Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

exhausted air is sucked out of one shaft by means of fans, and the fresh

  air enters the other of its own accord. But if left to itself the air

  will take the shortest way round, leaving the deeper workings

  unventilated; so all the short cuts have to be partitioned off.

  At the start to walk stooping is rather a joke, but it is a joke that

  soon wears off. I am handicapped by being exceptionally tall, but when

  the roof falls to four feet or less it is a tough job for anybody except

  a dwarf or a child. You not only have to bend double, you have also got

  to keep your head up all the while so as to see the beams and girders and

  dodge them when they come. You have, therefore, a constant crick in the

  neck, but this is nothing to the pain in your knees and thighs. After

  half a mile it becomes (I am not exaggerating) an unbearable agony. You

  begin to wonder whether you will ever get to the end--still more, how on

  earth you are going to get back. Your pace grows slower and slower. You

  come to a stretch of a couple of hundred yards where it is all

  exceptionally low and you have to work yourself along in a squatting

  position. Then suddenly the roof opens out to a mysterious height--scene

  of and old fall of rock, probably--and for twenty whole yards you can

  stand upright. The relief is overwhelming. But after this there is

  another low stretch of a hundred yards and then a succession of beams

  which you have to crawl under. You go down on all fours; even this is a

  relief after the squatting business. But when you come to the end of the

  beams and try to get up again, you find that your knees have temporarily

  struck work and refuse to lift you. You call a halt, ignominiously, and

  say that you would like to rest for a minute or two. Your guide (a miner)

  is sympathetic. He knows that your muscles are not the same as his. 'Only

  another four hundred yards,' he says encouragingly; you feel that he

  might as well say another four hundred miles. But finally you do somehow

  creep as far as the coal face. You have gone a mile and taken the best

  part of an hour; a miner would do it in not much more than twenty

  minutes. Having got there, you have to sprawl in the coal dust and get

  your strength back for several minutes before you can even watch the work

  in progress with any kind of intelligence.

  Coming back is worse than going, not only because you are already tired

  out but because the journey back to the shaft is slightly uphill. You get

  through the low places at the speed of a tortoise, and you have no shame

  now about calling a halt when your knees give way. Even the lamp you are

  carrying becomes a nuisance and probably when you stumble you drop it;

  whereupon, if it is a Davy lamp, it goes out. Ducking the beams becomes

  more and more of an effort, and sometimes you forget to duck. You try

  walking head down as the miners do, and then you bang your backbone. Even

  the miners bang their backbones fairly often. This is the reason why in

  very hot mines, where it is necessary to go about half naked, most of the

  miners have what they call 'buttons down the back'--that is, a permanent

  scab on each vertebra. When the track is down hill the miners sometimes

  fit their clogs, which are hollow under-neath, on to the trolley rails

  and slide down. In mines where the 'travelling' is very bad all the

  miners carry sticks about two and a half feet long, hollowed out below

  the handle. In normal places you keep your hand on top of the stick and

  in the low places you slide your hand down into the hollow. These sticks

  are a great help, and the wooden crash-helmets--a comparatively recent

  invention--are a godsend. They look like a French or Italian steel

  helmet, but they are made of some kind of pith and very light, and so

  strong, that you can take a violent blow on the head without feeling it.

  When finally you get back to the surface you have been perhaps three

  hours underground and travelled two miles, and you, are more exhausted

  than you would be by a twenty-five-mile walk above ground. For a week

  afterwards your thighs are so stiff that coming downstairs is quite a

  difficult feat; you have to work your way down in a peculiar sidelong

  manner, without bending the knees. Your miner friends notice the

  stiffness of your walk and chaff you about it. ('How'd ta like to work

  down pit, eh?' etc.) Yet even a miner who has been long away front

  work--from illness, for instance--when he comes back to the pit, suffers

  badly for the first few days.

  It may seem that I am exaggerating, though no one who has been down an

  old-fashioned pit (most of the pits in England are old-fashioned) and

  actually gone as far as the coal face, is likely to say so. But what I

  want to emphasize is this. Here is this frightful business of crawling to

  and fro, which to any normal person is a hard day's work in itself; and

  it is not part of the miner's work at all, it is merely an extra, like

  the City man's daily ride in the Tube. The miner does that journey to and

  fro, and sandwiched in between there are seven and a half hours of savage

  work. I have never travelled much more than a mile to the coal face; but

  often it is three miles, in which case I and most people other than

  coal-miners would never get there at all. This is the kind of point that

  one is always liable to miss. When you think of the coal-mine you think

  of depth, heat, darkness, blackened figures hacking at walls of coal; you

  don't think, necessarily, of those miles of creeping to and fro. There is

  the question of time, also. A miner's working shift of seven and a half

  hours does not sound very long, but one has got to add on to it at least

  an hour a day for 'travelling', more often two hours and sometimes three.

