|
|
|||||||||
| March 13th | Jack Penhale (Birth) | |||
| ‘Lucky or unlucky?’
Carnyorth – born Raymond Harry (1903 – 1976) was born on this day but wrote as Jack Penhale (and hereafter referred to as Penhale) and questioned if being born on Friday, the 13th made him lucky or unlucky.
The fourth of the seven children of William Thomas Harry and Mary Bennetts Harry he began work as a tin miner at the Levant Mine which was controlled by Captain Francis Oats (September 1st) and was present on the day of the Levant Mining Disaster (October 20th) and also when four trammers were killed in August 1920. Deciding to make a new life elsewhere, Penhale emigrated to Canada the same year and lived there for eight years returning to Carnyorth in 1928. He became famous for his eight part serial published in 1961 in ‘The Cornish Magazine’ established by Denys Val Baker (October 24th) and which was subsequently compiled as a ‘The Mine Under the Sea’. Fascinating for the details of working underground and the disaster, the book starts with reminiscences of his father who had emigrated to the Rand (1910) to work in the gold mines returning six years later ‘with hollow, sunken cheeks, and without lungs to breathe’ and who died the following year aged 43. This represents the fate of innumerable miners who worked in extraordinary heat, near darkness continuously breathing in dust and dirt and then having to spend up to one hour climbing ladders at the end of the shift.
|
||||