Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty

by Bailey, Catherine

  The oldest houses have been built in the backyard of the colliery itself: rows of grim boxes identical in size, and conceived, one feels, in the mind of some satanic toymaker. The bare yards are unpaved – a pother of dust in the dry weather, a quagmire in wet. I find it impossible to think of Denaby without an inordinate impulse to seize upon the architect of this monstrosity and haul him by the nose through the horror of his own creation.

  Winter or summer, sweeping a six-square-yard area in front of the houses yielded two barrowloads full of dust or muck.

  Phyllis Holcroft, a mother of ten, lived in one of the houses. For a family of twelve, it consisted of a living room, kitchen, scullery and two bedrooms upstairs. It had no water, gas or electricity. She wrote an account of what it was like to live there.

  It’s a dirty hole, dust getting everywhere. It blows in from the backs and under the door at the front. You can never open the windows, what with the dust and the stink from the middens. There’s no garden for the children to play, only the area round the dustbins and W.C.s. There’s damp walls, damp floors, walls and floors leaving each other. It’s a wonder I don’t go off my head with worry keeping the place. There’s ten of us in here it’s a mercy the middle lads are on nights at the pit. Where would the young uns sleep besides? There’s four of them in the back room at the top. The two lads take the bed when they come off the shift. The girls – our Sheila and our May – sleep with us. We’re always ill what with sleeping altogether all crowded in.

  ‘People from the other places roundabout looked down on you,’ remembered Robert Shepherd, a miner from Denaby. ‘The houses were lacking in many amenities, the streets were very close together and the sanitation was poor.’

  The houses cost 5 shillings a week to rent, the company deducting the money from the miners’ wages to ensure they never got behind with the rent. They had no running water: there were no lavatories or sinks. One tap served each street. All household rubbish, including human waste, went into ‘middens’ – open-sewer trenches.

  The middens were in the ‘backs’, the name given to the narrow lane that ran behind the terraces – the area where the children played and the women hung out their washing. The back door of each house opened directly on to the lane. Opposite, at a distance of less than five yards, was a long low building, where there was a lavatory for every house. The midden trenches ran underneath it.

  ‘Each midden served a WC on either side so that with the cinders from the fires continually piled into this and a convenient shovel, any person using the WC on either side, could straight away be able to cover their tracks, (so to speak) by shovelling down sufficient cinders on to the disgusting trench below,’ remembered Tom Hibbard, a miner living in Denaby. ‘We always had to make sure that our “midden” had plenty of cinders available. We had our own doors with just a board with a central hole inside. I know I was always glad to get out away from the flies that were everywhere.’

  The middens were emptied by hand. Once a week, the ‘nightsoil’ men, armed with shovels, would pile the muck from the trenches into a sewage cart, releasing a noxious smell that lingered for days. Epidemics of typhoid, enteric fever, diphtheria and other faeces-borne diseases were common in the village; unsurprisingly, infant mortality rates in 1899 were 250 in every 1,000.

  Visiting Denaby at the turn of the century, a Church minister wrote:

  The ruin of the children is especially sad. The first thing that impressed me when walking down the main street at Denaby was the large number of children with sore eyes. I saw more ophthalmic girls in the street in twenty minutes than I see in the slums of London in twenty days. ‘We’ve had an epidemic of it about for some months,’ people in the village told me, as though that explains everything. Yes, but why do epidemics of ophthalmia come? Because the home life is defective and because children are not properly and individually cared for. ‘It’s the dirt as does it,’ one man frankly told me.

  The minister was appalled by the company’s ‘despotic powers’, which he believed caused the miners to drown their sorrows in drink. The entire village was owned and run by the company: the houses, the shops, the church, the pub. It knew how much its miners drank, whether they were religious, which of their children were causing trouble on the streets, how much individual families spent on food and whether their credit status was good or bad at the local shop. It even had its own police force to round up children playing truant from school, and drunken miners after closing time at the pub. Owning the only public house in the village gave the company a profitable monopoly over drinking. As one miner commented ruefully to a colliery policeman who had taken charge of him for being drunk and disorderly, ‘This is a funny place, first we go to the pit office to get the money, then the Company gives us a place where we can pay the money back to it, and then, when the money’s gone, it provides you to take care of us.’

