Part 18

'The butties', said the miners and their wives, 'are the devil: they are negro drivers: they play the vengeance With the men.' The men kicked when, after working a couple of hours, they were fetched up, without pay, on the excuse that there were no waggons to take away the coal. But the butty comforted them with a bottle of pit drink, and all was smooth again.

A collier related a case where 'a pike man had worked only one half-day in the week and got 2s. for it, and because he did not spend 6d. of this at the butty's shop, the latter told the doggy (the under man) to let the man play for it.'

The miners recognized that often the butty was not to blame. In the district north and east of Dudley, the butties got their 'charter price' from the coal-owners in the form of tickets on the coal-owners' truck-shop. What else could they do but hand them on to the men? 'He used to be a very good butty,' said one miner's wife, 'till they haggled him and dropped his "charter", so that he cannot pay his men.'

West and south of Dudley the butties, though they did not truck their men, kept public-houses; and being employer and publican in one, they had a tight hold on the men.

Was the compulsion to drink an oppression? To our minds, yes; as also to the minds of the teetotal Chartists whom the Government imprisoned, and of the strike leaders whom the Government's Commissioners denounced. But to the majority of the miners the abundance of beer was a delight. They objected to the butty's bullying, but they loved his beer, especially the feckless ones, for when wives were importunate the drunkards pleaded necessity.

However, all the beer-drinking could not be charged to the butties. The miners themselves, in their own fellowships, were devoted to it; and the compulsion of friends was as severe as the compulsion of butties. Every approach to recreation, every act of mutual providence against accident or disease, began and ended in beer. The day a man entered the pit's company, he paid 1s. for footing-ale, and the doggy saw that no churl escaped. When a lad was old enough to have a sweetheart he was toasted with the 'nasty' shilling. The sins of the married men were washed away in half-a-crown's worth of ale. The beer-shop was the head-quarters of the Burial and Savings Clubs. The first charge on a Burial Club was a good oak coffin, the second charge drinks for the pall-bearers, and then a glass or two for the rest of the company.

They had lotteries to which each man contributed 20 fortnightly shillings. Each week a name was drawn, and the lucky man stood a feast; while every member, in addition to a shilling for the box, produced 6d. for drinks.

In all these festivities the butty was in the offing. When they would have him he presided; and so at his worst an obnoxious bully, at his best he was an accommodating landlord.

Direct employment, such as prevailed in the north of England, would have averted much of this evil. There were no structural difficulties in the way of change. Direct employment would not have meant a change to another class of work (this is what direct employment meant for knitters and hand-loom weavers). The butty system existed and persisted through slackness and irresponsibility. The owners paid compensation for accidents, when they might have diminished the number of accidents. They paid commissions to middlemen with whom they might have dispensed. The system made temperance impossible for the individual; and the masters, with the full approval of the Government, did their best to destroy the 'pernicious combinations' by which alone a standard of sober decency could be promoted.

5. The Report of the Truck Commissioners (1871-2) enables us to complete the picture. It also enables us to understand why, at this late day, truck was still rife in certain districts.

Truck and Tommy, truck-shop and Tommy-shop, are convertible terms. Truck is from the French 'troc' = barter. Cobbett tells us how the word 'Tommy' was used. In his soldiering days the rations of brown bread, 'for what reason God knows', went by the name of Tommy. 'When the soldiers came to have bread served out to them in the several towns in England, the name of Tommy went down by tradition, and, doubtless, it was taken up and adapted to the truck-system in Staffordshire and elsewhere.' From the textile districts it had all but disappeared in 1871. When the cotton manufactures went to outlying dales for water power, they were almost compelled to open stores for their workpeople. Owen's store at New Lanark was, in effect, a well-managed truck-shop; and the Truck Commissioners of 1871 reported that the New Lanark Company of that day was breaking the law. But when the cotton industry was gathered in the towns, the need for company stores ceased. Consequently, after the passing of the Act of 1831, which prohibited truck altogether, the masters very generally abolished the stores of their own accord; and survivals were jealously watched.

A collection of Factory Scraps, preserved at the Goldsmiths' Library in London, contains a copy of the Factory Bill of 1833, with some pencil notes in Ostler's handwriting which run:

Cragg Dale Facts

Truck System: Little altered: men knew they were imposed. They pay in money now--but compel them to buy at their own shops.... Wholesale warehouses at Rochdale say, 'Oh! put it sideways: it will do for Cragg Dale masters to sell among their people.'

Song: 'Lousy butter and burnt bread.'

About 1842 a curious perversion of truck was prevalent in parts of Yorkshire. The trade depression in the Bradford district tempted disreputable woollen manufacturers to force on their operatives the products of the factory as part payment of wages. Combers were given pieces of cloth, workers in shoddy mills bundles of rags. But this utterly inexcusable fraud, no less than its more specious complement, the employer's store, was rooted out by inspectors and factory reformers. Therefore in 1854 the Government's Commissioner was able to say that in a factory district like Lancashire truck was not only non-existent but 'impossible'.

