Black Diamonds (11 page)

In the pit villages of the West Riding, previous generations of miners, their experiences, and the conditions they had had to endure, were not forgotten: remembering was an integral part of life.

‘The times I liked best of all, were when the twelve of us were all sitting round the fire with my father talking, particularly about his boyhood and the things that happened when his father was a lad,’ Jim Bullock recalled. ‘He used to talk about the flooding of a mine in which there were forty-four children. Only eighteen escaped, twenty-six drowned. He used to tell us then about his father and mother – that was my grandfather and grandmother – how they were carried on the back of their parents to work in the pit.’

On street corners, groups of old men held court, young boys clustered around them, listening, fascinated, in the words of one, to the tales of ‘accidents, explosions, good bosses and bad bosses’ they had to tell.

In the mid-nineteenth century the Government published a report in which men, women and children recorded, in their own words, the conditions underground. Their experiences were the Yorkshire miners’ heritage; their fathers and grandfathers had been boys like seven-year-old John Saville, who, in 1842, worked as a ‘trapper’ at a Sheffield pit.

I’ve worked in the pit
about two weeks. I stand and open and shut the door all day. I’m generally in the dark and sit me down against the door. I like it very well. It doesn’t tire me. I stop 12 hours in the pit. I never see daylight now except on Sundays. They don’t ill use or beat me. I fell asleep one day and a corve ran over my leg and made it smart. When I go home I wash myself and get my drinking [supper] and sit me down on the house floor. I’ve tea and bread and butter to my drinking. I’ve sometimes dry bread, sometimes bread and cheese and sometimes red herring and potatoes to my dinner [lunch] in the pit. I know my letters. I’ve never been to school at all. I go to Park Sunday School and they teach me writing. I go to chapel every Sunday. I don’t know who made the world. I’ve never heard of God.

Thomas Moorhouse, ten years old, an orphan, was also interviewed by Samuel Scriven, one of the Sub-Commissioners of the Report. When Thomas’s body was examined, it was covered in wounds from his master’s belt.

I ran away from him because he used me so bad. He stuck a pick twice into my bottom. He used to hit me with the belt and fling coals at me. When I left him, I used to sleep in the cabins upon the pit bank and in the old workings, where I laid upon the shale. I used to get what I could to eat and for a long time ate the candles that the colliers had left behind. I had nothing else to eat.

Boys of Thomas’s age were employed as ‘hurriers’ to haul corves of coal weighing up to 6 cwt through the tunnels.

David Swallow, a miner in his fifties, described the conditions in which the boys worked.

The roads are very wet
in some of the pits. The boys are continually wet at their feet, sometimes plastered up to their knees in dirt and sludge as bad as any coach horse can possibly be. With being continually wet on their feet and legs they have inflammations in those parts, on their legs and knees. Boils and rheumatism in all parts of the body, particularly in their lower parts, in all their different stages and degrees. A loaded corve is about 6cwt. Where the road rises very fast, it is very heavy work indeed, so that they have to have large pads fixed to their heads and then the hair is very often worn off, bald and so swollen as that sometimes it is like a bulb filled with spongy matter, so very bad after they have done their day’s work, that they cannot bear it touching.

In the 1840s, women, as well as young children, were employed underground. Samuel Scriven saw women and girls ‘chained, belted, harnessed like dogs in a go-cart, black, saturated with wet and more than half-naked, crawling upon their hands and knees and dragging heavy loads behind them’.

In 1900, sixty years after the Royal Commission reported, Britain’s status as the richest and most powerful nation in the world depended on coal. It was her biggest export: it powered the factories and the vast network of railways spawned by the Industrial Revolution; it fuelled the steamships that carried her trade around the world, and the Imperial Fleet that protected them.

