Adventures of Working Men. From the Notebook of a Working Surgeon

by George Manville Fenn

“Yes, that’s my house under the hillside there, facing the south, where the lights are; you saw it as you came up. Pretty? Well, as pretty as we can make it. Looks like an oasis in a black desert; and hard work it is to keep it decent with so many pits about, each belching out its clouds of villainous smoke black as the coal which makes it; for you see we have not only the fires for the pumping and cage engine, but those at the bottom of the ventilating shafts, and the soot they send floating out into the air is something startling, without counting the sulphurous vapours which ruin vegetation.

“Of course, if you like to go down you can go. I’ll go with you. Oh yes: I’ve often been down. I should think I have! Hundreds of times. Why, I’ve handled the pick myself in the two-foot seam as an ordinary pitman, though I’m manager now. I don’t see any cause to be ashamed of it. And, after all, it’s nothing new here in Yorkshire. I could point out a score of men who have been at work in the factories, now holding great works of their own.

“Accidents? Well, yes; we do have accidents, in spite of all precautions and inspection, but not so bad as at Stannicliffe. I’ll tell you of one by and by. Now you, coming down to see a coal pit, look upon it as a dangerous place. Without being cowardly, you’ll shudder when we go down the great black shaft a couple of hundred yards, and you’ll then walk as if you were going through a powder-magazine. But you know what you used to write in your copy-book at school, ‘Familiarity breeds contempt.’ Truer words were never written, and I see it proved every week. It’s dangerous work going up and down our pit, and yet the men will laugh, and talk, and do things that will almost make your blood run cold. It is like throwing a spark amongst gunpowder to open a lamp in some parts of our mine; but our men, for the sake of a pipe, will ran all risks, even to lighting matches on the walls, and taking naked candles to stick up, that they may see better to work.

“Yes, we’ve had some bad accidents here, but I shall never forget one that happened five-and-twenty years ago. Tell you about it? Good: but it shall be after tea, by the warm fireside, and then if you like to go down the pit in the morning, why, go you shall.

“There, that’s cosy. This is the time I always enjoy—after tea, with the curtains drawn; the wind driving the snow in great pats against the window-panes as it howls down the hillside, and makes the fire roar up the chimney. Not particular over a scuttle of coals here, you see. One of your London friends was down once, and he declared that if he lived here he should amuse himself all day long with poker and shovel.

“And now, about this story of the accident I promised—only to hear this you must learn a little more beside. You needn’t go out of the room, my dear.

“Well, as I told you, it was five-and-twenty years ago, and I was just five-and-twenty years old then—working as regular pitman on the day or night shift. Dirty work, of course, but there was soap in the land even in those days; and when I came up, after a good wash and a change, I could always enjoy a read, such times as I didn’t go to the night-school, where, always having been a sort of reading fellow, I used to help teach the boys, and on Sundays I used to go to the school and help there.

“Of course it was all done in a rough way, for hands that had been busy with a coal-pick all day were not, you will say, much fit for using a pen at night. However, I used to go, and it was there I found out that teaching was a thing that paid you back a hundred per cent, interest, for you could not teach others without teaching yourself.

“But—I may as well own to it—it was the teaching at the Sunday-school I used to look forward to, for it was there I used to see Mary Andrews, the daughter of one of our head pitmen. He was not so very high up, only at the pit village he lived in one of the best houses, and had about double the wages of the ordinary men.

“Consequently, Mary Andrews was a little better dressed and better educated than the general run of girls about there; and there was something about her face that used, in its quiet earnestness, to set me anxiously watching her all the time she was teaching, till I used to wake up of a sudden to the fact that the boys in my class were all at play, when, flushing red all over the face, I used to leave off staring over to the girls’ part of the big school-room, and try to make up for lost time.