Cwmparc in the Rhondda valley is a typical colliery settlement of late-nineteenth-century South Wales.
The influence of the coal-mine owner extended beyond the coal pit to include the pit village. Now that the collieries and the tips that once dominated the landscape have largely gone, the pit village is usually the most direct reminder of the industry that was. Pit and pit village were part of an interlinked living and working community. Miners received payments in kind, in the form of subsidised housing and an allowance of coal (not exceeding domestic needs, in order to prevent miners from selling the surplus), which was sometimes free, or available below the market price.
Since the location of mines was determined by geology rather than by existing infrastructure, mine owners usually needed to provide housing for their workmen, which amounted to a substantial investment in any individual mine. The opening of a coal mine rapidly swelled the population of rural parishes. In 1801 the parish of Hetton in County Durham had 253 inhabitants, but thirty years later the growth of mining villages had swelled the population to nearly 6,000. Development of coalfield settlements had accelerated by the end of the nineteenth century. Over 113,000 people lived in the Rhondda valley in 1901, compared with fewer than a thousand half a century earlier.
Mining settlements of the early nineteenth century were of short rows of terraced houses. The standard was at least as good as that of the homes of agricultural labourers; nor were they always as overcrowded as is often supposed. A survey in 1757 of Hartley Colliery in Northumberland recorded an average of just over four people per house in a village of sixty-seven households. The Durham miner George Parkinson wrote affectionately of his childhood home in the 1830s, and his description reminds us that coal mining was a rural industry. His row of brick houses faced ‘a meadow through which ran a clear burn’, but the houses themselves were spartan: ‘Behind the door a ladder led to the upper room or loft close to the tiles, which were not hidden by any plaster or wooden ceiling. The flooring boards of the loft were laid loose upon the joists.’ Even when running water was supplied to houses there was no bathroom; the tin bath, hanging on a nail, was characteristic of the miner’s home well into the twentieth century.
Cwmparc in the Rhondda valley is a typical colliery settlement of late-nineteenth-century South Wales.
Rural isolation of coal pits meant that coal masters needed to build houses for the workforce. These houses at Waldridge Colliery, near Chester-le-Street, stood right next to the colliery.
However, the rapid expansion of mining and the building of large settlements of closely spaced houses created problems in the nineteenth century. Robert Haddow’s Scots colliery village, described in 1888, was towards the meaner end of the scale: ‘The colliery village is, as a rule, the very embodiment of dirtiness, dreariness, and rough squalor. Long rows of dismal brick houses face each other, and standing between them are the sanitary offices, which in hardly any one case are properly kept in order.’ Older housing stock in the industry was made worse by the fact that miners rented them for very little, or had them rent free (especially in northeast England). Landlords therefore had little incentive to fix the damp or the leaking roof and, in any case, a pit village lasted only as long as the pit, a further disincentive to long-term improvements. In the 1850s John Leifchild bemoaned the state of pit villages in the northeast for their lack of space and simple sanitation, but many of the same houses survived long enough to be included in a survey of the coal industry undertaken in the 1920s. At any given time the best miners’ housing was invariably the most recently built.
The pit village at Brithdir, in the Rhymney valley of South Wales, was begun in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The pit it served is long gone.
In most coalfields established by the early nineteenth century there were houses that had a single room downstairs and another in the loft reached by a ladder in which families slept. Larger houses, two-up, two-down, offered more comfort and privacy, although the rooms were small, as little as 10 feet square. There were also communal facilities. The Glasgow Herald, reporting in 1875, described Rosehall near Glasgow as having a closet for every three houses and a wash house for every six. These types of arrangements, along with communal bake houses, were common, even if they were often inadequate. Standards of accommodation improved in the latter part of the nineteenth century. In South Wales, for example, houses in the valleys were superior to those found in other parts of the coalfield, like Merthyr Tydfil, which had developed a century earlier with the rise of the iron industry.
Alfred Pollard, a miner from Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, washes himself at home in 1913. A tin bath was in every miner’s home.
Not all housing was owned by collieries, however, and in the twentieth century mining companies decreased their ownership of houses. Building societies and clubs provided funds for houses and local authorities built significant quantities of new homes. In those coalfields experiencing rapid growth, like Nottinghamshire and Kent, coal owners were still prepared to invest in new housing schemes, although much of the investment was channelled through the Industrial Housing Association, which in the 1920s built 12,000 new houses in the East Midlands and South Yorkshire, all of high quality. On a visit to the Dukeries of Nottinghamshire in 1927 the New Statesman praised the new pit villages: ‘the narrow meanness of the owners has been discarded. They have shown a wider outlook – a realisation of the social importance of cleanliness, of the social value of comfort.’
