THE PRICE OF COAL
A play in one act By Harold Brighouse
Mary Brown, Jack Brown, Ellen Brown, Polly Walker,
Miss Agnes Bartholomew. Mr. R. B. Drysdale.
Miss Elspeth Dudgeon. Miss Lola Duncan.
The Scene is laid in a Lanarkshire Colliery Village.
Modern industrialism has evolved its special types, and the Lanarkshire collier is small and wiry. He swings a pickaxe for hours on end crouched in an impossibly small space in heated atmosphere, and physique on the grand scale is unsuited to such conditions. He takes tremendous risks as part of his daily routine. His recreations are, to a fastidious taste, coarse. He works hard under ground and plays hard above ground. Constrained attitude is so much his second nature that he sits in perfect comfort on his haunches, in the pictured pose of the mild Hindoo, his back to a wall, discussing, amongst expectoration—a long row of him—, football, dogs, his last spree and his next, the police reports, women.
Altogether a most unpleasant person, this undersized, foul-mouthed, sporting hewer of coal-until you come to know him better, to discover his simplicity of soul, his directness, his matter-of-fact self-sacrifice, the unconscious heroism of his life: and to lose sight of his superficial frailties in your admiration for his finer qualities.
The womenkind of the colliers are marked by the life of the pits no less than the men. They are rough, capable housewives, dressing with more care for durability than effect, tolerant of their menfolks’ weaknesses, and, above all, stamped with the pit-side stoicism apt to be mistaken for callousness. The sudden death of their breadwinner is an everyday hazard, accepted without complaint and without concealment as part of their life. Like their husbands, they exist from hand to mouth on the brink of eternity. Thrift, when any day’s work may be your last, seems a misplaced virtue. Lean fare approaches as pay day recedes, and illness, meagrely provided for by membership of a “sick” society, is tided over in the main by the unfailing generosity of neighbours whose own table suffers by the charity.