"Patience Kershaw, aged seventeen: 'I hurry in the clothes I have now got on, (trousers and ragged jacket;) the bald place upon my head is made by thrusting the corves; the getters I work for are naked except their caps; they pull off their clothes; all the men are naked.'
"Mary Barrett, aged fourteen: 'I work always without stockings, or shoes, or trousers; I wear nothing but my shift; I have to go up to the headings with the men; they are all naked there; I am got well used to that, and don't care much about it; I was afraid at first, and did not like it.'"
In the Lancashire coal-fields lying to the north and west of Manchester, females are regularly employed in underground labour; and the brutal policy of the men, and the abasement of the women, is well described by some of the witnesses examined by Mr. Kennedy.
"Peter Gaskill, collier, at Mr. Lancaster's, near Worsley: 'Prefers women to boys as drawers; they are better to manage, and keep the time better; they will fight and shriek and do every thing but let anybody pass them; and they never get to be coal-getters—that is another good thing.'
GIRL WITH COAL CART IN THIN SEAM.
"Betty Harris, aged thirty-seven, drawer in a coal-pit, Little Bolton: 'I have a belt round my waist and a chain passing between my legs, and I go on my hands and feet. The road is very steep, and we have to hold by a rope, and when there is no rope, by any thing we can catch hold of. There are six women and about six boys and girls in the pit I work in; it is very hard work for a woman. The pit is very wet where I work, and the water comes over our clog-tops always, and I have seen it up to my thighs; it rains in at the roof terribly; my clothes are wet through almost all day long. I never was ill in my life but when I was lying-in. My cousin looks after my children in the daytime. I am very tired when I get home at night; I fall asleep sometimes before I get washed. I am not so strong as I was, and cannot stand my work so well as I used to do. I have drawn till I have had the skin off me. The belt and chain is worse when we are in the family-way. My feller (husband) has beaten me many a time for not being ready. I were not used to it at first, and he had little patience; I have known many a man beat his drawer.'
"Mary Glover, aged thirty-eight, at Messrs. Foster's, Ringley Bridge: 'I went into a coal-pit when I was seven years old, and began by being a drawer. I never worked much in the pit when I was in the family-way, but since I have gave up having children, I have begun again a bit. I wear a shift and a pair of trousers when at work. I always will have a good pair of trousers. I have had many a twopence given me by the boatmen on the canal to show my breeches. I never saw women work naked, but I have seen men work without breeches in the neighbourhood of Bolton. I remember seeing a man who worked stark naked.'"
In the East of Scotland, the business of the females is to remove the coals from the hewer who has picked them from the wall-face, and placing them either on their backs, which they invariably do when working in edge-seams, or in little carts when on levels, to carry them to the main road, where they are conveyed to the pit bottom, where, being emptied into the ascending basket of the shaft, they are wound by machinery to the pit's mouth, where they lie heaped for further distribution. Mr. Franks, an Englishman, says of this barbarous toil—