Coal Black Heart (8 page)

The miners hacked the coal out of the seam with picks and wedges. Then it was dumped into two-bushel tubs and hauled over a narrow log roadway “by strong-active young men” who were paid by the tub. At the bottom of the shaft the coal was emptied into a larger tub, which was hauled the ninety feet to the surface. There it was emptied into a hopper and discharged into twelve-bushel carts. If a ship happened to be at the local wharf, the carts were driven along a narrow road to dockside for loading. If no vessel was around—or during the long winter months—the coal was simply dumped at the wharf in a big heap.

By then, eighty to ninety men worked the Sydney Mines. Most were young and Irish—many of them veterans of the Newfoundland cod fisheries. To a man they were footloose, itinerant and, to Brown’s eye, frighteningly unskilled. “All that had been done was worse than useless as the property, instead of being improved, was seriously damaged,” Brown wrote, perhaps self-servingly, years later, about the scene when he arrived. “About seventy-five acres of the main seam had been worked out, leaving the pillars behind, which, owing to the settling of the roof could not be recovered. To show the wasteful, reckless way in which the works had been conducted, it need only be stated that from seventy-five acres of a six-foot-seam, which ought at least to have yielded 500,000, only 275,000 tons had been raised since the mine was commenced in 1785.”

Brown held the miners in low esteem. Their unwillingness to properly differentiate between big and small coal, he said, was responsible for Cape Breton coal’s inability to make any headway in the United States market. As for the compensation arrangement, well, come on: “All the workmen of the establishment, consisting of overmen, mechanics, colliers, haulers and labourers, in addition to their wages, whether by the day or by contract, were allowed rations of beef, pork, bread and molasses, which were given out weekly. If a man was absent from his work, of course he had to pay for his rations; but whether a man worked faithfully or not he received the same allowances, thus placing the industrious and skilful men on the same level as the idle and ignorant.”

Such, then, was the cushy life of Cape Breton coal miners in the early nineteenth century: the soot and damp, the back-breaking toil in pitch-black tunnels amidst rats and rockfalls. The workdays that began, whether on the surface or in the pit, at five a.m. and ran through to seven p.m., broken up by short breaks for breakfast and dinner, each meal punctuated by a glass of raw rum belted back
before they picked up tools again. (For good measure, they received another dollop of spirits at quitting time.) Wages were doled out at two paydays per year: one for “four months’ men” on May 1, the other for “twelve months’ men” on December 31. There was no exchange of cash in Nova Scotia’s pioneer economy. Instead, anyone working in the mining industry, fisheries or shipbuilding depended upon merchant credit—an arrangement known as the truck system. But normally, there wasn’t much left after the men had settled up for their clothing, stores and rum.

A lucky few lived in nearby cottages with their wives and kids or, if they were overmen or mechanics, in a log or sod hut. The rest of the men bunked down in one of the barracks or “cook-rooms” where they ate their meals, and slept in berths along the sides of the room. “It may easily be imagined what sort of a place the cook-room was, where forty men ate, slept and washed—when they did wash which was only once a week—in a single apartment,” wrote Brown.

I can see him lying in his bed at night, thin mouth crinkling in disgust at the smells and sounds emanating from the bunkhouse next door, head spinning with what he’d accomplished that day—and everything that lay ahead. Brown had a 30-horsepower engine built to raise the coal to the surface, and another 20-horsepower model to pump water from the shaft. He erected new workshops, warehouses and barracks. Worried that an accident to the steam engines would shut down the whole operation, he had an iron foundry, with fitting shops, lathes and “everything necessary for repairing all kinds of mining machinery” built “as there was at that time no place, within a distance of 800 miles, where such repairs could be efficiently made.” Shiploads of skilled workmen and colliers arrived from England. A light temporary railroad materialized, from the pit to the old wharf. Small vessels continued to load at the old wharf; the larger ones were loaded by schooner lighters carrying some sixty tonnes of coal, each “at a secure place of shipment some distance from the harbour.” On nights when sleep wouldn’t come he could stare out at the GMA ships, winking in the dark, before they weighed anchor and glided east, bound for the United States market his GMA bosses coveted so.

Who Could Live in Such a Hole?

