Collier Boys in the South Wales Coal Industry

Going to Work

The journey the young lads might have made to work would perhaps have been a fairly short walk. However, some miners would have a fair distance to travel to the colliery. Will Paynter, describes the journey from his home in Trebanog to work in 1917:-

There were no buses or other transport to take us the 2 and ½ miles or so from Trebanog to the Coedely Pit … On the morning shift we were raised from bed at about 4:20am to dress and walk to the pit, collect the pit lamp and be down the pit before 6am. This shift would start to ascend [come up] at 2pm which meant, with the uphill walk we had, getting home at around 4pm. … It was a state of affairs in which we were living only to work.

This first harsh fact of the hardness of the miner’s life would not yet have affected the young schoolboys who might have looked forward to their first day in the pit with the same eagerness of Joseph Keating :-

All the boys in school looked forward with longing to the day when they would be allowed to begin work … my happiness was not so much in leaving school as the idea of actually going underground. We saw the pit boys coming home … They adopted an air of superiority to mere schoolboys … They had experienced danger … They associated with big men and wonderful horses. They earned 6 shillings and nine pence every week … For me, the prospect of going to work in the mine contained more glittering romance than if its black mouth were the entrance to Ali Baba’s cave of gold.

Keating goes on to say about his first day in the Pit in 1883:-

I was up at half past five … My mother put my food in a small tine box and filled a ‘tin’ jack with cold tea, and said, 'May the Lord bring you safe home! as I left the house. I had on my duck trousers, pieces of string around below the knee known as Yorks, and my hobnailed working boots. I went to the pit-head in an ecstasy, with a thousand men and boys ...

Along with his ‘water-jack’ for fluid and ‘Tommy-box’ for food, the tools that the young miner would require, as well as his lamp were:-

hatchet, powder tin and coal-boxes; boring-machines and drills and several other things. He valued them at eight pounds, and he was forced to buy them himself. Nearly every week he had to buy a new handle of some sort … so that his wages were not all clear benefit...