Woodlands, shown here under construction in 1907, was built for the Brodsworth Main Colliery in South Yorkshire, and was a new type of pit village, with a rural English character and ample open space.
Outsiders did not always look kindly on coal miners. Mining was a dirty occupation and, with no facilities for cleaning themselves before leaving work, the appearance of men with blackened faces and clothes exacerbated the negative perception of them. Mine owners disdained their habits and sometimes even criticised them for being dirty. Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, Midlothian, despaired of his workmen at Loanhead Colliery, for their ‘profaneness and immorality, particularly excessive drinking … fighting … cursing and swearing, or taking the Lord’s name in vain’. But their supposed hard-drinking was of men engaged in dangerous, physically demanding and thirsty work. Even so, this is only a partial view of miners’ communities and not a representative one. The standards of coal-mining communities were no different from those of the rest of society. In fact there are many other contemporary accounts that emphasise the cleanliness of the collier’s family home. In 1833, for example, the Factories Inquiry Commission found the homes of colliers in Glasgow ‘usefully and cleanly furnished’ and that ‘the collier women were very clean in their appearance’.
In 1951 people gather at Easington Colliery on hearing of a pit explosion. Major accidents had a profound impact on communities dominated by this one industry.
The problem of rapid growth in the industry was that pit villages were dependent upon one industry only. In the Rhondda valley, for example, some three-quarters of adult males were employed at the pits. During the slump of the 1920s thousands of people left Wales and the northeast to settle in southeast England where they could find work – over a quarter of Rhondda’s population left in the 1920s. The coal industry had a surfeit of employees in almost all periods, except for the major wars; from December 1943 a small number of conscripts were chosen by ballot to work in the mines.
The Rhondda Baptist Chapel, with its attached Sunday School, epitomises the religious and cultural life of mining communities in Wales.
The growth of large pit villages from the final quarter of the nineteenth century created communities in which almost everybody was working class. It bred a strong collective culture where personal ambition found its way to the union lodge or the pulpit. Britain’s coalfields became strongholds of religious nonconformity and the temperance movement in the nineteenth century. The growth of the coal industry in the final quarter of the eighteenth century coincided with the rise of Methodism. Pit villages were captive audiences for preachers, where many people formulated their rules of right living and where, by joining forces to establish a chapel, the working classes could assert their independence. Membership of a chapel community became a means to a cultural life. Early chapels were small, sometimes just converted cottages. The more ambitious chapels still to be found in the coalfields are nearly always second- or third-generation chapels that testify to the success of the nonconformist denominations in establishing and growing their congregations.
The Hetton Silver Band, here showing off one of the trophies they won in local championships, were regular performers at the Durham Miners’ Gala.
Slowly the aspirations of coal miners, as with other industrial workers, changed. Literacy improved as church and chapel attendance increased. Schools, Friendly Societies, savings banks and trade unions gave miners a stake in the future. Nonconformists were active in opening schools and stimulating cultural life, the best-known manifestations of which were the brass band and male-voice choir. In South Wales and elsewhere, workmen’s institutes became prominent, voluntarily funded out of miners’ pay, which provided libraries, reading rooms and gymnasia. In Mountain Ash in the Cynon valley the institute erected by workmen of the Nixon’s Navigation Collieries also included a theatre, billiards room and swimming pool. It bred a culture of ambition and self-improvement that nurtured many talents, in people like Aneurin Bevan, founding minister of the National Health Service, who had come a long way from his first job at Tytryst Colliery near Tredegar.
Union banners have long been carried in procession at the Durham Miners’ Gala, where individual union lodges come together to celebrate the coal-mining community and its heritage.
The Durham Miners’ Association was established in 1869 and two years later held its first gala. It grew into an annual event, known as the Big Meeting, at which miners marched behind brass bands and their union banners, many of which portrayed their political heroes. There are no deep mines left in Durham, but the gala survives as a celebration of the coalfield community. To the tune of the brass bands banners are still carried in procession past the County Hotel at Old Elvet, Durham, before everybody converges on Durham racecourse where rallying speeches are made. It is the best kind of tradition, sustained by people who know their own history.
