BLACK GOLD EB

Jeremy Paxman

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780008128364, 9780008128388
• eBook ISBN: 9780008128357
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: History

From the bestselling historian and acclaimed broadcaster

'A rich social history … Paxman's book could hardly be more colourful, and I enjoyed each page enormously' DOMINIC SANDBROOK, SUNDAY TIMES

'Vividly told … Paxman's fine narrative powers are at their best' THE TIMES

Coal is the commodity that made Britain. Dirty and polluting though it is, this black rock has acted as a midwife to genius. It drove industry, religion, politics, empire and trade. It powered the industrial revolution, turned Britain into the first urban nation and is the industry that made almost all others possible.

In this brilliant social history, Jeremy Paxman tells the story of coal mining in England, Scotland and Wales from Roman times, through the birth of steam power to war, nationalisation, pea-souper smogs, industrial strife and the picket lines of the Miner's Strike.

Written in the captivating style of his bestselling book The English, Paxman ranges widely across Britain to explore stories of engineers and inventors, entrepreneurs and industrialists – but whilst coal inevitably helped the rich become richer, the story told by Black Gold is first and foremost a history of the working miners – the men, women and often children who toiled in appalling conditions down in the mines; the villages that were thrown up around the pit-head.

Almost all traces of coal-mining have vanished from Britain but with this brilliant history, Black Gold demonstrates just how much we owe to the black stuff.

1

Dirty Heat

Newcastle upon Tyne is as good a place as anywhere to begin. For generations, the city was synonymous with the coal trade – hence the implied stupidity of trying to carry ‘coals to Newcastle’: it was the place coal came from.

Perhaps there was a single person who was the first to realise that some of the rocks dug from the ground would burn for longer and with greater heat than wood from the trees growing on the surface of the earth. Perhaps it was an accidental, collective discovery by people wearing animal skins who lit a fire on top of an outcrop of coal on the surface of the ground, and then watched, open-mouthed, as it burned for hours. No one will ever know. There is evidence the Romans burned coal during their occupation of Britain. Certainly the Saxons are believed to have used coal in shaping tin implements. By the Middle Ages, people were digging to get at the seams, and then widening a chamber into the coal so that, in architectural cross-section, the excavation resembled a handbell. The miners were lowered into the heart of the bell in baskets. There is plenty of evidence that by the fourteenth century, coal was being dug from the ground in Wales. The fifteenth-century Pius II published an account of a visit he had made to Scotland before becoming pope. He described a place ‘wild, bare and never visited by the sun in winter’. He had noticed that poor people there were given stones as alms. Being ‘impregnated with sulphur or some fatty matter’, they burned them instead of wood, of which the country was, he claimed, ‘destitute’. (In both England and Scotland the popularity of coal may have had something to do with the fact that so many trees had been felled to clear land for agriculture.) Certainly, by the seventeenth century, there was a coal pit ‘eight fathoms’ (nearly fifty feet) deep in Somerset and other deposits were being exploited in the Midlands, Yorkshire and Lancashire.

The north-east of England was, then, far from unique in being gifted deposits of this strange, flammable rock. But Newcastle contained people with the imagination to see how coal could make them rich. The city is nearly 300 miles north of the English capital with its wealth and hunger for heat, while coal is bulky, heavy and dirty. The vital Geordie realisation was that significant quantities could be delivered to the capital in much less time than it would take for other coalfields to do so, even if the mines there were as efficient as those in the north-east: horse-and-cart haulage was slow, and both Newcastle and London were seaports.

Coal extracted from seams which occurred near the river Tyne was soon being floated downstream towards the estuary on flat-bottomed boats, to be transferred to sailing vessels for transport south to London. The trade flourished, and soon French, German and Dutch ships were sailing across the North Sea to carry coal to the continent as well. By the middle of the sixteenth century, one enthusiast was claiming that Newcastle coal had become so integral to French manufacturing that ‘France can lyve no more withowte [it] than the fishe without water’. By 1615 there were reported to be 400 freighters carrying coal from Newcastle. Most of it was shipped to London, which was soon acutely aware of its dependency: coal was so important to the functioning of the city that it had become a strategic need. In 1629 the veteran naval administrator, Sir John Coke, recommended the creation of a dedicated squadron of warships to protect the Newcastle coal fleet from continental navies. Soon, at any threat of aggression, the colliers were shepherded by warships to London in protective convoys.

