Gentle Reader,--Whilst thou sittest toasting thy feet at the glowing
fuel in thy grate, watching in dreaming unconsciousness the various
shapes and fantastic forms appearing and disappearing in the bright, red
heat of thy fire--here a beautiful mountain, towering with its glowing
top above the broken and diversified valley beneath--there a church,
with its pretty spire peeping above an imagined village; or,
peradventure, a bright nob, assuming the ken of human likeness, thy
playful fancy picturing it the semblance of some distant friend--I say,
whilst thou art sitting in this fashion, dost thou ever think of that
race of mortals, whose whole life is spent beyond a hundred fathoms
below the surface of mother earth, plucking from its unwilling bosom the
materials of thy greatest comfort?
The pitman enables thee to set at nought the “pelting of the pitiless
storm,” and render a season of severity and pinching bitterness, one of
warmth, and kindly feeling, and domestic smiles. If thou hast never
heard of these useful and daring men who
“Contemn the terrors of the mine,
Explore the caverns, dark and drear,
Mantled around with deadly dew;
Where congregated vapours blue,
Fir’d by the taper glimmering near,
Bid dire explosion the deep realms invade,
And earth-born lightnings gleam athwart th’ infernal shade;”[188]
--who dwell in a valley of darkness for thy sake, and whose lives are
hazarded every moment in procuring the light and heat of the flickering
flame--listen with patience, if not with interest, to a short account of
them, from the pen of one who is not unmindful of
“The simple annals of the poor.”
The pitmen, who are employed in bringing coals to the surface of the
earth, from immensely deep mines, for the London and neighbouring
markets, are a race entirely distinct from the peasantry surrounding
them. They are principally within a few miles of the river Wear, in the
county of Durham, and the river Tyne, which traces the southern boundary
of Northumberland. They reside in long rows of one-storied houses,
called by themselves “pit-rows,” built near the chief entrance to the
mine. To each house is attached a small garden,
“For ornament or use,”
and wherein they pay so much attention to the cultivation of flowers,
that they frequently bear away prizes at floral exhibitions.
Within the memory of the writer, (and his locks are not yet “silver’d
o’er with age,”) the pitmen were a rude, bold, savage set of beings,
apparently cut off from their fellow men in their interests and
feelings; often guilty of outrage in their moments of ebrious mirth; not
from dishonest motives, or hopes of plunder, but from recklessness, and
lack of that civilization, which binds the wide and ramified society of
a great city. From the age of five or six years, their children are
immersed in the dark abyss of their lower worlds; and when even they
enjoy the “light of the blessed sun,” it is only in the company of their
immediate relations: all have the same vocation, and all stand out, a
sturdy band, separate and apart from the motley mixture of general
humanity.
The pitmen have the air of a primitive race. They marry almost
constantly with their own people; their boys follow the occupations of
their sires--their daughters, at the age of blooming and modest
maidenhood, linking their fate to some honest “_neebor’s bairn_:” thus,
from generation to generation, family has united with family, till their
population has become a dense mass of relationship, like the clans of
our northern friends, “ayont the Cheviot’s range.” The dress of one of
them is that of the whole people. Imagine a man, of only middling
stature, (few are tall or robust,) with several large blue marks,
occasioned by cuts, impregnated with coal-dust, on a pale and swarthy
countenance, a coloured handkerchief around his neck, a “posied
waistcoat” opened at the breast, to display a striped shirt beneath, a
short blue jacket, somewhat like, but rather shorter than the jackets of
our seamen, velvet breeches, invariably unbuttoned and untied at the
knee, on the “tapering calf” a blue worsted stocking, with white clocks,
and finished downwards by a long, low-quartered shoe, and you have a
pitman before you, equipped for his Saturday’s cruise to “canny
Newcastle,” or for his Sabbath’s gayest holiday.
On a Saturday evening you will see a long line of road, leading to the
nearest large market town, grouped every where with pitmen and their
wives or “lasses,” laden with large baskets of the “stomach’s comforts,”
sufficient for a fortnight’s consumption. They only are paid for their
labour at such intervals; and their weeks are divided into what they
term “pay week,” and “bauf week,” (the etymology of “bauf,”[189] I leave
thee, my kind reader, to find out.)--All merry and happy--trudging home
with their spoils--not unfrequently the thrifty husband is seen “half
seas over,” wrestling his onward way with an obstinate little pig, to
whose hind leg is attached a string, as security for allegiance, while
ever and anon this third in the number of “obstinate graces,” seeks a
sly opportunity of evading its unsteady guide and effecting a retreat
over the road, and “Geordie” (a common name among them) attempts a
masterly retrograde reel to regain his fugitive. A long cart, lent by
the owners of the colliery for the purpose, is sometimes filled with the
women and their marketings, jogging homeward at a smart pace; and from
these every wayfarer receives a shower of taunting, coarse jokes, and
the air is filled with loud, rude merriment. Pitmen do not consider it
any deviation from propriety for their wives to accompany them to the
alehouses of the market town, and join their husbands in their glass and
pint. I have been amused by peeping through the open window of a
pothouse, to see parties of them, men and women, sitting round a large
fir table, talking, laughing, smoking, and drinking con amore; and yet
these poor women are never addicted to excessive drinking. The men,
however, are not particularly abstemious when their hearts are
exhilarated with the bustle of a town.
