Black Diamonds (14 page)

Communities were tightly bound; you looked after your own. It was both a strength and a weakness. The problem for the Denaby miners during the hard strike months in the winter of 1903 was that if they belonged to anyone, it was to the coal owners who were bent on crushing them into submission. The village was surrounded by land owned by Britain’s wealthiest aristocratic families – the Duke of Norfolk, Earl Fitzwilliam, the Earl of Scarbrough, Viscount Halifax – but their charity was feudal, based on centuries-old ties of sentiment and mutual self-interest. There was no binding at Denaby, the miners were outsiders; in times of conflict and strife they were left to fend for themselves.

Initially, their plight had moved the country. Throughout the week of the evictions, it was front-page news. Donations of food and money poured in from all over Britain. A Grimsby merchant sent two tons of fish and a Sheffield businessman promised twenty stone of flour each week until the strike was over. Some offered homes to the miners, or to take their children in for a month or two.
One woman
, writing from Chesterfield, said, ‘I have myself a little boy aged ten so they won’t be lonely.’ Collections were held at football matches at Sheffield, Manchester and Nottingham, and miners at pits as far afield as South Wales donated money from their wages.

After the evictions, Denaby dropped out of the headlines; the village was forgotten and the donations from around the country slowed to a trickle. The soup kitchens and bread queues run by the churches and the chapels, and by armies of local women volunteers, were not able to feed the proverbial five thousand. Groups of miners toured the district, begging what they could. The Reverend Jesse Wilson spoke to a woman in the tents waiting for her husband to return:

The poor mother
was seated outside in front of the tent stove, half blinded with the smoke, which seemed to hesitate as to which way it would go; then suddenly would take a whirl as if determined to fly all ways at the same time. She was anxiously waiting the return of her husband who had been away nearly all the day in the hope of picking up a few pennies for the hungry ones at home. I could see that a dread of failure arising from his long absence was in her face. Had he succeeded he would have been back long since, for she said, ‘He cannot stand the youngsters starving.’

In the weeks following the evictions, the magistrates’ courts at Doncaster, Rotherham and Barnsley were clogged with poaching cases. Traditionally, poaching had been a means of supplementing the family diet. After strike pay was stopped, it became a necessity.

The pit villages in the South Yorkshire coalfield were set amidst rich sporting estates. Away from the western edge of the Don Valley, coal, iron and steel, while scarring the land above, had not claimed it. In the summer, the hedgerows along the small country lanes connecting one village to another were crowded with cow parsley and wild flowers, and in spring, with hawthorn blossom. Fields of crops encircled the collieries. ‘The corn stands rank on rank,’ wrote Arthur Eaglestone, ‘a million ears, silent and bristling, or flowing like the tide when the wind sweeps along its liquid surface. The twin steel chimneys of the pit rise up beyond, and the dead straight cinder track is hidden in the depths.’ In a strange ritual, enacted whenever the pits were working, hundreds of coal-black men ran directly from the pithead into these fields at the end of their shifts, to recover stores of matches and tobacco they had buried at the base of the stalks of corn, or hidden in cracks in the stone walls that enclosed them.

The miners were countrymen, skilled in the art of poaching. They looked upon it as their right to take something from someone who had much more than they had. It was just another fight with the coal owner: ‘He robs us all day, we’ll rob him all night.’ A good poacher could call the hares on the back of his hand, with a peculiar sort of sound, walking round and round in decreasing circles, while the hare watched hypnotized.

Men, and young boys, walked miles through moonless nights across the great estates of South Yorkshire, and the lucrative poaching grounds in the Dukeries, an area to the south of Rotherham where the Dukes of Portland, Leeds, Norfolk, and Earl Manvers, some of the wealthiest coal owners in England, had their stately homes.