But the human cost of its extraction was high. Although women, and children under the age of thirteen, had been banned from working underground, more than a million miners worked in conditions that had barely improved since the Commissioners reported in 1842. Thousands were killed or seriously injured every year. In pit villages across the country, the miners and their dependants – estimated to embrace over 10 per cent of Britain’s population – lived in appalling conditions, oppressed and exploited by the coal owners and forced to endure grinding poverty during periods of slowdown. For the majority, there was no safety net: no unemployment, sickness or injury benefit.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, 88 per cent of the British population owned nothing. As defined by the statisticians, it meant they were worth less than £100. One per cent of the population owned two-thirds of the nation’s wealth. Over the years that followed, in the battle to redress the flagrant social injustices inherent in these statistics, coal would become the driving force behind social, political and economic reform: the quest by those who owned nothing to have something.

The South Yorkshire coalfield was one of the key battlefields on which this class war was fought out. On a bitterly cold morning in the winter of January 1903, some of the first salvos were fired in a village eight miles from Wentworth House.

9

They called it
‘a hell upon earth’. The worst village in England.

Standing at the head of the Don Valley in the shadow of a chain of rocky north-facing limestone slopes known as the Crags, Denaby was a pit village of 8,000 inhabitants. Writing in a state of ‘numb despair’, one visitor said that what he had to describe was ‘so repulsive that many who have never been near it will probably refuse to credit the story’.

Denaby was not a village that any visitor would be pleased to see. Most days, it was very hard to see at all, shrouded by a pall of smog that rose at 4.30 every morning, as if a switch had been thrown, a blue-grey blanket of smoke lifting from a thousand waking homes. Four thousand miners were employed at Denaby’s two pits, each receiving a monthly allowance of a ton of coal. Fires, used for heating, hot water and cooking, were lit every day. Summer or winter, an hour before the start of the morning shift, coals were mended in grates that had smouldered overnight, sending plumes of smoke furling from the village chimneys. Seeping upwards, high above the village, the thick smog blotted the view of the Don Valley from the Crags.

On the morning of 6 January 1903, there were no home fires burning at Denaby. For the first time in living memory, as the sun rose over the Crags, the valley could be seen stretching to the west. In the mid-distance were slag heaps, railway tracks and clouds of drifting steam: crowding the near horizon were the smokestacks, headstocks and foundries of Sheffield, Rotherham and Barnsley: beyond, in the far distance, lay the thin green line of the Derbyshire hills. The familiar sounds of heavy industry that, in the words of one miner, ‘filled the air, twangling and discordant, like Prospero’s magic island’, floated in from far away.

Looking down from the Crags on to the grids of terraced housing, months of trauma were evident in the scene below. The two collieries, Denaby and Cadeby Main, towered over the village, their headstocks immobile. Nothing moved: empty wagons, packed close together or randomly abandoned, clogged the thick lines of railway metals that tangled and twisted through the village, the arteries that moved the coal around and out of the pits. The winding machines on the slag had stopped. The village was as still as the Don, the river that slugged between the two collieries.
Putrid and stagnant
, it had long lost its silver of legend; even the village children were warned from its banks.

A few hours after dawn, a column of 200 policemen, drafted in from around the county, snaked through the centre of the village, the iron on their heavy toe-capped boots sparking on the cobbles. They had come to evict 3,000 families from their homes.

The authorities were expecting trouble: unconfirmed reports indicated that miners in the neighbouring pits would declare a ‘play’ day and flock in their thousands to the village to demonstrate against the evictions. Four companies of troops were on standby at Sheffield and York, and a force of more than 100 policemen stood in reserve, ready to be moved in by train at the first sign of trouble.

A large number of Denaby’s 8,000 residents lined the square and the streets leading into it, watching the police march past. ‘Suffering was etched on the faces in the crowd,’ wrote the Reverend Jesse Wilson, the Minister of the Methodist Chapel.

We had the women between the 30s and 50s, whose mouths were many, but whose crusts were few. The troublous times had put 20 years upon many of them, and they looked old and haggard long before their age warranted it. Hardships were saddening and making the distance between themselves and the grave perceptible. The cry of the children was breaking their hearts. We had the boys and girls with corduroy suits falling to pieces and muslin frocks hanging together by threads, shoes out at the toes, while the stocking feet were gone altogether. Their pinched faces indicated pinched stomachs. They were hungry and you could see it.