When the pitman is about to descend to the caverns of his labour, he is
dressed in a checked flannel jacket, waistcoat, and trowsers, with a
bottle or canteen slung across his shoulders, and a satchell or
haversack at his side, to hold provender for his support during his
subterrene sojourn. At all hours, night and day, groups of men and boys
are seen dressed in this fashion wending their way to their colliery,
some carrying sir Humphrey Davy’s (called by them “Davy’s”) safety-lamp,
ready trimmed, and brightened for use. They descend the pit by means of
a basket or “corfe,” or merely by swinging themselves on to a chain,
suspended at the extreme end of the cordage, and are let down, with
inconceivable rapidity, by a steam-engine. Clean and orderly, they
coolly precipitate themselves into a black, smoking, and
bottomless-looking crater, where you would think it almost impossible
human lungs could play, or blood dance through the heart. At nearly the
same moment you see others coming up, as jetty as the object of their
search, drenched and tired. I have stood in a dark night, near the mouth
of a pit, lighted by a suspended grate, filled with flaring coals,
casting an unsteady but fierce reflection on the surrounding swarthy
countenances; the pit emitting a smoke as dense as the chimney of a
steam-engine; the men, with their sooty and grimed faces, glancing about
their sparkling eyes, while the talking motion of their red lips
disclosed rows of ivory; the steam-engines clanking and crashing, and
the hissing from the huge boilers, making a din, only broken by the
loud, mournful, and musical cry of the man stationed at the top of the
pit “shaft,” calling down to his companions in labour at the bottom.
This, altogether, is a scene as wild and fearful as a painter or a poet
could wish to see.
All have heard of the dreadful accidents in coal-mines from explosions
of fire-damp, inundations, &c., yet few have witnessed the heart-rending
scenes of domestic calamity which are the consequence. Aged fathers,
sons, and sons’ sons, a wide branching family, all are sometimes swept
away by a fell blast, more sudden, and, if possible, more terrible, than
the deadly Sirocca of the desert.
Never shall I forget one particular scene of family destruction. I was
passing along a “pit-row” immediately after a “firing,” as the explosion
of fire-damp is called, when I looked into one of the houses, and my
attention became so rivetted, that I scarcely knew I had entered the
room. On one bed lay the bodies of two men, burnt to a livid ash colour;
the eldest was apparently sixty, the other about forty--father and
son:--on another bed, in the same room, were “streaked” three fine boys,
the oldest not more than fifteen--sons of the younger dead--all
destroyed at the same instant by the same destructive blast, let loose
from the mysterious hand of Providence: and I saw--Oh God! I shall never
forget--I saw the vacant, maddened countenance, and quick, wild glancing
eye of the fatherless, widowed, childless being, who in the morning was
smiling in her domestic felicity; whose heart a few hours before was
exultingly beating as she looked on her “_gudeman and bonny bairns_.”
Before the evening sun had set she was alone in the world; without a
prop for her declining age, and every endearing tie woven around her
heart was torn and dissevered. I passed into the neat little garden--it
was the spring time--part of the soil was fresh turned up, and some
culinary plants were newly set:--these had been the morning work of the
younger father--his spade was standing upright in the earth at the last
spot he had laboured at; he had left it there, ready for the evening’s
employment:--the garden was yet blooming with all the delightful
freshness of vernal vegetation its cultivator was withered and dead--his
spade was at hand for another to dig its owner’s grave.
Amidst all their dangers, the pitmen are a cheerful, industrious race of
men. They were a few years ago much addicted to gambling, cock-fighting,
horse-racing, &c. Their spare hours are diverted now to a widely
different channel; they are for the most part members of the Wesleyan
sects; and, not unfrequently in passing their humble but neat
dwellings, instead of brawls and fights you hear a peaceful congregation
of worshippers, uttering their simple prayers; or the loud hymn of
praise breaking the silence of the eventide.
The ancient custom of sword-dancing at Christmas is kept up in
Northumberland, exclusively by these people. They may be constantly seen
at that festive season with their fiddler, bands of swordsmen, Tommy and
Bessy, most grotesquely dressed, performing their annual routine of
warlike evolutions. I have never had the pleasure of seeing the
_Every-Day Book_, but I have no doubt this custom has there been fully
illustrated.
Ψ
[188] HUDDESFORD.
[189] Quære? Whether some wag has not originally given the pitman the
benefit of this term from _bafler_ or baffolier, to mock or affront;
“aiblins,” it may be a corruption of our English term “balk,” to
disappoint.
* * * * *
Some years ago a Tynemouth vessel, called the “Northern Star,” was lost,
and the following ballad made on the occasion: the memory of a lady
supplies the words--
_For the Table Book._