How Britain Worked Page 13

  ANIMALS AND BIRDS

  Canaries have far more sensitive respiratory systems than humans, and cannot tolerate air that is no longer fit to breathe. If your canary keeled over and dropped off its perch, it was time to get out of that part of the mine until it could be properly ventilated. The canary, if it was given fresh air quickly enough, might even survive. From 1911, bylaw, all coal mines in Britain had to keep canaries to check for gas underground. They were still being used until reliable electronic detectors were introduced in the 1980s. The last 200 canaries were made ‘redundant’ from the British coalfields in 1986. They lived out the rest of their days as miners’ pets.

  The canary wasn’t the only animal that was put to work down the mines. Pit ponies, generally smaller breeds such as Shetlands or Welsh Cobs, were used to haul wagons of coal, often working deep underground, and lowered down the mineshaft in harnesses. These ponies seldom saw the light of day. They would be reared in stables in the mine and start their working lives down the pits when they were three or four years old. Their underground stables were normally close to the surface where it was easier to supply them with fresh air, although the stable hands were careful that their ponies

  were not left standing in a draught when they were off duty. That would be bad for the pony and these ponies had to be properly looked after. They had to have enough space in their stalls to stretch and relax their muscles after a hard day’s work and they were fed on a healthy diet of hay and oats. Of course, what goes in one end of any horse comes out the other in a far less savoury fashion. That didn’t improve conditions in the mines at all. Ponies, their straw, their food and their dung also attracted unwelcome guests into the mines, increasing the number of rats and cockroaches the miners had to put up with.

  A horse working down a mine is as weird to me as a fish riding a bike. They are creatures that you naturally associate with running around in the fresh air, yet they were used in the mines from around 1750. At first, they weren’t widely used because any kind of horse is expensive to run and needs to be well looked after if it is to be fit enough to do its job. Using women and children to haul coal underground was a cheaper option until the Mines and Collieries Act came along. After that, ponies started to make more sense.

  At the largest pits, like the Grimethorpe Colliery, there would be around 300 ponies underground, and by 1913 there were an estimated 70,000 ponies at work in the pits. They might not have had what we would think of as a natural life for a horse, but they were seldom treated badly. They were, after all, a company asset and had to be cared for properly. The law looked favourably on them as well. By 1911, regulations insisted that there was at least one man allocated as a stable hand to look after every fifteen ponies in the mine. Ponies were also required to have protection for their heads to stop them being injured on tunnel roofs or joists, and they had to have blinkers to protect their eyes. It wasn’t obligatory to provide miners with hard hats and safety goggles until the 1950s!

  The pit ponies would normally have the same handler every day as they tended to get upset working with strangers. The miners were really fond of their canaries and ponies, and the animals shared the hardships and dangers that their human colleagues faced. Two weeks before Christmas 1866, an explosion in the Oaks Colliery near Barnsley killed 350 men and boys, along with forty pit ponies.

  The pit ponies were allowed out once a year or so when the mines were closed for holidays, but they didn’t really cope well with that. They weren’t used to open paddocks, grass, trees and a huge sky above their heads and some were traumatised by the wide-open spaces. This became a real problem when the great British public, famous for being horse lovers, kicked up a fuss in the 1950s on discovering that pit ponies were sold off for slaughter at the end of their working lives. That working life might be anything from four to ten years, depending on the pony and the work it was doing. The idea that the ponies were simply worked until they were of no further use and then ‘got rid of’ caused an uproar. After that, ponies were ‘retired’ to fields near their pits, but they needed a great deal of TLC to help them settle in to their new lifestyle. Sadly, many suffered from the same sorts of lung disease that afflicted the miners they had worked with. Few enjoyed long retirements, though some lived on to a ripe old age.

  The last pit pony to retire from a British mine was Robbie, who worked at the Pant y Gasseg drift mine near Pontypool for five years up to 1999. He spent the next ten years in happy retirement at the National Coal Mining Museum, where he died in 2009 at the age of nineteen. It was there, at the old Caphouse Colliery, now part of the museum, that we filmed for the TV show and I learned so much about the lives of the miners who provided the fuel that turned Britain into the world’s first industrialised nation. Without coal, there would have been no factory boom. It’s been estimated that we would have run out of sites where watermills could operate by around 1830.

  Coal is still mined in Britain today. According to the UK Coal Authority, there were thirty-five surface mines and thirteen underground mines still operating in England, Scotland and Wales in 2010, producing around eighteen million tonnes of coal and employing 6,000 workers. It’s a far cry from mining’s heyday at the beginning of the twentieth century, when one in five British workers were employed in the mining industry. Over the years, the high costs involved with mining coal in Britain made many of our pits uneconomical, even in pits where there were still substantial amounts to be dug out. Cheaper imports and the fall in demand as industry switched to oil or electric power led to the drastic reduction in the output from British mines. Even while there is talk about the high price of coal possibly making long-closed pits viable once more, there is also talk about further pit closures. Either way, there will certainly never be a return to the bad old days down the pit.

  TOUR DE FRANCE (AND ITALY, AND SPAIN, AND...)

