The following history is based upon the British government's
1842 report of the "Children's Employment Commission" by
Commissioner Mitchell.*
The equipment used in the cloth industry (yarn spinning
and looms) originally were powered by single persons.
Then trapiches (horses, typically a single horse) were
used (one horse power). These were followed by water mills
and finally by steam engines (the first useful steam
engine, by Watt, was 10 horse power). The steam engines
were constructed of iron and brick, and were powered by
coal. Thus, the coal and iron mines were the sources of
power for the Industrial Revolution. Hence the relevance
of this discussion of the coal and iron industry. In
addition to power sources, social problems such as riots,
workers' rights, gender discrimination, exploitation of
children, strike-breaking, immigration, industrial diseases,
etc., arose at this time. The agricultural sector was
unsettled as well; for example, the potato famine in
Ireland, the "Scotch cattle", and the "Captain Swing"
disturbances (repression by wealthy farmers of landless
agricultural workers, resulting in revolts by landless workers).
This is described by Charles Dickens in
"Martin Chuzzlewit": "Oh, magistrates, so rare a country
gentleman and brave a squire, had you no duty to society
before the ricks were blazing and the mobs were made?").
Protests against the displacement of laborers caused by the
spinning machinery at Richard Arkwright's mill took place.
Similarly, the Luddites (followers of "King Lud", or "General
Ludd") opposed the use of machinery, specifically the use of
jenny spinning frames. "General Ludd's" (Ned Ludd) followers
(the "Army of Redressers") were from cloth manufacturing
towns of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire
and Cheshire. They were the stockingers or framework
knitters, and the shearsmen or croppers. These organized
bands broke spinning jennies because specialized, more
highly-paid laborers were replaced by low-skilled and
low-paid laborers, unapprenticed workers. One such riot took
place at Ottiwell's Mill in 1812 (located very near
Huddersfield, between Manchester and Yorkshire). As a
consequence, the "Frame Breaking Act" of 1812 was
specifically designed by the government of Spencer Perceval
to stop these violent labour protests. Violation of the
"Frame Breaking Act" was made a capital crime. The
government had to station 12,000 troops in the North of
England to suppress the Luddites, several Luddites being
executed, several transported.
Just as with the mill workers in the cloth industry, workers
in the coal and iron mines were malnourished, and worked in
cramped quarters for excessively long hours. This resulted
in people with stunted stature and bodies with pathological
posture and other medical problems. Puberty was delayed for
both boy and girl workers. Pelvic deformities among girl
workers caused difficult or fatal child-bearing. Just as
with clothing mill operatives, the coal and iron mines had
a very large number of children and women workers. Lung and
heart diseases were common, and life spans were greatly
shortened. In the cloth industry, the smaller hands of
children and women made working with the yarn and looms
easier, making them preferred workers over teen-aged
boys and men. Children and women could be paid less than men,
and also had very few legal rights in Victorian England
compared to men. The increasing employment of children and
women depressed the wages paid to teen-aged boys and men,
and also weakened the structure of the family. In the case
of the coal and iron mining industires, the smaller size of
children and women made it easier for them to fit into very
small mine shafts. As with the cloth industry, children and
women in the coal and iron mining industries became preferred
workers. This depressed the wages paid to teen-aged boys
and men who worked in the mines. This helped create a form of
"class" warfare between men and women, referred to as "gender"
discrimination, now.
Children as young as three years old commonly worked in the
mines. Young Welsh girls were also doorkeepers and carriers
of tools. Sometimes miners got an extra allowance for taking
down a young girl. Women and children pushed and pulled tubs
of coal through the small shafts, up inclines, through water,
to the horse paths. (Note that tubs did not have wheels;
"wains",
which were used later, did.) The women and children were
fastened to the tubs by a harness and chain. The shafts were
so low that working men had to lie on their sides while
loosening the coal with a pick, resting upon an elbow or
knee as a pivot, thus causing inflammations to these
joints. As hydrocarbon gases often caused explosions
or suffocation, the youngest children were assigned to
close doors when gas explosions occurred. Mine owners
commanded that workers use "Davy lamps" to reduce
explosions, but these lamps provided insufficient light,
thus miners used candles (the miners were blamed when
explosions occurred). Due to the heat in the mines,
workers of both sexes were often totally naked.
