Coal Black Heart (9 page)

So weary and malnourished were the child workers that in 1836 the average twelve-year-old boy was four foot four. (As I write this, my twelve-year-old son—a kid of average height in his peer group—is over five foot two.) With time, an outcry against the exploitation arose. Just not loudly enough; many factory owners claimed that employing children was necessary for production to run smoothly and for their products to remain competitive. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, urged child labour as a way to head off youthful idleness and vice.

The only consolation for the textile workers was that their dismal lives could have been worse. By the early nineteenth century, the demand for coal had shifted from heating hovels to fuelling industry. Everywhere, boilers drove steam engines that pumped water from mines, powered machinery in mills, and transported materials, finished goods and people around the country and across the oceans. England’s coal industry grew ten-fold between 1750 and 1850 as the Industrial Revolution spread to Europe and the United States. The United Kingdom raced to open new coal mines to meet skyrocketing demand; in one fifteen-year period—1842 to 1856—the number of coal mines in Britain quadrupled.

Such a thing would have been unimaginable in the early days, when the only mines were built around outcrops of exposed coal that were harvested by hacking away with picks. Suddenly, in places throughout Lancashire and elsewhere, it made sense to dig deeper, where the thick seams were found. Human power was
needed to wield all those picks and shovels. The labour force soared, climbing from around 40,000 in 1800 to 143,000 within forty years. Women worked in the collieries of Scotland, Cumbria, Northumberland, Shropshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire. In Scotland and Northumberland they often carried coal in baskets on their backs as they climbed stairs out of the mine. Elsewhere, they hauled wagons on all fours, by means of a chain around the waist, through low passages.

Children also toiled in the mines. At this point one-third of those working underground in England’s coal mines were under the age of eighteen. The 1842 Children’s Employment Commission (Mines) Report noted that four-year-olds toiled in British mines, where the average age was between thirteen and eighteen. Often, they worked at jobs that would have made grown men wilt (“at six years old and upwards, the hard work of pushing and dragging the carriages of coal from the workings to the main ways, or to the foot of the shaft, begins”), in solitude (“solitary confinement of the worst order”) and blackness (“many of them never see the light of day for weeks together during the greater part of the winter season”).

The mind reels at what they faced: the total lack of sanitation; the eating, drinking, urinating and defecating that all went on side by side; the rats scurrying everywhere in such profusion that they sounded “like a flock of sheep.” The 1842 report went on to conclude that the younger children “are roughly used by their older companions.” Reading a description of the initiation ceremony experienced by a young Yorkshire miner, I tend to agree; his trousers were pulled down to examine his “little sparrow.” Size mattered. If a boy was well endowed, he was treated with respect. Alas, if the newcomer had “a poor, weedy little thing, they used to cover it with fat and make fun of us for days, or else they used to paint it and hang a bit of band on it and all sorts of things.”

The miners, regardless of age and gender, worked in tunnels tall enough to take the coal tubs but not tall enough for a person to stand. Often they had to crawl to the cutting face and lie down to work; in Lancashire and other areas, they worked seams less than eighteen inches high. The deeper the coal mine, the hotter the rock. According to historian John Benson, many workers—including females—worked naked, which increased their risk of accident only marginally. (An extra layer of clothes, after all, won’t protect you from a fall of half a ton of rock.) The pits swirled with so much dust that even in the early nineteenth century the roadways had to be soaked with water to keep the miners from suffocating. Some miners, like Edmund Stonelake from South Wales, never forgot “the foul atmosphere of a nineteenth century coal pit where one’s lungs got clogged with dust, and nostrils constantly assailed with foul smells from sweating stinking horses, and perspiring men.” The colliers of Lancashire, declared the 1842 report, were in a particularly pitiable state:

Most miners never made it to age fifty. In a world without electricity, flame was the only way to produce light. The safety lamp had been invented at the beginning of the nineteenth century but miners were expected to buy their own, and the light they gave off was feeble. Naked flames were the norm, making explosions of the methane that naturally gathered in the mines common. After an explosion, the danger was from afterdamp, the suffocating combination of gases that remained.

Some miners died en masse in highly publicized accidents in the Lancashire fields: thirteen at the Ince Hall colliery (1851); thirty-six at the Cappull colliery (1852); fifty-eight at the Arley Pits in Wigan (1853); another eighty-nine at Ince Hall (1854); forty at Ashton-under-Lyne (1857); fifty-three in the same district a year later; another twenty-five in Tyldesley (1858). Yet, as Benson points out, “the vast majority of deaths were caused not by famous disasters, but by isolated, and therefore almost entirely unpublicized accidents.” From 1850 through to the First World War, an average of over a thousand miners per year died in the mines. A disproportionate number died in Lancashire, due to the rapid expansion of the industry there and the gassy nature of many of the seams.

I have no idea what John Briers, my great-great-grandfather, had to endure in the Lancashire mines—whether he was maimed by air spontaneously combusting, whether he ever suffered from photophobia (dread of the light), or the strange and awful miner’s nystagmus, the chief symptom of which is a rotary oscillation of the eyeballs, or any of the other ailments that sometimes afflicted colliers. I don’t even know how old John Briers was when he ventured underground for the first time. I just know that his life progressed
in the usual fashion for a working man in this time at this place. In 1865, at age twenty-three, he married Ellen Margaret Pollard at St. George’s church in Wigan. Four years later, they were living in St. Helens.

