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8/10/1842: The UK bans women & children under age 10 as mine workers.
Long quote coming from George Korson's Coal Dust on the Fiddle
In and among many fine songs, I was rather stunned by many of the
incidents Korson relates. This in particular.
BABY MINERS
Many years ago there was a custom in Scotland by which colliers bound
their babies over to mine owners for a lifetime servitude in coal
mines merely by accepting "arles," earnest money at the baptismal
ceremony. Boys and girls started working in the pits when they were
only four or five years of age. As "trappers" boys sat all day in
total darkness, cold and shivering, their feet in muck and water,
opening and closing heavy ventilation doors for passing mine wagons.
They were also employed in the haulageways where they wore the
"soames," a harness consisting of a chain which passed between the
legs and was hooked to an iron ring attached to a leather belt.
Half-naked, crawling on hands and knees like animals, straining every
muscle in their frail bodies, these children dragged the coal wagons
through the dark entries.
Matthew Tate, the Northumberland miner bard, who knew these cruelties
as a boy, described the scene in his Pit-Life:
And mind when we were "foley" boys,
An' trod the dirt barroway,
Hid frae the sun an' a' its joys
For fully fowerteen oors a day.
Like little slaves befor' thi corve
An' all day pullin' at the soames.
Man, dis thoo think we did deserve
To toil awl day in livin' tombs.
Not only boys but even little girls and women were thus exploited in
British pits. The Parliamentary Commission of 1840-42 found shocking
conditions. Women were working in the pits down to the "last hour of
pregnancy," and many were giving birth to dead babies. One woman said
hers was "only horse work and ruins the women. It crushes their
haunches, bends their ankles and makes then old at forty." Said one
eleven-year-old girl, "I gang with the women at five and come up with
women at five at night; work all night on Fridays and come away at
twelve in the day." As a result of shocking revelations, Parliament in
1842 (8/10) abolished female labor in British coal mines but refused to
raise the age limit for boys beyond ten years.
In the United States women and girls were never employed inside coal
mines, but young boys were exploited as cruelly as in the British Isles.
Over here parents were not required to arle away the freedom of their
boys, but the combination of low wages, irregular work, a degraded
environment, and pressure from mine bosses nevertheless left them no
alternative but to deliver up their boys at an early age. Many coal
miners started their careers at nine, even in states where a minimum age
of twelve years or over was required by law. In West Virginia, back in
1910, a miner named Leslie G. Love, and his wife, were approached by the
boss of the Stuart mine to put their ten-year-old Dallas to work. Having
recently moved into the state of Ohio, the Loves were unfamiliar with
the Law and asked how old a boy had to be under West Virginia laws
before he was allowed to work in the mines. Replied the boss: "By God,
as soon as he is big enough to throw a trap door he is big enough to
work in a mine."
© Abby Sale - all rights reserved
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