Coal Black Heart by John Demont Page B

his wages over to his mother, who, being a grocer’s daughter, would have handed back a small allowance. Somehow, though, romance blossomed.
    Number 20 Gillibrand Walks, where the couple set up houseafter their wedding, was a brick row house with a bay window and front garden—both considered posh in the day. It was a short walk to the Rigby grocery store in the central part of town. The couple was surrounded by Rigbys—Margaret’s sister May Ann lived next door at number 18, Barbara at number 8, brother John at number 17 and Aunt Elizabeth at number 5.
    Chances are that my great-grandfather worked at the nearby Birkacre colliery, opened to supply the local textile works. But that’s only speculation; the huge number of collieries meant that labour was truly mobile in those days. Miners thought nothing of trekking a few miles to another colliery if it paid a couple of pence extra per ton. Heady ideas were in the air in England: for the first time ever, a working-class lad like John William might raise himself up with his own spirit, ambition, energy and good fortune.
    I imagine him going to sober talks on serious subjects at the miners’ lecture halls. He may have read Kipling, with his sentimental yarns about the inherent greatness of the Empire. He may have been a member of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, just two years old in 1891 but already boasting over 250,000 members willing to fight and even die for their principles. Or, perhaps it was Margaret, a descendant of a long-established Chorley family, who dreamed of greater things. One fact is undeniable: at some point, for some unknowable reason, in the first years of the twentieth century they had a chat.
    The news in the
Chorley Guardian
on May 10, 1902, must have been discouraging. “Some fourteen or fifteen collieries were stopped on Wednesday in South Lancashire owing to scarcity of orders, and 10,000 colliers are idle. … The Lancashire coal trade is now entering upon a spell of severe depression.” A story less than six weeks later brought news that an arbitrator with the august name of Lord James of Hereford had ruled in favour of the mine owners on somewage question. “Accordingly, there will be a reduction of 10 per cent in the miners’ wages from the first making up day in July.”
    Maybe it was that story that led Margaret and John William—beaten down by their Lancashire lives, or bursting with excitement about the future—to talk about the rumour that there was a need for colliery men in Nova Scotia.
    Nova Scotia?
    Nova Scotia—over there in Canada.
    John probably knew someone who had joined the flood of Englishmen heading “across the pond” to work in the booming Nova Scotia mines and steel plants. Maybe he had read advertisements in the
Chorley Guardian
or
Wigan Observer,
placed by “appointed agents,” encouraging immigration to Canada. Chances are that he had even heard about some of the disasters over there, which rivalled British tragedies for sheer carnage: the 73 who had died in the Drummond Colliery in a place called Westville in 1873, the 50 who had died at the explosion at the Foord Pit, in the same general area, seven years later. He would have certainly known about the explosion that had ripped through the Springhill Mine in northern Nova Scotia the same year he and Margaret were wed. On that February day, 125 died—the most in Canadian history to that point. Contributions to the Miners’ Relief Fund had come from across Canada and the British Empire, including from Queen Victoria.
    What ensued once the subject was opened I can only imagine: land is more than the ground we live on. Their people could trace centuries of history on that soil: here, some ancient member of the clan was claimed by the plague. There, a Rigby was once pilloried and pelted with rotting fruit for stealing rabbits from a nobleman’s estate. Over behind that building, a Briers with milky skin had to step lively to avoid Jacobite pikemen