Routledge Revivals: Miners, Quarrymen and Saltworkers (1977)

Raphael Samuel, Raphael Samuel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315447940
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Industrial discipline in mining, quarrying, brickmaking and other classes of mineral work was very different to that in nineteenth-century factories and mills. First published in 1977, this book deals with mineral workers of every class and discusses the peculiarities and common features of their work. It offers three detailed local studies: pit life in County Durham, slate quarrying in North Wales, and saltworkers in Cheshire alongside an introductory section on mineral workers in general. The author is concerned with the family and community setting; the social relationships at the point of production itself; job control and trade unionism; and with material culture, wages and earnings.

Part 1

Mineral workers

Raphael Samuel

I

Coal miners are the only class of mineral worker to have lodged themselves in the historian’s consciousness. This is partly because of numbers, partly because of records, partly because of trade union strength. It owes a good deal to the years from 1888 to 1914, when miners acquired a common political and trade union consciousness, and when the regional peculiarities of the individual coalfields – so marked in earlier years that it is difficult to speak of an industry at all – lost some of their original force. Amongst other classes of mineral worker no such national profile appears. Some groups were too localized, others too dispersed, and many (in mid-Victorian times) had auxiliary or alternative occupations which obscured their group identity. China clay diggers were peculiar to Cornwall and Lee Moor; arsenic miners to Devon, saltworkers to Cheshire, Droitwich and the Tees. Jet diggers may have been important in the economy of Whitby – indeed the making of jet ornaments in the 1860s was the most important trade in the town¹ – but with the exception of some nearby Cleveland villages² they do not appear in any strength elsewhere. The same may be said of the flint knappers of Brandon,³ the plumbago miners of Borrowdale or the hydraulic cement makers of Barrow-on-Soar. Gypsum, which like jet, was responsible for the mass production of cheap ornaments (today’s ‘Victoriana’), was only worked extensively in Derby and Notts.⁴ The Purbeck Marblers do not figure in the annals of the building trade, though their kerbstones and sills found their way to towns all over southern England; nor do the sett-makers of Mountsorrel or Paenmaenmawr. Groups of workers like these may attract the notice of the antiquarian – and latterly the industrial archaeologist – but it is difficult for the economic historian to assign them to a graph.

So far as metalliferous miners are concerned, one influence making for their neglect by posterity is the sharp chronological break which took place in the 1860s and 1870s, when foreign competition destroyed the profitability of copper, tin and lead. Copper was the first to be affected, and according to Robert Hunt, Keeper of Mining Records at the Museum of Geology, some 7,380 of 11,321 copper miners left Devon and Cornwall in the eighteen months ending December 1867.⁵ (The number of copper mines in Cornwall decreased from ninety in 1863 to forty in 1873: in 1893 only six were still working.)⁶ A comparable disaster overtook Cornish tin in the following decade: the number employed in the Cornish mining industries declined from 26,814 in 1873 to 5,193 in 1898.⁷ In the coal industry, by contrast, the number of miners went on increasing right down to 1921; the pit villages were becoming more sharply defined culturally and politically, more settled in their population, and more organized, precisely at the time when their metalliferous counterparts were in decay. The Rhondda Valley stamped itself on twentieth-century British consciousness; Devon Great Consuls – during the 1850s the largest copper mine in the world – faded into grass. Table 1.1 shows the movement of employment in metalliferous mining as a whole.

TABLE 1.1⁸

	Underground	Above ground
Year	Males	Males	Females	Total
1873	37,378	20,271	5,034	62,683
1883	30,492	17,773	1,970	50,235
1893	21,240	13,464	1,035	35,739
1903	17,571	11,984	268	29,823

