Coal Black Heart (6 page)

This wasn’t the case in the coalfields of England, where something truly transformative was taking place. The country’s coal operators faced a perplexing problem: demand for English coal was growing at breakneck speed. The trouble was that the bigger the industry grew, the deeper the operators had to dig in search of larger coal seams. And the farther each shaft punched into the ground, the more each mine filled with water. Enter a blacksmith from Dartmouth named Thomas Newcomen, who came up with a way to use the forces of nature to solve the drainage problem. By burning coal, Newcomen used steam pressure built up in a boiler to power a piston. The piston, in turn, drove a pump that drained
water from coal mines, allowing them to operate far more cheaply and efficiently. Author Bill McKibben estimates that Newcomen’s engine replaced the equivalent of a team of five hundred horses walking in a circle. The steam engine changed the whole energy equation forever; humans were freed from depending upon their puny muscles or the brawn of horses, oxen and other animals. Now they could use the pent-up energy buried underground to do the work for them.

In 1763 a Scotsman named James Watt went one step further, adding a separate cooling chamber to the machine. His innovation reduced the loss of heat and improved efficiency to the point where his steam engine could be applied to all kinds of industries. An old agrarian world based on manual labour and life on the farm was being replaced by one dominated by industry, machines and life in cities. Coal—which replaced the limited power of human and animal sweat and muscle with the unrelenting potency of soulless machinery—was the raw material that fired the transformation. Coal-fired boilers fired the factories and mills that turned out finished products, and ran the locomotives and steamships that widened the market for those manufactured goods. Coal, it was discovered, also had other uses. For centuries, the British had converted their iron ores to pig iron and steel by heating the raw material with charcoal, made from trees. By the mid-eighteenth century, the nation’s timber supply was failing. Coke, formed by baking coal until the impurities burned off, turned out to be a better, cheaper fuel for iron-ore smelting anyway.

Without coal, in other words, no clouds of smoke forever billowing from the ironworks and smelters of the Western Midlands—the Black Country. No Lancashire and Yorkshire terrifyingly transformed into the world’s greatest textile centres. No canals, roads and rail lines hacked out of the terrain.

All of which made coal-mining’s lack of progress in Cape Breton even more puzzling. The steady procession of names on the leases continued. In 1820, the year that the British Colonial Office reannexed Cape Breton to Nova Scotia, the leaseholders of the day managed to sell less than ten thousand tons of coal, marginally more than their predecessors had sold twenty years earlier. For an island within striking distance of the fast-expanding cities of the eastern United States, that was a startlingly meagre amount. Some of the reasons were obvious. Bootleg coal stolen with picks and shovels from Cape Breton’s uninhabited coastal cliffs ate into commercial production. According to historians of the day, the Nova Scotian product was sent to market in such poor condition that it couldn’t compete against English coal. Economics also conspired against the leaseholders: wages, which accounted for 80 percent of costs, were thought to be breathtakingly high. The shortage of return freight ratcheted up the price of shipping. That left the Cape Breton mine owners relying on local demand in Halifax, which consumed about three-quarters of output, and St. John’s, which took the rest. Even then the high price of Cape Breton coal made it barely competitive against British coal shipped to North America as ballast.

As the new century dawned, the administration’s approach—short-term leases coupled with exorbitant royalties—was as myopic as ever. “It could not be expected,” Richard Brown wrote half a century later, “that men of capital would employ their money in an undertaking of magnitude under a lease of five or seven years; and it is equally certain that, without capital, the mines could not be worked for profit.” The one way the authorities acted decisively—ensuring that the market for domestic coal remained a captive one—did no one any good. Landowners who discovered coal on their acreage found it was the property of the Crown. If they “forgot” this, soldiers who were empowered to prevent the mining and smuggling
of illegal coal arrived to remind them. “The action of the authorities,” geologist Francis W. Gray wrote in 1917, “must have seemed cruelly foolish and inexplicable to those colonists who, every spring, saw the coal that the winter’s frosts had loosened drop into the sea with the first thaws of spring, to be washed completely away by the first storm.”

