How Britain Worked Page 12
Movements in the earth’s surface, coupled with erosion, brought some of the coal seams to the surface. We know that people in Bronze Age Britain, about 5,000 years ago, realised that this strange black rock would burn: they used it on funeral pyres. The Romans burned coal in Britain apparently not only on domestic fires but also in industry, providing heat to dry grain and for iron-working. Coal, the stuff that fuelled the Industrial Revolution and made Britain great, had actually been working hard for Britain for quite some time.
Finding coal became more of a problem as time wore on. It didn’t take long for coal deposits found on the sea shore to be used up and any of the black stuff that had appeared as outcrops on hillsides was then chased underground, miners tunnelling into the hillside horizontally, following the coal seam in what is called a ‘drift mine’. The other early type of mine was a ‘bell pit’: here an outcrop might have been followed down into the ground, creating a shaft that was enlarged underground to form a coal cavern, with the whole excavation making a shape a bit like a bell.
These early mines could easily become inundated with water either running in from the surface when it rained or soaking in from the surrounding soil and rocks. If the mine went deep enough to reach the water table, there would be water everywhere. The water table is the area below ground level where water has soaked down through the soil and rock until it has reaches a level that is impervious. The porous rock above that level then becomes saturated. If you dig into that rock, the hole you dig will quickly fill with water. Areas of rock that hold groundwater in this way are called aquifers. The depth you have to dig before you find the aquifer can depend on the rock formations in the area, the time of year and the weather conditions. The one thing that you can definitely rely on is that water will get into a mine. Getting it out is then the problem.
At first, the problem was dealt with in very obvious ways. Mines were ‘baled out’ by bringing water to the surface in giant buckets, much as they did with coal. This, though, was a slow process that held up mining operations. Water was also drained away from the coal seam by digging tunnels or channels that allowed the water to run off towards another part of the mine, from where it could drain away naturally or be pumped out of the mine. Pumping, with the pumps driven either by manpower, horsepower or even windmills, provided an ideal solution in that they could extract the water from the mine most effectively. But these pumps were never powerful enough to raise water from the deepest mines – until, that is, steam power came along.
The Newcomen engine could pump water out of a mine to depths of 300 feet, although his first engine, installed at a coal mine in Staffordshire in 1712, was only working to 156 feet. By the time Newcomen died seventeen years later, at least a hundred of his engines had been built in Britain and northern Europe. All worked on the same principle, but they had progressively larger pistons – one Newcomen engine in 1769 had a piston with a diameter of more than six feet – in an effort to find more power and pump water from ever greater depths. Newcomen’s engines were not very efficient and they needed a lot of coal to keep their boilers going. This wasn’t a problem at a mine as the boilers were simply fed low-grade coal that didn’t have much of a market elsewhere. They did, however, allow the mines to go deeper, churning out the stuff that Britain needed more and more of as the years went by.
In the middle of the sixteenth century, it is estimated that about 200,000 tonnes of coal were mined every year. By the start of the eighteenth century that figure had risen to three million tonnes and more than 80 per cent of the coal mined in the world was produced in Britain. By 1800, production had risen to ten million tonnes. The railways, originally developed as a way of transporting coal, were sending steam locomotives thundering along the length and breadth of the country by 1850, gobbling up coal at a rate of a million tonnes a year. Steam power for factories pushed production from Britain’s 3,200 mines up to fifty million tonnes by the middle of the nineteenth century, with production peaking in 1913 at 288 million tonnes.
A lot of figures. A lot of big numbers. But what do they all really mean? You can’t really imagine what 288 million tonnes of coal looks like, or how big a pile it would make. To put it all in perspective, I tried to figure out how much coal you would need to fill an average living room in an average house. Using anthracite, which is the glossy black coal most of us think about when we think of coal and which is also the heaviest coal, you would need to shovel about 60 tonnes into your front room to fill it up. You can work out for yourself how many front-room-sized hunks of coal went to make up the 288 million tonnes that were dug out from below Britain in 1913 alone. It’s amazing that Wales, the Midlands and the north of England, which along with the central belt of Scotland is where most of our coalfields lie, haven’t just collapsed. Yet the appetite for coal demanded that the mines keep on churning it out.
It’s not hard to see why we needed so much. Our factories, our homes, our power stations and our ships – our island nation’s vital lifeline to the rest of the world – all ran on coal. Ships of all types, from tugboats and river cruisers to battleships and luxury liners all used massive amounts. Everyone knows the tragic story of the maiden voyage of the Titanic in 1912. She was, at the time, the largest moving man-made object on the planet, but she wasn’t that much bigger than her rivals and her consumption of coal wasn’t that different, either. Titanic had three enormous steam engines – two piston, or ‘reciprocating’, engines and a steam turbine. Steam was fed to the engines from twenty-nine boilers that were heated by 159 furnaces, which explains why the ship burned around 600 tons of coal a day, and the journey across the Atlantic would have taken five days. The Titanic actually carried enough coal to make the return journey without refuelling. So six thousand tons of coal – that’s a lot of living rooms...
