RANDOM THOUGHTS - Part I

Early days at the mine aroused my childish curiosity and left a clear impression. For instance, an intense local whirlwind blew up one afternoon and tore off sheets of roofing iron from the hoist house, leaving them draped over the hoisting cables like washing on a clothes line. The Cornish pump which ran continuously day and night was equipped with a box shaped balancing bob weighing about twenty tons, which rose and fell into a pit beside the shaft. Motion was slow, about six strokes a minute, so it was not difficult for a boy called Percy Pratt, whom I knew, to ride up and down on it, a dangerous feat that was not encouraged. This Cornish pump was used for draining water from the bottom of the mine by a series of plunger pumps from level to level until it reached the surface. The main rod operating these pumps being driven by a steam cylinder and beam housed in a granite building close by. Steam was supplied by boilers fuelled with firewood.

One afternoon a band of rebel bandits arrived at the mine gate and demanded horses, guns and ammunition from Dad, promising to pay later and handing out worthless I.O.U’s. He was aware of their presence in the district and their reputation for cruelty, so had put Mother, Syd, Amy and myself in the pump house out of sight, where we spent the night in total darkness sleeping on a broad window ledge to the accompaniment of wheezing groans and clanking of the machinery. I recall being scared stiff by the clamour, which seemed to indicate the presence of hobgoblins or ghosts. Luckily the bandits departed after stealing saddles, bridles and some money, and did not return.

The unsettled state of the country, the increase in banditry and uncertain future, coupled with the outbreak of war in Europe in August decided my father to remove his family, first to the greater security of Mexico City where he took brief lodgings in Calle Paris, and then in the Calle de Medellin, prior to obtaining passage from the Buenavista Station of the British owned Mexican Railway to Veracruz, after spending several days camped out on the platform while waiting for a train.

The train was for freight, the only accommodation was in the caboose, and this served
as home for the next eight days. It was the last train for many weeks because bandits blew up the track, doing much damage outside the station. During the ensuing days it was not unusual to see the corpses of men hanging from telegraph poles - evidence of bandit raids on the railway and the vengeance of federal troops. Further down the line the freight train was delayed for three days in the station of Orizaba owing to a derailment, and one’ one occasion while patiently waiting in the caboose, shunting operations of a locomotive in the yard propelled a boxcar down the adjacent track to
collide with an open sided boxcar in which a Peon family had taken up residence and were preparing their dinner. The jolt threw the man down the track, followed by his woman, the brasero and the kettle of soup in one pile - sad for them but funny for us!

The freight finally reached the Port of Veracruz, where much kindness was shown the family by the British Vice Consul, Mr. Hogg who arranged accommodation until the arrival of S.S. Morro Castle of the Ward Line enabled us to leave the country for the U.S.A. The voyage to New York via Havana, Cuba took a week and the last day was very rough, causing much sea sickness to Mother and younger son.

After a delay of several weeks in snow bound New York, residing at the Cornish Arms Hotel - proprietor Syd Blake - passage was secured on S.S.Lapland of the Belgian Red Star Line and the family endured more stormy weather crossing to the U.K., with port holes closed, green seas obscuring the daylight when she rolled. The liner carried war materials in addition to passengers, with a number of lorries on deck, secured to shackles. These vehicles obstructed the free passage of pedestrians, and the frequent boat drills conducted when the liner entered the submarine danger zone off Ireland, caused congestion. Fortunately, no untoward enemy action prevented the arrival at Liverpool Docks, although the Cunarder Lusitania was torpedoed off the old Head of Kinsala shortly afterwards by a German U boat.