By the time the 1881 census was taken they were a family of eight. The patriarch, at forty-one, was still listed as a collier. The second-eldest boy, John William, now ten, was identified as a “scholar,” which implied that things were going well enough in the household that, for now, he didn’t have to join the 30,000 children under the age of fifteen working in British mines. Number 50 Chorley Lane, where they lived, was a plain, terraced home with two gable walls, surrounded by a garden. Not that home ownership made a measurable difference in a family’s quality of life in eighteenth-century Chorley; freehold miners’ homes were probably just as damp, dank and filthy as the worst coal company shack. Polluted water supplies and barbaric waste disposal meant the rapid spread of digestive complaints like diarrhea, and more serious infectious diseases like typhoid, scarlet fever, measles and whooping cough. Infant mortality was heartbreakingly high.

The cramped, crowded nature of virtually every miner’s home—by the mid-nineteenth century five people was the norm in a house with only a couple of rooms—made day-to-day life maddeningly difficult. Beds were often located in the living room. Privacy was impossible: siblings slept in the same bed; the father and any sons and male tenants who worked in the pit bathed in a tin basin in the living room. Isolation in the case of illness was out of the question. In 1898, Benson recounts, a doctor called on a mining family in Derbyshire, in the middle of England. He found that the mother, “in a pathetic attempt to prevent the spread of infection in her overcrowded home,” had placed three children with scarlet fever in one end of a bed and three more with typhoid in the other.

Considering the conditions at home, maybe they welcomed rising at 2:45 a.m. to leave the house by 3:15, then walking for half an hour to be at the pit by quarter to four. Long gone were the old bell pits—little more than deep wells opened to provide access to the coal, in which women and children humped the coal up ladders to the surface. Drift mines, driven into the side of a hill, allowed the miners to follow the seams farther underground. When deeper mines were needed to provide coal to fuel the factories that were changing the world, the room-and-pillar system—a network of work spaces carved into the seam with columns of left-over coal supporting the mine roof—held sway.

John William Briers’s career, like his father’s, probably followed the normal arc: starting out as a trapper boy opening and closing the ventilation doors to allow men and coal to pass without disturbing the airflow through the workings; moving up the food chain a bit to perhaps becoming a “putter,” pulling huge tubs that could contain a quarter of a ton of coal out to the main roadway. Around eighteen or nineteen he would have joined the ranks of hewers—those who actually dug coal with picks and shovels, the most aristocratic of colliery occupations. At this point his future would have been preordained: the next thirty years as a pick-and-shovel man; then, if he was still able, finishing out his days above the surface, among the women and children, doing less physically demanding work.

Above ground, despite the stereotype of the day, not every miner hustled to the pub once the end-of-shift whistle blew to swill down grog until he saw double. Not everyone left his wages in the back alley on the way home, betting on everything from cards and marbles to games of pitch-and-toss. There were other diversions, particularly after Parliament passed legislation in 1847 limiting the workday to ten hours. Suddenly the sporting life—whether bare-knuckle boxing, bull-baiting and cockfighting, or more civilized pastimes like football, rugby and
cricket—became more popular. Some went to church—mainly the Church of England, although by the mid-1800s virtually every mining community had its own Catholic chapel. Others raised animals, gardened, even competed in regular flower shows.

It wasn’t a particularly learned society. Estimates are that by the early 1800s only 48 percent of men and 17 percent of women could sign their names to the marriage register. Nonetheless, some miners formed theatrical troupes and criss-crossed the coalfields. The most serious among them took to reading rooms and libraries and attended evening lectures at the miners’ institutes that began to spring up. Music—in the form of brass bands that materialized wherever factories were opened and pits sunk—was particularly popular. The instruments were simple to master and relatively cheap to buy. In many places the employers sponsored their workmen. As early as 1827, every large colliery in Northumberland and Durham was said to have its own band. Some of them could even carry a tune. In 1869 a group of workers from the St. Hilda Colliery, located in South Shields, an industrial town on the northeast coast, got it in their heads to form a brass band even though not one of them played an instrument. With the help of professional trainers they won England’s national brass band championship in 1912, 1920, 1921, 1924 and 1926.

So miners and their families weren’t—as the educated classes seemed to feel at the time—just knuckle-draggers and subhumans. The colliery folk of Lancashire and Lanarkshire, of Durham and Derbyshire, of Northumberland and Yorkshire, had the usual hopes, dreams and ambitions. In their cold, brutish world they found warmth by banding together in friendly societies that insured them against accidents. Somehow, they managed to start co-operatives to fight the monopoly of the coal company’s “truck”
system. In virtually every coalfield in the land, they made their first steps toward forming unions to offset the immense power of the colliery owners.

Moving onward, however haltingly, was the defining theology in this age of aspiration and progress. My people were no different. One day in 1891, twenty-year-old John William Briers stood inside St. George’s church—“majestic in its capacious design and originally built to seat 2,200 worshippers,” according to the history section of the church’s website—at the top of St. George’s Street in Chorley A.G. Leigh was likely seated at the organ that day; J. Alfred Pattinson—vicar from 1890 to 1903—may have been officiating. For it was an auspicious occasion: the day John William Briers married the woman who would become my great-grandmother, Margaret Rigby, a nineteen-year-old Chorley calico weaver whose family, like every Lancashire clan, had deep ties to coal mining.