On the mainland, the nineteenth century opened with little obvious promise. The Cumberland County mines in Joggins and Springhill ran into the same problems. The Scots who had settled in Pictou County where coal had been discovered in the early 1790s, stubbornly tried to seize their underground wealth; the result, though, was little different. The story of John MacKay, who dug possibly the first coal mine in Pictou County in 1807, is perhaps emblematic. Like the other early operators, he lacked the money and technical skills to turn the first pits into much. During the Napoleonic Wars, things were good for anyone who found a way to provision the garrison in Halifax. In the last year of the War of 1812, Nova Scotia’s lieutenant governor ordered MacKay to ship coal to Halifax. Expecting such orders—and wartime profits—to continue, MacKay invested heavily in roads, bridges, wagons and lighters to move the coal. But peacetime brought a collapse in prices. In 1817 MacKay was forced into bankruptcy and thrown into debtor’s prisoner for a year, leaving his wife and children in “greatest distress.” While in jail, MacKay petitioned the government in Halifax for help. Instead, while MacKay was in the brig, a local Pictou merchant and MLA named John Mortimer was handed the right to mine coal in Pictou County. Political patronage—another practice long associated with the province’s coal industry—had its start.

The postscript was no cheerier: MacKay died without making a cent off the coal. The next few years, as new mines were tentatively opened and leases moved back and forth between owners,
brought little improvement. A succession of local worthies took a shot at turning the leases into something. By 1820 total production was 7,762 tonnes. Five years later, production had dropped to a point where the leaseholder of the moment said his overall profit amounted to a grand total of £ 200.

One summer day I went looking, in the town of Stellarton, for an explanation of what happened next: how, within a few decades, coal mining in Nova Scotia went from nothing to an industry capable of bringing the Industrial Revolution to Canada. I wanted to start with a forgotten symbol: Mount Rundell, the twenty-room brick-and-wood official residence that the local manager of the General Mining Association had erected on a seventy-five-acre estate in the centre of the Pictou coalfield. Back in England it would have been a comfortable gentry house. “In the wilderness that Nova Scotia then was, in 1827,” James Cameron wrote, “it was a mansion.” The property included orchards, hothouses, a large park, a pigeon coop, stables, a porter’s house and a coach house. Some of the acreage had been cleared and planted with ornamental trees, shrubs and flowers. A cricket crease stood in one corner of the property; another corner, with a dance platform, chairs and tables, was lent to churches and charities for fundraisers and picnics. Large visitors’ houses marked the north and south ends of the property. Staff—some of them former slaves who had escaped from the United States—lived in small cottages elsewhere on the estate.

As much as anything, what intrigued me was the way Richard Smith and his wife, Elizabeth, the daughter of an important coal and iron master from England’s Midlands—had entertained like old-country royalty. At its peak, Mount Rundell rivalled the
provincial legislature as the most historic and important building in the province. At one point Lord Stanley visited, as did the Earl of Musgrave; and Sir William Fenwick Williams, a hero of the Crimean War. Prime Minister Charles Tupper eventually put in an appearance. So did Joseph Howe, the reformer and newspaper publisher. Fittingly, the great men of the burgeoning field of earth science—Dawson and Lyell—also appeared, drawn by the area’s fabulous coal seams.

To my mind you couldn’t beat the symbolism: this estate with its sweep of green lawn and long, curved carriage drive, completely surrounded by a hawthorn hedge, standing atop a hill on the edge of a scruffy little colliery town.

Two hundred years later, the grand buildings had been ripped down, and the grounds subdivided. It was near-impossible to find a hint of the mansion’s existence.

“Mount what?” a local old-timer said, when I asked about the house.

When I mentioned the General Mining Association, that rang a bell, but he was sketchy on the details. So I went home and tried to piece together the story of the GMA and coal-mining in Nova Scotia. That quest led me to London somewhere around the middle of the eighteenth century, when a man named Hart dealt in toys and fishing tackle in St. Paul’s Churchyard, “at the sign of the golden salmon.” “Business prospering, he moved to no. 32 Ludgate Hill, where he added the sale of cheap, light jewelry and box and other combs” to his line of merchandise. A man named Theed took over from Hart, took in a partner named Pickett and introduced “the sale of plate.” Somebody invited Philip Rundell, the youngest of sixteen, who had served his apprenticeship with a Bath jeweller, to work in their silversmith’s shop. Pickett, it developed, had political ambitions—serving as a London alderman
in 1782, sheriff in 1784 and lord mayor in 1790—and increasingly left the business to Rundell, who wasn’t devoid of ambition himself. One day, finding Theed in a “dissatisfied humour,” he persuaded him to sell out. “And thus,” wrote George Fox, the author of what may well be one of the earliest corporate histories in English, “he [Rundell] placed himself at the head of the House which afterwards was to become the object of envy to all the Trade and the wonder almost of the World.”

