The Privateersman (A Poor Man at the Gate Series Book 1)

by Andrew Wareham

  “And maybe he’s too big for his boots? Find out, George – he’s an intelligent man, let’s use his brain before he gets up to mischief with it. What about our quarryman, do you think I could talk to him about coal?”

  “Shouldn’t think so, Master – open quarrying be what he knows, not underground work.”

  From the works he made a rushed visit to Clapperley, the indispensable agent whose knowledge of the local business world was encyclopaedic, resulting in the opportunity to go more than one hundred feet underground in the largest local pit. It was a necessary experience; it was terrifying and it would have to become a part of his daily round. There had to be another way to spend his life.

  “Coal comes in layers, Mr Andrews,” his host, the mine manager and part owner, a Mr Collins, told him, a scrawny, bandy-legged, underfed-looking gentleman of thirty or so, a faint overlay of Irish in his voice suggesting childhood starvation as the reason for his size. “It seems to us – and we have been doing this for no more than two years, so we could well be wrong, the long term costs not what they first appear to be, you might say - but it would appear to be the case that it makes a might more sense to cut a shaft down through as deep as we can, in this case through three of the seams, and work out in galleries at each level at the same time. We would go deeper yet, but the pump will lift water no more than a hundred feet or so and the windlass to lower the people and bring the coal up gets terrible hard to turn as it goes further down.”

  The windlass was no more than a vertical wheel, much like you might see over a well, turned by cranks on either side, and a wooden bucket, maybe six feet across and a yard high on its sides, suspended over the shaft on a single rope dangling from a pulley. The bucket was deeply ingrained with coal dust, the rope not a great deal thicker than clothes-line; as Tom watched a family of man, woman and three children of six years and upwards climbed inside the bucket and waved a hand to a pair of twelve or thirteen year old boys, neither with a broken voice, who released the pawl and jerkily wound the rope down. Ten minutes later they struggled and heaved and tugged at the handles to bring two tons of coal to the surface, swaying the bucket onto an inclined plane and tipping the coal onto the heap below it. A group of even smaller children were shovelling into tubs on a short trackway on the other side. It seemed wasteful to Tom, why not tip directly into the tubs?

  “Too much spills onto the trackway and the kiddies are cheap.”

  Tom nodded.

  “Shall we go down, Mr Andrews?”

  “In the bucket?”

  “There’s no other way, sir.”

  “What will happen if the rope breaks, Mr Collins?”

  “Well… leaving aside the obvious, sir, as you might say, I would think that any poor soul underneath would be getting a terrible headache.”

  It had to be possible to build in ladders at least, Tom thought – a second shaft, one for people, one for coal, would be too expensive, but pole ladders would cost a very few quid. He said as much to Collins.

  “Why bother, Mr Andrews? You can’t lift coal up ladders, and that’s what the pit is here for, after all, not for the comfort and convenience of the hands that work the picks and shovels. They used to dig sloping passages down from one level to the next so that the coal could be dragged up in sacks or on wheelie-barrows, but a shaft is quicker, less expensive on labour, though it’s not so good at letting the air down. If we had an engine to work the windlass then we could put a fan on, I suppose, but it would be far too costly – I looked at the figures, do you see, sir, and it would cost fourteen shillings a day in coals, and a machine-man as well, close to four hundred pounds in a year! The boys cost eighteen pence a day apiece – it speaks for itself!”

  It did indeed.

  They jerked their way to the bottom, Collins making a show of balancing himself, Tom hanging on unashamedly. At the bottom, in the gloom, weakly lit by a single lamp and half a dozen open candles, Tom saw seven separate heaps of coal, children at each, picking them over with their bare hands.

  “Cleaning, Mr Andrews, throwing out the shale and the dross – I will only buy clean coal.”

  “Buy?”

  “Winsford, the tally-man for this level, does that for me.” Collins pointed to a desk in the corner and a grubby, pot-bellied, bent-over specimen of humanity leaning on a pair of sticks by it. Inspection decided Tom that he was a man of forty or so, broken and grey-faced.

  “He keeps a tally of all that goes out, making sure each bucket’s clean and not full of dust. There was a cave-in on the first level last year, killed his wife and three boys and the daughter and broke both his legs – he ain’t much use but I keep him here rather than throw him onto the Poor Law.”

  “Good of you, Mr Collins. The families always work together, do they?”

  “That’s their way, Mr Andrews, I’ll show you.” Collins was puzzled by Tom’s attitude, the apparent hostility and sarcasm of his comments – he had understood him to be a businessman.

  “The nearest stall is about eighty yards in – they follow the seam where it is thickest and most level, so that the water can run out to the sump where the pump sucks it up – we use an atmospheric lift, not the old-fashioned bucket chain, you know, that’s why it’s so much quieter down here without that rattling and banging you get in the old places.”

  “How long would it take to flood the lower level if the pump failed, Mr Collins?”

  “A day or so, I expect – we shut the pump down for no more than two or three hours at a time for maintenance, but we do that every day. It can be a little worrying when the rain falls too heavy and for too long.”

  A breakdown was inevitable, one day – it must happen, no machine was perfect, however thoroughly it was maintained – and then the lower level at least would be drowned, might take weeks to clear again.

