ColliersWork Colliers were then by no means the only type of miner, but they were the largest single group in the mine and carried out the basic job of mining the coal. The only training which a collier got was the training which he received as a young boy working as an assistant to an experienced collier-often his father or an elder brother. The collier had other tasks to carry out in addition to hewing the coal. This description by a mining engineer, T. Foster Brown, in 1883, makes clear the total work expected of the collier:
In 1900 one third of the coal seams being
worked in South Wales were below 3 feet in
height (below the level of the chair you are
probably sitting on) and even in 4 foot seams
the collier would be working on his knees and
perhaps in water.
The number of hours spent by the collier doing such hard work, per day and per week, did decrease as the 19th century went on. In the 1860s a twelve hour day, six days a week, would have been the average. By the end of the century this had fallen to about ten hours and in 1908 by Act of Parliament an eight hour day was introduced although overtime could be and still was worked. Even with this decrease the effect of long hours doing such physical work is clearly described by a miners' union leader from South Wales, Vernon Hartshorn, giving evidence to a' Government Commission in 1919:
Part of the pride which the collier had in his status came precisely from the fact that his job was one which required great strength. Colliers were indeed proud of their work and the great skill they had to show in doing it. Edmund Stonelake talking about the early 20th century, explains how this pride was to a large extent due to the great control which the collier had over his work compared to other workers:-
The fact that the collier did have this independence and control over his work is an important one to recognise and colliers in South Wales were well known for refusing to be influenced by Colliery managers and officials to speed up their work. The custom of controlling output was described by Alexander Dalziel, an official of the Coal owners Association, in 1871 as follows:-
As colliers were paid by the amount of coal they produced, this custom obviously resulted in harm to themselves. However, along with the great desire to protect their independence it was also probably a form of self-defence. In such a hard job, if you were to remain a collier for your working lifetime, then it was necessary to work at the pace, and for the number of days a week, that suited you best. Altogether, the collier was a worker who seemed to value his control over his work and the many other customs of the pit, almost as much as he did the wages he received for his work. WagesEvidence on wages
is incomplete and difficult to understand. In
the case of miner' wages the difficulties are so
great as to almost defy any understanding.
Obviously, however, they were very important to
the miner and his family. The collier was
usually a pieceworker (that is he was paid for
the amount of work he did). Other miners were
paid for a day's work of so many hours. Below
are the amounts paid each day to these workers
as a result of the Minimum Wage Act of 1912. You
can see again the great variety of mining jobs
and the variation in
paid for them.
It, not much easier to deal with the actual
amount of wages which miners received in South
Wales in the period up to 1920! Wages were
certainly going up: one historian calculates
that average wages of colliers were no more than
2 shillings and sixpence a day in 1800 but by
1914 they had risen to 9 shillings and four
pence a day. However, precisely because colliers
were pieceworkers ' averages are almost
meaningless. Conditions would vary from time to
time in the same working places, resulting in
the collier never being able to mine the same
amount of coal each day. These conditions and
the prices paid for work would also vary from
seam to seam in the same colliery and from
colliery to colliery across the coalfield. Also
there would be deductions made from the miners'
wages and he might miss a day's work through
illness, injury, strikes etc. Therefore, even
the same miner working in the same place might
earn very different amounts from week to week. |
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