From Birkenhead our family travelled to Torquay by the G.W.R. where we were accommodated by our grand parents at Elsmore Lodge in Chelston for a few months during which my brother, sister and I attended a primary school nearby. My father tried to rejoin the army to which he had belonged as cadet in the Rifle Corps, but he was rejected because of poor eyesight, so applied for a job in Woolwich Arsenal, where he served until the armistice. During these years my mother, brother, sister and I lived first in Barry Road, Dulwich, where we attended a school run by the Misses Taylor in Frier; Road, and were aware of enemy action over the London area, especially by night, with searchlights criss crossing, seeking raiding Zeppelins, and by day Taube and Gotha aeroplanes were easily visible. Bombs often fell in our suburb, especially around Dulwich Park, while sausage balloons in the vicinity of the Crystal Palace looked sinister against the sky.

I well remember an evening in December 1917 when the Silvertown munitions factory accidentally blew up - the detonations some miles away shook the house and caused much speculation as to the cause, which was naturally blamed on the Germans. Air raids at this time were announced by police constables riding their bicycles through the streets carrying a sign "TAKE COVER" across their chests. Once the planes or zeppelins had returned on their way to Germany the same constables carried the sign" ALL CLEAR" to reassure the public who had taken refuge where they could, especially in underground railway stations. These signs were accompanied by sirens, or maroons as they were dubbed, which were installed on high buildings and whose long drawn out wail became very familiar.

There was a depot of the National Steam Bus Co. close to our house and I often used to sneak rides on the buses as they moved up to the platform. Petrol driven Tilling Steven’s red buses also served Dulwich, together with double Decker trams along Lordship Lane, past Horniman’s Museum where we spent many a fascinated hour. It was during this period that I was admitted to the Children’s Hospital in Great Ormand Street, Bloomsbury, to have a hernia repaired. This lesion had been incurred in Mexico some three years earlier while jumping out of a horse manger.

Early in 1918 my father decided to remove his family from the danger of London to a
villa in the village of Dunsmore, Bucks, some thirty five miles out while he remained in London. The village also went under the name of Scrubwood, had a small pond which froze solid in winter, a general shop, an assembly hall, and a few houses, most of which had gardens where we grew vegetables, fruit, nuts, etc, and kept rabbits. The garden shed consisted of an ancient G.C.R. carriage minus wheels, which we shared with our neighbours, half each, and gave us much joy.

My memory is clear in helping my brother Syd manufacture gun powder which we used in a contraption called a key and nail gun, to deface stonework with a horrible yellow stain. The village had no electricity, gas or piped water, so one used paraffin lamps for illumination, anthracite coal for cooking and heating, and water had to be hand pumped from a well in the garden. The 100 was an outhouse and bloody cold in winter when snow could be five feet deep. School for my sister and me was over three miles away at Ellesborough at the foot of Coombe Hill, the highest summit of the Chilterns, which was crowned by a huge monument to the dead of the South African War, and whose apex was a stone flame visible in seven counties. It was here that a bonfire was lit on Armistice Night to celebrate the end of World War 1.

Our school contributed to the war effort by letting us out early on summer and autumn afternoons to pick wild blackberries in the beach woods of that chalk country, for which the Government paid 4d. a pound. We also picked potatoes and helped farmers with various jobs to ease the manpower shortage, which by 1918 was acute in spite of women joining the Land Army and the use of German prisoners of war who were incarcerated at a stockade near Halton Camp of the RAF, near Lord Rothschild’s country seat. It was during this period that I began collect wild bird’s eggs, learn to set wires for catching rabbits, climb high trees, slide on ice and ride my sister’s bicycle.

Once the Great War was ended on November 11 ^th , 1918, my father decided to resign from his post at Woolwich Arsenal and return to his mining activities in Mexico, so that as a pro tem arrangement Mother, Syd, Amy and I went to live with our grandparent’s in Torquay, later moving to a flat near the harbour in Higher Terrace, where we spent the next four years. Syd and I were educated at Torquay Secondary School for Boys while Amy went to the corresponding school for girls. We all had passes to use trams to and from school, even making a hurried nip home for lunch. Amy and I delighted in hopping on and off these vehicles whilst they were in motion, getting a thrill from the momentum, which enabled us to rush up the steps leading to our terrace after dropping from the rear step of the tram as it approached the Strand at speed.

