Harvey's Forgotten Shipyard By Daisy Culmer
Daisy Culmer has worked as the Museum Curator for Harvey's Foundry Trust at Hayle Heritage Centre in West Cornwall for more than seven years. There, Daisy is responsible for managing a diverse social and industrial history collection of around 8,000 objects and archival items relating to Hayle and the surrounding area.
She gave a fascinating and well illustrated talk about the company Harveys of Hayle. During the 19th century Hayle became the most important foundry in the world for making Cornish engines and Cornish boilers, and had many overseas sales offices. The great Cornish engineers and engine designers, including Richard Trevithick, all provided expertise to Harvey’s Foundry which was unmatched by other foundries. Harvey’s made the largest steam pumping engine ever built, the Cruquius steam engine in Holland with a bore of 12 feet and which is preserved in the Cruquius Museum.
She outlined their other activities, including shipbuilding and running a regular ferry service between Hayle and Bristol. They worked in cooperation with Isambard Kingdom Brunel, manufacturinghalf of the chain links for Brunel's Royal Albert Bridge across the Tamar at Saltash (this, following a glowing report from Brunel himself after his visit to the premises in 1840) and perhaps most famously the links for the Clifton Suspension Bridge. She detailed the rivalry between the Cornish Copper Company at the east end of town and Harveys at the west. The CCC wound up in 1869. The decline of the mining industry spelled Harvey's downfall and although the engineering works and shipyard had closed down by 1904, other lines of business survived. The name of Harvey was finally dropped in the 1980s, a building supplies business, now run by Jewson, still operates from part of the original Harvey site at Carnsew Road.
13/1/2024