Child Workers in Britain's Coal Mines

A child miner in 1842.

In 1842, a Children's Employment Commission was set up to discover the true facts about child labour in Britain's coal mines. 

We do not know precisely how many children worked underground in the middle of the nineteenth century. The commission only established the proportion of children and young people to adults, which varied according to district. For example, over one-third of the workforce was under eighteen in the Durham, Northumberland, Glamorgan and Derbyshire mines.

Wellcome Collection. Child workers 'hurrying'. 

The age when children first entered the pit depended on the thickness of the coal seams, family poverty, and local custom. Children as young as four were recorded. On average girls and boys began working underground when they were eight or nine years old. 

The youngest children were 'trappers'. They opened and closed the ‘trap-doors’ which regulated air-flow through the pit. The trappers sat alone for hours in the dark, unless they had a candle. Six-year-old Susan Reece, a trapper in a South Wales pit, said she ‘didn’t much like the work’.

Older children moved coal for the ‘getter’ or ‘hewer’ from the coal-face to the bottom of the mine-shaft. Thin seams (only twenty inches high) could only be worked by using children to drag or push the loads of coal, sometimes up a steep slope. This was called ‘hurrying’ or ‘putting’. 

Children hauled tubs of coal using a girdle or belt and chain, which they paid for out of their wages. The belt blistered and cut the children’s skin; their bodies became stunted from prolonged stooping.

Descending into the pit, 1870s.

In some pits, young boys were ‘engineers’;  they controlled the engine which wound parties of workers up and down the mine-shaft. They had to stop the basket or tub carrying the people at exactly the right moment. If not, the tub and its passengers continued up and over the overhead pulley, injuring them or dashing them into the mine-shaft below.  

In east Scotland, women and girls of all ages carried coal on their backs to the surface via a succession of steep, rickety ladders. The loads they carried were incredibly heavy. Some fathers ruptured themselves as they lifted a load onto their daughter’s back.

Women and children also worked above ground at the pit-brow in many areas. 

Coal mines were (and still are) very dangerous places to work in. Explosions from gases like fire-damp were commonplace; and there were thousands of run-of-the-mill accidents, like being run over by a coal waggon, or a roof collapse. In 1838, there were 349 fatalities in English collieries; over one-third of those killed were under eighteen. 

An explosion in a coal mine, 1870s.

The Mines Reform Act of 1842 banned all women and girls from the pits. The minimum age for boys entering the pit was lowered to ten, but they could be engine-men as young as fifteen. However, it proved difficult to enforce the Act. Boys under ten were found working below ground over ten years after the Mines Reform Act.

 

Oldest and youngest miners in a colliery, c.1906.

The Book Which Inspired a Research Project and Exhibition

I was absolutely thrilled to hear that my book The Children History Forgot has inspired a research project and a new exhibition on child miners in Somerset, as reported in the Mendip Times (see feature, above).   The exhibition, which runs at Radstock Museum through May, June and July, tells the poignant story of the boys who worked in the local mines: some of the lads were as young as seven years old.

This sounds like an amazing exhibition, so do drop in if you are in the area. 
Update 24 July: The exhibition has been extended for another four weeks - until 31 August. 

Image: Feature © Mendip Times and reproduced by kind permission of the editor, Steve Egginton.

Sacrifice in the Trenches: WWI Ancestors

This blog post is a tribute to two relatives who died in the Great War long before I was born. They made the ultimate sacrifice for King and Country.

Two of my great-uncles, Herbert and Harry (Henry) Dickman from Pendlebury, were killed in France in 1916.

Herbert Dickman (service number 15647) born c.1899, served as a private in the 8th battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, and his date of death is given by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website as 7 March 1916, aged twenty-five. He was a POW, and died of his wounds.

His brother Harry Dickman (service number 15080), who was two years younger, was a private in the 16th battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers (2nd Salford Pals); his date of death is given as 30 July 1916, during the battle of the Somme. I believe that the battalion was at Haillicourt around that time. Both soldiers are commemorated on the Loos memorial.

Brothers Harry and Herbert worked at Agecroft Colliery before the Great War, and their names can be seen on its war memorial, along with the names of many others from the pit who died in the ‘war to end all wars’. 
If you have a Lancashire ancestor who served in the armed forces, some sources for military history are included in my new book Tracing Your Lancashire Ancestors, which has just been released.
Update May 2014: If you have an ancestor who served in WW1, you may like to visit the Lives of the First World War website.

Images: Agecroft Colliery War Memorial. © Sue Wilkes.
Private Harry Dickman, from an undated, unattributed news cutting in the author’s collection.

Postcards in the author’s collection, date circa 1919:
Lens (near Loos) before and after the war, Boulevard des Ecoles.
Lens before and after the war, Pit No.5.
Ypres Cloth Hall before the Great War.

The Price of Coal

Coal has long been valued as a fuel source. The industrial revolution greatly increased demand for coal. It was used to smelt iron and generate steam, and coal production in Britain rocketed from six million tons p.a. in 1770 to twenty-three million tons in 1830. By the mid-1850s production was over sixty million tons p.a. Mines were sunk ever deeper to meet the demand.

But coal’s success story had a terrific human cost: thousands of men, women and children were killed down the mines and at the pit brow. You can find out more about working conditions in the mines in my books The Children History Forgot and Narrow Windows, Narrow Lives. There are also some tips on how to trace your coal-mining ancestors, in my feature for this month’s Discover My Past England (now on Genes Reunited) and in my forthcoming book Tracing Your Lancashire Ancestors.




Images from the author’s collection:
‘How are you off for coals?’ Satirical postcard from the miners’ strike of 1912.

The New Hartley Pit disaster in Northumberland on 16 January 1862 killed over two hundred men and boys. This Illustrated London News (8 February 1862) engraving shows the long, sad funeral procession at Earsdon.