  They stumbled bent-over through the murk, the floor uneven, the roof never more than five feet high, passed half a dozen abandoned stalls, one of them collapsed.

  “Where the seam takes a dip you can’t stop the water coming in and so you have to give up and move on.”

  They came to a working face after a long three minutes, entering a pool of weak light, two tallow dips enabling the family to see what they were doing - just.

  Two men were knelt using short-handled picks to lever coal out of a four feet seam, hooking it back behind themselves, working slowly but never stopping; they seemed tired, thin, ill-fed; one of them coughed every minute or so. An old woman, grandmother at least, shovelled the coal back to the entrance to the stall where a girl of twelve or so and an older woman, her mother, presumably, were loading a big wheelbarrow, at least half a ton capacity. Tom watched as the woman grasped the handles and the girl wrapped sacking round her head and shoulders and then put on a set of straps like a horse’s harness and bent over to pull; they staggered off through the darkness to their coal heap and the younger children.

  “Four tons a day, that’s the least I’ll accept or they’re out; most do six. They get three bob a ton, clean and delivered to the coal heap at pithead – that’s why Winsford keeps the tallies. They rent the stalls – a good one like this costs eight bob a day, so they can clear three quid a week easy, if they keep at it and don’t waste too much on lights and tools. I own the cottages at the top and let them have one for half a crown a week – cheap, that is. There’s a store, too, where they can buy their food on tick, square up at the end of the week.”

  A Tommy shop – Tom had heard of those, of the mill shops and the ‘Tommy-rot’ they sold and the bills that were never quite paid-off from one week to the next so that the workers could never leave. It wasn’t slavery – for bondage was unlawful in England, unlike the Scots mines where the workers were still serfs – but it wasn’t freedom either.

  “Seven heaps, so seven families in all?”

  “Down here, yes, Mr Andrews. Twelve in the middle, thirty at the top. The shaft, sir, limits the number of times the bucket can go up and down.”

 
; Tom took a last glance about him, noted that the coal was left uncut in pillars of about a foot square every six feet or so.

  “Holding the roof up, sir – they cut them out last thing when they abandon a stall. Some places use timber pit-props, but you can’t always recover them, they jam in place sometimes, and that’s terrible wasteful, so it is.”

  They passed quickly through the upper, older galleries, there being little different to see, except that the working seams were much thinner, the best having been taken first, and the men mostly lay on their sides on sackcloth pads, hacking away at eighteen inch faces, often two body lengths or more in from the main stall, hopelessly trapped, crushed if there was the least movement of the rock around them. The smell was stronger up here, sulphur from the coal mixed with body odours from the abandoned stalls where the miners relieved themselves.

  The above ground pithead needed little inspection – heaps of coal, drays and heavy-horse teams to shift the coal to the canal head two miles away – it was ‘too far’ for the trackway, ‘too expensive’ to cut a spur from the canal.

  It was nearly dark when Tom left and the first families were coming up – uniformly ragged, the children stumbling in tiredness, several of the women heavily pregnant, at least a quarter of the miners with hacking coughs, two he saw spitting bloodily. Tom twitched the reins, set off slowly in his gig, looking forward to the hot water Bennet had been warned to have ready, wondering what was for dinner, wondering as well just what he had done in buying a coal mine.

  Collins’ mine was inefficient, less profitable than it should be and the way of working was no more than an accident waiting to happen; sooner or later two or three of the old stalls would cave-in at the same time and the whole of the gallery itself would collapse. Not considering the dead and the trapped, there would be no coal coming out for weeks, in his case no coke for Roberts after two or three days, leaving him needing to find alternative supplies expensively on a tight market. He needed to do better, but he also needed to keep his costs down to the level of every other producer – he was not in the charity business. Everything must depend on the workers first of all – this selling of stalls to families was no way to run a business – it might be the tradition but it had to end, so it would be easiest if he got his workers from outside the trade, bringing no expectations with them. Men drifted in off the farms every day, ones and twos knocking on the door in the hope of a job most mornings as the old ways changed on the land, but he wanted anything up to a hundred hands all together.

  “George? How would I go about picking up fifty or sixty men, unskilled, all at once?”

  “First off, you would have to have someplace for them to live, Master, and food for them to eat, because they won’t have anything of their own before first payday. Then it’s down to the docks, where the Irish boats come in – the families are brought in by the dozen each week, driven out of their homes and dumped aboard ship or hoping to make a better life or running from starvation, poor sods! Sorry, Master! Put up a notice, in English, they’re no use to us if they can’t talk civilised, and have a wagon ready – they’ll be only too pleased to come. Mostly they’ll be good enough workers for all you need – a few will take a wage for a week or two then drift and some will drink too much to be any use to you or to themselves, but you find them anywhere; most will stay and do an honest job.”

  “So, they will be there when I want them, the last thing to worry about. Clapperley is making contact with an attorney in Cornwall to try to get an underman for me – I’ll hire on men when he comes. For the while, I can get the place ready.”