  At one time nobody really took holidays at all. Working-class people didn’t have any time for holidays – at least, not a proper leisure-time holiday. A holiday actually meant what the word said: it was a holy day, when work might be set aside, as on Sunday, to spend the day at church, reading the Bible or otherwise praising the Lord. Holy days, holidays, were religious festivals like Christmas, but even at Christmas not every worker was automatically given the whole day off. In times past, the only people who actually had any real leisure time were the upper classes.

  The aristocracy in the seventeenth century spent a great deal of time on sporting pursuits such as hunting, shooting, gambling and horse racing. Thoroughbred horses were then, as now, very expensive investments and only the seriously rich could indulge themselves and show off how rich they were, by owning a racehorse. Few people, even the rich, put up with the discomfort of travelling any great distance, but within their own counties the nobility would certainly want to be seen at all the right social gatherings, which generally revolved around their sporting activities. Knowing the right people was, after all, how you maintained your position in society but to make sure that the right people wanted to know you, you had to be able to talk about the right sorts of things. I like to think that I can chat with most people about lots of different things – not just trucks, motorbikes and Lancaster bombers. I enjoy finding out what interests other people and it’s always good to listen to someone who knows what he’s talking about. You can learn a lot when you’ve got your listening head on. To be able to make polite conversation with top-drawer people in the seventeenth century, however, you had to have a proper education. You had to to show that you understood about art, architecture, music, culture and horsey sport. That was what they chatted about at social gatherings. Other things – like business and politics – would be discussed by men only in rooms full of pipe smoke.

  You won’t be surprised to hear that they didn’t have any Internet in those days, no TV documentaries, or even any public libraries or museums. The British Museum in London didn’t open until 1759 and it was the first national public museum in the world. So, as part of their edu
cation, it became fashionable for young men (young ladies didn’t need to be quite so well educated) to go to Europe to see great works of art and classical buildings at first hand. This became known as the Grand Tour. Young men would cross the channel to France or Holland (depending on who we were at war with at the time), then either hire or buy a coach (coaches if they were travelling with servants and a cook as well as their tutor/guide), or take a boat up the Seine to Paris, or up the Rhine to Basel. In Paris they might have lessons in French, dancing, fencing and riding.

  To see works of art, most of which were held in private collections, these young men would be carrying letters of introduction to show that they were on a scholarly journey. They would be shown around grand houses stocked with treasures they would otherwise never get the chance to see, and perhaps even be invited to stay for a while: the very rich enjoyed showing off their collections and knowing that they would be talked about in high society when their visitors got back home. From Paris the travellers headed south to Geneva, then across the Alps to Italy where they visited Florence, Venice and Rome, and maybe even ventured as far as Naples to study music. The whole trip would take many months, sometimes even years, and the ‘Grand Tourists’ would ship home crates of souvenirs; not the wooden lizard, glass gondolier or Mount Etna snowglobe that you might find nowadays, but crates of paintings, sculptures and statues that would decorate the stately homes of England – something else for people to chat about at social gatherings.

  There are plenty of reminders of the Grand Tour still around today. The name is where the GT letters on the back of a car came from. A proper GT, or Grand Tourer, is a car that can comfortably cover long distances at speed. The Grand Tour tradition continued right up to the latter part of the nineteenth century, sewing the seeds for the development of organised tour companies. It’s also where the phrase ‘travel broadens the mind’ came from, the Grand Tour being a real learning experience. The young men who returned from their Grand Tour, if they managed to avoid being set upon by bandits, getting caught up in any nasty European wars and survived any stormy sea crossings, were far more sophisticated specimens than when they left.

  SO NEAR, SO SPA

  Travel, then, was seen as a good thing, helping to promote a healthy outlook and a robust constitution. Taking this attitude to heart, the upper classes began to visit spa towns, rejuvenating the old Roman spa at Bath and establishing new ones such as Tunbridge Wells, Epsom and Harrogate, where the properties of the mineral waters were found to be good for the health. One seventeenth-century Dutch visitor to Epsom wrote that ‘Epsom is a very famous and much visited place, very pleasant, and that because of the water which lies not far from there in a valley, which is much drunk for health reasons, having purgative powers

  Naturally, the new health fad didn’t lead to the rich giving up their other pursuits. It’s no accident that there are racecourses at Epsom, Bath and pretty close to every spa town. If people with money were visiting, then there was clearly money to be made in the spa business and there were plenty who wanted in on the act. Around 1620, a woman called Elizabeth Farrow discovered spa waters flowing into the sea at the North Yorkshire harbour town of Scarborough. The town was soon promoting itself as a rival to Harrogate, with the added advantage of refreshing sea breezes to perk up jaded socialites. Scarborough can lay claim to being Britain’s first seaside resort, although it was well known as a market town for its trading fair – the Scarborough Fair from the famous song – for centuries before it became a holiday resort. By the 1660s, Dr Robert Wittie was recommending not only the mineral water at Scarborough but also the sea water as a cure for just about everything. Wittie was quite a well-respected physician and the author of Scarborough Spaw; or a Description of the Nature and Virtue of the Spaw at Scarborough in Yorkshire. Medical men who saw fortunes being made in spa towns inland weren’t slow in realising that they could just as easily promote sea water as a health cure. Some recommended that it should be drunk with milk or honey, while others prescribed the drinking of it straight, three times a day after meals. These ‘doctors’ sound like complete chancers to us nowadays, but if you try drinking sea water – and I’m not recommending it – you are liable to be sick and the ‘purgative’ effect was one of the things that people in those days thought was doing them good, cleaning out their systems.

