargo vessel captained by his brother-in-law). George Phillip Stevens also emigrated separate from his family arriving in Melbourne in February 1855 on the 'Ida'. He first lived in Ivy Cottage, Flinders Lane and advertised his services as a reliable sea captain on the front page of the Argus newspaper weeks after his arrival. His sons from his marriage to Elizabeth Pemberthy also emigrated to Victoria. Ann Williams Bennetts with her two young sons along with Louisa and her children made the passage to Australia on the ‘Hotspur’ arriving in Port Phillip in 1857. The two families established homes in the working class suburb of Collingwood next door to each other in Harmsworth Street and remained close for the rest of their lives. Louisa had three daughters and one son and died in 1893. Ann Williams Bennetts had five children and died in 1900.   

23 years after their arrival in Melbourne, a nephew of Louisa and Ann, also emigrated to Victoria. Thomas William Bennetts along with his sister had been orphaned as children after the early deaths of their parents, Thomas Williams Bennetts and Eliza (nee Hocking), in the late 1850s. Raised by Eliza’s sister, Thomas had lived with his aunty and uncle in St Just until at least 1871, working in the mines. He then moved north to Barrow-in-Furness, a mining town at the edge of the Lake District in North Lancashire. He worked as an iron miner and married Mary Ann Rogers (who was visiting England from Australia).  They decided to emigrate to Victoria in the late 1880s. Mary Ann's brothers were mine managers in Bendigo and the opportunity for employment on the goldfields as well as being close to Mary Ann's family likely provided the motivation for their decision. On arrival, they travelled up to the mining town of Bendigo, 100 miles north of Melbourne and site of the legendary 1852 goldrush. He worked in the Bendigo mines for the rest of his life becoming a respected local identity in a town full of Cornish miners. He died in Bendigo in 1908. It is not clear how much contact he had with his elderly aunties in Collingwood but he certainly lived in Collingwood for a few years later in his life literally around the corner from a number of his cousins so I suspect that he also maintained some contact with his extended family in Australia. 

Another nephew, Francis John Warren, the son of sister Eliza, emigrated to Victoria in 1865. Francis was a blacksmith and also had travelled north to the goldfields in Bendigo where his established a smithing shop in California Gully. He married Emma Porritt, in Eaglehawk in 1872. Interestingly, she had resided in Johnston Street Collingwood and it is likely that Francis met her through visiting his aunties in Collingwood. In the late 1870s Francis and Emily returned to Melbourne to live at Emma Street in Collingwood where he established a blacksmithing shop over the road. They had three children and Francis died in 1908 in Collingwood. 

Hugh Bennetts Grenfell, another nephew and son of Margaret Bennetts, likely emigrated to Victoria some time prior to 1871. He was located in Ballarat, another major gold-mining centre 60 miles to the north-west of Melbourne in 1877 where he married Emily James. He lived in Ballarat for the rest of his life and records indicate that he later worked on the railways. He had eight children and died in Ballarat in 1912. 

Leaving for New Zealand

The final piece of the puzzle concerns the emigration of two brothers, John and Hugh Bennetts, to New Zealand about 1860. John’s story has been partially told above. How he quite ended up in Christchurch is not clear but it would seem that he either travelled with his first wife and children in the 1850s (and they subsequently died or left New Zealand) or else he left England after their deaths and arrived in New Zealand closer to 1860. Either way, the next confirmed fact is that he married Charlotte Sarah Grint in Christchurch in 1862. He had by this time, established a grocery shop on Tuam Street where he worked for a number of years. At this point, the story of his brother needs to be introduced as the lives of the two brothers are quite interconnected.

Hugh Bennetts had been a miner in Letcha prior to his marriage to Elizabeth Stuckey in Bristol in 1850 and afterwards moved to Pucklechurch in Gloucestershire where Elizabeth’s parents lived. Hugh and Elizabeth had a number of children in Pucklechurch during which time Hugh worked as a baker. After the death of Elizabeth’s parents, Hugh and Elizabeth inherited a significant amount of money which they used to pay for a passage to Christchurch, New Zealand on the ‘William Miles’ in 1860. Travelling with them was Susanna Bennetts, Hugh’s niece (the daughter of Elizabeth Williams Bennetts). On arrival, Hugh established a Temperance Hotel (served meals and coffee but no alcohol) in Tuam Street next door to his brother’s grocery shop. His niece, Susanna, worked in the grocery shop for a number of years prior to her own marriage to Albert Truscott in 1865. Albert was a farmer from the rural region of West Melton and used to shop at John Bennetts store for supplies. It was through the shop that Susanna and Albert met.

John Bennetts went into partnership with a Mr McIntosh in 1868 seeking to establish a soapworks in Nelson, a growing town on the northern end of the South Island of New Zealand. This was a significant dislocation for his young family who were forced to relocate 200 miles from Christchurch. The business began producing good soaps but cash flow was a problem and the business struggled to get off the ground. A daughter was born to John and Charlotte in Nelson in 1871 but the baby was sickly and his wife decided to take her two young daughters back to Christchurch later that year. John pressed on with the soapworks but tragically he died suddenly in 1876 in Nelson. John’s surviving daughter, Elizabeth, married William Couzins in Christchurch in 1894. Her uncle Hugh was a witness at the ceremony.

Hugh Bennetts established a clearing –house in Christchurch in the 1860s and worked as a well-known auctioneer in the city alongside his business at the Good Templar Hotel. He had a large family of nine children and built a reputation in Christchurch as a moral campaigner and leading advocate for the Temperance movement. He was a committed Christian and worked as a lay Methodist preacher in his retirement after relocating to Wellington in about 1905. He also ran for election on the Christchurch city council on more than one occasion. Hugh died in Wellington in 1909      

Finally, niece, Susanna Truscott (nee Bennetts), who had arrived in New Zealand with her uncle in 1860 in ‘delicate health’, married and moved inland to Sugar Loaf Farm near West Melton with her husband Albert. They raised eight children before the farm was eventually sold and Susanna and Albert brought a big house in Christchurch where they retired. Until the end of her life, Susanna maintained a correspondence exchanging letters regularly with her sisters back in Cornwall.

If you found this story interesting or it connects with your family please leave a comment. If you can add any details Id also love to hear from you.