M
y great-great-great-great-grandfather, James Briers, was born twice, as far as I’m concerned. The first time was sometime around 1767, depending upon which tombstone or church registry you consult. The second time was 240 or so years later, when I discovered that he had come into this world amidst the flat farmland, ancient hedges and stone walls that mark the land like inukshuks in the south corner of England’s Lancashire County. How his people got there, I don’t precisely know; according to the family genealogist, the first mention of the Briers name was in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, where they were some kind of border clan—a mixture of Gaels and Celts “whose original territories ranged from Lancashire in the south, Northward to the south bank of the Clyde river in Scotland.” Not a lot is known about James Briers, either, other than that he was a coal miner and had a son named Peter who followed his father into the pit. Andrew Alston, my redoubtable third cousin and a whiz with a family tree, figures Peter and his wife Ann moved around a bit in the Lancashire area.

One thing’s certain: in 1842 they had a son named John who was baptized at St. Mary’s church in the town of St. Helens. And somewhere along the line John took up pick and shovel, and he too became a coal miner.

It makes perfect sense. In mid-sixteenth-century England the locals, unaware of the immense coal seams which ran beneath their feet, were still burning turf when they couldn’t get timber to heat their homes. The move to coal, when it came, was rapid. By the early seventeenth century St. Helens coal was travelling by pack horse to fuel the salt factories in Cheshire and Liverpool. Within decades, as the country’s transportation revolution bloomed, coal from there was travelling via road, canal and railroad to new markets and customers. St. Helens—which later used its coal to build a great glass-making empire—was one of the miracles of the Industrial Revolution. There were so many. England, with its capital, technological know-how and global empire that provided a built-in market for homegrown manufactured goods, had a huge lead on other countries as this massive cultural, economic and social shift occurred. An economy based on manual labour was being replaced by one built around machines and dominated by heavy industries: shipbuilding, coal-mining, steel production and textiles. In the process, England became the workshop for the world. And at the very centre of it—coughing and wheezing, clanking and hissing—was Lancashire, whose cotton mills emerged as one of the most telling symbols of epochal change.

Before the rise of the factory, Lancashire’s towns already had a tradition of small textile workshops and cottages where hand-loom weavers made yarn into cloth. Then along came a couple of Lancashire men with big ideas—John Kay, who invented the flying shuttle, and James Hargreaves, the creator of the spinning jenny—who took the spinning industry out of the cottages and countryside
and into the mills. Not everyone was overjoyed. Throughout the country, Luddites—followers of a mythical leader named Ned Ludd, who was rumoured to live in Sherwood Forest—ran amok, breaking into factories and smashing machines that threatened to take textile industry jobs. In 1813, fourteen of them were hanged. Others were jailed, fined or deported to Australia. Ultimately, of course, the power lay with the mill owners. “We may see in a single building a 100 horse power steam engine (which) has the strength of 880 men, set in motion 50,000 spindles,” one mill owner observed in 1835. “The whole requires the service of but 750 workers. But these machines can produce as much yarn as formerly could have hardly been spun by 200,000 men.”

Lancashire, damp enough to ensure the necessary moisture for raw cotton to be spun into yarns and made into clothes, became the centre of the world’s cotton trade. Manchester became England’s first industrial city. By 1830 it boasted 101 mills employing more than 28,000 people. Another 18,000 worked at Oldham’s 89 mills, 13,000 toiled at Rochdale’s 63 mills, and Ashton-under-Lyne’s 35 factories had a workforce of 8,400. Twenty years later, almost all of the cottage cotton weavers in Lancashire were working in “manufactories,” and there was undeniable truth when the county’s cotton masters bragged that they satisfied the home market before breakfast, and catered to the rest of the world afterwards. A decade later, an incredible 446,000 people toiled in Lancashire’s cotton mills, as country folk crowded into towns that had seldom known a second of prosperity. Peter Briers, with his son John, daughter-in-law Ellen and their five children (Ann, Elizabeth, Samuel, Ellen and John William), eventually moved north to one of them: Chorley, with its rolling roadways and grand old manor houses, at the foot of the haunting West Pennine Moors.

Life changed, the world changed. The new, citified existence was better in so many ways than their old lives. Yet my heart still sinks when I picture the country folk arriving that first day in sprawling, soulless Liverpool or Manchester. Imagine them walking through mouldering landscapes unbroken by plants or green space, everything overlaid by a layer of soot. See their defeated body language when they discover that home is now some dirt-floor cellar with no light or ventilation, or a single room in a townhouse deserted by well-off owners anxious to put some distance between themselves and the encroaching lower classes.