  ‘Care’ did not feature in the company’s equation. It did not need to. In 1903, a coal owner had few statutory obligations. Pensions, health benefits, compensation for deaths and injuries in the workplace were optional. Wages, too, were optional; coal owners were not legally bound to pay a minimum, or even a weekly, wage. Miners across the country were paid piecemeal for the amount of coal they extracted. When trade was bad, the Denaby and Cadeby Main Collieries Company, like many other coal owners, closed the mines, or put its miners on short-time, meaning the colliers earned less, or nothing. Even the weather had a bearing on take-home pay. The main market for Denaby’s coal was Eastern Europe and Russia. If the Baltic Sea froze, the pits would stop; no wages were paid until the sea thawed.

  At the turn of the twentieth century, the Welfare State was not there to catch a man when he fell. The miner’s financial security, the quality of his life, his very existence, was entirely dependent on the character of the owner of the pit.

  Death, more than anything else, was the hallmark of a coal owner. In the years leading up to the First World War, over 1,000 men were killed annually in Britain’s coalmines. In the majority of cases, so violent was the way of dying that there was little left of the miner. His body was scraped off the walls of a tunnel, or swept from the floor, and put in pieces into a sack.

  Arthur Eaglestone, the miner at the Fitzwilliams’ New Stubbin colliery, described the first time he witnessed a death underground:

  He was quite dead when we found him – squashed by a fall of stone. The smell of blood was everywhere, a slaughterhouse reek, and sickening. His body seemed to be almost completely covered by the tremendous boulder that had fallen. Only one hand was visible and the upper portion of his forehead – nothing else. His mate wept openly, speaking sometimes with a strangled incoherence, a clucking babble of words, but no one took much notice, for the man was dead enough, and the only help we wanted was in rolling the stone away. If trembling went for anything we were all goosey. I didn’t want to stay. I didn’t want to look on IT! My heart sickened at the thought of all that mangled flesh. So craven of spirit I slid my lamp around my thigh, seeking comfort in the shadow that my body threw upon the rock.

  ‘If the jack’s not coming,’ said Morgan, ‘we’ll try again. All together … now then … heave ho!’ We gathered in, crowding against the protuberance like Rugby players in a football scrum. Our fingers touched the hard rock gingerly at first, as though it held some sacred quality, but Morgan’s harsh controlling voice with ‘Now then, no playing! put to it … put to it! … all ready? … heave!’ inspired us to lofty physical effort … and so we pushed … the stone lifted. ‘Shove the block in,’ hissed Morgan, ‘quick! … now … heave! … ah!’

  Oh! he was there all right. The first thing that I saw was the sloppy pool of dirt that was his body. And then his face all coal and wax in the midst of which two eyes wide open, staring, shone strangely golden in the swinging lamplight, with the same illumination that a cat’s have, in firelight, or sunlight.

  And then again in thick and cloying waves, the stench of blood … the indrawn sighing of the res
cuers … the thin insistent hissing of the face itself … S-S-S-S-S.

  The hiss, from the coalface, came from gas, a serial killer underground.

  Mortality rates depended on conditions at the pit. No pit was the same. There were hot pits, wet pits, cold pits. The miners likened them to a woman: each had its own particular bad and fickle moods, the ‘she-devil’ waiting to take her revenge in human lives.

  Denaby, 422 yards deep, and Cadeby, 118 yards deeper, were hot pits. It was estimated that the mean rate of increase in temperature was 1 degree Fahrenheit for every forty-six feet in depth. On a warm summer’s day, the temperature in the tunnels rose to well over 100 degrees.

  The ‘she-devil’ at Denaby was gas. The deeper the pit, the greater the danger from firedamp, chokedamp or blackdamp, the names the miners gave to the natural gases that lurked between the strata of rock and coal.

