Disability in the Industrial Revolution

Physical impairment in British coalmining, 1780–1880

David M. Turner, Daniel Blackie

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781526118158
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526125781
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book asks what happened to disabled people during industrialization by examining the experiences of those disabled in the coal industry. It presents new perspectives on disabled people's working lives in the past, and for the first time places disabled people at the heart of the story of Britain's Industrial Revolution.

1

DISABILITY AND WORK IN THE COAL ECONOMY

Thomas Burt’s early memories of mining were haunted by the sight of the mutilated bodies of his fellow workers. Remembering his work as a teenage pony putter in the 1850s, responsible for moving coal underground at Murton Colliery, County Durham, Burt recalled that ‘everywhere, below ground and above, dangers stood thick’. Compounded by the ‘rush and recklessness’ of workers there, these dangers meant accidents were common. ‘Never’, he wrote in his autobiography published posthumously in 1924, ‘had I seen so many crutches, so many empty jacket sleeves, so many wooden legs.’ Returning to his native Northumberland after his Murton experiences to work at Cramlington Colliery, Burt was again struck by the high frequency of ‘accidents to life and limb’ and noticed people using ‘crutches and wooden legs’ among the local population. Although these were ‘less conspicuous than at Murton’, workers with impairments were a common sight at Cramlington. Burt recorded at least one by name, a mineworker called Bob Barrass who had ‘unhappily lost an eye’ but worked as a rolley-way man, maintaining the underground roads on which coal was transported. The dangers at Cramlington were so ‘great’ and the incidence of injury so high that Burt regarded it as remarkable that both he and his father ‘were fortunate enough to leave the place unscathed and uninjured’.¹

Written from the perspective of his later role as an MP and trade unionist, Burt’s comments about the high number of injured workers he encountered in mining were intended to highlight the dangers faced by miners in pits where the safety of workers seemed to matter less to colliery owners than profit. Yet, beyond the political and rhetorical use to which he put them, Burt’s observations also raise important questions about the supposed consequences of industrialisation for ‘disabled’ people. As Burt’s recollections make clear, workers with impairments were not automatically forced from the mines during the Industrial Revolution but continued to work there in considerable numbers despite their injuries. If industrialisation was such a calamity for disabled people’s working lives, as some disability scholars have argued, how were so many people with impairments able to work in a sector crucial to Britain’s industrial economic development? And how far, if at all, did they, or others, actually regard themselves as ‘disabled’ people?

This chapter addresses these questions by examining the nature of mine work and the development of mining in the nineteenth century, paying special attention to the factors that enabled injured workers to participate in the working life of collieries and the extent to which they did so. To understand perceptions and experiences of disability during industrialisation it is necessary to examine the nature of ‘industrial work’ in all its forms. This chapter facilitates such an assessment by specifically exploring the ways in which economic factors, from working techniques and changing technologies to contracts and conditions of employment, affected the perception and experiences of injured and impaired mineworkers. It explores the extent of disablement in coalmining and analyses the working experiences of people with impairments within coal mines and their surrounding communities. In the process, it re-evaluates the relationship between ‘disability’ and work in industrialising Britain and suggests that popular ideas about the impact of the Industrial Revolution on disabled people’s lives that emphasise their exclusion from work need re-thinking.²

The nature and conditions of mine work

Mineworkers’ experiences in the coal industry were shaped by the differing economic trajectories and geologies of the specific coalfields in which they worked, as well as the significant cultural differences between them. The most glaring of these, particularly in the early nineteenth century, concerns the division of colliery labour and the employment of women and girls. According to the report of the commission set up to investigate children’s employment in mines published in 1842, ‘female Children of tender age and young and adult women are allowed to descend into the coal mines and regularly … perform the same kinds of underground work, as boys and men’ at some collieries in Yorkshire and Lancashire.³ The practice of female work in south Wales’ early nineteenth-century mines was ‘not uncommon’ either, but was most prevalent in Pembrokeshire, where women worked on the surface and underground usually operating a windlass by which loads of coal were drawn up steep passages.⁴ Female mine work had been declining since the start of the nineteenth century and in some areas, such as north-east England, women were already excluded from working underground.⁵ By the time of the Children’s Employment Commission only an estimated 4 per cent of all British workers in coalmining were female.⁶ Of these women and girls, however, a substantial proportion (2341, or about 40 per cent of the total) worked at Scottish mines, particularly in the eastern part of the coalfield.⁷ Here, women and girls were heavily involved in underground work and were employed in hauling and bearing coal in significant numbers.⁸ Women’s work in early nineteenth-century Scottish coal mines was a legacy of the system of serfdom in Scottish coalmining, which had lasted from 1606 until 1799, where whole families had been bound to mine owners for life.⁹

