The Lives of the Pennine Miners

By Kirsty McHugh, OUP UK

Geoff Coyle graduated in mining engineering from the Royal School of Mines, Imperial College London. He has worked underground in coal and copper mines, and qualified as a practical coal-face worker. The contraction of the coal industry led him to develop an alternative career, and after working in the chemical industry, he became a management academic. Now retired, he is a freelance academic and consultant. In writing his new book, The Riches Beneath our Feet: How Mining Shaped Britain, he returns to his first love – the fascination of mining. In the post below he writes about the hard lives faced by the miners who worked in the Pennines.

The Pennines – a chain of hills and mountains that runs up the spine of England – were rich in lead, zinc and other valuable minerals. In addition, refined lead usually contained a proportion of silver and some ‘lead’ mines were effectively silver mines. The Romans mined lead, and large amounts were produced in Mediaeval times for castle and cathedral roofs and water pipes. The many uses of lead enabled the industry to survive until the early 20th century but 2,000 years of activity is not abnormal for many of Britain’s mining industries.

The life of the miner was hard. For instance, it was impractical to walk miles to and from work every day after hours of hard labour, and even more so in winter, so many mines had a barracks or hostel, called the mine shop. The routine was to walk to the mine on Sunday afternoon after Chapel, back home on Saturday morning, and to camp out in the shop for the working week. Each man brought his own food such as bread, potatoes, tea and sugar, bacon from the family pig, or whatever his wife or mother could provide. The miners cooked their own food and entertained themselves in the evenings by singing, talking, or playing instruments such as the fiddle or concertina. If this all sounds rather charming, the reality was very different.

The mine shop at a Pennine mining museum had four beds for 32 men and boys which, with two shifts, meant three men in a bed and a boy across its foot. Cooking was done in a communal frying pan, swimming with grease, and we can imagine the arguments about whose turn it was to clean it, if it ever was. There was a fire and the men’s wet muddy clothes were hung up to dry but, as they did so, the fine dust from drilling fell out, covering everything and being breathed in by the inhabitants. The window was kept closed against the cold, so it’s best not to imagine the odour from cooking, drying clothes, sweat, and other bodily emissions. Washing after work was in a trough or the river, and sanitation was an earth closet, an open latrine or the river. The men may have entertained themselves as described, but it is hard not to believe that fights never occurred. Though Inspectors of Mines came into force in the 1840s for the coal industry, it was not until the later 19th Century, when metal mines were also inspected, that conditions were reasonably improved.

Away from work many locally established miners had a field or two for a cow, some pigs, and a vegetable plot. They usually took a week or two away from the mine in September to get or help get in the hay crop and to slaughter and salt a pig or two for the winter. The system was that the man’s wife looked after farm and family while he, and probably her older children, worked at the mines. The danger was that a poor farrowing of the pig or a bad hay crop would verge on the disastrous. It was a hard life, but it was such people in many of Britain’s amazingly varied mineral industries who produced much of the country’s wealth.