The Privateersman (A Poor Man at the Gate Series Book 1) (20 page)

“Not coal, no, Master. For the rest, well, he has
often looked about him and pursed his lips and shaken his head, as if he could
do better. Maybe he could…”

“And maybe he’s too big for his boots? Find out,
George – he’s an intelligent man, let’s use his brain before he gets up to
mischief with it. What about our quarryman, do you think I could talk to him
about coal?”

“Shouldn’t think so, Master – open quarrying be what
he knows, not underground work.”

From the works he made a rushed visit to Clapperley,
the indispensable agent whose knowledge of the local business world was
encyclopaedic, resulting in the opportunity to go more than one hundred feet
underground in the largest local pit. It was a necessary experience; it was
terrifying and it would have to become a part of his daily round. There had to
be another way to spend his life.

“Coal comes in layers, Mr Andrews,” his host, the
mine manager and part owner, a Mr Collins, told him, a scrawny, bandy-legged,
underfed-looking gentleman of thirty or so, a faint overlay of Irish in his
voice suggesting childhood starvation as the reason for his size. “It seems to
us – and we have been doing this for no more than two years, so we could well
be wrong, the long term costs not what they first appear to be, you might say -
but it would appear to be the case that it makes a might more sense to cut a
shaft down through as deep as we can, in this case through three of the seams,
and work out in galleries at each level at the same time. We would go deeper
yet, but the pump will lift water no more than a hundred feet or so and the
windlass to lower the people and bring the coal up gets terrible hard to turn
as it goes further down.”

The windlass was no more than a vertical wheel, much
like you might see over a well, turned by cranks on either side, and a wooden
bucket, maybe six feet across and a yard high on its sides, suspended over the
shaft on a single rope dangling from a pulley. The bucket was deeply ingrained
with coal dust, the rope not a great deal thicker than clothes-line; as Tom
watched a family of man, woman and three children of six years and upwards
climbed inside the bucket and waved a hand to a pair of twelve or thirteen year
old boys, neither with a broken voice, who released the pawl and jerkily wound
the rope down. Ten minutes later they struggled and heaved and tugged at the
handles to bring two tons of coal to the surface, swaying the bucket onto an inclined
plane and tipping the coal onto the heap below it. A group of even smaller
children were shovelling into tubs on a short trackway on the other side. It
seemed wasteful to Tom, why not tip directly into the tubs?

“Too much spills onto the trackway and the kiddies
are cheap.”

Tom nodded.

“Shall we go down, Mr Andrews?”

“In the bucket?”

“There’s no other way, sir.”

“What will happen if the rope breaks, Mr Collins?”

“Well… leaving aside the obvious, sir, as you might
say, I would think that any poor soul underneath would be getting a terrible
headache.”

It had to be possible to build in ladders at least,
Tom thought – a second shaft, one for people, one for coal, would be too
expensive, but pole ladders would cost a very few quid. He said as much to Collins.

“Why bother, Mr Andrews? You can’t lift coal up
ladders, and that’s what the pit is here for, after all, not for the comfort
and convenience of the hands that work the picks and shovels. They used to dig
sloping passages down from one level to the next so that the coal could be
dragged up in sacks or on wheelie-barrows, but a shaft is quicker, less
expensive on labour, though it’s not so good at letting the air down. If we had
an engine to work the windlass then we could put a fan on, I suppose, but it
would be far too costly – I looked at the figures, do you see, sir, and it
would cost fourteen shillings a day in coals, and a machine-man as well, close
to four hundred pounds in a year! The boys cost eighteen pence a day apiece –
it speaks for itself!”

It did indeed.

They jerked their way to the bottom, Collins making
a show of balancing himself, Tom hanging on unashamedly. At the bottom, in the
gloom, weakly lit by a single lamp and half a dozen open candles, Tom saw seven
separate heaps of coal, children at each, picking them over with their bare
hands.