Once the coal had been wrested from the earth, power belonged to those who could organise its transportation to the places where it would be burned. In the eighteenth century this meant the digging of canals* and, later, the laying of railway tracks.

In Newcastle the coal trade offered a very comfortable living to a privileged group of merchant families belonging to the ‘Hostmen’s Company’, one of those smart English coteries which in other places would be called a ‘racket’. By 1771, the leading producers of coal were meeting to agree upon how to keep the price up, by deciding how much coal they would release to the market. Customers of the coal trade became increasingly fed up, an anonymous shipowner writing a pamphlet in 1842 to lambast the ‘unprincipled conduct’ of the Newcastle coal merchants: ‘No man can set foot in an office on the quay, with one or two rare exceptions, but must prepare to be cheated or overreached’, he howled.1 The merchants would delay the loading of ships, diddle shipowners by giving short measures, overcharge and refuse to provide receipts.

The Hostmen still exist, organised by a dozen ageing men and women who enjoy dressing up in blue and red robes and exercising the right to graze cattle – or rent out the right – on Newcastle moorland. Entry is restricted to sons and daughters of Freemen of the City ‘born in lawful wedlock’. It sounds a self-interested and slightly comical piece of mummery of the kind that still exists all over England, but the people of Newcastle can thank them for the fact that the city has nearly 1,000 acres of open space within its boundaries. Precisely how this clique acquired the rights to the highly lucrative Newcastle coal ‘vend’ is unknown, though it was well-enough established by the sixteenth century for Elizabeth I to ‘incorporate’ the company and its monopoly in 1600. This was a royal stamp of approval for a cartel: the main interest of the Hostmen was to look after their members by keeping out competition and keeping down their workers. At both these tasks they were highly effective, acquiring control of mines and controlling way leaves over land between collieries and riverside loading wharves.

The figures speak for themselves. In 1622 the Hostmen sold 14,420 tons of coal. By the middle of that century there were 900 coal vessels carrying coal out of the city, with each cargo negotiated by a Hostman. The cartel may have been the antithesis of capitalism ‘red in tooth and claw’ – and, like most cartels, made for corruption and laziness – but it had the advantage for officialdom of making it easier to tax the coal trade. The Hostmen’s meeting place – the Mayor’s Parlour – testified to their hold over the city. Some became proprietors of mines themselves, but control of the transport of coal to seagoing vessels remained the key to their power.

The best-known feature of Newcastle is its abundance of bridges: passengers high up on the train between London and Edinburgh have looked out for generations upon the river and city and their bridges. There had been a road bridge across the river since medieval times, part-owned by the prince-bishops of Durham, but its arches were too low to allow through the coasters carrying coal south to London. Then a roiling great flood brought down the bridge in 1771. An elegant new construction opened ten years later. But its architects had failed to take into consideration the needs of the growing coal trade: the nine stone arches spanned the river at a height which made it still quite impossible for sailing ships to travel upstream to take on their cargo. So for generations coal continued to be carried downstream to the seagoing vessels in flat-bottomed wherries called ‘keels’. Which is bizarre, considering they hardly had one. At their peak there were said to be 500 of these boats at work on the Tyne, each approximately forty feet long, broad in the beam (nearly twenty feet across), pointed at each end, manufactured of oak and elm, powered and steered by oars. From a distance, the river must have looked as if there had been a great hatch of enormous black insects upon its surface. Each boat was usually operated by a crew comprising a skipper, two crewmen known as ‘bullies’, and a boy. Most of the keelmen seem to have originally been migrants from Scotland and the border areas. It was wearying work, and they were not even free agents, for each keelman was ‘bound’ to a Hostman – binding time was Christmas Day.

Where the Hostmen wore robes and fancy hats, the Sunday best of the indentured keelmen was a white shirt, yellow waistcoat, blue coat and a flat-brimmed black hat: like many of the miners, their ‘off-duty’ clothes were colourful and impractical. The bright colours could hardly have been in greater contrast to their mucky everyday wear, and have been romanticised in Tyneside culture as reminders of the origins of the city’s prosperity.† Admiration rarely stooped to indulgence, for several times the town summoned the army to put down disputes by keelmen. Consigned to folk memory, Newcastle might show a greater appreciation of their existence by properly caring for the magnificent Keelmen’s Hospital, which they built to look after sick and elderly members of their trade with the proceeds of a self-imposed tax of one penny each tide from every boat. It is one of the most wonderful buildings in the city.