In 1920 I learnt to swim, encouraged by Dad, and joined the Torquay Leander Swimming and Life Saving Society whose headquarters were in the Municipal Saltwater Swimming Baths, adjacent to Beacon Cove, which gave access to the sea during the summer months. Thursday evenings were ‘Clubnight’ and the heated water in the bath was obtained from a live steam pipe discharging under water, which made ‘a very comfortable temperature in winter. We were given instruction in swimming, diving and life saving, taught all the different strokes including the new crawl which was displacing the ‘trudgeon’ in Australia and the U.S.A. We were encouraged to enter competitions at galas and regattas to improve our technique and speed, racing against swimmers from other clubs along the coast between Exeter and Plymouth for useful prizes and being freely criticised by the sporting editor of the ‘Express and Echo’ newspaper.

Apart from club competitions, several of our group entered for Devon County or.
Western Counties Championships and those who were successful were entertained at a subsequent banquet. Diving, both plain and ‘fancy’ as it was known in those days interested me even more than swimming. The bath in Torquay boasted a stage with 3 ft. spring board, 4 ft., 8 ft. and 12 ft. platforms which was centred at the deep end where we had about 8 ft. depth of water to protect us. During winter months we trained intensively here and amplified our mastery of several styles of dives, emulating the feats of older members who gave occasional exhibitions.

At one stage my body was so sore from repeated awkward entries that I refused to carry on, so the trainer produced a heavy overcoat which he forced me to don over my trunks and try again - much to my surprise the sting was completely eliminated and confidence restored. Shortly after this I suffered a different sting from colliding in mid air with a girl that I admired, who had taken off from a higher board, not noticing me below. Back in those days the modern complicated and very difficult multiple twisting somersaults were unknown, as was the system of points scoring. We specialised in plain ‘neat’ or swallow dives from any height up to thirty feet, and fancy jack knives, back fronts, mollbergs, back somersaults and hand stands off twelve feet. The high dives were always summer affairs and done from a newly erected platform on Princess Pier into the harbour. Being tidal, the height of the dive could vary, so efforts were made to hold competitions when tides were at their mean. This constraint also applied to our training from the vertical cliffs near Beacon Cove where we had set up a series of tiny concrete pads on suitable ledges to simulate the required heights for the Olympic Games which were due to be held in Paris in 1924 and for which we hoped to qualify, although none of us did, unfortunately. Our nerve for high diving was tested by our trainer who arranged a boat to take us along the coast to the Saddle Rock, whose pinnacle stood sixty feet above high water mark. One by one we climbed this granite tower and took off into the void, which looked pretty hairy from above - but not too daunting.

Among the diving fraternity was a character called ‘Jack’ Collings, who was then in
his sixties and ran a refreshment shop on Meadfoot Beach. The walls of the shop were full of photo’s of his famous diving feats, including five man coupled dives off forty feet and every sort of acrobatic feat from whatever offered, culminating in a dive from the yardarm of a warship at one hundred and fifty feet. Every summer when the Torbay Royal Regatta was held, usually coinciding with a visit by the Atlantic Fleet of the Royal Navy, large numbers of sailors joined in the aquatic events. On one occasion over six hundred men entered their names for racing, so a large number of heats had to be set up to accommodate them and the programme became quite lengthy. The names of some famous ships appeared on the programme, recalling events of the recent Great War. All these warships were at anchor in Torbay and as part of the regatta celebrations the public were invited to go aboard selected units and were ferried to and fro by steam pinnaces at no cost.

With great glee we availed ourselves of this opportunity, making three trips to inspect the battle cruiser H.M.S. Hood, then the largest in the world as well as the most handsome, but subsequently sunk by the Bismarck in W.W.2. We were allowed to explore a gun turret and look through the rifled barrel of one of its 15" guns - only the engine room was off limits, but we managed to peep into that of H.M.S. Valient on a later trip. This ship, together with H.M.S. Queen Elizabeth, Barham, Warspite and Malaya formed the original oil burning, 25 knot fast division of 1915 - all survived the Great War and were still operational at the outbreak of the second war against Germany.