“Cleaning, Mr Andrews, throwing out the shale and
the dross – I will only buy clean coal.”

“Buy?”

“Winsford, the tally-man for this level, does that
for me.” Collins pointed to a desk in the corner and a grubby, pot-bellied,
bent-over specimen of humanity leaning on a pair of sticks by it. Inspection
decided Tom that he was a man of forty or so, broken and grey-faced.

“He keeps a tally of all that goes out, making sure
each bucket’s clean and not full of dust. There was a cave-in on the first
level last year, killed his wife and three boys and the daughter and broke both
his legs – he ain’t much use but I keep him here rather than throw him onto the
Poor Law.”

“Good of you, Mr Collins. The families always work
together, do they?”

“That’s their way, Mr Andrews, I’ll show you.”
Collins was puzzled by Tom’s attitude, the apparent hostility and sarcasm of
his comments – he had understood him to be a businessman.

“The nearest stall is about eighty yards in – they
follow the seam where it is thickest and most level, so that the water can run
out to the sump where the pump sucks it up – we use an atmospheric lift, not
the old-fashioned bucket chain, you know, that’s why it’s so much quieter down
here without that rattling and banging you get in the old places.”

“How long would it take to flood the lower level if
the pump failed, Mr Collins?”

“A day or so, I expect – we shut the pump down for
no more than two or three hours at a time for maintenance, but we do that every
day. It can be a little worrying when the rain falls too heavy and for too
long.”

A breakdown was inevitable, one day – it must
happen, no machine was perfect, however thoroughly it was maintained – and then
the lower level at least would be drowned, might take weeks to clear again.

They stumbled bent-over through the murk, the floor
uneven, the roof never more than five feet high, passed half a dozen abandoned
stalls, one of them collapsed.

“Where the seam takes a dip you can’t stop the water
coming in and so you have to give up and move on.”

They came to a working face after a long three
minutes, entering a pool of weak light, two tallow dips enabling the family to
see what they were doing - just.

Two men were knelt using short-handled picks to lever
coal out of a four feet seam, hooking it back behind themselves, working slowly
but never stopping; they seemed tired, thin, ill-fed; one of them coughed every
minute or so. An old woman, grandmother at least, shovelled the coal back to
the entrance to the stall where a girl of twelve or so and an older woman, her
mother, presumably, were loading a big wheelbarrow, at least half a ton
capacity. Tom watched as the woman grasped the handles and the girl wrapped
sacking round her head and shoulders and then put on a set of straps like a
horse’s harness and bent over to pull; they staggered off through the darkness
to their coal heap and the younger children.

“Four tons a day, that’s the least I’ll accept or
they’re out; most do six. They get three bob a ton, clean and delivered to the
coal heap at pithead – that’s why Winsford keeps the tallies. They rent the
stalls – a good one like this costs eight bob a day, so they can clear three
quid a week easy, if they keep at it and don’t waste too much on lights and tools.
I own the cottages at the top and let them have one for half a crown a week –
cheap, that is. There’s a store, too, where they can buy their food on tick,
square up at the end of the week.”

A Tommy shop – Tom had heard of those, of the mill
shops and the ‘Tommy-rot’ they sold and the bills that were never quite
paid-off from one week to the next so that the workers could never leave. It
wasn’t slavery – for bondage was unlawful in England, unlike the Scots mines
where the workers were still serfs – but it wasn’t freedom either.

“Seven heaps, so seven families in all?”

“Down here, yes, Mr Andrews. Twelve in the middle,
thirty at the top. The shaft, sir, limits the number of times the bucket can go
up and down.”

Tom took a last glance about him, noted that the
coal was left uncut in pillars of about a foot square every six feet or so.

“Holding the roof up, sir – they cut them out last
thing when they abandon a stall. Some places use timber pit-props, but you
can’t always recover them, they jam in place sometimes, and that’s terrible
wasteful, so it is.”

