Recent Developments in European Thought Part 11

And therefore, seeing that coal has meant all this to England, let us look at the men who raised the coal. How did they live, what did they think about, what did they count for then, what do they count for now?

2. In 1800 the miners stood for nothing in the nation's life. In Scotland they had just been emanc.i.p.ated from the status of villeinage.

In Northumberland and Durham they were tied by yearly bonds. Elsewhere they were weak and isolated. In 1825 a 'Voice from the coal mines of the Tyne and Wear' cried: 'While working men in general are making 20_s._ to 30_s._ per week (_sic_) the pitmen here are only making 13_s._ 6_d._ and from this miserable pittance deductions are made.'[45]

In 1839, during the Chartist disturbances, a Welsh M.P. wrote to the Home Secretary begging for barracks and troops: 'A more lawless set of men than the colliers and miners do not exist ... it requires some courage to live among such a set of savages.'[46] When the miners came out in 1844, there were thousands of cottages tenantless in Northumberland and Durham. For the colliery proprietors owned the cottages, and when the miners struck evicted them. So the miners set up house in the streets. 'In one lane ... a complete new village was built, chests-of-drawers, deck beds, etc., formed the walls of the new dwelling; and the top covered with canvas or bedclothes as the case might be.'[47]

Yet, for all their griminess, they had human hearts and voices. During the strike they obtained permission to hold a meeting at Newcastle; and the wealthy citizens who made their fortunes out of the coal trade trembled before the invasion of black barbarians. But the meeting pa.s.sed off in rain and peace. Thirty thousand miners marched in procession, 'for near a mile flags in breeze, men walking in perfect order'; and as they marched, they sang, as only miners sing, songs and hymns and topical ditties:

'Stand fast to your Union Brave sons of the mine, And we'll conquer the tyrants Of Tees, Wear, and Tyne!'

Up and down the Durham coalfields tramped a misguided agitator (in after life the veteran servant of the Durham Miners' a.s.sociation), by name Tommy Ramsey. With bills under his arm and crake in hand, he went from house-row to house-row calling the miners out. He had only one message:

'Lads, unite and better your condition.

When eggs are scarce, eggs are dear; When men are scarce, men are dear.'[48]

Such blasphemy appalled the Government's Commissioners. But the miners had a zest for religion as well as for strikes. During the strike of 1844, 'frequent meetings were held in their chapels (in general those of the Primitive Methodists or Ranters as they are commonly called in that part of the country), where prayers were publicly offered up for the successful result of the strike.' They attended their prayer meeting 'to get their faith strengthened'.[49]

Such ignorance could only be cured by education. Some worthy members of society had already recognized the fact. In 1830 a Cardiff 'Society for the improvement of the working population in the county of Glamorgan'

issued improving pamphlets:

No. 9. Population, or Patty's Marriage.

No. 10. The Poor's Rate, or the Treacherous Friend.

No. 11. Foreign Trade, or the Wedding Gown.[50]

But the northern miners were perverse people. In Scotland, according to one Wesleyan minister,[51] the miners read Adam Smith. In Northumberland, with still greater perversity, they preferred Plato. 'A translation of Plato's _Ideal Republic_ is much read among those cla.s.ses, princ.i.p.ally for the socialism and unionism it contains; in pure ignorance, of course, that Plato himself subsequently modified his principles and that Aristotle showed their fallacy.'[52]

3. The Royal Commission of 1842 on the Employment and Condition of Children and Young Persons in Mines disclosed facts which made Cobdenite England gasp. The worst evidence came from Lancashire, Cheshire, the West Riding of Yorkshire, East Scotland, and South Wales. In these districts juvenile labour was cheap and plentiful; and this was an irresistible argument for its employment, though the miners themselves disliked it. The meddlesome restrictions on the factories were a contributory cause. Parents, it was said in Lancashire, were pushing their children into colliery employment at an earlier age because of the legal restrictions upon sending them to the neighbouring factories.