The Torbay Regatta lasted a full week during the month of August and the swimming events were accompanied by rowing events in the harbour and sailing races in Torbay, which were dominated by the big yachts of the ‘J’ class, including H.M. King Gearge’s Britannia, which was most popular. Also Sir Thomas Lipton’s Shamrock IV, plus Lulworth, Westward and Astra. The Navy joined in with great enthusiasm, participating in local events as well as their own intership rivalries of cutters, whalers,
gigs and galleys. After dark spectacular firework displays were conducted by either Brock’s or Paine’s experts, culminating in set pieces depicting King George and Queen Mary, and a procession of decorated boats were towed around the outer harbour with prizes given for the most original designs. The Leander Swimming Club presented a pirate vessel, complete with kegs of rum, prisoners walking the plank and fake artillery, and on a later occasion a Viking ship.

At the end of 1923 our mother moved from Torquay to Exeter, so our association with Torquay Secondary School ended - in my case having progressed from form I, via IIc, IlIb, 4b to 4a in preparation for the Cambridge Senior Exam. At Exeter, where Syd engaged in the study of electronics and photography and Amy enrolled at the Art School, I entered form V of Mount Radford Private School as a day scholar, remaining until April, 1924, at which time our father was able to send for us all to join him in Mexico.
It was a tremendous experience to return to our former home after an absence of ten years and sheer joy travelling by train to Southampton, staying at the Norfolk Hotel
and then crossing the Atlantic on the Holland America boat Volendam [15,600 tons] to Veracruz. Brief visits ashore were provided at the north Spanish ports of Santander,
La Corunna and Vi go en route, and also La Havana in Cuba where most travellers manage to patronise the free beer gardens of Le. Tropical. The Volendam berthed at the ‘T’ pier in Veracruz Harbour where we drove to the Hotel Imperial for one night’s stay, thereafter by the daily express on the Mexican Railway from Vercruz to Mexico City, changing at Ometusco for the branch line to Pachuca.

Although the Mexican Revolution had officially ended in 1919, sporadic upheavals continued from time to time when some discontented caudillo gathered a few adherents and took up arms. Such a one was Cavazos who defied the federal troops and started looting in the Pachuca area. He was captured and shot the same day we arrived and I had the pleasure of being questioned by one of his disgruntled followers outside. the station. The last of the revolutionary leaders who survived the fighting was Pancho Villa, [Doroteo Arango] who gave up banditry and retired to his farm in the north, but animosities in many quarters were latent and he was disposed of by a fusillade of bullets while driving his Dodge car near Parral in 1923.

During the months of May, June and July 1924 life was fun - activities included
swimming, tennis, parties, exploring the hills, and investigating mines and mills; riding ore trains underground and learning the functions of machinery in several mills that dressed silver ores in the area. Come August and it was decided that I should return to England to complete my secondary education, so travelled with Jack Holcombe and his wife on the Hamburg Amerika steamer S.S.Toledo from Veracruz to Plymouth. Holcombe, an old friend of my parents, was retiring from mining and intended looking for a suitable cottage somewhere in Cornwall. He had left with us on the freight train in 1914 when we all left the country and was ‘Uncle’ Jack to us. The boat was a slow old tub and after running aground on a sand bank in Veracruz Harbour, called at Havana, Cuba and Spanish ports of La Corunna and Santander; first landfall after crossing the Atlantic being Santa Cruz in the Canary Islands followed by Tenerife and Gran Canaria, where we went ashore to see the town capital of the group. The place was dead - 9 p.m. on a Sunday evening - not even a cafe where one might get a meal was open. The boat had called at these islands to repatriate some four hundred cane cutters who had been to Cuba for the season.