They passed quickly through the upper, older
galleries, there being little different to see, except that the working seams
were much thinner, the best having been taken first, and the men mostly lay on
their sides on sackcloth pads, hacking away at eighteen inch faces, often two
body lengths or more in from the main stall, hopelessly trapped, crushed if
there was the least movement of the rock around them. The smell was stronger up
here, sulphur from the coal mixed with body odours from the abandoned stalls
where the miners relieved themselves.

The above ground pithead needed little inspection –
heaps of coal, drays and heavy-horse teams to shift the coal to the canal head
two miles away – it was ‘too far’ for the trackway, ‘too expensive’ to cut a
spur from the canal.

It was nearly dark when Tom left and the first
families were coming up – uniformly ragged, the children stumbling in
tiredness, several of the women heavily pregnant, at least a quarter of the miners
with hacking coughs, two he saw spitting bloodily. Tom twitched the reins, set
off slowly in his gig, looking forward to the hot water Bennet had been warned
to have ready, wondering what was for dinner, wondering as well just what he
had done in buying a coal mine.

Collins’ mine was inefficient, less profitable than
it should be and the way of working was no more than an accident waiting to
happen; sooner or later two or three of the old stalls would cave-in at the
same time and the whole of the gallery itself would collapse. Not considering
the dead and the trapped, there would be no coal coming out for weeks, in his
case no coke for Roberts after two or three days, leaving him needing to find
alternative supplies expensively on a tight market. He needed to do better, but
he also needed to keep his costs down to the level of every other producer – he
was not in the charity business. Everything must depend on the workers first of
all – this selling of stalls to families was no way to run a business – it
might be the tradition but it had to end, so it would be easiest if he got his
workers from outside the trade, bringing no expectations with them. Men drifted
in off the farms every day, ones and twos knocking on the door in the hope of a
job most mornings as the old ways changed on the land, but he wanted anything
up to a hundred hands all together.

“George? How would I go about picking up fifty or
sixty men, unskilled, all at once?”

“First off, you would have to have someplace for
them to live, Master, and food for them to eat, because they won’t have
anything of their own before first payday. Then it’s down to the docks, where
the Irish boats come in – the families are brought in by the dozen each week,
driven out of their homes and dumped aboard ship or hoping to make a better
life or running from starvation, poor sods! Sorry, Master! Put up a notice, in
English, they’re no use to us if they can’t talk civilised, and have a wagon
ready – they’ll be only too pleased to come. Mostly they’ll be good enough
workers for all you need – a few will take a wage for a week or two then drift
and some will drink too much to be any use to you or to themselves, but you
find them anywhere; most will stay and do an honest job.”

“So, they will be there when I want them, the last
thing to worry about. Clapperley is making contact with an attorney in Cornwall
to try to get an underman for me – I’ll hire on men when he comes. For the
while, I can get the place ready.”

Tom’s favoured builder, knowing from experience that
he had the ‘in’ with the Corporation that would get him the best price for
public works, was able to make an immediate start on eighty cottages in a
double terrace downslope of the mine on a piece of otherwise useless rough
ground. Single-skin brick built they would be two up, two down, depending for
their strength on the chimney stack that served each four, centrally positioned
to take the smoke from the single fireplace in each house; there would be a
privy to each pair, brick built and at least four paces from the doorway, and a
standpipe for water to its side. There was a stream not a furlong away and it
was quite cheap to build a brick header tank to give a twenty-foot fall to
provide water pressure for the taps. For most families one upstairs room would
be for parents and the baby, the other for the girls, the boys in the
downstairs and all living in the kitchen, the warmest room in the place; the
fireplace would be large enough for a pair of pothooks on either side for
kettle and stewpot together.

If they made an effort to keep them clean, they
would not become a slum immediately and in any case, from all Tom had heard,
they would be better than the mud-walled, turf-roofed cabins of a typical Irish
village.