Colliers Working in the South Wales Coal Industry

Work

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:

...The collier of South Wales has to cut the coal and fill it into the trams; he has to get the rubbish, make and keep the working place safe and in order, he has to keep his stall road in travelling order, and do all the timbering necessary in the working place.

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.

Along with all the dangers of underground work the collier's task was of course, physically very hard and exhausting. This extract from a poem written in 1938 by Idris Davies describes the strain of the work and the conditions in which it was done:-

There are countless tons of rock above his head,
And gases wait in secret corners for a spark;
And his lamp shows dimly in the dust.
His leather belt is warm and moist with sweat,
And he crouches against the hanging coal,
And the pick swings to and fro,
And many beads of salty sweat play about his lips,
And trickle down the blackened skin
to the hairy tangle on the chest
the rats squeak and scamper among the unused props,
and the fungus waxes strong.

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:

The colliery starts winding coal at 7 o'clock in the morning. The men have to be down somewhere between 6 and 7 o'clock ... They come up between 3 , and 4 ... So that we get the miner in his pit clothes from about 5 in the morning until, say, half past three when he ascends the pit, and by the time he gets home and has his food and a bath and gets out of his pit clothes again, it is half past four ... 1 think it is true to say that during the whole of the winter months a miner never gets more than one or two hours of daylight on any day except Sunday ... I know when I was a growing lad after I got home in the night and after getting my food . . . feeling too tired and stiff and lifeless to get a bath ... In the morning when I was hauled out of bed, I felt it was like going to the gallows to get up at all ...

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:-

Before the days of machine mining in South Wales each collier had his own working place, in much the same way as an allotment holder had his own plot. He worked his plot in his own way without interference from anyone; it was his own little domain (territory) he worked, and he had to live on what he got out of it ... not even the manager dare tell me how I should work my place, and this was true of most colliers in South Wales.

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:-

In South Wales . . . the collier 'nurses' his work. He remains in the pit many more hours than the Northern workmen, and yet raises individually much less coal. All the rules of the pit, made by the men . . . are in restraint (restriction) of production. It is a point of honour with them not to 'race'.

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.

Evidence 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.

As far as the collier paid by piecework is concerned, there are three factors to take into account in showing how he earned his wages:-

* He was paid so much per ton of large coal that he cut.

* For other jobs that he had to do such as ripping the roof of the seam (to allow room for horses and trams to get in), gobbing (packing rubbish into the gap left where he had removed the coal) and timbering (putting up props to support the roof) he would be paid by the inch, foot, yard etc.

* The amount for the two jobs above would be added together and then a percentage would 'be added to this total to give the total wage. Whereas the amount paid for the first two jobs would be decided for each different seam in each different colliery, the percentage was the same all over the coalfield and was meant to reflect the increase in the selling price of coal above a standard price agreed between the Coal owners and. the miners in a certain year.

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.

One final point can be made on this question of wages. To really see what changes in wage rates actually meant you have to compare them with the movement of prices. Again the evidence here is very difficult to use but one historian has estimated that colliers on average were actually three times better off at the end of the 19th century than at the start, even allowing for price increases.