After a month in Plymouth I returned to Mount Radford School in Exeter as a boarder and remained there until the end of the summer term in 1926, the year of the general strike when amateurs manned the railways and had lots of fun, especially when engines ran out of steam. Return to Mexico, originally booked on the Holsatia of the Hamburg Amerika Line which subsequently was condemned as unseaworthy, was eventually secured on the S.S.Rio Bravo of the Ozean Line via Santander and Havana to Veracruz. This route across the north Atlantic traverses the Sargasso sea, of which I had read accounts which led me to believe that it was a dense concentration of weed, making progress difficult. Not so; it is merely a loose, open agglomeration of clumps with much free water between - no hazards to a steamer.

Remaining with the family at Hda de Progreso for the next five years, I began looking for a job in various firms, both in Mexico City and Pachuca and eventually was taken on by Mr.W.J.A.Palmer, Chief Clerk of the British Cia de Santa Gertrudis as a distribution clerk in the warehouse at the mill in La Reforma, my boss being John Jenkin. A year in this employment taught me many things about stocks management, and also gave me the opportunity to explore and study the mill itself - which had been built in 1912 and was modernised in 1924 and known as ‘Molino Nuevo’. It was situated in the village of La Reforma, some 2 km. from Pachuca up a steep road, metalled but not paved.

In April 1928 the mill Superintendent, an American W.E.Crawford, offered me a
shiftboss job starting in the bullion melting room at $US.150 per month, under foreman Albert Pengelly, a competent, resourceful ‘Cousin Jack’. Basic routine in this department was governed by a weekly melt of precipitate accumulated in six triangular Merril filter presses, which were blown, opened and unloaded on Monday and Tuesday day shift, half each. It was my privilege to fire up the five ton capacity reverberatory furnace at 4 a.m. and have it incandescent by 7 a.m. when the day shift of eight men came on with the foreman to drop and reload the presses - the product, a black mud was shovelled into the furnace periodically as it melted together with a flux of borax, broken glass and iron scrap. Returning at 6 p.m. I began the 15 hour night shift with one peon as helper to load remaining precipitate, etc and melt same into a bath of molten Dore bullion which had to be ready to pour at 7 a.m. - burners were adjusted as required to ensure punctuality. .

The" silver bullion was tapped into cast iron moulds, producing 35 kilo bars when cool. These were then trimmed with a pneumatic tool to remove adhesions, weighed, marked for identification and record of weight and finally loaded on a steel car for transport to the mill office, where they were stacked on a lorry for shipment to the refinery of Cia de Real del Monte in Pachuca. The second 15 hour night shift was a repetition of the first, the precipitate from the second three presses being, fluxed, melted, poured and finally the bars shipped together with the first batch to the R.D.M.
refinery. The amount of Dore silver produced varied, but the furnace capacity of five tons was often reached and 144 bars, plus or minus, resulted. In those days the conical tapping bar was forged from low carbon steel, without heat resistant qualities and occasionally melted. In this state it was impossible to control the flow of silver from the furnace, so it poured on to the concrete floor and congealed into a huge slab, which had to be laboriously cut up with a hammer and chisel and reloaded into the furnace to be remelted and poured into bars that same night.

The native Mexican melting crew were inveterate thieves and we had constantly to be on our guard to prevent loss of scrap silver, or at least to minimise the quantity purloined, most of which they managed to wrap in cloth, grease and insert into their
rectums - to be recovered when they got home. These men were provided with
pocket less overalls after changing from their street clothes and obliged to jump down a 36 inch step stark naked to the second changing room before starting work. All silver scrap was collected and placed in the safe as soon as produced, but the men were very clever at secreting bits to hide as described. We tried to discourage the stealing by mixing cayenne pepper with axle grease used by the slag crusher, also chiles, but to little effect. It was illegal, also infra dig to submit men to a body search, so they continued their merry depredations until came a day when we procured a tough, ex army police officer to aid us and interview the gang of eight as they came off shift - they were herded into the carpenter’s shop and compelled with loaded pistol, one by one to sit on a bench and ‘do a job’ into a bucket - any reluctance to cooperate was swiftly overcome by slaps in the face and threats of dire punishment, so one by one they produced the amazing average quantity of 800 grams of silver per head, or tail in this case. The whole gang was immediately sacked and sent back to their village of Zumpango in disgrace, to be replaced with a new crew from elsewhere having smaller rectums and, presumably inferior extractive skills.