Fred Smith, a miner
from Kiveton Park colliery, born in 1891, looking back on his childhood, wrote, ‘I could go on for years about food. It seems to have been one long struggle for food. Thousands of experiences crowd into my mind, and the idea of food runs through them like a thread.’ Among the most memorable was the night Fred went poaching with his father on the Duke of Portland’s land at Welbeck Abbey:

Six miles or more we travelled, mostly across fields, only using the road to cross. Outside a small wood near Whitwell Common, we stood and listened for a long time, an hour I should think, and the romance of the night sounds sent cold shivers down my spine. The far-off bark of a farm dog, the crow of a pheasant in the wood, the staccato yelp of a fox and the stir of life in the undergrowth. The laws of nature were being enacted in the night and their long arm stretched into the heart of a nine-year-old little poacher. I was part of that nature and was going into the night to kill, to kill so that I might eat.

Crossing the Worksop Road
into Welbeck Park, they came to a wood where there were ‘hundreds of pheasants as tame as fowls’. Half a mile away, Fred could see Welbeck Abbey, the Duke of Portland’s home, ‘its windows alive with lights and its turrets gleaming’. Three fires blazed on the other side of the wood. ‘On the air came the faint scent of cigar. The old man sniffed and said he thought that the yogs [gamekeepers] were on the watch and had given themselves away by smoking.’

Fred’s father knew the estate well. He also knew what lay beneath it. As a boy, he had worked as a carter for the 5th Duke of Portland, wheeling stone from the local quarry, used to construct a vast network of underground rooms that extended for twelve miles under the Welbeck estate. There was a ballroom that could accommodate 2,000 people and a riding school with a gallop a quarter of a mile long, lit by 8,000 jets of gas. One tunnel led to a suite of rooms covering four acres, and another to stables, cow-houses and dairies, where more than sixty people were employed.

The Duke of Portland was one of the richest coal owners in England. In the 1860s, when construction first began, a miner working at one of his collieries earned around £50 a year. The Duke’s annual income was in the region of £108,000. Whimsy, not wages, drove him to burrow underground; an eccentric and a recluse, he could not bear to be seen.

The Duke spent his life wandering his estate at Welbeck. Tenants, labourers and servants were forbidden to speak to him, or even to acknowledge his presence. If they chanced upon the Duke, their instructions were to pass him by ‘as they would a tree’. The man who dared touch his hat would be instantly dismissed. The temptation to stare must have been strong. Winter or summer, the Duke dressed in the same peculiar fashion. His trousers were tied inches above the ankle with a piece of string; he wore a heavy sable coat that touched the ground, and an old-fashioned wig. On top of the long wig, he wore a hat two feet high. Rain or sunshine, he carried an umbrella to hide beneath if anyone passed. He never mingled in society and was never seen at court. When he drove out on his estate, it was alone, in a black carriage, drawn by black horses, with the blinds down.

The same carriage transported him to London. Directly underneath Welbeck Abbey there was a circular courtyard, where eight underground roads and passageways converged. It was the hub of the tunnel network. Two hundred yards in radius, built from red brick, it had a vaulted roof and a platform made from stone. Lit by gas lamps, it was where the Duke would wait for his carriage to collect him, the noise of the horses’ hooves and the clatter of wheels against the brick echoing along the tunnels, announcing its imminent arrival minutes before it thundered into the courtyard, sweeping in a majestic half-circle up to the platform where the Duke stood.
From here
, the carriage proceeded down the longest tunnel, almost one and a quarter miles, to Worksop station, where it was loaded, with the Duke inside it, on to a specially built railway wagon. Four black horses, harnessed in the Duke’s livery, waited at Euston station, enabling him to continue his journey, uninterrupted, and unseen, to his house in Cavendish Square.

‘My father knew every inch of these tunnels,’ wrote Fred Smith. Above ground, dotted across their poaching grounds, were scores of circular glass windows. They had been installed, at intervals of twenty feet, to light and ventilate the tunnels. Thirty years after Fred’s father had worked on their construction, the skylights offered him and his son a line of escape in the event of discovery.