Work was typically done in 12-hour shifts, but often these
shifts were extended to 24 and 36 hours in length, and
night work was common. Although the standard of living was
relatively good, the working conditions were obviously
horrific. The government's Children's Employment Commission
report by Commissioner Mitchell states "...that children
often throw themselves down on the stone hearth or the
floor as soon as they reach home, fall asleep at once
without being able to take a bite of food, and have to be
washed and put to bed while asleep; it even happens that
they lie down on the way home, and are found by
their parents late at night asleep on the road."
Before the advent of screening plants, coal was
tipped and piled into a heap
to be loaded into wagons. In Lancashire and Yorkshire,
the miners gave it a primary riddling or sieving underground.
In Pembrokeshire this job was done by women. The coal was
also sorted by riddling at the surface, using hand-riddles or a
large stationary riddle. Before the miners were allowed to
appoint their own check-weigher in 1860, the management was
free to calculate a miner's payment by measure. A miner's
work was identified by a tin tally and only the tallies that
came up on the full tubs of coal were counted. The miner therefore
had no say in whether a tub was full or what constituted good
coal. At many pits a girl shouted out when the tub had some
dirt, thereby enabling the banksmen to know whether to penalize
the miner. The appointment of the miner's own check-weigher
and the system of payment by weight also involved the use of females.
After the full tub was run to the landing, the women helped place it
on a swivel or turntable, where it would be weighed and then run
along rails or landing plates to the tippler. In 1873 Arthur
Munby, an educated observer who sympathized with the class of
proletarian women2, noticed
the huts for the new tally-takers (known as the
in the Wigan area).
These girls shouted out the miner's tally number and collected
the tallies.
Women also helped to operate the tipplers, which teamed or tipped the
coal onto the screen. The "kickup" type was shaped like an iron cradle
and when the full tub of coal ran into this cradle, its weight caused
it to over-balance and tip out the coal. It automatically righted itself
and the tub was returned to the shaft. A trap door at the bottom of the
chutes prevented the coal from sliding onto the screen until it was
needed.
The main task for women was to work as drawers
(also called barrowmen,
carters,
draggers, hauliers,
hurriers or putters).
This involved pulling sledges, tubs or wains
along the hard floor, or on wet clay or on planks, from the coal face
to the bottom of the shaft. Women worked as bearers,
fillers, hookers of baskets, cleaners and as horse drivers. Whole
collier and salter families were bound as slaves in servitude to
employers, lacking any real freedom. Binding workers was originally
designed to cope with a shortage of labor during the expansion of
the coal and salt trade. However, binding the workers amounted to
appropriating them as property; this soon resulted in binding
entire families for life. It ensured that "wives, daughters and
sons went on from generation to generation under the system, which was
the family doom". The hewer who extracted the coal from the pit face
generally engaged two bearers and perhaps shared a third
'fremit' (non-relative) with a fellow
hewer. By the 17th century some pits had primitive windlasses known
locally as a 'druke and beam'.
The 1842 report described women using windlasses above and below the
ground. The considerable depth of some pits meant that windlasses
were used to haul tubs up steep slopes, a number being fixed at
convenient intervals on the incline of the coal or iron vein. Women
would turn the handles of the windlasses' wooden rollers. This
system of using windlasses in this manner was used in what was
called 'pitching veins'. They also
helped with a pouncing or boring when a new shaft was being sunk.
The introduction of horses and a few wheeled vehicles in the
mid-18th century saw boys taking over haulers' jobs. This meant
that in the more advanced pits drawers now only had to pull the
coal down the passages as far as the main roadways. It was then
transferred to four-wheeled trams running on wooden rails. The
trams were pulled by horses and guided by
trammers, or horse-drivers.
In the mid-1770's cast-iron rails were introduced in place
of wooden ones.
Yorkshire females hurried an average of 20-24
corves and multiple
rakes
over distances of over 200 yards each way. Some Scottish
strappers drew
hutchies but where there were no
rails they pulled slypes.
Female pumpers found their workplaces so wet that they had to be
relieved every six hours. Others carried buckets of water
or helped red (clean) the roadways at night. Margaret Leveston
(66 years old) did 10 and 14 rakes there. Girls might begin
separating coal from culm on the
surface but by age 12 would graduate to windlass work below
ground.
Women also worked in the wagons with big spades, helping to
control the flow of coal in the chutes; they also trimmed, or
leveled down, the coal in the wagon. Females took
drams from the top of the pit and
'tripped' them down the screen. Sometimes sorters worked at
the screens.