After a year promotion came, to the cyanide plant where I replaced a Swede called Monsson, and took over his shift of 18 men, working 8 hour shifts, which replaced the 12 hour ones formally used. Those shifts, actually 11 hours day and 13 hour night, were awkward and resulted in Day, Night, Rest - successively, which prevented
adequate sleep hours - having always the same crew and regular daily 8 hours work was a great improvement. The Sta Getrudis mill had a capacity of 2,000 metric tons of ore, processed daily, second only in the district to the Cia de Real del Monte y Pachuca whose throughput was close to 4,000 tons per day. Ores processed by Molino Nuevo originated mostly in the Dos Carlos and San Francisco mines close by - transported underground in dump cars-hauled by an electric locomotive and hoisted to the surface in skips. A smaller tonnage of ore came from leased mines and was delivered to mill bins by overhead cable bucket ways from EI Cristo, EI Bordo and Santo Tomas shafts.

These aerial tramways were designed to operate over considerable distances and steep acclivities, spanning wide gulches and changing direction where necessary. They were driven by electric motors, but where altitude of delivery point was lower than that of loading - gravity alone would provide the motive power. They were a cheap form of transportation to operate, but open to the abuses of ore thieves who occasionally managed to dump a bucket of high grade ore on remote hillsides and make off with it.

Molino Nuevo was equipped with storage bins for individual ore reception whence it passed to three ‘Gates’- 6k gyratory crushers for coarse, and two ‘Symons’ 48" cone crushers for fine crushing - thence after weighing on a Merrick weightometer and sampling by a series of ‘Vezin’ cutters, to fine ore bins serviced by a 30" travelling conveyor. Symons crushers were protected by a suspended ‘Ohio’ electro magnet
from tramp steel such as sledge hammers in the ore stream. Each lot of ore was crushed, weighed, sampled and assayed separately and its percentage moisture determined for accounting purposes.

As originally built the mill was equipped with sixty 1500 Ib stamps in twelve batteries to effect the primary grind. These were superseded in 1924 by one Traylor rod mill, one Hardinge ball mill and two Krupp ball mills having a daily tonnage capacity of 1,000, 450, 325 and 225 tons respectively. Wet grinding was with cyanide solution. Secondary grinding was accomplished in six 4 ft. tube mills, using 3" diameter cast iron balls and bucket elevators coupled to a Dorr duplex rake classifier, and tertiary grinding performed in seven 4 ft. diameter autogenous mills, each with classifier and Frenier pumps for recirculation. The end product from the grinding process was a pulp having a fineness of 60% - 200 mesh, with a liquid - solid ratio of 83 : 17 and a specific gravity of 1.11. Lime for protective alkalinity was added at this point, quicklime slaked with mill solution was prepared as a slurry and fed into the tertiary mill sump continuously.
Mill pulp, after screening to remove trash, passed to three circuits consisting of
thickeners and agitators to increase pulp density and aerate by means of compressed air for a period amounting to 72 hours. During this treatment precious metals exposed by comminution in small particles were exposed to cyanide solution and dissolved therein. This pregnant solution was separated from the solids by vacuum filtration, clarified)and silver and gold precipitated from it by means of zinc dust. The dark grey precipitate being melted into Dore bullion, as already described.

For the next eight years I progressed from Cyanide Plant Shift boss to Acting Asst. Mill Supt., but the fortunes of the Sta Gertrudis Company were on the wane due to natural depletion of ore reserves underground, increasing cost of supplies, and militancy of newly organised labour unions. Financially the company was eventually driven to the wall by a drop in the price of silver on the N.Y. market down to 25c US per troy ounce from a high of over 1 dollar at the end of World War 1. A very serious mine accident did not help - seven workmen lost their lives in a fire, which originated in the control room on the 19 ^th . level of the Dos Carlos shaft.

