20 My new favourite band
Emmeline and the Hoopers – world tour 1846
I’m writing this in the run up to Glastonbury Festival and I’m excited to introduce you to my new favourite band
Emmeline and the Hoopers
They have a steampunk kind of look and a sound somewhere between Wolf Alice and The Cranberries. As far as I know they don’t exist but I really think they should.
Our fierce female lead is Emmeline Hambly Herring (or Emlyn, Emlin, Emelia depending on the spelling scene you’re into), my 3xgreat grandaunt and she tours the world with her husband Henry Hooper and his extended family.
We met them in Tinners and Streamers and when we were with the Kids at the Corn Mill. Then they surprised me when I unearthed their stories in the digital records. I knew we had ancestors who had left Cornwall for Canada and America, but not that there were Aussie Cousin Jacks in our narrative.
Who is Cousin Jack?
There is a saying that in any hole you might find on this planet, you’ll find a Cornishman at the bottom of it, digging.
The fortunes of Cornish mining changed dramatically from the mid 1800s as ores and minerals mined around the globe hit international markets. The skills in hard rock mining to extract this wealth from the earth were still concentrated in Cornwall, but opportunities at home declined. Thousands of Cornishmen and their families boarded ships and took their talents across the world. Their skills were like the gold dust they sought out.
The tale goes that speculators in the emerging mining economies, keen to dig deeper, wider encouraged Cornish diggers to get their cousin, Jack, to come out too.
But before we go any further with that story it is time to pay attention to some food for my hungry mind.
First Nations
I have learned that it is culturally kind to flag where writings include images, voices and names of people who have died, as that may cause distress or offend some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the First Nations of Australasia. Seeing as my writings are nearly all linked to people who have died, The Hungry Minds Club won’t be a welcoming place for all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, which makes me sad.
Heavy English boots trampling on first nation cultures again.
I am about to write about Cornish people from my ancestral network who moved across the world and benefitted from the British Crown claims on the land there.
It is important now to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of that land, the Dja Dja Wurrung and Taungurung People to acknowledge their continuing connection to land, waters and community. And pay our respects to the people, the cultures and the Elders past and present. They won’t feature much in the rest of this narrative, despite the story playing out on their land.
Watercolour by S. T. Gill, (1869) from the collection: The Victorian gold fields during 1852 & 3, comprising forty original sketches hosted by the State Library Victoria.
The numbers who emigrated from Cornwall in the latter part of the 19th Century are quite mind-blowing. Whole communities were hollowed out and the next generation disappeared. Tim Hannigan highlights the 45% of young men and 26% of young women (those aged 15 to 24) who emigrated overseas between 1861-1900 in his book The Granite Kingdom.
The story of Emmeline and the Hoopers brought these numbers to life for me. The wholesale shift of an extended family from a small village must have left a shadow.
Emmeline and Henry married at St Nonna’s in Altarnun in 1844, shortly after they are both recorded living in the tiny hamlet of Trevague in the south of the parish on the 1841 census. Their families have lived here or in adjacent parishes for generations.
Henry’s family are already getting restless if I have followed my paths through the records correctly.
An early mover is Henry’s uncle, Jacob Hooper. A cordwainer, making shoes in Altarnun, he ships out with his large family in the earliest years of the Victorian Gold Rush. Their brood carry an unusual flourish in the names department compared to others we have seen on our wanderings, including a Lavinia, Sabina, Leonora, Matilda (who dies aged 11 in December 1846, they arrived in Australia in that May) and Isabella … named after the ship she was born on between Plymouth and Adelaide, who dies at just six-months.
Jacob’s obituary in the South Australian Register 1882 explains,
“There lately died at Salisbury, at the age of eighty-two, another old colonist, Mr. Jacob Hooper, who arrived in the colony by the Isabella Watson in May, 1846, with his wife and eleven children and settled in Bowden. His descendants number 106”.
Returning to Jacob’s nephew Henry and Emmeline, Henry Hooper was the fourth of five children born between 1813 and 1830, Mary, Margaret, James and Sampson, all of whom appear to have emigrated to Australia at some point between 1844 and 1856. Young families disappearing from the community in Altarnun.
Their mother Thomasine died in 1850, leaving father Sampson a widower, lodging with other tin miners in Cornwall, before he too emigrates, taking his mining skills to the gold and quartz mines around Bendigo.
Emmeline and Henry Hooper’s young family complete the Hoopers’ exodus from Cornwall to the mining boom towns of Victoria. Their passage to Adelaide on the Ship Aliquis set off from Plymouth on 4th June and arrived on the 26th August 1856, Henry and Emmeline with 7-year-old Mary and baby Sampson. One family among 438 passengers arriving on that voyage.
Four years after arriving in Australia, Henry is the Underground Foreman at the New Chum Quartz Mining Company. A position weighed with responsibility which sees Henry in front of an inquest jury after an accident on his watch in March 1860.
“…on [the miner’s] head there was a piece of stone, weighing probably 6 cwt., upon his body about half a ton of stone. He was quite dead”
We’ll return to that story another time.
Steve Knightley captured the bitter sweet dynamics of the Cornish diaspora in his song Cousin Jack.
Where there's a mine or a hole in the ground
That's what I'm heading for, that's where I'm bound
So look for me under the lode and inside the vein
Where the copper, the clay, the arsenic and tin
Run in your blood and under your skin
I'll leave the county behind, I'm not coming back
Oh, follow me down, cousin Jack
You can listen here.
I’m really looking forward to hearing Emmeline and the Hoopers’ cover version.