spontaneously combusting, whether he ever suffered from photophobia (dread of the light), or the strange and awful miner’s nystagmus, the chief symptom of which is a rotary oscillation of the eyeballs, or any of the other ailments that sometimes afflicted colliers. I don’t even know how old John Briers was when he ventured underground for the first time. I just know that his life progressedin the usual fashion for a working man in this time at this place. In 1865, at age twenty-three, he married Ellen Margaret Pollard at St. George’s church in Wigan. Four years later, they were living in St. Helens.
By the time the 1881 census was taken they were a family of eight. The patriarch, at forty-one, was still listed as a collier. The second-eldest boy, John William, now ten, was identified as a “scholar,” which implied that things were going well enough in the household that, for now, he didn’t have to join the 30,000 children under the age of fifteen working in British mines. Number 50 Chorley Lane, where they lived, was a plain, terraced home with two gable walls, surrounded by a garden. Not that home ownership made a measurable difference in a family’s quality of life in eighteenth-century Chorley; freehold miners’ homes were probably just as damp, dank and filthy as the worst coal company shack. Polluted water supplies and barbaric waste disposal meant the rapid spread of digestive complaints like diarrhea, and more serious infectious diseases like typhoid, scarlet fever, measles and whooping cough. Infant mortality was heartbreakingly high.
The cramped, crowded nature of virtually every miner’s home—by the mid-nineteenth century five people was the norm in a house with only a couple of rooms—made day-to-day life maddeningly difficult. Beds were often located in the living room. Privacy was impossible: siblings slept in the same bed; the father and any sons and male tenants who worked in the pit bathed in a tin basin in the living room. Isolation in the case of illness was out of the question. In 1898, Benson recounts, a doctor called on a mining family in Derbyshire, in the middle of England. He found that the mother, “in a pathetic attempt to prevent the spread of infection in her overcrowded home,” had placed three children with scarlet fever in one end of a bed and three more with typhoid in the other.
Considering the conditions at home, maybe they welcomed rising at 2:45 a.m. to leave the house by 3:15, then walking for half an hour to be at the pit by quarter to four. Long gone were the old bell pits—little more than deep wells opened to provide access to the coal, in which women and children humped the coal up ladders to the surface. Drift mines, driven into the side of a hill, allowed the miners to follow the seams farther underground. When deeper mines were needed to provide coal to fuel the factories that were changing the world, the room-and-pillar system—a network of work spaces carved into the seam with columns of left-over coal supporting the mine roof—held sway.
John William Briers’s career, like his father’s, probably followed the normal arc: starting out as a trapper boy opening and closing the ventilation doors to allow men and coal to pass without disturbing the airflow through the workings; moving up the food chain a bit to perhaps becoming a “putter,” pulling huge tubs that could contain a quarter of a ton of coal out to the main roadway. Around eighteen or nineteen he would have joined the ranks of hewers—those who actually dug coal with picks and shovels, the most aristocratic of colliery occupations. At this point his future would have been preordained: the next thirty years as a pick-and-shovel man; then, if he was still able, finishing out his days above the surface, among the women and children, doing less physically demanding work.
Above ground, despite the stereotype of the day, not every miner hustled to the pub once the end-of-shift whistle blew to
By the time the 1881 census was taken they were a family of eight. The patriarch, at forty-one, was still listed as a collier. The second-eldest boy, John William, now ten, was identified as a “scholar,” which implied that things were going well enough in the household that, for now, he didn’t have to join the 30,000 children under the age of fifteen working in British mines. Number 50 Chorley Lane, where they lived, was a plain, terraced home with two gable walls, surrounded by a garden. Not that home ownership made a measurable difference in a family’s quality of life in eighteenth-century Chorley; freehold miners’ homes were probably just as damp, dank and filthy as the worst coal company shack. Polluted water supplies and barbaric waste disposal meant the rapid spread of digestive complaints like diarrhea, and more serious infectious diseases like typhoid, scarlet fever, measles and whooping cough. Infant mortality was heartbreakingly high.
The cramped, crowded nature of virtually every miner’s home—by the mid-nineteenth century five people was the norm in a house with only a couple of rooms—made day-to-day life maddeningly difficult. Beds were often located in the living room. Privacy was impossible: siblings slept in the same bed; the father and any sons and male tenants who worked in the pit bathed in a tin basin in the living room. Isolation in the case of illness was out of the question. In 1898, Benson recounts, a doctor called on a mining family in Derbyshire, in the middle of England. He found that the mother, “in a pathetic attempt to prevent the spread of infection in her overcrowded home,” had placed three children with scarlet fever in one end of a bed and three more with typhoid in the other.
Considering the conditions at home, maybe they welcomed rising at 2:45 a.m. to leave the house by 3:15, then walking for half an hour to be at the pit by quarter to four. Long gone were the old bell pits—little more than deep wells opened to provide access to the coal, in which women and children humped the coal up ladders to the surface. Drift mines, driven into the side of a hill, allowed the miners to follow the seams farther underground. When deeper mines were needed to provide coal to fuel the factories that were changing the world, the room-and-pillar system—a network of work spaces carved into the seam with columns of left-over coal supporting the mine roof—held sway.
John William Briers’s career, like his father’s, probably followed the normal arc: starting out as a trapper boy opening and closing the ventilation doors to allow men and coal to pass without disturbing the airflow through the workings; moving up the food chain a bit to perhaps becoming a “putter,” pulling huge tubs that could contain a quarter of a ton of coal out to the main roadway. Around eighteen or nineteen he would have joined the ranks of hewers—those who actually dug coal with picks and shovels, the most aristocratic of colliery occupations. At this point his future would have been preordained: the next thirty years as a pick-and-shovel man; then, if he was still able, finishing out his days above the surface, among the women and children, doing less physically demanding work.
Above ground, despite the stereotype of the day, not every miner hustled to the pub once the end-of-shift whistle blew to
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