‘My father took the gun parts from his pocket, fastened them together, and we silently crept into the plantation. “I’m going to have two shots,” he said. “Look, them’s the two,” and looking up into a tree I saw two objects not unlike footballs, apparently hanging twenty feet high amongst the branches. “Get ready to pick up the first one. I’ll pick up the other,” and up went the gun to his shoulder. I began to shiver. My heart seemed to stop when – Bang! and then Bang! and all the silences of the night were racked as by the crack of doom. “They’ll hear us at the Abbey,” I exclaimed. “Never mind the Abbey, get after that bird,” he whispered, and I scrambled after the pheasant. I picked it up. It was warm and wet and sticky with blood and feathers. “Got it?” I heard him whisper. “Well, come on then,” he urged. “Can’t you hear them coming?” Yes, I could hear them coming. Men shouting, dogs barking, and to this accompanying hullabaloo, we flew to the tunnel window. I went down first, he following and pulling the window down behind him. We scuttled along the dark tunnel until we came down to a part where it was open. There we climbed out and walked across the Park to another cover where we shot two more pheasants.’

A blinding snowstorm
swept full in the teeth of crowds of men and women, pressed up against the squads of policemen, mounted and on foot, guarding the entrance to the platform at Conisbrough railway station, a mile from Denaby. There were two or three thousand miners and their families; some held banners bearing the slogan ‘Till Death or Victory’ and the Denaby and Cadeby Main colliery colours; others waved sheep’s heads, pierced through by long spikes. As the crowds waited for the trains to pull into the station, they sang ‘Rule Britannia’, accompanied by bandsmen from the collieries’ brass bands.

It was a Monday, six weeks after the evictions. The trains were coming in from Doncaster every twenty-five minutes. Steam from the locomotives drifted across the tracks, blurring the swirling snow. The crowd surged and roared as each train disgorged its passengers: scores of men – ‘blacksheeps’ – protected by the cordons of police, who had come from across the north of England to take the miners’ jobs.

The Denaby and Cadeby Main Collieries Company had paid for their tickets. In a final bid to bludgeon the miners back to work, the company had opened the pits, and advertised for 5,000 new workers. The crowds cajoled then bullied the men, imploring them to go home, hissing and threatening those who walked on through the police lines up the road from the station to the collieries, a mounted escort accompanying them through the empty streets to the pit gates.

The striking miners were fighting from the last ditch. The law courts had banned their strike pay; the colliery company was drafting in men to take their jobs and their former homes. In the preceding days, they had even lost the support of their own union, which had ruled that they should return to work. Though 1,500 of them continued to hold out, for some 2,000 men and boys the intimidation and hardship proved too much. In dribs and drabs, through February and early March, they returned to work. The strike was officially declared over in the third week of March. The miners went back on the same terms under which they had left the pits nine months earlier. Defeat was resounding: the strike had been for nothing.

The company was not benevolent in victory. It saw in it a means to get rid of the troublemakers from its pits. Five hundred of Denaby and Cadeby’s miners were not taken back on.

Ironically, for years after it ended, the Denaby Bag Muck Strike, which at the outset had seemed a parochial affair, assumed centre stage in the national battle between capital and labour, one that between 1900 and 1906 was being fought out in the Inns of Court.

In this unhappy period, it seemed that capital, through its natural alliance with the judges, had an unfair advantage. From 1871, when trades unions were first made legal, it had not been possible for companies to issue criminal proceedings following industrial action. Subsequently, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, they had looked for, and come up with, ingenious methods of restraining organized labour in the civil courts.

The most controversial of these was the 1902 Taff Vale Judgement, when the Law Lords ruled that a union could be sued for damages resulting from industrial disputes. At a single stroke, it appeared that the House of Lords had disabled labour’s most effective weapon: implicitly, the ruling threatened a workman’s right to strike.

The judgement caused a deep sense of grievance. Workers across a range of industries throughout the country felt victimized, and ostracized from the political process. Industrial action was the one lever they possessed to raise wages and working conditions. There was little point in having a nominal right to strike if, when exercising this right, the trades unions became liable for damages.

Ramsay MacDonald, the Secretary of the burgeoning Labour Party and a future Prime Minister, responding to the Taff Vale decision, urged the unions to support their own parliamentary candidates. ‘
Trades Unionism is being
assailed,’ he said, ‘not by what the law says of it, but by what judges think the law ought to say of it. That being so, it becomes necessary for the unions to place men in the House of Commons, to challenge the decisions which I have no doubt will follow this.’