Every chunk of coal that was shovelled into a furnace aboard one of our ships was supplied by men who laboured thousands of feet below ground and who had followed coal seams that stretched for miles – even miles out under the sea. Coal is still mined in Britain today, although there are only a fraction of the number of pits that there once were and miners now have machinery underground that miners in the nineteenth century could never have dreamed of. Back in those days, a miner had only a pickaxe to hack away at the coal. Given that he would be paid by the amount of coal that he dug out of his section of the seam during his shift, you’d expect that pick – the main tool that he used – would be big and heavy, to help him carve out as much as he could as quickly as possible. In fact, the miner’s pickaxe was a good deal smaller than one that you might see being used by a navvy above ground. The men had very little room to work in and, if they were hacking out coal from a seam that was only eighteen inches high, they would have to work lying on their sides. It was normal for a miner to spend all day on his knees because the roof was so low. In the damp conditions of the mine, this meant that almost all miners suffered some form of rheumatism in later life, just one of the many health hazards that came from working down the pit.
LIGHTING THE WAY
Apart from his pick, the miner would also need a candle to see what he was doing. There was no other form of lighting in the mines but the naked flame of the candle could be a deadly friend. Early candles were made from tallow, which is basically animal fat, so the candle could even be eaten in an emergency. But they were also smoky, didn’t give much light and smelled awful. Candles moulded from wax that came from whale oil, or oil from plants, were more widely used by the nineteenth century as they lasted longer, gave a brighter light and didn’t give off such a terrible pong. Anything that improved the quality of the air down the mine was a huge benefit.
A brighter candle flame, however, wasn’t always a good thing. If a miner’s candle suddenly flared it might mean that there was ‘firedamp’ in the air. Firedamp is methane gas – marsh gas created by decaying vegetation and trapped in the coal and rock many millions of years ago. If a miner came across a pocket of firedamp, he was in trouble. Methane i
s highly flammable when it mixes with oxygen in the right proportions: pure methane will not burn but firedamp leaking into the mine atmosphere at concentrations of less than five per cent would make the flame of a candle glow more brightly. At between 5 and 15 per cent the gas would ignite, sending an explosion ripping through the tunnels and chambers of the mine. One of the worst such disasters in Britain came in 1812 at the Felling Colliery in County Durham. A pocket of firedamp ignited, triggering a coal dust explosion that claimed the lives of ninety-two men and boys working in the pit. Some of the youngsters were only eight or nine years old.
This accident prompted the invention of the safety lamp. Three men were working independently on finding a way to provide miners with a light that wouldn’t cause firedamp to ignite. William Clanny came up with a complicated solution that involved insulating the candle flame from the outside atmosphere in a lamp with water above and below it, air to keep the flame burning being pumped into the light chamber using bellows. It was clever, but it wasn’t really practical for everyday use by miners.
George Stephenson came up with the idea of adapting an oil lamp: the flame was enclosed in glass, and the air flowed into the lamp, through vents in the bottom. Methane could get in and burn inside the lamp, but the flame could not ‘burn back’ to ignite gas in the atmosphere. The lamp was tall and slim to allow the gas to burn and rise inside the glass before escaping through perforations in the copper lid. The glass was surrounded by perforated metal to protect it and Stephenson’s lamp became known as the ‘Geordie Lamp’. Geordie is a pet name commonly used at that time in the North East for someone called George. Because it was such a common name in the area, anyone from Tyneside is now called a ‘Geordie’.
Sir Humphrey Davy’s solution was also to use an oil lamp. Because the Davy Lamp and the Geordie Lamp both came about at the same time, in 1815, there were suggestions that one had stolen the other’s ideas. In fact, the two systems are really quite different. In Davy’s lamp, the flame was surrounded by a wire gauze that absorbed the heat of the flame and spread it across its surface so that it was not hot enough to ignite the methane.
The new safety lamps soon caught on, and other versions were to follow. But they didn’t eliminate the firedamp problem altogether. The gas could still be ignited by miners’ picks sparking against rocks, for example, and there was an obvious danger when they were using explosives. Even so, the safety lamps reduced the risks immensely. The miners loved the lamps and the mine owners were delighted: an accidental explosion meant sealing off a coal seam and leaving any un-mined coal in the ground, which hit their profits hard.
Another advantage of the safety lamps was that their flames would burn a different colour if there was firedamp in the air, turning blue instead of yellow. The miners could then abandon their work until the gas was cleared, either by letting it escape through the ventilation shaft or being burned off by a very brave lad, known as ‘the monk’. Draped in a long, wet, woollen cloak – hence the name – and with his hands and face wrapped in wet rags or leather, the monk would approach an area of firedamp with a lighted candle. If the gas, which was lighter than air, had accumulated at the top of a tunnel or gallery, the monk would crawl along the ground, where he would still be able to find breathable air and hold up a candle on a long pole to burn off the gas. If the gas simply flared and burned away, the monk would be okay. If it exploded, he probably wouldn’t be so lucky.
