Jane Harvey Trevithick: a loyal wife

A version of this post first appeared on my website Victorian Lives. I wanted to commemorate one of the many forgotten women who supported the ‘great’ men whose names are remembered by history.

Welcome to the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. It is probably not where you expected it to be. But the small town of Hayle, on the north coast of Cornwall, was once home to the two biggest foundries in the world. Henry Harvey and his rivals at the Cornish Copper Company exported steam engines and iron goods all over Britain and beyond. Ships from Hayle traded around the coast of the UK, to the ports of the Mediterranean, and across the Atlantic. The age of steam changed lives and Hayle was part of it.

In 1808, twenty years before Stephenson's Rocket was built in Newcastle, the Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick, known as the Cornish Giant, sent his Catch-me-who-can locomotive racing round a circular demonstration track in London at the heady speed of 12 miles per hour. In 1799 Trevithick was the first to test an engine that successfully used high pressure or 'strong' steam, boiling it like a giant kettle on the kitchen fire tended by his long-suffering wife. Jane Trevithick was the older sister of Henry Harvey, the owner of one of Hayle’s two great foundries.

Jane has largely been forgotten by history, overshadowed by her colourful husband, but she deserves to be remembered as a successful businesswoman in her own right. She loyally followed Richard to London, where they lived until he caught typhus and was declared bankrupt. They then returned home to Cornwall, where he designed the Cornish engine, a highly efficient condensing engine used to drain water from the tin and copper mines. Ever restless, in 1816 Richard Trevithick set sail for South America on a whaling ship to see for himself how his machinery worked at altitude in the silver mines of Peru. He stayed away for more than ten years, during which time he fought with Bolivar’s rebel army and narrowly escaped being eaten by an alligator in Costa Rica. It is perhaps unsurprising that he neither wrote home nor sent his wife any money.

White Hart Hotel, Hayle 1838 (original hotel on the left)

Henry Harvey decided the solution was to set his sister up in business and in 1825 he built a hotel and installed Jane as hostess. The White Hart provided Jane and her six children with a living even after Richard Trevithick came home in 1827 with no more than the clothes he stood up in, a gold watch, a magnetic compass, a drawing compass, and a pair of silver spurs. Robert Stephenson, the son of the man who designed the Rocket, had fortunately given him £50 to pay his passage home when they met by chance in Colombia. By 1833 her errant husband was dead, but Jane lived for another 35 years, by which time the original hotel that she managed had been replaced by the fine building that still stands in Foundry Square.