Quarrymen, for most of the nineteenth century, may be said to be statistically invisible, as regards the majority of them. The census records 60,000 of them in 1891.⁹ Yet within four years of the passage of the Quarries Act in 1894, no fewer than 134,478 persons were registered as being in quarrying employment¹⁰ – a figure which, on the evidence of the mines inspectors themselves, must have represented only about a half of the total number of those following some kind of quarry-based occupation (the Act was confined to pits of over 20 feet in depth).¹¹ One possible reason for the failure to number them is that quarrymen were often something else besides. As a divisional inspector of mines put it in 1912: ‘You may have a perfectly good quarryman working three weeks or a month in a quarry, and another time he is a farm labourer or working on some other work altogether.’¹² Brickfield workers must also have been underestimated by the census, if only because of the time in which it was taken, in March.¹³ Most yards in mid-Victorian times were ‘summer yards’ with only a nucleus of workers who stayed all the year round. There was a large influx of seasonal migrants when the making season began (in April); and, in the southern brickfields, this was also the chief time of the year when women and children were employed (things were different in the Black Country, and on the Welsh coalfield, where brickmaking was largely in the hands of women). An extreme case of the possible variation in numbers comes from the evidence given at the Children’s Employment Commission in 1866 about Messrs Rutter’s brickyard at Crayford, Kent – only thirty-three persons were employed there in winter, though the number employed at the height of the season was 382.¹⁴ There were some for whom brickmaking was a casual employment, and many for whom it was a secondary occupation. In Hertford it alternated seasonally with the town’s main trade of malting;¹⁵ in the Medway district of Kent with winter work in the cement works; many brickmakers (as Eric Hobsbawm pointed out long ago) were gas-workers in their season off.¹⁶

The progress of capitalism in the nineteenth century was intimately bound up with the exploitation of mineral wealth, not only of coal (which because of its importance has riveted the attention of posterity) but also of tin and copper, iron ore and lead, sand (the basic raw material in glassmaking), clay (the material of pottery and bricks), mud (mixed with chalk for cement), salt (an alkali for the chemical industry as well as a primary item of household use), and all the different varieties of stone. The Newcastle glass bottle makers quarried their raw material from the flats at Jarrow Slake,¹⁷ the Dublin glass bottle makers from the shore deposits at Sandymount Strand.¹⁸ Sands lined the furnace bottoms in the ironworks; limestone filled them as well as iron ore and coal. In the Black Country all the materials for ironmaking were quarried or mined in the locality – the sand at the numerous cuttings on the sides of the Wolverhampton and Stafford canal,¹⁹ coal and ironstone in bellpits, quarries and shallow shafts, limestone in the Silurian rocks at Dudley Castle Hill and Wren’s Nest, the stone pits at Sedgley Beacon, and the limestone quarries at Walsall and Daw End.²⁰ The whole district was honeycombed with diggings and craters and tips: ‘while a coal-pit appears in full work on one side of the road, on the other are pits of ironstone and limestone, equally busy’.²¹ The ‘heads of the valleys’ ironworks in Monmouthshire drew their limestone from the carboniferous outcrops on the northern rim of the coalfield: the Llangattock quarries were one major source of supply; the Trevil mountains another.²² In the earliest days of the industry the limestone was brought down by pack horse and mule, but by the 1800s an extensive network of iron tramroads connected the Trevil quarries with the works at Tredegar, Sirhowy and Ebbw Vale.²³ The Sheffield hinterland was also thickly quarried, quite apart from the coal mines which, in the 1840s, were still being worked on the city fringes.²⁴ There was an ‘immense excavation’ in the sandstone quarry at the foot of Wincobank Hill, near Grimesthorpe, ‘very conspicuous … from the scar produced by the removal of the green sod’;²⁵ there were many more at Deepcar, where limestone was quarried and burnt.²⁶ The cutlery trades were served by some dozens of grindstone quarries in the nearby Peak district and in the immediately adjacent parts of South Yorkshire. At Wickersley, near Rotherham, which specialized in the finer class of grindstone, no fewer than twenty-one different owners of grindstone quarries are recorded in White’s Directory for 1861.²⁷ The steel industry at Sheffield was equally well supplied with ganister, a refractory stone which was manufactured into steel-making crucibles, and was also used for lining cupolas and furnaces. In the earlier part of the century the ganister had been quarried opencast for roadmaking²⁸ but with the development of the Bessemer (‘open hearth’) process of steelmaking, after 1860, it became of ‘inestimable value’²⁹ to the steelmakers (the Sheffield steel industry was using some 14,000 crucibles a week in the 1890s).³⁰

Limestone was a basic ingredient in the making of pig iron, the normal charge of the furnace being one barrowload of lime to two of ironstone and three of coal, though the proportions varied according to the quality of iron required.³¹ (At Dowlais in 1850 the ‘limestone girls’ who worked near the tunnel heads of the furnaces, breaking the limestone for use in the smelting...