In time Rundell was joined by John Bridge, who had served his apprenticeship with the same Bath jeweller. Rundell, who Fox wrote “was naturally of a violent disposition, very sly, and cunning and suspicious,” minded the shop; charming, urbane Bridge was the outside “contact” man, a “complete courtier,” well fitted for “beating the bush to drive the game to Ludgate Hill.” In Georgian England a little charm could get a person a long way; in 1797 Rundell and Bridge were appointed one of the royal goldsmiths, and seven years later they received the royal warrant to supply the Crown with plate, jewels, medals, insignia and even works in ormolu and bronze.

By the 1820s—thanks to Bridge’s charm, Rundell’s ruthlessness and the sheer beauty of their product—the pair headed a vast enterprise with agencies in Paris, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Baghdad, Constantinople, Bombay, Calcutta, and various cities in South America. The British royal family—particularly George III, who used to shower jewels on his mistresses and members of his inner circle and was as mad for silver-gilt and gilt bronze as his rival Napoleon—adored their plate and jewels. With time, according to antiques scholar Christopher Hartop, it got so that “the affable Bridge would leave Ludgate Hill every morning with his trademark blue bag to show the king a selection of the firm’s latest creations.”

Why am I telling you all this? Because George’s son Prince Frederick, the Duke of York and Albany, also had a thing for
baubles. When he saw his brother, George IV, dressed for the coronation in 1821, he admired the profusion of jewellery (not all real) and exclaimed, “By God I’ll have everything the same at mine.” His biographer called Frederick the king’s favourite son, “inattentive to his pecuniary affairs, in consequence of which he fell into many difficulties, and in some instances his name stood on tradesmen’s books.” The death of George III in 1820 meant that the prince was without the £10,000 a year he had received for looking after his father. When he died in 1827, he left such staggering debts that the Duchess of York approached Christie’s to sell his extensive silver collection to cover them. By 1825 Messrs Rundell and Bridge of Ludgate Hill were holding a big slice of the £250,000 in debts which the Duke could barely cover.

The jewellers had another problem: what to do with the money that filled their coffers at a time when the world seemed decidedly short on sound investment opportunities. A year earlier, Rundell and Bridge had been persuaded to form a company with the intriguing title of Colombian Pearl Fishery Association. They raised £120,000 on the stock market, then sent two ships to Latin America in search of lucrative pearl beds. Their ships didn’t find anything that would yield the kind of return the London jewellers needed on their investment. They went back to the drawing board, rounded up some more London investors and formed the General South American Mining Association. The company moved quickly, sewing up mineral rights in Brazil and Colombia. A year later—with Latin American mining companies failing everywhere—the GSAMA abandoned its adventure. Which is precisely where the Duke of York and his marker with Rundell, Bridge and Rundell (Philip’s nephew, Edmond, had joined them in 1803) came in.

In 1788—even though his mental illness had yet to explode into
full-blown mania—George III had drafted a lease to all the mineral rights in Nova Scotia that he fully intended to give to the Duke of York. The documents, for one reason or another, were never completed and the lease seemed to have slipped the duke’s mind—until Parliament and his moneylenders at some point started looking askance at his dissipated ways. By then the paperwork had been mislaid, the king was too far gone to recall the past, and all the officials from 1788 were dead or gone. No one put any stock in the duke’s claim. So you can imagine the bafflement when the document was found in the Crown’s patent office. And in 1826 the Duke immediately turned around and sublet the mining leases to the London jewellers. Then he no doubt issued a royal “whew.” Everyone was happy. He had reduced his debts and acquired a 25 percent cut in the anticipated profits from a new foreign venture. Rundell, Bridge and Rundell, who had shortened the name of their offshore company to the General Mining Association, must have been relieved not to have to write off the royal debt. When the deal was examined from one angle the people of Nova Scotia had lost out: their minerals, and the riches that went with them, had been cavalierly handed away to old-country landlords in an act of outrageous royal whimsy. On the other hand, the pragmatists in Nova Scotia understood that suddenly there was capital and mining expertise—in short, an industry—where before there had been none.