My mother installed central heating in our house in the 1960s. It ran on coal and we were one of the first people we knew to have it. The coalman regularly delivered cwt (hundredweight – 112lb/eight stone or 50.8kg) sacks from an open-top lorry to our coal shed in the garden. Of course, before central heating everyone had an open fire for heating, cooking or both, and the coalman was a regular visitor to houses everywhere.
Until 1963, coal was sold by the chaldron, a measurement by volume not weight (vulnerable to chicanery), and the chaldron size differed throughout the country. Estimates for the weight of a chaldron depended on location and date and varied from 2,000lb (704kg) in 1421 to 5,940lb (2,690kg) by 1694. A chaldron was the legal limit for a coal cart; too much weight was deemed to damage the road – no one was concerned with horse welfare in those days. A cart carried a maximum of two tons and, because of this weight restriction, a coalman served a relatively small area.
From at least Elizabethan times, collieries were privately owned by landed gentry with coal on their estates. By the seventeenth century, they tended to lease out their collieries, although three Cumbrian families, the Curwens of Workington, the Fletchers of Distington and the Lowthers of Whitehaven continued to work their own minerals.
Coal tax was levied from at least the reign of James I (1603–25). During the Great Plague of 1665, the price of coal was fixed by the government at ‘no more than thirty shillings’. Owners claimed to be operating at a loss and closed their mines. That winter, a ferociously cold one, demand for fuel soared and, with the added crisis of the Great Fire of 1666, the price rocketed to £6 a chaldron. By 1704, to pay for the rebuilding of London, the coal tax had risen from one shilling to seven shillings a chaldron. In 1831, thirteen pence per ton was charged before coal was unloaded from the boat. Coal duties were abolished in 1889–90 and many clerical staff at the Coal Exchange made redundant.
Because the government fixed the price and distribution of coal during the late 1600s as part of the tax system, there was no viable opportunity for coal merchants to trade until the 1800s, although Charringtons www.coalproducts.co.uk were in business from 1731. The Cory family, associated with the formation of the Woodmongers’ Company circa 1605, was still going strong in 1849.
Effectively, coal merchants were a result of the Industrial Revolution. Factories needed power, the population exploded and there was a huge rise in demand for heat and energy. Until the late seventeenth century, domestic fires were fed by wood or peat for cooking and heating, although how much heating a hovel had is debatable. Burning at a higher temperature, coal was a revolutionary improvement: in 1831 there were 5,167 recorded coal merchants; in 1851 this had risen to 12,092 and by 1871 it was 16,250. Many coal merchants had other occupations as well; one ancestor of mine mended roads, ran a pub and sold coal. Ironmongers commonly sold coal in their shops.
By 1802, a cast-iron range could be found in well-heeled urban kitchens. By 1848, the main source of fuel for London was coal and a household might burn a ton a month. To supply the fireplaces of London nearly 3.5 million tons of coal was transported each year by ship (called sea coal) from the coalfields of Northumberland and Durham to Billingsgate Docks of fish fame. Men lived for weeks on board ships between Newcastle and London. It took 12,000 shiploads and 3,000 vessels to transport it and the subsequent coal tax revenue funded building works such as the Thames Embankment.
After the 1850s, coal arrived mainly by train. In 1875, eight million tons of coal was transported to London, five million by train and three by sea. No wonder London was plagued by pea-soupers! On arrival, coal was unloaded, graded and sold, the market price set according to how much coal was available that day. Sales were conducted privately between sellers and buyers.
Coal factors were middle-men buying coal from collieries and taking it by cart (later lorry) to be distributed to coal merchants, although some collieries employed factors directly; these were paid commission to sell coal to merchants. Factors in the London Coal Exchange were intermediary agents between sellers and purchasers and again received a percentage of the deal as commission, although it was possible to sell one’s own coal without using a factor. The Coal Factors’ Society was established in the first half of the eighteenth century for people engaged in the wholesale coal trade in London. By 1832, it had become a ‘mutual protection’ society. Dating from 1761, its archives, consisting largely of an alphabetical list of ships, their tonnage, minutes, attendance books, financial records, lists of prices of coal and contracts with people for the supply of barges and so on, are held in the LMA.
From 1770, London coal merchants acquired their coal from the London Coal Exchange, opened to regulate the trade on the north side of Thames Street, almost opposite Billingsgate Market. It suffered considerable damage in the Blitz. After the Second World War, the coal industry was nationalised.
Coal bought from the London docks or the railway station was bagged by hand, put on a cart and transported to customers. For those outside London, coal was sourced direct from the mines (e.g. Cheshire, Derbyshire, Kent, Lancashire, Scotland, Wales and Yorkshire) or collected from the station. Water transport was an option via navigable rivers and canals where coal merchants collected from hubs. Blacksmiths (see Chapter 7) generally sourced their coke from the nearest gas works, where an enterprising coal merchant also acquired coke, cheaper than coal, for his poorer customers.
