Tysoe goes to Brazil for monozite

 

I’m supposed to be writing here about industry in Greenwich but lately I’ve been straying a bit over the borders into Lewisham and Bexley and places like that. I hope our editor will forgive me - but he’s got to be even more forgiving this week because I thought we should go on a nice late summer holiday, perhaps to Brazil.  A good holiday should be by the seaside and I thought we could go to the radioactive black sands at Guarapari.

I don’t normally watch TV but I have watched the programme on tbe BBC in the last few weeks in which Brazil has featured. This has been ‘Celebrity Race Across the World’ where the teams have been going down through Brazil.   It is such a vast huge country and it was worth watching for all the amazing scenery in between the bus stations the programme is so keen on. I kept watching it in the hope we’d see the radioactive sands but no such luck. Perhaps they thought it would be bad for trade

There is, of course, a background to this and I want to describe the adventures in Brazil of an important man from Greenwich - he lived in Westcombe Park Road and was the manager of East Greenwich gas works. I wrote a bit about him here six weeks or so ago when I did an article about the gas mantle factory down in West Greenwich and how Joseph Tysoe, the Manager of East Greenwich Gas works, had been sent to Brazil in 1902 by the Company. He went in order to investigate sources of monazite which was the source of Thorium which was needed to make gas mantles for lighting. Thirty or so years earlier Tysoe had worked at a gas works in Brazil so – I assume – it was thought he would ‘understand’ it there. Clearly South Met. Gas hoped to corner the supply of monazite and establish a monopoly of gas mantle manufacture at their Greenwich factory on Deptford Creek.

Learning about his adventures had originally been sparked by Brian Sturt’s article ‘Joseph Tysoe and Monazite Sand. (Historic Gas Times 106 Dec 2021 –  available from the Institution of Gas Engineers). The kind staff at the National Gas Archive sent me a copy of Tysoe’s own account of his adventures in Brazil and I thought you might like to hear about them too.  it must have taken him weeks to get to Brazil by ship and he was away for many months. Today I can follow his tracks very happily on Google Street View and visit the cities he was at a century ago. Also I don’t have to actually step on the radioactive beach

Tysoe arrived in Rio de Janeiro at the end of April and found himself immediately engaged with government officials and with the Brazilian Ministry of Finance and it was over a month before he could move away from Rio.  In the mean time, while negotiating, he was staying at the Grand International Hotel in Santa Teresa. I’m afraid that the hotel has long since been demolished –but the road it was in winds pleasantly up the hillside with amazing views down into the City. Tysoe was very impressed with the view of ‘universal red tiled roofs’ and much else. In particular he was very pleased to see the Rio Gas Works with its holders ‘standing up prominently in the middle distance making up a picture which must be seen to be appreciated’.

 I’m afraid I’m not entirely sure exactly where the Rio gas works was and I couldn’t see any gas holders around now. The gas industry in Rio in the 19^th century was British owned and Company meetings were held at the Cannon Street Hotel in London and the engineers were all of them British.  I can see perhaps that people in Rio might not have been that keen on its gas works being run from the other side of the world.   Anyway  Tysoe looked out over Rio and  said ‘every prospect pleases’.

He left Rio by steamship which wasn’t, he said, “first class from an English standpoint”.  He went to a place down the coast called Victoria which he said was ‘beautiful viewed from a distance’.  On Street View there is actually a motorway now which goes across the Bay so that you can get a very good view of what Tysoe would have seen as he came in by steamship – but today, like everywhere else, it’s all tower blocks.

As the ship came into the Bay Tysoe noticed a derelict gas works – ‘all that was left being the guide framing of the holder and various pipes’. He found that 20 years earlier the town had been lit by gas but it was a Brazilian owned company which had been unable to make it a success. Lighting in the town was now by kerosene. There were also vultures perched in the ruins. He said there were lots of vultures and it was illegal to kill them because they ‘acted as the sanitary authority and removed refuse from the streets’.

Happily for Tysoe he didn’t have to stay in Victoria because he had a letter of introduction to an Englishman and moved to his house on an island 2 miles away.  For which he was very thankful.  But he needed to go to where the monazite deposits sites were. The nearest were at Guarapari where the deposits are on the shore. He explained that the Brazilian state had claimed ownership and granted concessions for working them but the federal government had realised ‘there was  money in it’ and claimed it to be theirs. This was going to have to be sorted out.

Tysoe had been given that an introduction to a ‘Doctor Silviera da Motta who was Chief of the Demarcation Committee’ and he set about trying to find him at Guarapari. To get there he had been lent the Custom House steam  launch  but the weather was too bad to go and when, later ,it was good enough to clear  the Bay there were such heavy seas that  they had to go back. Eventually they went and it was a ‘rough passage of five hours’ and he experienced ‘no little anxiety’.

He said Guarapari was largely composed of mud hovels and the only accommodation to be obtained there was of a primitive description. Today it is all flashy tower blocks along the coast and inland are traditional houses and a decent but modest little town. I’m also sure that the food is a lot better than Tysoe got. He stayed at ‘what was described as a hotel’ and ate his dinner which consisted of one course by the light of one candle

They travelled by mule to the beaches where the monazite deposits were - or are - and he described in some detail how it was dug, washed and bagged up.  He thought it was similar to gold mining. There is a background to this – monazite had been processed and exported since 1886 by an English (or American) engineer called John Gordon. He had dealt with it on behalf of French and German interests and presumably provided supplies to the Welsbach Company who had been the principle manufactures of gas mantles. He had had a concession at Guarapari which had been withdrawn, but his men were still engaged in processing previously dug deposits and shipping it off to Germany

Today the ‘black beaches’ are very much in evidence at Guarapari and you can walk along a seaside path –lined inland by expensive looking blocks – and look at them.  There seems to be nothing stopping you accessing them and indeed some people seem to be sitting on them.  Tysoe may be forgiven for ignoring the radio activity but today it also doesn’t seem to be an issue.

Tysoe left quite quickly following a long talk with Dr.Motta meant to return to Victoria by the steam launch. He then discovered to his dismay that one of its boiler tubes had given way the previous evening. He was grateful that the tube had not failed during the voyage ‘as nothing could have saved us on that rocky coast’.  the next day steam was got up but the tube failed again and he decided immediately to return to Victoria by land, getting himself a horse and a guide for the purpose

The ride took two days with an overnight stay half way. He was very pleased that he had got the horse not only that it was safer but the ‘scenery and objects of interest the forest were full recompense for the inconvenience’. He was then four days in Victoria before he went back to Rio and he left the place ‘without one pang of regret’. Once in Rio he managed to prevent  the contract for  the deposits being  given to a Brazilian syndicate and made sure it was thrown open to ‘ree and fair’ public competition.

Clearly he had failed to get any concessions for South Met Gas. He said that he thought he was successful because he had stopped the concession being automatically given to a Brazilian company.  In fact once he left that’s exactly what happened. Today we can understand the Brazilians’ wish to control their mineral assets themselves. This is not about colonialism but the other process which gets less attention whereby the natural assets and management of a ‘third world’ country were owned and controlled by European capital interests. 

Tysoe clearly hated his mission and couldn’t wait to get back to Westcombe Park and also see that the management of east Greenwich gas works had survived without him.