The Black Gold of Staithes: The Story of Jet

Look closely at a piece of jet and it doesn’t look particularly impressive at first.

Fresh from the cliff, it is not the deep, glossy black that we associate with Victorian jewellery. It is often brownish-grey, dull, and easy to mistake for an ordinary lump of coal. But polish it, and something remarkable happens. The surface transforms into a deep, velvet black that catches the light like glass.

For centuries, this strange little piece of fossilised woodland has been pulled from the cliffs around Staithes. It has been carved into jewellery, treasured as a protective charm, traded for fortunes, fought over, and – occasionally – blamed for a few unfortunate decisions involving cliffs, alcohol, and lost money.

Jet is one of Staithes’ forgotten industries. Everyone knows about fishing. Many people know about ironstone, alum and potash. But long before tourists came searching for fossils and seaside views, men were hanging from ropes above the sea, risking their lives to find pieces of what became known locally as “black gold”.

A tree that became treasure

Jet is not actually coal. It is a type of fossilised wood, formed around 200 million years ago during the Jurassic period, when the land that would eventually become Yorkshire was covered with forests of ancient trees related to today’s monkey puzzle tree.

Over millions of years, buried beneath layers of sediment, these trees were compressed and transformed into jet. Unlike coal, which forms in large seams, jet occurs in scattered pockets known as “lenses”. A miner could spend days working through the rock and find nothing – then suddenly discover a beautiful piece hidden inside the cliff.

The best quality jet had several distinctive features. When scratched against a hard surface, genuine jet leaves a brown mark rather than a black one. It also has a distinctive oily smell because both the jet and the surrounding shale contain natural mineral oils.

This oily nature would become both a blessing and a curse.

Jet before jewellery

Jet has been valued for thousands of years. Archaeologists have found Bronze Age examples of jet ornaments, and the Romans also prized the material. It was carved into beads, rings and small objects, partly because of its beauty and partly because people believed it had special powers.

The Venerable Bede, writing in the eighth century, recorded the belief that burning jet could drive away snakes. Medieval Christians carved it into rosaries and crosses, believing its dark colour and unusual properties made it spiritually significant.

The landscape around Staithes was already famous for its jet long before the Victorian jewellery craze. The Elizabethan poet Michael Drayton praised the jet of the area in his 1622 work Poly-Olbion, writing:

“The rocks by Moul-grave too my glories forth to set / Out of their crannied cleeves can give you perfect jet.”

The “crannied cleeves” – the cracks and cliffs – were hiding a valuable secret.

The Victorian obsession with mourning

The great boom in jet came during the Victorian period.

When Queen Victoria went into mourning after the death of Prince Albert in 1861, she wore black clothing and black jewellery for the rest of her life. The fashion spread across Britain. Suddenly, jet – already associated with mourning and remembrance – became one of the most fashionable materials in the country.

Demand exploded.

Whitby became famous as the centre of jet carving, with thousands of pieces of jewellery produced for wealthy customers. But the raw material came from places like Staithes, where miners searched the cliffs for the precious stone.

Between around 1840 and 1920, jet mining became a significant local industry.

And, like many of Staithes’ industries, it was dangerous work.

Hanging over the sea

Jet miners did not have comfortable underground workings with proper tunnels and lighting. Instead, they followed the jet seams through unstable cliffs.

One of the techniques they used was known as “dressing”. A miner would be lowered down the cliff face on a rope while clearing away layers of rock until the jet seam was exposed. It was slow, frightening work – with the North Sea crashing below and loose shale shifting around them.

The best workings were around places such as Jet Wyke, Brackenberry Wyke and Old Nab. The cliffs around Staithes and Port Mulgrave became a landscape of holes, ropes, tools and men searching for their fortune.

But the cliffs did not always give up their treasures willingly.

The dangers of the jet cliffs

The jet industry claimed lives.

In 1857, William Pegg was killed while blasting for jet.

In 1860, Isaac Codling, a jet miner working for the wealthy dealer Matthew Moore, was buried beneath an avalanche of stone after disturbing the unstable cliff.