Before the First World War, most coal merchants’ yards were wooden sheds near railway sidings which were, of course, their coal source. A coalman’s yard needed space to stable horses and store coal and cart. Outgoings included horse-feed, the farrier and occasional trips to the wheelwright. The exit roads from the sidings sloped and coal carts were fitted with skid pans under the rear wheels. When these failed, as they commonly did, horse and runaway load frequently crashed into houses, shops and gardens. During the inter-war suburb expansion building boom, railway companies built small coal offices near stations on the high street; far more convenient for coalman and customer. They can still be spotted, although the business will have changed.
It was possible to make large amounts of money from selling coal. Cesar Picton (c.1755–1836), a black African slave brought to England in 1761, used a £100 legacy to set up as a coal merchant. He bought a house in Thames Ditton, Surrey, in 1816 for £4,000! Conversely, Samuel Plimsoll (1824–1898) became a London coal merchant in 1854 only to be left destitute when his business failed. When his fortunes changed, he became MP for Derby, successfully campaigning for the introduction of the Plimsoll line on ships. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, coal merchants’ businesses struggled because of coal workers’ industrial action.
The first reference to the Worshipful Company of Fuellers www.fuellers.co.uk (originally the Company of Woodmongers and Coal Sellers) is in 1376, but they weren’t awarded their first Royal Charter until 1605. Their main responsibility was to collect coal tax. The Company surrendered its charter after the Great Fire of London and other bodies represented the coal industry. It was re-formed in 1981 to cater for the energy industry. R.S. Brown’s Digging for History in the Coal Merchants’ Archives, 1988, mentions a large amount of archives including society minute books from 1842 (earlier minutes have been lost) and scrap books containing letters, handbills, booklets and prints from the 1820s. It is unlikely that they hold archives of relevance to the family historian.
The Coal Trade Benevolent Association, founded in 1888 by the Colliery Agents and Coal Salesmen’s Association, first met in the Coal Exchange to ‘dispense charitable relief’ to people who had worked in the coal-selling industry. Unfortunately, no beneficiary archives are held by either the Benevolent Association or the Coal Merchants’ Federation.
For those searching for information about coal merchant ancestors, there is little available. Rootsweb, family history websites and forums are full of posts about former coal merchants and their businesses with greater and lesser success. If your family ran an established firm, you may get more response than for a one-man operation. As is usual with local firms and businesses, more satisfaction may be gained at the local family history centre and library, where photographs and archives relating to coal merchant ancestors might be available. Don’t be too disappointed if there is nothing on a one-man-band operation. Records offices may help; for instance, Cambridge holds land purchases for several coal merchants and they have coal merchants Coote and Warren’s Wisbech depot’s cash book 1907–09.
The British Newspaper Archive (subscription) and physically searching local newspapers may produce results, but this is unlikely to be quick. You may find information in the Discovery archives http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk: for instance, in 1841 William Emms stole coal from Thomas Gibbs, a Stratford upon Avon coal merchant. Also try www.aim25.ac.uk/cgi-bin/vcdf/search?keyword=Coal%20merchants&acc_type=1&nv1=browse&nv2=sub.
We think of Britain as a nation of tea drinkers but when they were first imported, coffee and chocolate were the beverages of choice – none with today’s respectable reputation.
In 1651, Alexander Hay bought a brew-house in the Pool of London and from 1710 the eponymous Hay’s Wharf was the most important for unloading tea, coffee and cocoa. This part of the Pool of London became ‘London’s Larder’, with foodstuffs, potatoes, hops, cider and lamb imported and stored here – it has now been converted to apartments and offices. Tea, coffee and chocolate were imported by merchants and dealers and sold on.
The East India Company placed its first order for 100lb of China tea in 1664. By 1685, this figure had increased to 12,070lb, swamping the market as tea was less popular than coffee, gin and ale. Once tea arrived in England, it was sold at auction and bought in bulk to sell generally to dealers around the country who sold to smaller dealers and teashops. At this time, the only legal tea importer was the East India Company.
Walpole (1676–1745) introduced taxes on tea, chocolate and coffee in 1724, which affected the East India Company more than the consumer. The only way most people could afford it was to buy illegally imported tea smuggled alongside tobacco and brandy in such quantities that the East India Company lost huge amounts of money. By 1750, the East India Company was importing over four and a half million pounds of tea, charging what it liked because of its monopoly. In the 1770s, London tea merchant Richard Eagleton, selling his tea from the Grasshopper Tea Warehouse in Bishopsgate Street, advertised tea at four to fifteen shillings per pound, which, when a tradesman earned ten shillings a week, equates to more than an average man’s weekly salary. Nor is it surprising that, to boost sales, for every quarter pound of tea sold, Eagleton entered his customers into a prize-winning lottery.
In 1706, Thomas Twining bought a coffee shop in The Strand, London, proceeding to sell tea in the neighbouring shop. It was a risky enterprise. When he set up business, the price of legally imported tea was an exorbitant fourteen to thirty shillings a pound. In 1784, his grandson Richard Twining successfully lobbied the government to reduce the tax in the Commutation Act. Although tea was still imported by the East India Company, smuggling ceased virtually overnight. The Twining shop and museum claims the record for the longest surviving business on the same London premises without changing name, ownership or commodity. For anyone with a Twining in their ancestry, the shop and museum posts its family tree on the walls, plus a history of tea importation into this country.