Audio File: Oll an Gwella
Camborne_Hill pdf with lyrics and score
Video: Oll an Gwella singing in Cornish and English with subtitles.
Puffing Devil photo- Adrien Willcocks
The Cornish mining industry was the birthplace of 19th century steam technology and this is embodied in the work of one of Cornwall’s most famous sons Richard Trevithick. Steam engine technology had steadily developed during the 18th Century from Thomas Newcomen’s first engine in 1712; to James Watts technological advances in 1776; and William Murdoch’s experimentation with locomotives in 1784. It was Richard Trevithick who developed the technology to harness the power of high-pressure steam and the engines that dominated the industrial world of the nineteenth century. Richard Trevithick applied the increased power offered by high pressure steam to locomotion. One of his first successful experiments was the Puffing Devil, a steam engine carriage that travelled along the road under its own power.
On Christmas eve in 1801 the residents of Camborne were greeted with the sight of the Puffing Devil carrying six passengers along Fore Street and then continuing up Camborne Hill to Beacon. The story goes that during later trials the Puffing Devil suffered technical problems when it hit a gully in the road. The drivers withdrew to a local tavern forgetting to turn the boiler down with the result that it blew up! Trevithick was undismayed as his experiment had proved a success.
The story of Trevithick’s steam engine is captured in the song “Camborne Hill”. The exact origins of the song are lost to us and to date no nineteenth century broad sides or song sheets have come to light with the lyrics or tune. The song clearly travelled the world with Cornish miners, and it is a salute to them that the first printed version of “Camborne Hill” appears in a collection called “Songs of the Butte Miner” published in Western Folklore in 1950. It was recorded in 1946 from the singing of a Cornishman called Richard Guest who had mined at Butte, Montana, for some 30 years. It was not was not identified by the 19th century folk song collectors in Cornwall or American folklorist James Madison Carpenter when he visited Cornwall in the 1930s. It was clearly popular by the time Peter Kennedy recorded it in 1956 and Inglis Gundry published it with a Cornish version by E.G. Retallack Hooper in Canow Kernow in 1960.
Today “Camborne Hill” holds pride of place in Cornish singing tradition and enjoys several variations in lyrics including the version in Cornish shown above sung by Oll an Gwella at the Lowender Peran Celtic Festival in 2017.
The core verses celebrate the wheels moving without horses and the white “stockans” which refer to the
protection worn by the drivers against the heat of the boiler.