  Tom’s favoured builder, knowing from experience that he had the ‘in’ with the Corporation that would get him the best price for public works, was able to make an immediate start on eighty cottages in a double terrace downslope of the mine on a piece of otherwise useless rough ground. Single-skin brick built they would be two up, two down, depending for their strength on the chimney stack that served each four, centrally positioned to take the smoke from the single fireplace in each house; there would be a privy to each pair, brick built and at least four paces from the doorway, and a standpipe for water to its side. There was a stream not a furlong away and it was quite cheap to build a brick header tank to give a twenty-foot fall to provide water pressure for the taps. For most families one upstairs room would be for parents and the baby, the other for the girls, the boys in the downstairs and all living in the kitchen, the warmest room in the place; the fireplace would be large enough for a pair of pothooks on either side for kettle and stewpot together.

  If they made an effort to keep them clean, they would not become a slum immediately and in any case, from all Tom had heard, they would be better than the mud-walled, turf-roofed cabins of a typical Irish village.

  The building would take three months, at a cost of a little more than three thousands, extra cash that would have to come from the speculative pot, which was a pity but could not be avoided. Typical rent, Tom discovered, was four bob a week, which for eighty places amounted to… £832 in a year, on three thousands, that was, quick scribbling and crossings out said a mite more than twenty-seven per cent! Perhaps he should give some thought to speculative building next year.

  Building the coke ovens took much the same time as the houses, and the canal spur was no more than a four week job – everything would be ready for spring.

  Three months passed but no underground manager appeared – the word from Cornwall was that the bulk of skilled men had gone to the coal in South Wales and the rest had crossed the Atlantic to mines in Upper Canada and the States. None had wished to go ‘foreign’ to the north of England, and Lancashire was especially anathema; enquiry divulged that the Cornishmen had risen against the Crown a while before, a mere two or three centuries back, with the assurance of aid from the North West, which aid had never materialised – they had long memories in the West Country.

  Tom recalled Joseph’s words of five years before – it was all new, there were no experts, merely a few men who had been doing it for a longer time and knew a bit more than the others. What they had learnt, he could, must, indeed.

  He bought picks, shovels and wheelbarrows and a mile of wrought iron rails for a trackway; Roberts ran cast iron wheels and axles and frames for tubs and he bought deals to make the sides for two dozen. Wincing at the outrageous cost, he bought a ship load of Canadian fir for pit props and sleepers for the trackway. Finally, all in place, money spent and no revenue coming in, he could delay no longer, set out for the docks to find his labour.

  There was, yet again, famine in Ireland, in the part called the Midland Counties this year; there was starvation in one part or another most years from all he could gather – not enough rain, or too much at the wrong time, and the potatoes failed – they were not a native crop to Ireland and the conditions were only almost right for them. The potatoes had become the food crop for almost all of the poor and they had only pots for boiling them over open fires; when the spuds failed they could not eat, even if given flour as an alternative, for they had no ovens and no knowledge of dough making, of kneading and proving either. The old died quickly and the young took disease and followed more slowly; the survivors tramped in search of work and reached the cities where there was a little in the way of poor relief until they became a burden on the funds and were bundled aboard ships, mostly to be dumped at dockside in Liverpool or Bristol or Cardiff within a couple of days. A few of the ‘lucky’ ones ended up in Boston or New York, half of their family typically dying on the way, most often to end up despised in the slums there.

  There was little for the Irish in Liverpool; the chapels reluctantly performed good works amongst the Papists and supplied a roof and a blanket and a couple of scanty meals a day; the corporation, not wanting disease to spread, provided a little as well and pushed them out on the road to the Welsh mines as quickly as they could. The offer of work brought a swarm of hungry, pleading men and women to surround Tom.

  For lack of any
organisation he had gone to the warehouse where a harassed Methodist preacher was providing bowls of stew with the assistance of some of the ladies of his congregation. The nearly exhausted minister had fallen on his shoulders, blessing him for bringing some release from his burden, had happily handed the load over.

  “I need eighty men, sir, no more – I have eighty cottages to put them in, and you must have three hundred here, reverend. They must be strong men who can wield pick and shovel, but there will be work for the women and older children as well.”

  “Families then, Mr Andrews, no single men. None of the sick or enfeebled.”

  “The work would kill them, sir – it is hard labour I am offering, but a roof and a full belly and a living wage besides.”

  The minister, a firm believer in salvation through work, had no difficulty with this and was able to make the bulk of the choice for Tom. Some of the men and women had made an effort, helping with the cleaning, tending the cooking fires, nursing the sick, scrounging firewood, and these had come to his attention as worthy souls – a pity they were inveterate Papists, but they might yet save themselves – and he in turn recommended them to Tom. They let the chosen fifty make up the numbers with relatives and acquaintances from their home villages, it seeming likely that they would look after each other and work together more successfully than a random collection of strangers might. They loaded up onto six wagons and set off in holiday mood, their time of tribulation perhaps coming to an end.

  They gawped at the big red-brick buildings of the town, the great mass of people in the streets, the shops for the rich people, chattering and nudging each other, dropping silent in awe as they pulled up at a market on the outskirts of the industrial area near the old village of Anfield. There were at least a hundred stalls, mostly foodstuffs.