In 1862, Matthew Moore himself – one of the successful figures of the jet trade – died after falling from the Penny Nab workings. He was found unconscious at the foot of the cliff and died five hours later.

There were also less official dangers. The unstable shale could collapse without warning, and the oil-rich rock sometimes caught fire.

The cliffs that burned

The geology that made Staithes’ jet valuable also made the cliffs behave in very strange ways.

The surrounding shale contains oil and bitumen, and when exposed to the right conditions it can spontaneously combust. Local people were familiar with cliffs that smoked, steamed and appeared to burn from within.

In 1828, geologists George Young and John Bird recorded that part of the cliff between Staithes and Runswick had fallen down and caught fire. It continued burning for two or three years.

Later observers described smoke rising from the cliffs like a miniature volcano. In the 1920s, Professor Percy Kendall recorded areas still burning decades after industrial activity had ended. In the 1930s, writer Edmund Vale described seeing “a cloud of steam like the smoke of a volcano” rising from the coast.

To someone approaching Staithes from the sea, the sight must have seemed almost magical – or perhaps slightly alarming.

A village where the cliffs themselves appeared to breathe fire.

The men behind the trade

Although jet is often associated with Whitby, Staithes had its own important jet merchants.

One of the most fascinating characters was William Thompson (1809–1886).

Thompson was described as probably one of the richest men in Staithes at the height of his success. He was a fish curer, merchant, ship owner and one of the largest dealers in rough jet. His jet warehouse was believed to have been at Badger Castle, near the top of Staithes Bank.

Like many successful Victorian businessmen, Thompson was involved in almost everything. He owned ships, traded fish, invested in industry and became a major figure in village life. He was also known as a determined and sometimes argumentative character.

In 1866, he became involved in a legal dispute with the Marquis of Normanby over land at Badger Castle. Thompson had built on what he believed was waste land, but the Marquis challenged his rights. Thompson lost the case. He may have lost the building, but he certainly left his mark on Staithes.

A fortune found – and lost

Perhaps the most entertaining jet story from Staithes is the tale of the “Loafer of Old Nab”.

According to local legend, a man who spent much of his time wandering the cliffs discovered an enormous piece of jet sticking out from the rock. He managed to extract it and took it to Whitby, where he sold it for the incredible sum of £500. For a working man in the nineteenth century, this was a life-changing fortune.

Naturally, he celebrated.

The story goes that he returned to Old Nab with friends to drink and enjoy his success. Unfortunately, while celebrating near the place where he had found the jet, he fell from the cliff into the sea and drowned.

Neither his body nor the money was ever recovered.

Whether completely true or slightly exaggerated by generations of storytellers, it captures something important about the jet industry: the constant mixture of hope, danger and unpredictability.

A person could become wealthy from a lucky find – or lose everything in an instant.

Jet theft and secret treasures

Because jet was valuable, it was not always obtained honestly.

In 1862, an ironstone miner was imprisoned after attempting to smuggle three pounds of jet from the Port Mulgrave drift mine. At its peak, good quality jet could sell for around a guinea per pound – a significant amount of money at the time.

The material was small, portable and valuable. A good piece could fit in a pocket and represent days or weeks of wages. The cliffs were full of secrets.

The end of the jet boom

The Victorian fashion for mourning jewellery did not last forever. As fashions changed, demand for jet declined. By the early twentieth century, the great period of jet mining was coming to an end.

Whitby continued producing jet jewellery, and visitors still buy it today, but the dangerous cliff workings around Staithes slowly disappeared.

The industry left behind few obvious traces. The miners’ holes have been reclaimed by the landscape, the ropes have vanished, and the men who risked their lives searching the cliffs are mostly forgotten.

But the jet is still there.

Walk along the shore at low tide and you are walking through the remains of an ancient forest, through the same rocks where Victorian miners searched for treasure. A small piece of polished jet might look like a simple piece of jewellery. But hidden inside it is a story of prehistoric forests, Victorian fashion, dangerous work, local ambition, lost fortunes, and cliffs that once burned.