  Firedamp could blow a man to pieces or bury him under a fall of stone. Chokedamp, released into the atmosphere following an explosion, could suffocate him. If the rescue party failed to arrive, death by chokedamp was slow. Michael Smith, trapped with forty miners on the wrong side of a roof fall in the Seaham explosion of 1880 – a disaster that claimed 164 lives – had hours to scratch a message to his wife on his tin water bottle before he died. His death was a double tragedy: the couple had recently lost their youngest child:

  Dear Margaret there were 40 all together at 7 am. Some were singing Hymns, but my thoughts were on my little Michael that him and I would meet in heaven at the same time. Oh Dear Wife, God save you and the children and pray for me Dear Wife. Farewell, my last thoughts are about you and the children, be shure and learn the children to pray for me. Oh what an awfull position we are in.

  In 1903, Denaby and Cadeby were among the deepest and most dangerous pits in the country; in the previous decade, thirty-nine miners had been killed, compared to five, for example, at the Fitzwilliams’ two collieries.

  The man Arthur Eaglestone pulled from under a stone was lucky to work for the Fitzwilliams. The family paid compensation to the widows of miners killed at their pits; they were also given a pension and subsidized housing. At Denaby, it was company policy to evict the dead miner’s family from their house within weeks of bereavement. ‘Those days, the only form of compensation a miner had was a club-round by the other workmen,’ George Cheshire, a miner at Denaby, recalled, ‘and if they didn’t lose a day’s work the company put in the same amount as that collected.’

  This meagre gesture was brutal in its deliberate flouting of a long-cherished tradition. Historically, after a fatal accident, as a mark of respect to the dead man and his family, the miners had stopped work and come out of the pits. In the early 1900s, when the average wage at Denaby was 28 shillings a week,* the widows’ collections rarely amounted to more than £10 or £12. The company lost thousands of pounds when the miners stopped the pit, yet still it refused to pay out compensation for a death; it knew that its offer to match the ‘club-round’ would force the men to continue their shift.

  By default, the miners had their own barbaric practices. Such was the imperative of compensation, however small, that at Denaby and Cadeby Main, and at other collieries in the South Yorkshire coalfields, a dead man sometimes died twice. No coal owner paid out compensation, however small, to the widow of a man who died a natural death underground. For the sake of their wives and children, the miners mutilated the bodies of heart attack victims, or men who had died from some other natural cause. ‘Well, he was dead now and there was to be no compensation,’ wrote Jim Bullock, from Bowers Row colliery, ‘so three or four of such a man’s mates would pull him under an old prop which supported a bad piece of stone. They would lay him there, knock the prop away and let the muck bury him. He was then taken out killed. A compensation would have to be paid.’

  In the absence of a benevolent coal owner, jeopardy and uncertainty were the keynotes of a collier’s existence. The dangerous conditions in the workplace, the poor sanitation at home, the lack of available medical expertise, hovered over his family life. He lived on a roller-coaster, never knowing what he would be earning the following week. He could be injured, or ill. Rheumatism or nystagmus, or any one of a number of illnesses miners were prone to, might stop him from working. The pit might close, or lay him off, or put him on short time. In coal-mining villages across England at the turn of the twentieth century, so frequent was short-time working, that it was customary for a flag to be run up, or a bellman sent round every evening, to announce whether or not the pit would be operating the following morning.

  At Denaby, for 3,500 miners and their families, the roller-coaster was about to dip.

  At 9.30 on the morning of 6 January 1903, the column of 200 policemen marched out of the main square in the village, heading for Firbeck Street, the first of ten rows of terraced housing they were under orders to clear that day.

  A grim procession rumbled edgily through the narrow streets. The roads into the village, wet from the previous day’s rain, had been churned to a bog by scores of carts and drays, sent in sympathy by tradesmen from the neighbouring towns of Mexborough, Conisbrough and Doncaster, to help the miners move the contents of their homes. The wagons now formed up in single file behind the columns of policemen, followed by thousands of villagers.

  The police cordoned off Firbeck Street at both ends. A guard of mounted officers and a dozen men on foot formed a barrier against the crowds. The side streets and the entrances to the ‘backs’ were also guarded. At the edge of the cordon, a lone organ-grinder played ‘I Hear Thee Speak of a Better Land’.