A Lancashire woman said in evidence:

'I have a belt round my waist and a chain pa.s.sing between my legs, and I go on my hands and feet.... The pit is very wet where I work and the water comes over our clog tops always, and I have seen it up to my thighs.... I have drawn till I have had the skin off me; the belt and chain is worse when we are in the family way.'[53]

The children's office was a lonesome one. Children hate the dark, but being little they fitted into a niche, and so they were used to open and close the trap-doors. A trapper lad from the county of Monmouth, William Richards, aged seven-and-a-half, said in evidence:

'I been down about three years. When I first went down, I could not keep my eyes open; I don't fall asleep now; I smokes my pipe, smokes half a quartern a week.'[54]

Except in the northern mining districts, where there were good day and Sunday schools and Methodism was powerful, a pagan darkness prevailed.

As a Derbyshire witness put it:

'When the boys have been beaten, knocked about, and covered with sludge all the week, they want to be in bed all day to rest on Sunday.'[55]

In the hope of startling a religiously-minded England, the Commissioners reproduced examples of working-cla.s.s ignorance. James Taylor, aged eleven,

'Has heard of h.e.l.l in the pit, when the men swore; has never heard of Jesus Christ; has never heard of G.o.d; he has heard the men in the pit say, "G.o.d d.a.m.n thee ".'

A Yorkshire girl, aged eighteen, said:

'I do not know who Jesus Christ was; I never saw him, but I have seen Foster, who prays about him.'[56]

4. Just as in the East Midlands the frame-work knitters worked for middlemen or master middlemen, and just as the Dudley nailers worked for petty-foggers and market-foggers, so too the Staffordshire miners worked for 'b.u.t.ties'. Here again the workers were exposed to the petty tyrannies of semi-capitalism; and here again the middlemen, in this case the b.u.t.ties, incurred the odium of a system for which their superiors, the coal-owners and coal-masters, were responsible.

Why the b.u.t.ty system prevailed in the Midlands--and in a modified form it prevails to-day--is not clear. In some places it seems to be connected with the smallness of the mining concerns or of the metal trades which they supplied. In South Staffordshire a contributing factor was the ancient and allied industry of nail-making.

The conditions in South Staffordshire in 1843 are fully described in the Midland Mining Commission of that year.

The b.u.t.ty was a contractor who engaged with the proprietor or lessee of the mine to deliver the coal or iron-stone at so much per ton, himself hiring the labourers, using his own horses, and supplying the tools requisite for the working of the mine. The contract price was known as the 'charter price' or 'charter'. Thus by a freak of language the Staffordshire miner knew by the same word the 'b.u.t.ty's charter' which was the symbol of his oppression, and the 'people's charter' which was the goal of his desire.

'The b.u.t.ties', said the miners and their wives, 'are the devil: they are negro drivers: they play the vengeance With the men.'[57] The men kicked when, after working a couple of hours, they were fetched up, without pay, on the excuse that there were no waggons to take away the coal. But the b.u.t.ty comforted them with a bottle of pit drink, and all was smooth again.

A collier related a case where 'a pike man had worked only one half-day in the week and got 2_s._ for it, and because he did not spend 6_d._ of this at the b.u.t.ty's shop, the latter told the doggy (the under man) to let the man play for it.'[58]

The miners recognized that often the b.u.t.ty was not to blame. In the district north and east of Dudley, the b.u.t.ties got their 'charter price'

from the coal-owners in the form of tickets on the coal-owners'

truck-shop. What else could they do but hand them on to the men? 'He used to be a very good b.u.t.ty,' said one miner's wife, 'till they haggled him and dropped his "charter", so that he cannot pay his men.'[59]

West and south of Dudley the b.u.t.ties, though they did not truck their men, kept public-houses; and being employer and publican in one, they had a tight hold on the men.

Was the compulsion to drink an oppression? To our minds, yes; as also to the minds of the teetotal Chartists whom the Government imprisoned, and of the strike leaders whom the Government's Commissioners denounced. But to the majority of the miners the abundance of beer was a delight. They objected to the b.u.t.ty's bullying, but they loved his beer, especially the f.e.c.kless ones, for when wives were importunate the drunkards pleaded necessity.

However, all the beer-drinking could not be charged to the b.u.t.ties. The miners themselves, in their own fellowships, were devoted to it; and the compulsion of friends was as severe as the compulsion of b.u.t.ties.

Every approach to recreation, every act of mutual providence against accident or disease, began and ended in beer. The day a man entered the pit's company, he paid 1_s._ for footing-ale, and the doggy saw that no churl escaped. When a lad was old enough to have a sweetheart he was toasted with the 'nasty' shilling. The sins of the married men were washed away in half-a-crown's worth of ale. The beer-shop was the head-quarters of the Burial and Savings Clubs. The first charge on a Burial Club was a good oak coffin, the second charge drinks for the pall-bearers, and then a gla.s.s or two for the rest of the company.

They had lotteries to which each man contributed 20 fortnightly shillings. Each week a name was drawn, and the lucky man stood a feast; while every member, in addition to a shilling for the box, produced 6_d._ for drinks.

In all these festivities the b.u.t.ty was in the offing. When they would have him he presided; and so at his worst an obnoxious bully, at his best he was an accommodating landlord.

Direct employment, such as prevailed in the north of England, would have averted much of this evil. There were no structural difficulties in the way of change. Direct employment would not have meant a change to another cla.s.s of work (this is what direct employment meant for knitters and hand-loom weavers). The b.u.t.ty system existed and persisted through slackness and irresponsibility. The owners paid compensation for accidents, when they might have diminished the number of accidents. They paid commissions to middlemen with whom they might have dispensed. The system made temperance impossible for the individual; and the masters, with the full approval of the Government, did their best to destroy the 'pernicious combinations' by which alone a standard of sober decency could be promoted.

5. The Report of the Truck Commissioners (1871-2) enables us to complete the picture. It also enables us to understand why, at this late day, truck was still rife in certain districts.

Truck and Tommy, truck-shop and Tommy-shop, are convertible terms. Truck is from the French 'troc' = barter. Cobbett tells us how the word 'Tommy' was used. In his soldiering days the rations of brown bread, 'for what reason G.o.d knows', went by the name of Tommy. 'When the soldiers came to have bread served out to them in the several towns in England, the name of Tommy went down by tradition, and, doubtless, it was taken up and adapted to the truck-system in Staffordshire and elsewhere.'[60] From the textile districts it had all but disappeared in 1871. When the cotton manufactures went to outlying dales for water power, they were almost compelled to open stores for their workpeople.

Owen's store at New Lanark was, in effect, a well-managed truck-shop; and the Truck Commissioners of 1871 reported that the New Lanark Company of that day was breaking the law. But when the cotton industry was gathered in the towns, the need for company stores ceased. Consequently, after the pa.s.sing of the Act of 1831, which prohibited truck altogether, the masters very generally abolished the stores of their own accord; and survivals were jealously watched.

A collection of Factory Sc.r.a.ps, preserved at the Goldsmiths' Library in London, contains a copy of the Factory Bill of 1833, with some pencil notes in Ostler's handwriting which run:

_Cragg Dale Facts_

_Truck System_: Little altered: men knew they were imposed. They pay in money now--but compel them to buy at their own shops....

Wholesale warehouses at Rochdale say, 'Oh! put it sideways: it will do for Cragg Dale masters to sell among their people.'

_Song_: 'Lousy b.u.t.ter and burnt bread.'

About 1842 a curious perversion of truck was prevalent in parts of Yorkshire. The trade depression in the Bradford district tempted disreputable woollen manufacturers to force on their operatives the products of the factory as part payment of wages. Combers were given pieces of cloth, workers in shoddy mills bundles of rags. But this utterly inexcusable fraud, no less than its more specious complement, the employer's store, was rooted out by inspectors and factory reformers. Therefore in 1854 the Government's Commissioner was able to say that in a factory district like Lancashire truck was not only non-existent but 'impossible'.[61]