Members of the great cartel of suppliers, the Hostmen, were blessed by the inventiveness of others. Merchants needed to waste no effort in dreaming up new applications for their product, for once this combustible rock had become widely available, scientists, inventors, engineers and manufacturers found endless uses for it. By the early 1700s, coal had become essential to manufacturers of metals, bricks and glass; extractors of salt; refiners of sugar; makers of dyes; brewers of beer; distillers of gin, to say nothing of blacksmiths or those who just wanted to heat their homes. In 1730, one writer had estimated that ‘there are above a Thousand Sail of Ships constantly imployed in Carrying Coals to the different Parts of England, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Germany, France, Flanders, and Holland; and the Market at London is the Standard and settles the Price, for the most Part for all other Markets’.2 By the middle of the eighteenth century an estimated 1 million tons of coal were being shipped to London each year.3 Coal was making Britain’s fortune. It was steam generated by coal that made possible the industrialisation of Britain, and it was industrialisation that made possible the country’s world dominance.‡

It is tempting to see the coasters which brought coal from Newcastle to London as somehow not ‘proper ships’. But the Endeavour on which Captain Cook sailed to Botany Bay and then claimed Australia for Britain, had been built in Whitby in 1764 as one of these coal carriers. Sturdily constructed, broad in the beam and with a flattish bottom, the Admiralty realised that its shallow draught also meant the boat was well suited to uncharted waters with unknown rocks, shoals and reefs. Cook not only mapped the coasts of the two islands of New Zealand but claimed the east coast of Australia from his converted collier, before sailing it all the way back to England around the Cape of Good Hope. When Matthew Flinders later set out to circumnavigate the continent of Australia, he too did so in a former east-coast collier, built in County Durham. The fact that north-eastern coaling ships were reckoned safe enough to be used on voyages of discovery speaks volumes about the hazards of the east-coast coal trade, when one estimate calculates that on average two ships were lost off the Yorkshire coast each week between 1500 and 1900.

The trade was distinctive in other respects, too. In most places, miners were taken on or got rid of on a fairly casual basis. But for much of the life of the north-eastern coalfield, the terms of employment were quite astonishingly feudal. For a payment of one shilling, miners entered into a ‘bond’ which obliged them to be available for work whenever called upon, but did not require the employer to provide anything for them to do to earn the shilling. The bond was a hangover from the ‘hiring fairs’ when wandering agricultural labourers were contracted to work for the coming year and it originally ran from one autumn to the next, with breaking of the bond being a criminal offence, punishable by a fine or gaol with hard labour. (The employer faced no criminal sanction if he failed to honour the deal.) The terms were laid out in numerous clauses which might run to thousands of words, recited by the hiring agent for the benefit of illiterate miners who might then sign en masse by pushing forward to touch the pen marking an ‘X’.§ The miner employed under these conditions was a serf. When mine bosses tried in 1765 to make things even worse for the miners, by demanding that they produce a ‘leaving certificate’ from their last employer (this was almost the arrangement in Scotland, which practised a form of slavery, with miners bound to mine-owners for their entire life, and bought and sold along with the mine if it changed hands), an estimated 4,000 men went on strike. The Dragoons were made ready, but were given no opportunity to draw their swords, for the miners behaved impeccably, simply refusing to work, and after six weeks, the owners gave in and abandoned the ‘leaving certificate’ notion. This early example of the power of collective action reverberated in the minds of miners for decades.

But, generally, there was no shortage of labour: employers believed they could hire and fire men as readily as they hauled and sold coal. There was something magical about the thought of human beings descending into the earth to become the first living things to see a layer of rock which had once – millions of years beforehand – been alive itself. But it took a supreme effort of imagination to keep that vision alive in the dangers and sheer drudgery of the harshest manual labour.