The children crackled
and rustled when they moved; sheets of newspaper were layered under their clothes to provide extra warmth.

The Denaby miners had been on strike for twenty-seven weeks. Their houses belonged to the ‘Masters’, the Denaby and Cadeby Main Collieries Company, one of the most oppressive and ruthless companies in the South Yorkshire coalfield. It had issued the eviction orders to coerce the men back to work.

Miners in villages nearby, working at family-run pits like the Fitzwilliams’, called Denaby a ‘rough ’oyl’, ‘a reet plecque’, meaning a very bad place. ‘You hadn’t much trouble at the family pits, Fitzbillies [Earl Fitzwilliam’s], etc. There weren’t much trouble, you know, at little pits. You see, there was a stronger set of owners at Denaby, they could rule the roost,’ recalled Fred Bramley, a miner at Denaby Main. ‘I heard it quoted that the owner, Mr Buckingham Pope, said that he had a square yard of gold and he’d sink it before the miners would win.’

Six months earlier, the strike had begun with an argument over a layer of dirt.

‘Bag muck’, an uneven seam of soft dusty rock that ran between the beds of coal, was one of the banes of a collier’s life. Up to eight inches thick, it had to be removed before the coal could be mined. Faceworkers were paid according to the amount of coal they extracted, rather than the number of hours they worked. Time spent bagging the muck cost the miners money. Most collieries in the South Yorkshire coalfield paid their men a separate rate for bringing it out of the pit. But not at Denaby. In the months before the strike, the faceworkers were coming across seams of dust that were as much as forty inches thick. When they refused to remove the dirt, the company drafted in extra labour to bag it, deducting the cost from the miners’ wages. On 29 June 1902, they downed tools and walked out of the pit. The bag muck dispute involved just 180 men at Denaby Main, yet the entire workforce of both village collieries – 3,500 men – came out with them.

Twenty-seven weeks later, the strike had long ceased to be about dirt. On the miners’ part, after months of hardship, it was a stand against the sway of the coal owners.

The company was typical of a new set of owners that emerged in England’s coalfields in the second half of the nineteenth century: the corporate coal owner.

At Denaby, there were no family or territorial ties, no shared memories and experiences stretching back through centuries to lend a semblance of binding between the masters and men. Duty, loyalty, responsibility, concern – even affection – all seams in the complex layer that characterized the Fitzwilliams’ relationship with their colliers, were absent at the company’s two pits.

Both masters and men were outsiders, drawn by the lure of large profits and wages.

The company, formed by a syndicate of West Midlands prospectors, had come to Denaby in the early 1860s – frontiersmen in the coal rush that swept along the eastern edge of the Barnsley seam in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Before the two pits were sunk, Denaby was a small rural hamlet with a population of 204. It lay in open country on fertile agricultural land. In summer, lavender and corn grew in the fields that were broken by copses of dark elms. In 1863, the syndicate leased the land from the local gentry in return for mineral royalties on any coal it found. Four years later, coal was struck beneath the limestone, a quarter of a mile underground. By 1900, the two pits, Denaby and Cadeby Main, employed 4,000 miners and were among the most productive in South Yorkshire, producing one and a half million tons of coal a year, all of it hewn and shovelled by hand.

To accommodate the miners, the company had constructed some of the worst slum housing in the north of England.

One key opened the front door of all but three of the houses in the village, every one of them built from the same mud-yellow, coal-blackened brick. There were rows and rows of them, over 1,000 in total. Two-storeyed, two-up, two-down, terraced houses, hastily and cheaply constructed. Laid out in grids, they straddled the pit. Forty-nine houses were crammed to an acre: there was not a patch of green or a tree in sight. A local miner described them:

The oldest houses
have been built in the backyard of the colliery itself: rows of grim boxes identical in size, and conceived, one feels, in the mind of some satanic toymaker. The bare yards are unpaved – a pother of dust in the dry weather, a quagmire in wet. I find it impossible to think of Denaby without an inordinate impulse to seize upon the architect of this monstrosity and haul him by the nose through the horror of his own creation.