When the mines closed, men left Cornwall in their thousands, going out literally into the unknown. Many left from Redruth Station and their heartache is still there.
Clock creeps to midnight
Soft sleep its gentle hostage takes
Throughout the tired town.
But there, where arc of bridge
Throws high its granite span
The day hangs on.
As lamps cast pools of light
On platform cold and grey,
Where parting people stand
Islands in the dark,
Cocooned and swathed
Against November chill
That comes as east wind tips
Down Carn Brea’s top,
And coldness grips the town.
A place of passage
A place to feel
That final hold on home
And hope for exile brief,
That fortune’s smile will hold
The hope of quick return.
They do not know
But bonds are sundered here
That never forge again
And as they go
The life-blood, too,
Goes from our land.
This place has felt the pain
In former days,
When from the west
They came to wait
In huddled hordes.
Bereft of work, of hope,
A land where silent shafts
Send messages of lives destroyed
And forced to leave this land.
Caught in camera’s eye,
That sea of anxious faces,
Flung platform long
In quiet confusion,
Speaks the pain of parting,
The aching want of home.
Those faces full of fear
Of unknown lands.
Stood here so late
On lonely night
When winds of time blow chill
I see them still.
David Oates is a Cornish bard who has published a history of Troon, entitled “Echoes of an Age”, a guide to Godrevy and Gwithian, “Walk the hidden ways” and a slim volume of his own verse, “Poems from the far west”. His unpublished work includes a reflection on a Cornish childhood, “What time do they close the gates, Mister?” and a fictionalised story for young people based on the extant life of St Gwinear, with the working title, “The son of a king”. David is working on another guide in the “Walk the hidden ways” series, entitled “Hard Rock country”.
David is a tenor singer with the well-known group, Proper Job based in mid- Cornwall and has collaborated with Portreath musician, Alice Allsworth, to write the lyrics for a number of songs about Cornwall and the Cornish.
Miners digging, down below,
Working with just a lanterns glow,
Cornish mines, closed at last.
Miners dreaming of the past,
In other lands so far away,
A few remember that sad, sad day.
From Redruth station and others too,
They travelled on to lands anew.
Moved by the poems . My grandfather probably left from Redruth station (from Condurrow) for South Africa .later joined by my father and grandmother. Sadly on his return he died at sea.