Nowadays, mining companies can recover methane from mines and even use it on the surface, burning it to heat water in boilers so that the miners can have a good hot shower when they finish their shift. The nineteenth-century miner was afforded no such luxury. In fact, he was provided with nothing except the opportunity to work hard in a very dangerous environment. He had to supply his own equipment, which would usually have to be bought from the company store, and even employ his own team to recover the coal that he dug, install the wooden pit props used to hold up the roof of the coal seam and operate the wooden doors in the mine that were supposed to help ventilate the place.
The cheapest way to organise all of that, of course, was to bring in the family. The miner, also called a ‘hewer’, worked the coalface using a pick, wedges, a hammer and a shovel. He would shovel the coal into wicker baskets called corves that sat on wooden sleds.
The sled would then be towed out of the seam by his son, his wife or his daughter. The miner’s youngest child (and children as young as four or five years old worked down the mines at one time) would be the ‘trapper’, opening and closing the wooden doors that were there not only for ventilation but also to help contain a blast should there be an explosion. Young children would also be used to sit and pump bellows to circulate air in the mine. The family team would probably have just one candle between them, so everyone except the miner would be working in the dark.
In 1865, an economist called William Stanley Jevons wrote a book called The Coal Question, which was all about when Britain’s coal reserves would be used up. Although he wasn’t too concerned about the conditions that existed down the mines, he did discuss how the temperature increased the deeper you went into a mine: ‘in one Cornish mine men work in an atmosphere varying from 110° to 120° Fahrenheit... ’ (that’s 43° to 48° Celsius) ‘... but then they work for twenty minutes at a time, with nearly naked bodies, and cold water frequently thrown over them. They sometimes lose eight or ten pounds in weight during a day’s work.’
WORKING CONDITIONS
The Cornish mine that Jevons was talking about would have been a tin mine, and until a few years earlier conditions in a coal mine would be little different. Men worked alongside women and children, all practically naked. The work was particularly demeaning for women and girls. A woman who worked as a ‘drawer’ or ‘hurrier’ would tow a sled loaded with a wicker basket of coal by using a leather belt or girdle strapped around her waist. The belt would have ropes or chains attached to it so that she could crawl along (there being no room to stand up), dragging the sled behind her. In 1841, a Royal Commission was set up to investigate working conditions for children and young people in mines. Commission inspectors toured mining towns conducting fact-finding interviews and one such official, John Kennedy, interviewed eighteen-year-old Rosa Lucas in Lamberhead Green, not far from Wigan. Rosa worked as a drawer and had first gone down the pits when she was just eleven years old.
When asked what hours she worked down the pit, Rosa replied, ‘I go down between three or four in the morning and sometimes I have done by five o’clock in the afternoon, and sometimes sooner.’ So Rosa was normally working at least a twelve-hour shift, and it was hard graft at that. She was asked the distance that she had to pull her load of coal and said it was ‘twenty-three score yards in length’. A ‘score’ means twenty, so she was pulling her coal load for 460 yards, then pulling the empty sled back the same distance for the next load. Rosa said she was doing that eighteen times in one shift. That means she was crawling about, drawing her load for up to nine-and-a-half miles, every day.
Did she find the work hard? ‘Yes, it is very hard work for a woman. I have been so tired many a time that I could scarcely wash myself at night.’ At the time she was interviewed, Rosa was not working down the pit any more. She had been injured during a recent shift when ‘a great stone fell from the roof on my foot and ankle, and crushed it to pieces, and it was obliged to be taken off.’ Rosa lost her leg.
Not only did young women like Rosa (whose father had been killed in a mine accident) face the dangers of explosions, roof falls and flooding, if they were not thought to be working hard enough, an overseer would be on hand to administer a beating. Rosa identified a woman called Mary as being the one who beat the drawers and said it was done with ‘a pick arm’.
The Royal Commission had been set up in response to the public reaction to an accident at the Huskar Colliery near Barnsley in 1838 when twenty-six children, all under sixteen years old, most under twelve and some as young as eight, drowned while trying to escap
e from rising flood water after a freak storm sent a torrent into their section of the mine. When the commission’s report was published, there was an even greater public outcry, resulting in the Mines and Collieries Act of 1842. Not only were people appalled at the thought of women being used as beasts of burden, but Victorian morals were outraged at the thought of women working practically naked and seeing men doing the same. The subsequent Act prohibited all females from working in the mines. Boys were banned from working in the mines until they were ten years old and within a few years the lower age limit was raised to twelve.
While some were saved from the dangers of the mines, for those who remained working underground, conditions were slow to improve and miners continued to suffer ill health. Lung diseases caused by constantly breathing air laden with coal dust were common and it was rare to meet a miner who was older than forty-five. As bad as it was, breathing air full of muck and dust was better than having no air at all. Miners faced a constant hazard from ‘black damp’, which was sometimes also called ‘choke damp’. Unlike firedamp, black damp was a silent killer, slowly reducing the oxygen content in the air until miners passed out and suffocated. Coal, you see, has a tendency to absorb oxygen once it is exposed to the air. It then gives out carbon dioxide. This, along with the miners breathing in oxygen-rich air and breathing out carbon dioxide, could lead to black damp creeping up on men working underground, without them even noticing. What they needed was something to warn them of the danger. But what could they use as an early warning system? The answer was... a canary.