The ‘hewers’ who attacked the seam of coal with picks and shovels – and later with explosives – had to adjust themselves to the space they found themselves in. Often, this meant working bent double, on their knees, or lying on the ground. The coal they had won (the competitive language explains a great deal about how everyone in the industry saw their task) was hauled away from the face by small teams of two or three ‘putters’, who might be their sons or nephews. The putters then had to manoeuvre great ‘corves’ – round baskets made of hazel twigs – through tunnels to the bottom of the shaft sunk from the surface. Here, they attached the baskets to thick hemp ropes. Each of these corves could hold about 4.5 hundredweight (about 230 kilos) of coal. They were then raised up the approximately eight-foot-diameter shaft to the surface by horses made to plod in a circle, winding a winch. On a good day, the manual labour of a deep mine might produce about ninety tons of coal.

Aspects of the local coal trade like the bond are specific to Newcastle. But the pattern of development is characteristic of the business everywhere – landowners who cannot believe their good fortune, colliery proprietors who pay them a royalty for the right to extract coal, miners working in appalling conditions, rapacious merchants and entrepreneurs exploiting transport opportunities to bring it to the marketplace (where other labourers unload the vessels, and other merchants make their living from the trade). While the South Wales coalfield was one day to become the centre of the production of ‘steam coal’ and high-quality anthracite essential in the bellies of Royal Navy destroyers, and some of the thickest seams of the Midlands and Yorkshire would only become reachable with technology as yet unimaginable – these early days of coal exploration were as significant in their way as striking gold or other precious metal. No wonder lumps of coal acquired the nickname ‘black gold’. And no wonder there were so very many fingers in the pie.

If the cleanest way to make money from coal was to be a landowner, and the second easiest to be a middleman selling it, the keelman was only slightly better off than the men, women and children who went into the bowels of the earth to extract the rocks which made the Hostmen wealthy. Shovelling coal at all hours of the day and night (the work was dependent upon the tides), the keelman’s job was a filthy one – especially when it required them to shovel coal ‘uphill’, because the collier’s gunwale was much higher than that of the keel. After work, they returned to homes in Sandgate, their grimy slum outside the city walls, a place which so scandalised the visiting preacher, John Wesley, that he remarked in 1742 that he had never encountered ‘so much drunkenness, cursing and swearing, even from the mouths of little children’.4

Though the coal trade began with the exploitation of seams which outcropped near to the river, ever-increasing supplies were needed for the burgeoning business. By geological good fortune, the Newcastle area was remarkably rich in deposits of coal, and those who owned the land above it became very rich. Everyone seemed to be making money; even those with no coal under their grass, but who could charge for the right of others to transport it across their land to collection points. The soft southern customers could only moan about how harsh their lives would be without the comfort of coal. ‘Everybody complains of the dearness of coals, being at 4l. per chaldron [the standard unit of measurement, equivalent to just over 2,500 kilos],’ the Londoner Samuel Pepys had written in his diary on 6 March 1667, ‘the weather, too, being become most bitter cold, the King saying to-day that it was the coldest day he ever knew in England.’ And there was worse to come, for the English and Dutch were at war, and the British too short of money to deploy many of their better ships, which were laid up at Chatham. In June, the Dutch fleet broke into the Medway and destroyed most of them – the worst calamity in the history of the Royal Navy. London became a place of panicky rumours, for, among other things, Dutch command of the sea cut the capital off from its source of warmth. Pepys wrote of how ‘the great misery the City and kingdom is like to suffer for want of coals … and it is feared will breed a mutiny; for we are not in any prospect to command the sea for our colliers to come, but rather, it is feared, the Dutch may go and burn all our colliers at Newcastle’. The Dutch never did so, and ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• Introduction
• 1 Dirty Heat
• 2 Invisible Underground
• 3 To Those Who Hath Shall Be Given
• 4 Full Steam Ahead
• 5 The Right Side of the Tracks
• 6 Smoke on the Water
• 7 All I Want is a Room Somewhere
• 8 The People’s Flag
• 9 Does Your Country Really Need You?
• 10 Not Quite What We’d Hoped For
• 11 Oops!
• 12 Workers’ Playtime
• 13 King Coal Coughs
• 14 White Heat
• 15 ‘People will always need coal’
• 16 To the Death
• 17 Goodnight and Goodbye
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Illustrations
• Picture Section
• Index
• Also by Jeremy Paxman
• About the Author
• About the Publisher