Darkness, heat, paltry wages and lack of safety – mines in the Victorian Age were more like a game of survival. This LocalHistories article explores the working, living and leisure conditions of the rugged Yorkshire miners of the 19th century.
Coal for the Empire!
Coal mining in South Yorkshire dates back to the Bronze Age. This mineral was used as fuel by the ancient Romans and medieval monks, but it was only during the Industrial Revolution that mining reached its heyday.
Coal had a special meaning. It heated homes, supported shipping and international trade, and kept railways and factories running.
In 1800, coal production in the UK was 10 million tonnes a year, rising to 225 million tonnes by 1900. Despite the rise of the mining industry, the job of a miner was hard, poorly paid and very dangerous.
Work & Life Conditions
The mines operated day and night and the miners worked in shifts. A typical Yorkshire miner’s day in the nineteenth century was as follows: the workers woke up before dawn, had breakfast of bread, homemade cheese, biscuits and milk, and hurried off to the pit.
All miners were required to wear tokens, which could be used to identify a person in the event of an accident. They then descended to a depth of 500 feet, lighting the way with a small lamp. The miners sat in what is known as a “set”, consisting of wagons on rails. The set was pulled by the ponies until the tunnel became too narrow. In that case, the miners had to walk. The tunnel ceilings were often so narrow that the men had to work with picks and shovels lying down.
During the lunch break, which the miners called “bait time” or “snap time”, the workers did not go upstairs but stayed in the mines. The lunch consisted of water, jam and bread. But the miners did not eat much, as an uncomfortable position could cause an upset stomach. By the way, there were no toilets underground either, so many people took newspapers or rags with them.
In 1860 the average life expectancy of a miner was only 45 years. Coal dust and toxic fumes caused poisoning and respiratory problems, poor lighting resulted in temporary blindness, and the cramped conditions led to arthritis among the workers. More often than not, however, miners were the victims of accidents and breakdowns, which were not uncommon in those days.
An important invention was the safety lamp, invented by Sir Humphry Davy in 1815. The lamp consisted of a wick and a mesh screen. This mechanism reduced the danger of explosions due to the presence of gases and allowed the Davy lamp to be used in coal mines. There were special regulations requiring all miners to use safe lamps, otherwise they could be fined or even imprisoned.
However, even those lamps could not completely save workers from accidents. Collapses, methane explosions, floods – all threatened the lives of the brave English
miners on a daily basis. The Oaks tragedy is regarded as the worst mining disaster in England in the 19th century. On 12 December 1866, with just an hour and a half to go before the end of the shift, there was an explosion at a mine in Oakes, Yorkshire. Upstairs spectators recalled that it was like an earthquake – the ground was shaking with a loud roar and pillars of smoke were billowing from the open pit. At the time, 388 people perished in a series of explosions caused by a fire.
Children-miners
The mines are no place for children, but only if you don’t live in Victorian England. In the mining industry in the first half of the 19th century, children comprised 20 to 50% of the workforce.
It was common for children to enter the profession at the age of 8 or 9. There have been cases where four-year-olds have worked alongside adults in terrible conditions. What kind of work could children do? The children worked as trappers. They were small enough to fit through narrow pits and close and open trapdoors to circulate air. Sometimes children would forget to close or open the right trapdoors in time, and dangerous poisonous gasses would build up in the pit, leading to explosions.
The older children also served as hurriers and pulled the corves laden with coal, or as thrusters and pushed the corves from behind. Such a wagon could weigh several quintals. The working day started at 3am and lasted 12-16 hours. Child labour was profitable for mine owners, because on average a child was 80% cheaper than a man, and 50% cheaper than a woman.
Such labour was beneficial to the parents themselves. Usually, the miners hired the hurries themselves and they paid them the money, and if the hurry was your son or daughter, the money stayed in the family! The only thing worse than working conditions was the treatment of the little miners. Children were often severely beaten for failing to cope with their duties, being lazy or falling asleep at the workplace.
There have often been real tragedies. In 1838 a heavy rainstorm flooded a mine in Huskar and 26 children drowned. This monstrous catastrophe shocked English society and led to the creation of a Commission for the Employment of Children and Women in the mines in 1842. In 1850 a new law came into force that banned boys under the age of 12 from working in the mines. However, unfair and greedy mine owners still continued to use women and children even after the official ban.
