Background

Horses and Pit Ponies have been associated with coal mining ever since coal was first extracted from the earth in commercially viable quantities. When pits were nothing literally nothing more than pits or holes in the ground, horses were used for transporting the coal away from them. As the pits sank deeper, horses were used to power the ‘gins’ and windlasses that were used to raise the coal to the surface. As the demand for coal grew and its importance to industry and the National Economy increased, so mining knowledge and technology advanced and the working coal faces moved further and further out from the pit shafts. Then horses, so much stronger than humans, were taken down the mines to provide the power for haulage that until then had been supplied by men, women and children.

The presence of the ponies underground has always been at least a matter to be commented on in extremely different ways and the subject of great debate by different people. Management, animal-lovers and underground workers all see the ponies from a different standpoint.

Management and coal owners have tried to see the ponies only as a crucial link in the process of bringing coal from the coalface to the customer. The management’s concern for the pony, therefore, centred on obtaining the maximum amount of labour for the minimum outlay. The pony represented capital investment and their care and upkeep were expenses contributing to the coal cost of winning coal and so influenced profits. This economic interest of the management in the pit ponies maybe seen as the single most influential element in the life and work of the horse underground for upon it depended every aspect of the care and conditions of work experienced by the ponies during the days of private ownership of the mines.

The general public, on the other hand, has always disregarded the economic aspects, seldom even making the connection between the ponies and the price of coal. Instead, the animal-lovers have tended only to be aware of the shameful inhumanity when, as they saw it, a noble and beautiful animal, is forced into arduous and dangerous slave labour underground in the dark.

The man in the middle was the miner. To them the pony was an involuntary workmate and was treated as such. The pony driver had no control over, and usually no knowledge of, the financial management of the pony he drove. Neither could he take the idealistic view of the public. He worked with the pony and together they were a success or failure as a working team, experiencing the same conditions and exposed to the same dangers.

The relationship between the driver and his pony was a complex one: the animal and man brought together to carry out an arduous and unpleasant task in dark and extremely dangerous conditions, the man compelled by the system to force the animal to work extremely hard, yet aware that the pony and he suffered very similar privations. The opportunity was here for the driver, roughly handled by the men he served, to handle the pony roughly in turn and there were drivers happy enough to take the opportunity.

The instance of a horse as a companion cannot be underestimated. Many of the drivers were boys, perhaps only 14 or 15 years old themselves, often converted from schoolboys to underground workers overnight. They would travel in the dark with no company but the pony for mush of his shift. It is, therefore, little wonder that they developed a great affection for each other. Many of the drivers were in the habit of taking ‘treats’ for their pony and in the rough, male work of the mine, such expressions of affection say a great deal.

In 1913 there were some 70,000 horses underground in Great Britain, the highest ever recorded according to the Government Digest of Statistics. However, even by this time their importance had started to decline. When the mines were nationalized in 1947, the N.C.B [National Coal Board] acquired some 21,000 pit ponies.