The end came in July 1937. Unable to raise enough money to meet the payroll, management gave orders to shut down all mining and milling operations.
Negotiations with union representatives and the Mexican Government resulted in the company turning all their assets over to a cooperative, formed by embracing all the members of the labour unions in their employ - some 2,000 men. The staffing of the top jobs in this new organisation involved much vociferous discussion among the union leaders, none of whom had any experience in the skills of management required in an enterprise of this magnitude, but eventually a few of the loudest, most active and most ambitious elements got themselves elected and it was decided to resume operations on the same basis as formerly, changing nothing until they got the hang of a complex process which required the cooperation of all parties to succeed. That they eventually did so is a matter of record and operations continued for 15 years, finally ending in 1953, by which time the cooperative totally exhausted ore reserves, including much stolen from adjacent claims belonging to others.

They eventually had no funds for purchase of essential supplies, such as dynamite, fuel oil, cyanide and carbide. They owed the electric power company over $800,000 and virtually nothing of any value remained in the materials and spare parts store rooms that had not been stolen or appropriated by different functionaries. The federal Government had been anxious to prove that Mexicans were able to mine and mill silver and gold bearing ores without the need to employ foreign experts to do so, and they subsidised the operation to the tune of several millions of pesos which they never recovered - although they could claim that a large number of men were kept in employment at the time of depression in the mining industry.

The new bosses who got the staff appointments, ex fitters, pump men and helpers, were confronted with endless perplexities in learning how to operate and give orders to their subordinates, who were resentful and undisciplined at being passed over.
Before the end of July I secured employment with the Negotiation Minera de San Rafael y Anexas as assistant to Geoff Baly, British Mill Superintendent, and over one weekend packed our belongings and moved our furniture to a company house close to the perimeter wall of the San Rafael mill, which was located up in the hills to the north of Pachuca, and reported for work on the Monday morning.
This mill was smaller than Molino Nuevo, having a capacity for about 800 metric tons per day, but actually treating only 600 tons on two shifts. Ore was obtained from company owned mines - Soledad Trompillo and Nuevo Guatemoctzin, this latter arriving at the coarse ore bins via an aerial tramway. Coarse crushing of ore was performed by an M/c Cully gyratory and followed by a Symons 48" cone crusher. Milling in cyanide solution involved one 6 ft Sterns Roger rod mill, together with an Alc ball mill and ten 1200 Ib stamps, followed by six tube mills for fine grinding. Thickening and agitation was accomplished in Dorr 30 ft diameter tanks and eight 60 ft Pachuca tanks. Filtration was done in a triple Moore type vacuum filter, the only one in the district. It received pulp from the Pachucas, which was batched. Effluent of the caking period plus barren solution wash was delivered to the ‘Crowe’ vacuum system for precipitation of Ag - Au values by zinc dust. Presses were dropped once a week 8c ppte melted in a reverbatory furnace. Bullion was poured into 35 kilo bars and delivered by truck to the parting plant of the ROM Co. in Loreto Mill for refining to silver .9993 fine and gold 999.9 fine.
During the following thirteen months, we enjoyed working in San Rafael. Our home was comfortable, with a good view across surrounding hills. We had a small lawn and grew some flowers and vegetables. Except for a robbery we suffered one night,
life was uneventful. We had a tennis court in the mill and access to a water cooling tank for swimming. The company provided a bus to take children to school in Pachuca and for wives to purchase supplies in the markets.

Some six months after leaving Molino Nuevo I received a deputation of officials from that mill, who were in a quandary over low production of bullion which they could neither explain, nor remedy and they begged for help. They produced a pile of reports and operational data and frankly answered my questions. The causes of their embarrassments were immediately apparent. Shortage of cyanide due to irregular supply caused by late payment of bills, and the robbing of pulp from agitation tanks, resulting in insufficient treatment time. Not mentioned was the probable theft of silver by crooked foundry men.