Part 17

Where would English industry have been without its king? In 1780 (in round figures) 5,000,000 tons of coal were raised in the United Kingdom: in 1800, 10,000,000; in 1865, 100,000,000; and in 1897, 200,000,000. Coal enticed the cotton factories from the dales of the Pennines to the moist lowlands of West Lancashire. At every stage of their work the iron-makers depended on coal; and the great inventions in the iron and steel industry are land-marks in the expansion of the demand for coal--Cort's puddling process 1783, Watt's steam-engine 1785, Neilson's hot blast 1824, Naysmith's steam-hammer 1835, Bessemer's steel-converter 1855, Siemen's open hearth 1870, Thomas' basic process for the treatment of highly phosphoric ores 1878. The steamship, a novelty in 1820, ruled the seas in 1870; and ironclads followed steamships. The smokeless steam-coal of South Wales guarded the heritage of Trafalgar. By the end of the nineteenth century, coaling stations were an important item in international politics.

Meanwhile, the people of England, heedless of Malthusian forebodings, multiplied exceedingly. They lighted their streets and buildings with coal-gas, and burnt coal in their grates. With coal they paid for the food and raw materials from other lands. Imports of food and raw materials were offset by exports of coal and of textiles and hardware produced by coal. The spirit of invention has pushed on to electricity and oil, but coal is still the pivot of English industry and commerce. And therefore, seeing that coal has meant all this to England, let us look at the men who raised the coal. How did they live, what did they think about, what did they count for then, what do they count for now?

2. In 1800 the miners stood for nothing in the nation's life. In Scotland they had just been emancipated from the status of villeinage. In Northumberland and Durham they were tied by yearly bonds. Elsewhere they were weak and isolated. In 1825 a 'Voice from the coal mines of the Tyne and Wear' cried: 'While working men in general are making 20s. to 30s. per week (sic) the pitmen here are only making 13s. 6d. and from this miserable pittance deductions are made.'

In 1839, during the Chartist disturbances, a Welsh M.P. wrote to the Home Secretary begging for barracks and troops: 'A more lawless set of men than the colliers and miners do not exist ... it requires some courage to live among such a set of savages.' When the miners came out in 1844, there were thousands of cottages tenantless in Northumberland and Durham. For the colliery proprietors owned the cottages, and when the miners struck evicted them. So the miners set up house in the streets. 'In one lane ... a complete new village was built, chests-of-drawers, deck beds, etc., formed the walls of the new dwelling; and the top covered with canvas or bedclothes as the case might be.' Yet, for all their griminess, they had human hearts and voices. During the strike they obtained permission to hold a meeting at Newcastle; and the wealthy citizens who made their fortunes out of the coal trade trembled before the invasion of black barbarians. But the meeting passed off in rain and peace. Thirty thousand miners marched in procession, 'for near a mile flags in breeze, men walking in perfect order'; and as they marched, they sang, as only miners sing, songs and hymns and topical ditties:

'Stand fast to your Union Brave sons of the mine, And we'll conquer the tyrants Of Tees, Wear, and Tyne!'

Up and down the Durham coalfields tramped a misguided agitator (in after life the veteran servant of the Durham Miners' Association), by name Tommy Ramsey. With bills under his arm and crake in hand, he went from house-row to house-row calling the miners out. He had only one message:

'Lads, unite and better your condition. When eggs are scarce, eggs are dear; When men are scarce, men are dear.'

Such blasphemy appalled the Government's Commissioners. But the miners had a zest for religion as well as for strikes. During the strike of 1844, 'frequent meetings were held in their chapels (in general those of the Primitive Methodists or Ranters as they are commonly called in that part of the country), where prayers were publicly offered up for the successful result of the strike.' They attended their prayer meeting 'to get their faith strengthened'.

Such ignorance could only be cured by education. Some worthy members of society had already recognized the fact. In 1830 a Cardiff 'Society for the improvement of the working population in the county of Glamorgan' issued improving pamphlets:

No. 9. Population, or Patty's Marriage.

No. 10. The Poor's Rate, or the Treacherous Friend.

No. 11. Foreign Trade, or the Wedding Gown.

But the northern miners were perverse people. In Scotland, according to one Wesleyan minister, the miners read Adam Smith. In Northumberland, with still greater perversity, they preferred Plato. 'A translation of Plato's Ideal Republic is much read among those classes, principally for the socialism and unionism it contains; in pure ignorance, of course, that Plato himself subsequently modified his principles and that Aristotle showed their fallacy.'

3. The Royal Commission of 1842 on the Employment and Condition of Children and Young Persons in Mines disclosed facts which made Cobdenite England gasp. The worst evidence came from Lancashire, Cheshire, the West Riding of Yorkshire, East Scotland, and South Wales. In these districts juvenile labour was cheap and plentiful; and this was an irresistible argument for its employment, though the miners themselves disliked it. The meddlesome restrictions on the factories were a contributory cause. Parents, it was said in Lancashire, were pushing their children into colliery employment at an earlier age because of the legal restrictions upon sending them to the neighbouring factories.

A Lancashire woman said in evidence:

'I have a belt round my waist and a chain passing between my legs, and I go on my hands and feet.... The pit is very wet where I work and the water comes over our clog tops always, and I have seen it up to my thighs.... I have drawn till I have had the skin off me; the belt and chain is worse when we are in the family way.'

The children's office was a lonesome one. Children hate the dark, but being little they fitted into a niche, and so they were used to open and close the trap-doors. A trapper lad from the county of Monmouth, William Richards, aged seven-and-a-half, said in evidence:

'I been down about three years. When I first went down, I could not keep my eyes open; I don't fall asleep now; I smokes my pipe, smokes half a quartern a week.'

Except in the northern mining districts, where there were good day and Sunday schools and Methodism was powerful, a pagan darkness prevailed. As a Derbyshire witness put it:

'When the boys have been beaten, knocked about, and covered with sludge all the week, they want to be in bed all day to rest on Sunday.'

In the hope of startling a religiously-minded England, the Commissioners reproduced examples of working-class ignorance. James Taylor, aged eleven,

'Has heard of hell in the pit, when the men swore; has never heard of Jesus Christ; has never heard of God; he has heard the men in the pit say, "God damn thee ".'

A Yorkshire girl, aged eighteen, said:

'I do not know who Jesus Christ was; I never saw him, but I have seen Foster, who prays about him.'

4. Just as in the East Midlands the frame-work knitters worked for middlemen or master middlemen, and just as the Dudley nailers worked for petty-foggers and market-foggers, so too the Staffordshire miners worked for 'butties'. Here again the workers were exposed to the petty tyrannies of semi-capitalism; and here again the middlemen, in this case the butties, incurred the odium of a system for which their superiors, the coal-owners and coal-masters, were responsible.

Why the butty system prevailed in the Midlands--and in a modified form it prevails to-day--is not clear. In some places it seems to be connected with the smallness of the mining concerns or of the metal trades which they supplied. In South Staffordshire a contributing factor was the ancient and allied industry of nail-making.

The conditions in South Staffordshire in 1843 are fully described in the Midland Mining Commission of that year.

The butty was a contractor who engaged with the proprietor or lessee of the mine to deliver the coal or iron-stone at so much per ton, himself hiring the labourers, using his own horses, and supplying the tools requisite for the working of the mine. The contract price was known as the 'charter price' or 'charter'. Thus by a freak of language the Staffordshire miner knew by the same word the 'butty's charter' which was the symbol of his oppression, and the 'people's charter' which was the goal of his desire.