A Yorkshire girl, aged eighteen, said:
'I do not know who Jesus Christ was; I never saw him, but I have seen Foster, who prays about him.'[56]
4. Just as in the East Midlands the frame-work knitters worked for middlemen or master middlemen, and just as the Dudley nailers worked for petty-foggers and market-foggers, so too the Staffordshire miners worked for 'butties'. Here again the workers were exposed to the petty tyrannies of semi-capitalism; and here again the middlemen, in this case the butties, incurred the odium of a system for which their superiors, the coal-owners and coal-masters, were responsible.
Why the butty system prevailed in the Midlands—and in a modified form it prevails to-day—is not clear. In some places it seems to be connected with the smallness of the mining concerns or of the metal trades which they supplied. In South Staffordshire a contributing factor was the ancient and allied industry of nail-making.
The conditions in South Staffordshire in 1843 are fully described in the Midland Mining Commission of that year.
The butty was a contractor who engaged with the proprietor or lessee of the mine to deliver the coal or iron-stone at so much per ton, himself hiring the labourers, using his own horses, and supplying the tools requisite for the working of the mine. The contract price was known as the 'charter price' or 'charter'. Thus by a freak of language the Staffordshire miner knew by the same word the 'butty's charter' which was the symbol of his oppression, and the 'people's charter' which was the goal of his desire.
'The butties', said the miners and their wives, 'are the devil: they are negro drivers: they play the vengeance With the men.'[57] The men kicked when, after working a couple of hours, they were fetched up, without pay, on the excuse that there were no waggons to take away the coal. But the butty comforted them with a bottle of pit drink, and all was smooth again.
A collier related a case where 'a pike man had worked only one half-day in the week and got 2s. for it, and because he did not spend 6d. of this at the butty's shop, the latter told the doggy (the under man) to let the man play for it.'[58]
The miners recognized that often the butty was not to blame. In the district north and east of Dudley, the butties got their 'charter price' from the coal-owners in the form of tickets on the coal-owners' truck-shop. What else could they do but hand them on to the men? 'He used to be a very good butty,' said one miner's wife, 'till they haggled him and dropped his "charter", so that he cannot pay his men.'[59]
West and south of Dudley the butties, though they did not truck their men, kept public-houses; and being employer and publican in one, they had a tight hold on the men.