William Corbould
CORBOULD, William (Thomas) Henry, (1866-1949)
Born in Ballarat, Victoria, on 5 November 1866, William Corbould was educated at Ballarat College and at the Ballarat School of Mines under the renowned Professor Mica Smith. He started his mining career working as an assayer for several months in 1886 at the silver lead smelter of the Pinnacle Group Silver Mg Co. at Pinnacles near Silverton, NSW. He then moved to Broken Hill, only eighteen months after the Broken Hill Pty company had been floated. He worked as an independent assayer for several of the Broken Hill mines until he joined Broken Hill South in 1886, and then moved to Central BHP when it struck the main BHP lode.
Corbould left Broken Hill in 1888 to work as metallurgist at the Flora Bell Silver Mg Co near Pine Creek in what was then northern South Australia. In 1889-90 he travelled through South East Asia and Japan to the USA, where he visited a number of the leading mining centres and worked as a metallurgist in Denver. He visited the UK where he worked for the Elmore brothers on experiments for the flotation process, returning to Australia via Germany and Italy. In Adelaide, in 1891, Corbould was appointed manager and metallurgist for Ediacara Consols Silver Mg Co, a new silver lead mine 480 km north of Adelaide. Extensive exploration failed to find a payable lode. Corbould travelled to London to seek further finance but when unsuccessful he resigned. On the return voyage to Australia in 1893 he learnt of Hannan’s find in Western Australia and joined the ‘rush‘ to Hannan’s.
After working several small shows en route to Kalgoorlie, Corbould was appointed manager of Hannan’s Hill G Mg Co NL (ECGF, Kalgoorlie) by a South Australian syndicate. He became ill in 1894 and recuperated in Albany and Adelaide. In October 1894 a London group amalgamated Hannan’s Hill and Hannan’s Reward to form Hannan’s Reward GMg Co. On his return to Kalgoorlie Corbould became manager of this new company which employed over 200 people and after a year was producing 170 fine oz per month. In May 1896 he left for London leaving his deputy Steve Harris in charge.
Corbould was married in the UK in August 1896 and left for Rossland Goldfield in British Columbia, Canada, where he was consultant, and later general manager, of Canadian Pacific Exploration Ltd on a twelve months contract from February 1897, but he was back in London before the end of the year. He returned to Kalgoorlie at the end of 1899 and again took up the management of Hannan’s Reward Ltd (reconstructed July 1898). In Jan 1902 the company amalgamated with Mount Charlotte G Mg Co to form Hannan’s Reward and Mount Charlotte Ltd. Corbould disagreed with the new board over development priorities and resigned in December 1902.
Corbould returned to London where he was made manager of Lloyd’s Copper Co. Ltd. which had purchased a smelting and refining works at Lithgow and a mine at Burraga, south of Bathurst, NSW. He arrived at the mine in mid 1903 to find that a new water jacket blast furnace recommended by a consultant was unusable and that the existing plant was extremely wasteful in power, labour and time. Nevertheless, by 1905 the overdraft had been paid off and the plant rebuilt including the largest wood fired reverberatory furnace in the world. However, timber fuel, brought in by bullock team, was getting increasingly expensive. Corbould proposed a narrow gauge railway to bring timber in and to refine the blister copper at the mine but the directors preferred to pay a dividend and Corbould resigned in 1909.
The directors of a new company floated in 1907, Mount Elliott Ltd, offered Corbould the position of general manager and metallurgist of the company’s copper mine at Selwyn, south of Cloncurry, in the far north west of Queensland where the company was building a copper blast furnace and converter plant. The second hand plant, which was in poor condition and poorly laid out, was commissioned, with great difficulty, in May 1909 and Corbould threatened to resign unless a new plant was built. The new plant to Corbould’s design was commissioned in August 1910 and 204 tons of blister copper were produced by the end of the year. For the next four years the company paid dividends but the high grade ore at Mount Elliott was being depleted.
In 1912 the company bought Hampden Consols Mine and several smaller properties the purchase of which was in line with Corbould’s aim of coordinating the copper industry in the Cloncurry region. When war began Prime Minister Hughes called for Australia’s metal industries to cooperate to assist the allies, and Mount Elliott was prevailed upon to send its blister copper to the Port Kembla refinery of the Collins House group. The blister copper going to Port Kembla had to contain at least one percent gold. At Selwyn the heavier blister copper containing the gold was run off separately and sent to Port Kembla while the remaining Mount Elliott blister was sent to the company’s refinery at Bowen where it was treated at half the cost, an arrangement which intensified the rivalry between Collins House and Corbould. Labour problems increased at Selwyn during the war, particularly over the manning of an enlarged smelter which Corbould eventually had to decrease in size. He was in England from 1919 to 1922 attempting to raise money for a centralised processing plant at Cloncurry. When this failed he resigned as Mount Elliott’s general manager.
In November 1923 Courbould inspected the newly discovered Mt Isa silver lead prospect, 110km west of Cloncurry, and obtained options on many of the leases. Mt Isa Mines Ltd was formed in January 1924, with Corbould one of the directors. By 1925 the company had acquired the remainder of the leases. During the next four years Corbould was largely engaged in seeking capital to develop Mt Isa. The Collins House group did not wish to participate with the exception of the London based W.S. Robinson but his involvement ceased in 1926. Negotiations with a syndicate lead by Anglo American Corporation and Selection Trust also broke down at the end of 1926. In 1927 Leslie Urquhart, of the Russo Asiatic Consolidated Ltd, agreed to acquire a controlling interest in Mt Isa and Corbould became a non voting advisory director. Urquhart pressed on with the development of the mine and in the mid 1930s brought in the American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO) as partners and Kruttschnitt, from ASARCO, became Mt Isa’s general manager.
On behalf of one of Urquhart’s companies Corbould visited the Edie Creek Goldfield in New Guinea in 1928. The goldfield had been found in 1926 and a very strenuous climb was required to reach it. Corbould took options of many of the leases and reported to Urquhart on the field’s possible development. Whilst in New Guinea he contracted a very painful condition which was probably dengue fever. He recuperated in the south of France and lived there until his death in 1949, aged 83.
References:
Hore Lacy;
JCMWA 1902.