Women’s labour
Girls and women worked in the mines as well as men. They usually loaded wagons with coal or pulled heavy trolleys. Because of the heat and stuffiness in the mines, men often worked naked, while girls and women were dressed in men’s clothes. It was also possible to see girls (sometimes even at puberty) stripped to the waist, making them easily confused with boys.
This is how Sub Commissioner of Mines J.C. Simons described women’s labour in the mine:
“One of the most disgusting sights I have ever seen was that of young females, dressed
like boys in trousers, crawling on all fours, with belts around their waists and chains passing between their legs, at day pits at Hunshelf Bank, and in many small pits near Holmfirth and New Mills: it exists also in several other places. In two other pits in the Huddersfield Union I have seen the same sight. In one near New Mills, the chain, passing high up between the legs of two of these girls, had worn large holes in their trousers; and any sight more disgustingly indecent or revolting can scarcely be imagined than these girls at work-no brothel can beat it. In the Flockton and Thornhill pits the system is even more indecent: for though the girls are clothed, at least three-fourths of the men for whom they >hurry= work stark naked, or with a flannel waistcoat only, and in this state, they assist one another to fill the corves 18 or 20 times a day: I have seen this done myself frequently.“
However, the masculine clothing and lack of morals that so frightened Mr Simons were far from the worst of the problem. Perhaps hardest of all was the hellish work that female miners of the 19th century had to deal with.
Thirty-seven-year-old Betty Harris, who worked with her husband, told the commission about conditions at the mine: “I have drawn till I have bathed skin off me; the belt and chain is worse when we are in the family way. My feller (husband) has beaten me many times for not being ready. I was not used to it at first, and he had little patience”.
Pregnancy was not an excuse, and women only stopped working when there was a threat of miscarriage.
Thirty-eight-year-old Isabelle Wilson worked as a coal putter in Sir John’s mines. The hard work seriously affected the woman’s health:
“When women have children thick [fast] they are compelled to take them down early. I have been married 19 years and have had 10 bairns; seven are in life. When on Sir John’s work was a carrier of coals, which caused me to miscarry five times from the strains, and was ill after each. Putting is not so oppressive; the last child was born on Saturday morning, and I was at work on the Friday night”.
Entertainment
The miners’ hard and honest work was rewarded with a lot of fun. In winter, men would spend their days hunting on the heath (often to earn more money) and women would meet around the fireplace and knit. The people of the mining villages and towns participated in fairs and exhibitions, played wind instruments and sang in the choir, for even the tough miners of Northern England are no strangers to the finer things in life.
But the most popular resting place for miners was the pub. After a hard day’s work the labourers would meet in the local pubs for a pint, sing cheerful songs, play “Knurr and Spell” or “Quoits” and try their luck at gambling. Gambling was usually simple, using cards or other crude implements, not like the top live casino’s we see today. Miners would also tell each other dark tales of dwarves, boggarts and tommyknockers living in the mines. In the United Kingdom they were called by different names, for example brownie in England and Scotland, coblynau in Wales and leprechaun in Ireland.
Some miners believed that tommyknockers were small (no more than 2ft tall) mischievous creatures dressed in miners’ clothes. They can hide tools or put out lights, and they can also point out where the most coal is hidden. Others believed that
tommyknockers were the souls of dead miners who protect and help their brothers in labour. Making fun of or joking about tommyknockers was considered bad luck.
English miners were very superstitious people. For example, they believed that if you met a red-haired woman on the way to the mine, you would surely die. And it was also the miners in northern England who gave it the folk tradition of not putting shoes on the table. When a miner died in his workplace, his family and comrades would put his shoes on the table as a sign of respect. Putting the shoes of the living on the table was considered a very bad sign. If you put your shoes on the table, you’re a dead man.
Many families in the UK have mining ancestors, but not many are aware of their difficult and hard lives. Thanks to the hundreds of thousands of men, women and children working day and night in the mines of Northern England, British industry grew and developed.
“You and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., and the poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for Infants – all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.” – so wrote George Orwell in his 1933 essay “Down the mine”. It is difficult to disagree with him. It was there, in the dark depths of the earth, under a layer of coal dust, the heart of Britain’s Industrial Revolution was beating, defining the development of the country for decades to come.