Pitmen: A Breed Apart

Often isolated from outside influences, coalminers were a law unto themselves. They saw themselves, and indeed were seen by outsiders, as a breed apart. The London Quarterly Review, reflecting on the lives of colliers after reviewing the 1842 Report of the Commissioners for Enquiring into the Conditions of Children Employed in the Mines, observes that ‘here we find tens of thousands of our countrymen living apart from the rest of the world—intermarrying—having habits, manners, almost a language, peculiar to themselves—the circumstances surrounding their existence stamping and moulding mind and body with gigantic power’. In the northern coal mines of Northumberland and Durham in 1843, 25,770 adults and children were employed in 192 pits on the Tyne, Tees and Wear Rivers and mining communities existed elsewhere in England and Wales and in Scotland. Miners were naturally suspicious of proprietors, managers and agents who never or rarely ventured down the mines, and who ‘manifested the utmost indifference to the age at which children—some as young as five, six and seven—were employed in their works’.