  Of course, the 'travelling' is not technically work and the miner is not

  paid for it; but it is as like work as makes no difference. It is easy to

  say that miners don't mind all this. Certainly, it is not the same for

  them as it would be for you or me. They have done it since childhood,

  they have the right muscles hardened, and they can move to and fro

  underground with a startling and rather horrible agility. A miner puts

  his head down and runs, with a long swinging stride, through places where

  I can only stagger. At the workings you see them on all fours, skipping

  round the pit props almost like dogs. But it is quite a mistake to think

  that they enjoy it. I have talked about this to scores of miners and they

  all admit that the 'travelling' is hard work; in any case when you hear

  them discussing a pit among themselves the 'travelling' is always one of

  the things they discuss. It is said that a shift always returns from work

  faster than it goes; nevertheless the miners all say that it is the

  coming away after a hard day's work, that is especially irksome. It is

  part of their work and they are equal to it, but certainly it is an

  effort. It is comparable, perhaps, to climbing a smallish mountain before

  and after your day's work.

  When you have been down in two or three pits you begin to get some grasp

  of the processes that are going on underground. (I ought to say, by the


  way, that I know nothing whatever about the technical side of mining: I

  am merely describing what I have seen.) Coal lies in thin seams between

  enormous layers of rock, so that essentially the process of getting it

  out is like scooping the central layer from a Neapolitan ice. In the old

  days the miners used to cut straight into the coal with pick and

  crowbar--a very slow job because coal, when lying in its virgin state,

  is almost as hard as rock. Nowadays the preliminary work is done by an

  electrically-driven coal-cutter, which in principle is an immensely

  tough and powerful band-saw, running horizontally instead of vertically,

  with teeth a couple of inches long and half an inch or an inch thick. It

  can move backwards or forwards on its own power, and the men operating

  it can rotate it this way or that. Incidentally it makes one of the most

  awful noises I have ever heard, and sends forth clouds of coal dust

  which make it impossible to see more than two to three feet and almost

  impossible to breathe. The machine travels along the coal face cutting

  into the base of the coal and undermining it to the depth of five feet

  or five feet and a half; after this it is comparatively easy to extract

  the coal to the depth to which it has been undermined. Where it is

  'difficult getting', however, it has also to be loosened with

  explosives. A man with an electric drill, like a rather small version of

  the drills used in street-mending, bores holes at intervals in the coal,

  inserts blasting powder, plugs it with clay, goes round the corner if

  there is one handy (he is supposed to retire to twenty-five yards

  distance) and touches off the charge with an electric current. This is

  not intended to bring the coal out, only to loosen it. Occasionally, of

  course, the charge is too powerful, and then it not only brings the coal

  out but brings the roof down as well.

  After the blasting has been done the 'fillers' can tumble the coal out,

  break it up and shovel it on to the conveyor belt. It comes out first in

  monstrous boulders which may weigh anything up to twenty tons. The

  conveyor belt shoots it on to tubs, and the tubs are shoved into the main

  road and hitched on to an endlessly revolving steel cable which drags

  them to the cage. Then they are hoisted, and at the surface the coal is

  sorted by being run over screens, and if necessary is washed as well. As

  far as possible the 'dirt'--the shale, that is--is used for making the

  roads below. All what cannot be used is sent to the surface and dumped;

  hence the monstrous 'dirt-heaps', like hideous grey mountains, which are

  the characteristic scenery of the coal areas. When the coal has been

  extracted to the depth to which the machine has cut, the coal face has

  advanced by five feet. Fresh props are put in to hold up the newly

  exposed roof, and during the next shift the conveyor belt is taken to

  pieces, moved five feet forward and re-assembled. As far as possible the

  three operations of cutting, blasting and extraction are done in three

  separate shifts, the cutting in the afternoon, the blasting at night

  (there is a law, not always kept, that forbids its being done when other

  men are working near by), and the 'filling' in the morning shift, which

  lasts from six in the morning until half past one.

  Even when you watch the process of coal-extraction you probably only

  watch it for a short time, and it is not until you begin making a few

  calculations that you realize what a stupendous task the 'fillers' are

  performing. Normally each o man has to clear a space four or five yards

  wide. The cutter has undermined the coal to the depth of five feet, so

  that if the seam of coal is three or four feet high, each man has to cut

  out, break up and load on to the belt something between seven and twelve

  cubic yards of coal. This is to say, taking a cubic yard as weighing

  twenty-seven hundred-weight, that each man is shifting coal at a speed

  approaching two tons an hour. I have just enough experience of pick and

  shovel work to be able to grasp what this means. When I am digging

  trenches in my garden, if I shift two tons of earth during the afternoon,

  I feel that I have earned my tea. But earth is tractable stuff compared

  with coal, and I don't have to work kneeling down, a thousand feet

  underground, in suffocating heat and swallowing coal dust with every

  breath I take; nor do I have to walk a mile bent double before I begin.

  The miner's job would be as much beyond my power as it would be to

  perform on a flying trapeze or to win the Grand National. I am not a

  manual labourer and please God I never shall be one, but there are some

  kinds of manual work that I could do if I had to. At a pitch I could be a

  tolerable road-sweeper or an inefficient gardener or even a tenth-rate

  farm hand. But by no conceivable amount of effort or training could I

  become a coal-miner, the work would kill me in a few weeks.