He was right as to the factory districts, but not quite right as to Lancashire. In Prescot, a small Lancashire town on the fringe of the factory district, the watchmakers in 1871 were being paid in watches. The masters alleged that they only gave watches to the workers when the latter had orders for them, but the evidence showed that these orders only came to hand when the men were asking for fresh work. The pawnbrokers explained what happened. 'Watches', said a pawnbroker's clerk, 'pass from hand to hand as a circulating medium until they get very low in the market and are pawned.' The pawnshop in question had 700 watches on pledge, most of them belonging to workmen in the town.

In railway contracting truck was prevalent in the forties. In roving employment of this type it is difficult to see how some form of contractor's shop could have been avoided. The navvy needed canteens or Y.M.C.A. huts, but such things had not been thought of then. However, when the big period of railway construction came to an end, the question lost its importance.

South Staffordshire and the Black Country were the ancient strongholds of truck. The campaigns against truck originated here. The nailers, the cash-paying masters, and the respectable ratepayers joined together to promote the Truck Act of 1820. Lord Hatherton, a Staffordshire nobleman, after three years hammering at the House of Commons, obtained the Truck Act of 1831. But in 1843, the year of the Midland Mining Commission, truck was still rife in the coalfields. The well-known Tommy-shop scene in Disraeli's novel Sybil, which was published in 1845, is taken direct from the Commissioners' Report. Diggs, the butty of the novel, is Banks, the coal proprietor of the Report. In the novel the people say of Master Joseph Diggs, the son: 'He do swear at the women, when they rush in for the first turn, most fearful; they do say he's a shocking little dog.' In the Report, page 93, the miner's wife says: 'He swears at the women when the women are trying to crush in. He is a shocking little dog.' One touch is Disraeli's own. He makes the miners keen to purchase 'the young Queen's picture'. 'If the Queen would do something for us poor men, it would be a blessed job.' In the Report there is nothing about this, but there is a section dealing with Chartism.

However, the truck-shop was gradually disappearing. Every year it became easier to expose evasions, and in good times the workers used their prosperity to slip away from the Company store. In 1850 a final campaign was initiated by five local Anti-Truck Associations, backed by the National Miners' Association under Alexander MacDonald. Truck-masters were prosecuted and truck was steadily dislodged from the coalfields and adjacent ironworks. Only in the nail trade did it survive, for the reason that the complete subjection of the nailers made it possible to practise the essentials of truck without a formal violation of the law.

In the remaining colliery districts in 1871 truck was prevalent only in West Scotland and South Wales.

In West Scotland it was yielding ground before the pressure of the unions. The companies only maintained it by active coercion. If a miner held out for money, they had to yield; and if they were malicious, they marked him as a sloper and dismissed him the first when a depression came. 'Black lists', said the Truck Commissioners, 'are often kept of slopers; threats of dismissal were repeatedly proved; and cases of actual dismissal for not dealing at the store are not rare.' However, the masters themselves were getting tired of it, since it led so frequently to strikes.

Truck in South Staffordshire was bound up with the butty system; in railway construction with the system of contracting and sub-contracting, and similarly in South Wales, as also in the west of Scotland, it was bound up with and dependent on the system of long pays. In order to carry on from one pay day to the next, the men got advances on the company's store. In this way many lived permanently ahead of their wages. The thriftless and drunkards were always 'advance men, but the provident miners hated it and only dealt there on compulsion'.

The Commissioners drew a vivid picture of Turn Book morning in South Wales at the close of the pay month.

At 1 or 2 a.m. the women and children begin to arrive with their Advance Books. Perhaps one hundred would be there, wet or fine, sleeping on the doorsteps or singing ballads until morning.

At 5.30 a.m. the doors opened, and the waiters made a rush for the counter. Advance Books were produced, and goods handed over up to the amount of wages which would shortly fall due. Women took their pick of the articles, groceries, tobacco, occasionally a few shillings.

'It is quite usual', say the Commissioners, 'for shoemakers and other small tradesmen in the neighbourhood of Abersychan to be paid by the workmen in goods.... Tobacco in several districts of South Wales has become nothing less than a circulating medium. It is bought by the men and resold by them for drink, and finds its way back again to some of the Company's shops. Packets of tobacco pass unopened from hand to hand. An Ebbw Vale grocer who took the Company's tobacco at a discount declared: "For years, when they were selling it for 1s. 4d. a lb. I used to give 1s.; but I was so much over-flooded with it that I was obliged to reduce the price to 11d. That would not do still, and I had to reduce it to 10d. I told the men to take it to some other shop if they could get 11d. or 1s. for it. I was obliged to do that many a time, in order to get rid of the large stocks I held in hand. Tobacco will not keep for many months without getting worse."'

Weekly pays, therefore, were the constant demand of the miners' unions. In Northumberland and Durham, whence truck had disappeared long ago, pays were fortnightly, and the only objection advanced by the owners against weekly pays was the practical inconvenience of the pressure on the pay staff. In the North of England Iron Trade, weekly pays, the Commissioners found, had just been introduced. In West Scotland some of the coal-owners were trying to recoup themselves for the loss of their truck-shop by charging poundage on the men's wages. But this dodge, like the bigger grievance of truck, was stoutly resisted by the local union. Indeed, in one coalfield after another the disappearance of truck and kindred evils coincides with the appearance of strong County Unions.