  A number of houses were already empty; their owners had ‘flit’ to avoid the shame of eviction. Sprigs of Christmas holly still hung in some of the windows, and in others the occupants had left painted signs: ‘Not Lost, But Gone Before’ and ‘Happy New Year’; some simply read ‘Gone For Ever’.

  Starting at the top of Firbeck Street, the police worked their way down. At every house the procedure was the same: the miners and their families were asked to stand to one side while their possessions were removed from their homes. The heavier items were lowered down ladders from the upper windows by chains of policemen. Linoleum was torn from the floors, pictures taken from the walls, beds unfastened, the babies’ cots and dolls bundled out. By midday, the streets resembled an impromptu open-air market; household effects were strewn along the length of them: mattresses, beds, chairs, tables, sofas, fenders, clocks, sewing and wringing machines, piled in heaps.

  Reporters from local and national newspapers stood with the miners and their families, watching the evictions. ‘There goes my beautiful Turkey carpet,’ one man was overheard to say as a policeman deposited a tattered old hearthrug, woven from bits of old rags, on the road in front of him. On Annersley Street, one of the miners took on the role of auctioneer, ringing a handbell, shouting out inflated prices for the meagre possessions littering the streets. But despite the black humour, the distress – particularly among the women – as one reporter observed, was acute:

  Their eyes were strangely big and their white faces wore a look like that of the hunted hare when the dogs are on it. ‘It isn’t the police fault,’ they said, ‘they’re only servants who’ve got to do as they’re bid. It’s him,’ and their eyes went in the direction of the handsome colliery offices where the all-powerful managing director worked. One would break down and, with a sudden turn, would seek a corner alone in a still open house. In a minute or two she would come out again, her eyes red and swollen, but walking proudly as though to defy those who accused her of crying, and the men stood quietly whispering to one another.

  On the first day of the evictions, the police cleared eighty-two families out of their homes. The expected trouble did not materialize; as one miner was heard to say, ‘We have been quiet so far, and it will be better to be quiet now.’ That night, the temperature in Denaby dropped 10 degrees. Hard frosts and snow were forecast. A further 650 families were to be turned out on to the streets over the ne
xt three days.

  The evicted families had to find somewhere to go. For many it was difficult. Few had relatives in the area. Most of Denaby’s inhabitants were immigrants who had come to the village in the last decades of the nineteenth century from Ireland, and from worn-out pits in the North Staffordshire and Shropshire coalfields. Many of the families – like Ernest Godber’s – were large: ‘My father moved to Denaby from Derbyshire. “There were fourteen of us altogether, mother, father and fourteen children. They didn’t all come to Denaby though, one got run over with a steam-roller, and one got shot, doing summat he shouldn’t a done I expect – that were afore I were one year old, but we heard about it anyways.’ The Godbers were lucky to find accommodation at a shopkeeper’s house in Mexborough. Others too crowded into small cottages belonging to friends in the neighbourhood. One woman, the mother of seven children, moved into a house where there were nine children already.

  But of the 3,500 evicted, there were 267 men, women and children who had nowhere to go. They were looked after by the Reverend Jesse Wilson, Denaby’s Methodist minister. A hundred and forty of them were housed at his chapel and at the school he ran; the remainder were put up in local authority tents erected in fields on the edge of the village.

  Jesse Wilson was a miner’s son who had grown up in the Yorkshire pit village of Castleford, south of Leeds. Before going to Denaby, he had preached for seventeen years in the Welsh valleys. There was a strong Methodist tradition in the pit villages in south Yorkshire, as there was throughout England’s coalfields. The Church of England clergy owed their livings to the landowners and coal owners who were careful about the political outlook of the person they appointed to look after the souls and spiritual wellbeing of their miners. To be a Methodist was a mark of independence: as well as spiritual solace, it offered the miners a means of unguarded self-expression and conferred a sense of self-respect. Wilson’s strong sympathy for the families sprang from his own experiences as a child. On the Sunday following the evictions, speaking from the pulpit, he told his depleted congregation why he wanted to help them: