Mr T. H. L. Hony’s letter, which appropriately appeared on Lady Day, suggested an interesting story, and as I think, though I am not quite sure, that I am answerable for the first publication in print of the curious legend. I may as well explain how I got hold of it, and give my authority for it.

About 40 years ago, I happened to be dining at the house of one of the masters of Harrow School, the late Mr George Hallam, when the following story was told of of a friend of his by our host, who had just heard it.

Mr James Baillie Hamilton, an amateur in organ-building, went to the workshop of one of the principal firms of organ-builders in London to see the process of making metal pipes. It seems that it is the practice, in order, I suppose, to obtain a perfectly smooth and homogenous surface, to throw a shovelful of molten metal along a table on which a linen cloth is stretched. It may well be understood that this is a delicate operation, and requires considerable dexterity, for a slight slip might have serious consequences. Each workman before he made his cast said in a low tone, “Joseph was in the Tin Trade”. The foreman, who was taking the visitor round, after some persuasion, explained this, saying in words to the following effect:-

“We workers in metal are a very old fraternity, and like other handicrafts, we have old traditions among us. One of these, the memory of which is preserved in this invocation, is that of Joseph of Arimathea, the rich man of the Gospels, made his money in the Tin Trade with Cornwall. We have also a story that he made voyages to Cornwall in his own ships, and that on one occasion he brought with him the Child Christ and His mother, and landed them at St Michael's Mount.”

When I heard this I said that the saying “Joseph was in the Tin Trade” was known to me as current in Cornwall, though I had not thought enough about it to consider to which of the three Scriptural Josephs it referred. I found later that it was well known to other Cornish people. When I went to the British Museum the next day I looked up St Joseph of Arimathea in the “Acta Sanctorum”, and though I found nothing about the tin trade, and most of what I did find was the usual Gospel of Nicodemus, Glastonbury and Grail legend, there was one life which made him accompany St James the Great to Galicia in Spain, which was the other tin-producing district of the time.

The tradition that “Joseph was in the Tin Trade” may account for the choice of St Joseph as the legendary Apostle of Britain. When several of the Twelve are not accounted for, and a romancer may have chosen one of those without much fear of contradiction, it is curious that a character who is mentioned only once in each of the Gospels, though, it is true, in connection with a very important incident, should have been picked out, unless there was a tradition that he really did come. The Glastonbury legend is not found before the 12th century, though that does not prove that it is no earlier, and St Joseph is liturgically very much neglected in Western rites, even in the Sarum books, though more is made of him in Greek liturgies.

I told the story soon after I heard it to my friend Mr Ascott Hope Moncrieff, the editor of Black's Guide to Cornwall and he put it into his 1895 (16th) edition, which, as far as I know, was its first appearance in print. I also told it to Mr Baring-Gould, to whom it was quite new, and he worked it into one of his novels, and rather spoilt it by a characteristically conjectural emendation into “Joseph to the tinner's aid”.

Soon after that I was staying on South Uist, in the Catholic part of the Outer Hebrides, and found there a whole set of legends of the wanderings of the Holy Mother and Son in those islands, with some very pretty folklore and moral teaching associated with them. There was nothing about St Joseph or the Tin Trade in them, and some were connected with St Bridget in her anachronistic character of “Muime Chriosta” (Foster-mother of Christ), as the Gaels call her.

I wonder where Mr Hony got his notion that St Joseph was the uncle of Our Lady. It is not at all improbable, but I do not remember any mention of such a relationship even in the most fanciful of the Grail romances.

As Mr Hony rightly says, “It is an attractive legend”. It is not impossible that it is true, but, though one would like to believe that Those Two really did come to Cornwall, I fear that one can only ask with William Blake, who seems to have known some form of it.

and we shall probably never be able to get an answer to those questions.

Nicola Holdgate, librarian of the Archives department of that newspaper, provided the relevant photocopies to authors Arthur & Rosalind Eedle, Albion Restored: A Detective Journey To Discover The Birth of Christianity, pages 70-72 (Lulu, 2013).