The Mines and Collieries Act passed in August 1842 prohibited all females and boys under the age of ten from working underground.¹⁰ Women continued to work in various capacities above ground at collieries, but their involvement in underground tasks ceased.¹¹ Although the numbers of women working at collieries at each census between 1841 and 1911 remained fairly consistent at between 4000 and 6000, the female proportion of the total workforce declined from around 3.5 per cent in 1841 (just before underground work became illegal) to less than 1.25 per cent after 1861.¹² Moreover, although the law prohibiting boys under ten from working below ground was sometimes flouted, the 1842 Act meant that the age profile of the underground work force became more mature.¹³ While underground mine work had arguably always been seen as a masculine domain – even in Scotland where one female miner reported that ‘men about this place don’t wish wives to work in mines but the masters seem to encourage it’ – the gendering of coalmining as men’s work was, after 1842, reinforced by government regulation.¹⁴

There were many different jobs at collieries, on the surface as well as below ground. An account of South Hetton Colliery near Durham published in the Penny Magazine in 1835 indicates the diversity of occupations at a single pit. At the top of the hierarchy were the colliery manager, viewer (an agent or surveyor appointed by the owner to run the colliery), first and second engineer and surgeon. Above ground worked thirteen joiners and sawyers, seven engine-wrights who made and repaired the pit’s machinery, eight engine-men employed to keep the machinery working, nine firemen to attend the boilers, eighteen smiths to prepare the iron work required in the machinery and wagons, eight masons, six labourers, eleven cartmen, nine horsemen and a saddler. Other employees at the surface included banksmen (who emptied the tubs or corves of coal), boys employed to pick out stones and clean the coals, and railway attendants. Of the colliery’s 526 employees, 210 worked above ground; the rest worked below at cutting or hewing coal, hauling it, or as underground foremen and support workers.¹⁵

By the end of the nineteenth century there were more than 200,000 men, women and children working at the pithead. This work, as John Benson has demonstrated, could be heavier, dirtier, more unpleasant and dangerous than many other jobs above ground in Victorian Britain. While rarely considered in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discussions of occupational morbidity in the coal industry, surface workers faced a number of threats to their health and well-being, such as inhalation of coal dusts, the danger of various accidents such as being run over by wagons, and ruptures and strains from heavy lifting.¹⁶ The variety of roles available at mines gave rise to an occupational hierarchy within the coal industry that was reflected in different levels of pay and status between jobs. The fundamental division in colliery work was between those who worked above ground and those who worked below. Working below tended to attract higher pay, was regarded as higher status and, as we shall see, carried considerable risk of accident.

Of the numerous non-supervisory jobs below ground, hewing, or coalcutting, was at the top of the occupational hierarchy. It commanded the best wages and had the highest occupational status throughout Britain’s coalfields. As former County Durham pitman George Parkinson recalled with great pride, hewing was ‘the highest unofficial position attainable’ underground.¹⁷ In Scotland and north-east England, hewers regarded themselves as skilled craftsmen rather than common or unskilled workers and compared themselves to other skilled artisans such as stonemasons.¹⁸ The status of the hewer was reinforced by the belief that, in Parkinson’s words, he had the ‘hardest’ of mining jobs.¹⁹ It was hard in two senses. First, it was physically arduous. As the Colliery Guardian observed,

The hewer sits on a low stool (four inches in height) and grasping his pick with both hands, makes successive horizontal blows. To give the greatest effect to the stroke, his head is thrown back to one side, his left leg extended and his right bent, his right elbow resting on the right thigh, enables the leg to augment the force of the arm.²⁰

Physical exertion was common to all hewing, but the degree of physical toil was affected by local geological conditions. The differing softness or thickness of the seam was also important in determining the physical demands on the bodies of miners. ‘The differences of thickness sometimes admit the erect posture,’ noted the Penny Magazine, but often men were obliged to ‘sit, recline, or bend the body to an extreme degree.’ The exploitation of deeper seams increased the temperature in which hewers worked, a situation exacerbated by having to work in very narrow, confined spaces in some collieries.²¹ As we shall see in the following chapter, the health of coalminers was frequently judged by their posture and the deleterious effects of working in contorted positions for long periods of time.

Second, coal-cutting not only necessitated physical strength and endurance, it also entailed technical skill on the part of the hewer and ‘considerable dexterity and experience’.²² Generally, large coals fetched a better price at market and were the most prized, both by collier...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Series editors’ foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Disability and work in the coal economy
• 2 Medicine and the miner’s body
• 3 Disability and welfare
• 4 Disability, family and community
• 5 The industrial politics of disablement
• Conclusion
• Select bibliography
• Index