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Elizabethan Klondike
The picture of Keswick to the middle of the sixteenth century has necessarily been sparse but with a new wave of invaders our knowledge of the town becomes more definite.
The arrival of expert miners from Germany in the mid- 1500s transformed a small rural community into a busy industrial complex, which, for a time, enjoyed a measure of prosperity unknown in its more normal capacity as a medieval market centre.
Queen Elizabeth I, anxious to satisfy the demand for copper, turned to Germany for expert miners. In june 1564, Daniel Hechstetter, Hans Loner and twelve workmen arrived in Keswick and found workable deposits of copper not far away. Six months later, the Queen gave official permission for Hechstetter to ?search, dig, try, roast and melt all manner of mines and ores of gold, silver, copper and quicksilver? not only in Keswick area but also in Coniston, Cornwall and Wales.
Whatever the truth of the stories about the smuggling and shady dealing, one fact is certain: Borrowdale wad provided the raw material for Keswick?s major industry, the manufacture of pencils.
The town likes to boast that it is the home of the first pencils in the world. There is no hard evidence to prove the claim and its validity depends on what is meant by the word ?pencil?. It is derived from the Latin ?penicullus? (literally, a small tail) and was used to describe small, fine pointed brushes for painting.
Various Dates have been suggested for the first pencil works by the Greta in Keswick but Molly Lefebure?s authoritative article in her Cumberland Heritage (1970) puts forward a tentative date of 1792. one local tradition credits a Keswick joiner with making the first important step of encasing wad in wood. Another insists that pencils were made in the town in Elizabethan times- the raw material was certainly available.
(Bott, 1994, pp. 23)
George is a local historian and for 45 years he has had a passion for all things Cumbrian. In 1949 he moved to Cockermouth where he was head of English and Librarian at the Grammer school for the next 30 years
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