'Poll girls' took iron ore from
trams, sorted out stone and shale, cleaned the ore and piled
it ready for the furnaces;
'coke girls' stacked coal ready
for coking or broke limestone with hammers ready for
smelting. 'Pilers' worked in the
puddling mills, stacking and weighing
the heavy iron bars which had been cut to be made into rails.
By the early 19th century shallow pits were using endless
chain systems with windlasses, winding the deeper pits with winding
engines that used hemp ropes. These were replaced by both
flat and round wire cables. In Scotland at a few Pembrokeshire
pits, coal was still being carried on the backs of women coal
bearers. Both miners and coal were frequently drawn up to the
surface by hand. In Shropshire, women helped attach baskets to
ropes and wound them up and down the shaft by hand.
Some windlasses had been adapted to be worked by horses. For
example, the cog and rung gin was
a windlass that worked on a wheel-and-pinion basis.
The horse-driven whim gin, or
whimsey, now superseded the cog and
rung. The whim gin was comprised of a drum that was mounted on a
vertical shaft away from the pit mouth, whose diameter could be
increased to provide faster winding. The number of levers and
horses could be increased for heavier winds.
Arthur Munby (an important observer) described the mid-century
banking method: as the cage reached
the top of the shaft, women helped to push a slide underneath
and unloaded the wains
(skips tubs) and pushed them along
the pit bank. They also helped to 'run them in', which meant
pushing the empty wains back into the cage. In South
Wales, where an abundant supply of water existed,
horse gins were replaced by balance
pits. Full trams were raised by lowering empties containing water
and thereby acting as a balance (the horse was replaced by gravity).
The speed at which iron and coal ore could be raised to the surface
depended upon how quickly water could be drained from the container.
Balance pits were introduced in the Tredegir area in 1829. Ty Trist
mine was started as a balance pit in 1834, changing to steam winding
in the 1860's. (Steam winding was faster than draining water.)
The working environment of the Iron miners differed
little from that of the coal miners and the cloth
factories: industrial slavery. One notable
difference was that the Irish formed the predominant
work force in iron mining.
Both the "truck" (company store) and "cottage" (company
housing) systems were effectively universal. Miners were
paid by volume though coal was sold by weight. In
addition, miners were fined if the tubs credited to them
contained coal-dust or were only partly filled (though
over-filled tubs were not paid any extra). When workers
were paid by weight, false scales were used. Miners' pay
was delayed, thereby enslaving the miners. Any complaints
were heard by local Justices of the Peace who were almost
universally mine owners themselves. In most cases, miners
were bound by a contract to work for a year, during which
time the miner could not work for any other employer.
However, the mine owner was not obligated to provide
employment. If a contracted miner worked elsewhere (in
violation of the contract), then the miner was imprisoned
or dismissed.
The situation of mine workers was immediately
remedied (Lord Ashley's Children's Employment Commission
1842), but only on paper, as no mine inspectors
were appointed to effect any changes. Instead, the
miners held a conference in Manchester in March, 1844
and formed a union and demanded:
The mine owners refused, and a great strike took place
in 1844. Using the cottage system,
the miners were thrown out of their houses,
miners were falsely arrested, coal was imported to
Newcastle (!) so that the mines could fulfill their
contracts, and the mine owners employed
"knobsticks" (scabs, but when
Irish, these strike breakers were called
"blacklegs"). After several
months the union funds used to support striking workers
were consumed and the strike broken.
W. P Roberts was an important
defense solicitor.
Friedrich Engels pointed out that if the views of
Malthus were accepted, then "[T]he proletariat would
increase in geometrical proportion...and the
proletariat would soon embrace the whole nation,
with the exception of a few millionaires. But in
this development there comes a stage at which the
proletariat perceives how easily the existing power
may be overthrown, and then follows a revolution."
The expectation of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
was that industrialization with its proletariat would
spread throughout the globe would result in a
proletariat with class interests that surmounted
national borders as well as cultural differences;
thus, the proletariat class interests were not
national, but international.
This description is based upon Engels, chapter "The
Mining Proletariat", pp. 247-262, Penguin, 2005 edition.
* The 1842 Report of the Children's Employment Commission discussed not only the collieries, but also discussed pottery factories. Some major points to be noted include the following:
© Copyright 2006 - 2018
The Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg Trust
Web Site Terms of Use