The squalor wasn’t limited to the metropolises. In the smaller towns of Lancashire a similar picture emerged; one writer described the cellars in Bolton as “the fever nests of town,” where people, donkeys and even pigs lived side-by-side. In Bury, a survey discovered sixty-three households where five members of the same family slept in one bed. In the Rossendale region, rows of back-to-back houses were built clinging to the steep valley sides, leaving them damp, dark and airless. In Bacup, tenants paid a shilling a week to rent small cheek-by-jowl dwellings with a view of a communal yard where mangy, diseased wildlife wandered. Historian Andrew Taylor writes that the single privy shared by several households was a 170-yard walk for some, and the nearest well a half-mile distant. Finding room in a lodging house left tenants in no better shape; investigators found one household where a whole family and their dogs shared one bed in a single room.

Disease, as you can imagine, ran rampant. Housing conditions were so unsanitary that during the early part of the Industrial Revolution, 50 percent of infants died before the age of two. Work, the whole point of being there, provided no comfort. Skilled artisans suddenly found themselves reduced to routine labourers as machines began to mass-produce the products that, until then, had
always been made by hand. Working in a cottage surrounded by family gave way to labouring on the factory floor among strangers. There, life was governed by the constant pumping of the combustion engine, and the employees’ need to produce as much as possible during their long working hours. To many, the transformation was something magical: the triumph of man over nature, city over country, middle-class capitalists over the landed class of nobility and gentry. Yet it’s the ghastly images of Blake’s “dark satanic mills,” Zola’s Germinal, Tocqueville’s Manchester—which he described as a “new hades” with its “heaps of dung, rubble from buildings” and “vast structures” enshrouded in “black smoke” that “keep air and light out of the human habitations which they dominate,”—that linger. It’s Dickens’s Coketown from
Hard Times
—from which the following passage is taken—that has stayed with us through the years:

Inside the factory, the crueller lessons of capitalism were instilled. Productivity trumped people in a time when owners, unfettered by government regulation, were free to pursue whatever path was the most profitable, without considering human safety or well-being. The spinners boiled, the weavers froze. Cotton dust clogged the air and the lungs. Constant noise frayed the nerves and battered the eardrums. Mill workers suffered from chest complaints, headaches and stomach ailments, according to a Manchester history. One day a nobleman visited Manchester and spent a day wandering around “this great nasty manufacturing town.” “Who,” he wondered, “could live in such a hole where the slave, working and drinking a short life out, is eternally reeling before you from fatigue or drunkenness.”

He had to know the answer: people without a choice in the world. In 1841, 2,350 women—their families stretched by the higher cost of urban living—worked in the coal mines of the United Kingdom, one third of them in Lancashire. Often they toiled side-by-side with their own offspring. An 1833 survey considered nearly 8,000 workers in the Lancanshire mills and discovered that one-third were under the age of sixteen and 400 less than eleven years old. Children, after all, were part of the workforce in the 19th century United Kingdom where, in most households, they followed their parents into their respective industries. It was 1870 before schooling was made compulsory, and the 20th century before the allowable age for leaving school was raised to fourteen.

Life was truly lamentable for the youngest workers. Since they had no rights to speak of, they got the most tedious, dangerous jobs: as piecers tying yarn strings together when they broke, or scavengers
picking up ends of loose cotton from underneath the heavy, dangerous machinery. They worked from six a.m. to seven p.m. Monday to Saturday with an hour for dinner for the princely sum of a few pence a week According to a locally published history of Manchester’s cotton industry, if children were late they were fined. If they made a mistake or fell asleep on the job they were beaten, especially in the early years of the industry when it was common practice for children to be contracted out by workhouses as “pauper apprentices,” leaving them open to all kinds of abuse.

“Any man who has stood at twelve o’clock at the single narrow door-way which serves as the place of exit for the hands employed in the great cotton-mills, must acknowledge, that an uglier set of men and women, of boys and girls, taking them in the mass, it would be impossible to congregate in a smaller compass,” Peter Gaskell wrote in 1833, in
The Manufacturing Population of England: