The pitman enables thee to set at nought the “pelting of the pitiless storm,” and render a season of severity and pinching bitterness, one of warmth, and kindly feeling, and domestic smiles. If thou hast never heard of these useful and daring men who
“Contemn the terrors of the mine,
Explore the caverns, dark and drear,
Mantled around with deadly dew;
Where congregated vapours blue,
Fir’d by the taper glimmering near,
Bid dire explosion the deep realms invade,
And earth-born lightnings gleam athwart th’ infernal shade;”[188]
—who dwell in a valley of darkness for thy sake, and whose lives are hazarded every moment in procuring the light and heat of the flickering flame—listen with patience, if not with interest, to a short account of them, from the pen of one who is not unmindful of
“The simple annals of the poor.”
The pitmen, who are employed in bringing coals to the surface of the earth, from immensely deep mines, for the London and neighbouring markets, are a race entirely distinct from the peasantry surrounding them. They are principally within a few miles of the river Wear, in the county of Durham, and the river Tyne, which traces the southern boundary of Northumberland. They reside in long rows of one-storied houses, called by themselves “pit-rows,” built near the chief entrance to the mine. To each house is attached a small garden,
“For ornament or use,”
and wherein they pay so much attention to the cultivation of flowers, that they frequently bear away prizes at floral exhibitions.
Within the memory of the writer, (and his locks are not yet “silver’d o’er with age,”) the pitmen were a rude, bold, savage set of beings, apparently cut off from their fellow men in their interests and feelings; often guilty of outrage in their moments of ebrious mirth; not from dishonest motives, or hopes of plunder, but from recklessness, and lack of that civilization, which binds the wide and ramified society of a great city. From the age of five or six years, their children are immersed in the dark abyss of their lower worlds; and when even they enjoy the “light of the blessed sun,” it is only in the company of their immediate relations: all have the same vocation, and all stand out, a sturdy band, separate and apart from the motley mixture of general humanity.
The pitmen have the air of a primitive race. They marry almost constantly with their own people; their boys follow the occupations of their sires—their daughters, at the age of blooming and modest maidenhood, linking their fate to some honest “neebor’s bairn:” thus, from generation to generation, family has united with family, till their population has become a dense mass of relationship, like the clans of our northern friends, “ayont the Cheviot’s range.” The dress of one of them is that of the whole people. Imagine a man, of only middling stature, (few are tall or robust,) with several large blue marks, occasioned by cuts, impregnated with coal-dust, on a pale and swarthy countenance, a coloured handkerchief around his neck, a “posied waistcoat” opened at the breast, to display a striped shirt beneath, a short blue jacket, somewhat like, but rather shorter than the jackets of our seamen, velvet breeches, invariably unbuttoned and untied at the knee, on the “tapering calf” a blue worsted stocking, with white clocks, and finished downwards by a long, low-quartered shoe, and you have a pitman before you, equipped for his Saturday’s cruise to “canny Newcastle,” or for his Sabbath’s gayest holiday.
On a Saturday evening you will see a long line of road, leading to the nearest large market town, grouped every where with pitmen and their wives or “lasses,” laden with large baskets of the “stomach’s comforts,” sufficient for a fortnight’s consumption. They only are paid for their labour at such intervals; and their weeks are divided into what they term “pay week,” and “bauf week,” (the etymology of “bauf,”[189] I leave thee, my kind reader, to find out.)—All merry and happy—trudging home with their spoils—not unfrequently the thrifty husband is seen “half seas over,” wrestling his onward way with an obstinate little pig, to whose hind leg is attached a string, as security for allegiance, while ever and anon this third in the number of “obstinate graces,” seeks a sly opportunity of evading its unsteady guide and effecting a retreat over the road, and “Geordie” (a common name among them) attempts a masterly retrograde reel to regain his fugitive. A long cart, lent by the owners of the colliery for the purpose, is sometimes filled with the women and their marketings, jogging homeward at a smart pace; and from these every wayfarer receives a shower of taunting, coarse jokes, and the air is filled with loud, rude merriment. Pitmen do not consider it any deviation from propriety for their wives to accompany them to the alehouses of the market town, and join their husbands in their glass and pint. I have been amused by peeping through the open window of a pothouse, to see parties of them, men and women, sitting round a large fir table, talking, laughing, smoking, and drinking con amore; and yet these poor women are never addicted to excessive drinking. The men, however, are not particularly abstemious when their hearts are exhilarated with the bustle of a town.