  BRIGHTON ROCKS

  In 1750, Dr Richard Russell, from Lewes in Sussex, published his Dissertation on the Use of Sea-Water in the Diseases of the Glands, particularly, the Scurvy, Jaundice, Kings-Evil, Leprosy and Glandular Consumption. Catchy title, eh? Russell reckoned that the sea water from Brighthelmstone was particularly good for the health and prescribed it for his patients, building a large house nearby where they could stay while undergoing treatment. When he died in 1759, the house was let to visitors, including the Duke of Cumberland. The Duke was visited in Brighthelmstone – by now more usually called Brighton by the Prince Regent, who later became King George IV. He had a summer palace built in Brighton, the Royal Pavilion, with the royals adding to the allure of what had become Britain’s most fashionable seaside resort. The Royal Pavilion was built in stages over a number of years and completely redesigned between 1815 and 1822 by John Nash to resemble an Indian palace somewhat like the Taj Mahal. But the more conventionally elegant buildings of the period, along with a seafront promenade, soon turned Brighton into the place for anybody who was anybody (or wanted to be somebody) to be seen.

  Only a few years before, if you weren’t a fisherman, a trader or a smuggler, there would have been no point in your visiting a place like Brighton, but by the end of the eighteenth century, wealthy visitors had turned it into a thriving resort. They came not only to drink the sea water, but to bathe in it. They didn’t go for a swim as we would nowadays. The ‘swimmers’ literally ‘took a dip’, again under doctor’s orders, as being plunged into sea water – the colder the better – was guaranteed good for your health.

  Other seaside towns soon blossomed in the same way: Margate, Eastbourne, Bognor Regis, Bournemouth and, the place where King George III first tried sea bathing in 1789, Weymouth. In the north, Blackpool began its transformation into Britain’s Mecca for the masses although, like all of the other resorts, it began as a destination for the upper classes.

  This is how the English nobility came to have such an influence over your annual holiday. Only the rich had the time to travel for leisure – London to Brighton by coach, even once there was a well-surfaced road, took nine hours – but they took with them their servants, who had plenty to gossip about with their friends and family when they got home. Ordinary people were well aware of the goings-on at the seaside resorts, they simply never had the chance to visit them... until the coming of the age of steam.

  Even for the wealthiest holidaymakers, taking your luggage and servants with you was an expensive business. Rather than have an entire entourage travelling in a convoy of coaches, some heading for a holiday in Margate took to sending their staff by boat. The grain barges bringing cargo from Kent to London regularly made the return journey empty and their owners saw an opportunity to make money, offering cheap passage for those who did not require luxury accommodation.

  Arriving at a seaside resort by boat, whether it was Margate, Southend, Brighton or any number of other resorts, especially once paddle steamers cut the sailing times and provided a reliable service, became a desirable and affordable option for the less well-off. Middle-class professional people and wealthy merchants were increasingly able to take time out for relaxation, and they followed the upper classes to the coastal resorts. Transferring passengers from the steamers (which had to anchor in deep water off the beaches) to small boats that struggled through the breaking waves to the shore, could be a very undignified business for image-conscious passengers. The answer was to build landing stages, or piers, that stretched out to the deeper water, allowing the steamers to berth safely and the passengers to disembark without getting their feet wet or losing their breakfast.r />
  PIERS OF THE REALM

  The first piers were built at Margate, Deal, Herne Bay, Southend, Brighton and Great Yarmouth. As the seaside holiday boom developed, the wooden, later iron, structures stuck out into the sea at every major resort. By the 1870s, Britain’s coastline bristled with piers – two new piers were being built every year – but they weren’t only used as landing stages. The pier became an extension of the promenade with the added excitement that you could actually walk out over the water. Swimmers could jump or dive off into the deep water and anglers could cast their lines from the pier. Later, the pier was also to develop into the hub of the seaside entertainment industry. The use of the pier as a functional landing stage declined with the coming of the mass transport that really put the seaside resorts on the map – the railways.

  The rapid expansion of the rail network during the nineteenth century brought the seaside within reach of the masses, the shorter journey times making it possible to take a day trip to the coast rather than having to book into a hotel for the night. Upper-class holidaymakers generally spent several weeks in a resort, whether following the regimes set out for them by their doctors or just enjoying the social scene: the influx of day-trippers came as something of a shock to them. Queen Victoria – and they don’t come more upper class than that – decided to abandon the Royal Pavilion at Brighton when the railway arrived in 1841. She thought that the town no longer offered any privacy and was increasingly overrun with ‘flashy vulgarians’. She and Prince Albert built Osborne House on the Isle of Wight as their summer retreat.