  Watching coal-miners at work, you realize momentarily what different

  universes people inhabit. Down there where coal is dug is a sort of world

  apart which one can quite easily go through life without ever hearing

  about. Probably majority of people would even prefer not to hear about

  it. Yet it is the absolutely necessary counterpart of our world above.

  Practically everything we do, from eating an ice to crossing the

  Atlantic, and from baking a loaf to writing a novel, involves the use of

  coal, directly or indirectly. For all the arts of peace coal is needed;

  if war breaks out it is needed all the more. In time of revolution the

  miner must go on working or the revolution must stop, for revolution as

  much as reaction needs coal. Whatever may be happening on the surface,

  the hacking and shovelling have got to continue without a pause, or at

  any rate without pausing for more than a few weeks at the most. In order

  that Hitler may march the goose-step, that the Pope may denounce

  Bolshevism, that the cricket crowds may assemble at Lords, that the poets

  may scratch one another's backs, coal has got to be forthcoming. But on

  the whole we are not aware of it; we all know that we 'must have coal',

  but we seldom or never remember what coal-getting involves. Here am I

  sitting writing in front of my comfortable coal fire. It is April but I

  still need a fire. Once a fortnight the coal cart drives up to the door

  and men in leather jerkins carry the coal indoors in stout sacks smelling

  of tar and shoot it clanking into the coal-hole under the stairs. It is

  only very rarely, when I make a definite mental-effort, that I connect

  this coal with that far-off labour in the mines. It is just

  'coal'--something that I have got to have; black stuff that arrives

  mysteriously from nowhere in particular, like manna except that you have

  to pay for it. You could quite easily drive a car right across the north

  of England and never once remember that hundreds of feet below the road

  you are on the miners are hacking at the coal. Yet in a sense it is the

  miners who are driving your car forward. Their lamp-lit world down there

  is as necessary to the daylight world above as the root is to the

>   flower.

  It is not long since conditions in the mines were worse than they are

  now. There are still living a few very old women who in their youth have

  worked underground, with the harness round their waists, and a chain that

  passed between their legs, crawling on all fours and dragging tubs of

  coal. They used to go on doing this even when they were pregnant. And

  even now, if coal could not be produced without pregnant women dragging

  it to and fro, I fancy we should let them do it rather than deprive

  ourselves of coal. But-most of the time, of course, we should prefer to

  forget that they were doing it. It is so with all types of manual work;

  it keeps us alive, and we are oblivious of its existence. More than

  anyone else, perhaps, the miner can stand as the type of the manual

  worker, not only because his work is so exaggeratedly awful, but also

  because it is so vitally necessary and yet so remote from our experience,

  so invisible, as it were, that we are capable of forgetting it as we

  forget the blood in our veins. In a way it is even humiliating to watch

  coal-miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own

  status as an 'intellectual' and a superior person generally. For it is

  brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only

  because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain

  superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., and the poets

  and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for

  Infants--all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to

  poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full

  of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles

  of steel.

  NORTH AND SOUTH (FROM "THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER") (1937)

  As you travel northward your eye, accustomed to the South or East, does

  not notice much difference until you are beyond Birmingham. In Coventry

  you might as well be in Finsbury Park, and the Bull Ring in Birmingham is

  not unlike Norwich Market, and between all the towns of the Midlands there

  stretches a villa-civilization indistinguishable from that of the South.

  It is only when you get a little further north, to the pottery towns and

  beyond, that you begin to encounter the real ugliness of

  industrialism--an ugliness so frightful and so arresting that you are

  obliged, as it were, to come to terms with it.

  A slag-heap is at best a hideous thing, because it is so planless and

  functionless. It is something just dumped on the earth, like the emptying

  of a giant's dust-bin. On the outskirts of the mining towns there are

  frightful landscapes where your horizon is ringed completely round by

  jagged grey mountains, and underfoot is mud and ashes and over-head the

  steel cables where tubs of dirt travel slowly across miles of country.

  Often the slag-heaps are on fire, and at night you can see the red

  rivulets of fire winding this way and that, and also the slow-moving blue

  flames of sulphur, which always seem on the point of expiring and always

  spring out again. Even when a slag-heap sinks, as it does ultimately, only

  an evil brown grass grows on it, and it retains its hummocky surface. One

  in the slums of Wigan, used as a playground, looks like a choppy sea

  suddenly frozen; 'the flock mattress', it is called locally. Even

  centuries hence when the plough drives over the places where coal was once

  mined, the sites of ancient slag-heaps will still be distinguishable from

  an aeroplane.

  I remember a winter afternoon in the dreadful environs of Wigan. All

  round was the lunar landscape of slag-heaps, and to the north, through the

  passes, as it were, between the mountains of slag, you could see the

  factory chimneys sending out their plumes of smoke. The canal path was a

  mixture of cinders and frozen mud, criss-crossed by the imprints of

  innumerable clogs, and all round, as far as the slag-heaps in the