Black Country Men Afield Written over 50 years ago By C.A.G. Thomas This article, written by a descendant of William Pearson, first appeared in 'The Blackcountryman' - the journal of The Black Country Society:

It is a pity that the praiseworthy tidiness which from time to time destroys all the out-of-date records of trading companies and partnerships sometimes makes an end of a good deal of material which might give a little colour to the grey pages of the economic historian.  During the coal strike of 1926 it was the writer's good fortune to find, in the office of a South Staffordshire firm, a bundle of old letters, part of the business correspondence of two brothers, John and William Pearson, who were coal and iron masters in the fifties of the last century.  They were among those who tried to trace some extension of the Black Country coal seams across the deep fault which forms their western boundary and, going further afield than their neighbours, developed the mines at the southern end of the Clee Hills in Shropshire, some 30 miles away.

Being much occupied with their pits and ironworks in Staffordshire, they directed their subsidiary enterprise by letters, of which a complete file was accidentally preserved when the Shropshire pits were sold and, at a moment when the industrial troubles of the present firm seemed more than usually pressing, there was considerable enjoyment to be found in reading the various and occasionally rather humorous trials of its ancestors, as referred to in the letters of 70 years ago.

The Shropshire enterprise was to consist, when fully developed, of coal and ironstone mines, a lime works, and a brick works, all manned by Staffordshire men.  Scarcely was work begun when an unexpected obstacle was encountered in the homesickness of the manager, one Richard Randall, which may have been increased by a letter from his employers warning him that there were doubtless many natives of the Clee Hills who would gladly murder him for the sake of the office cash.  He begged to be allowed to return to Staffordshire, but was at last so far encouraged by references to the battle of Inkermann, an addition of £9 a year to his salary, and the free use of a riding pony, that he settled down in his new home.

His subordinates in exile also felt themselves marooned at the hill, and at first disliked everything they found there, the new foreman of the lime works even disliking the works equipment and petitioning urgently for a set of blasting tools, "like we had in our own country".  In this connection it is amusing to note the chance inclusion in the file of a letter to Richard Randall from a friend of his youth, who had risen to the post of station master on a new railway at a small seaside resort in Wales.  He, too, seems homesick, and refers to his new dignity as "a humbugging job".  He adds that although his family are entranced by the beauty of the scenery, and the gaiety of the visitors, he himself would gladly be among the collieries and the ironworks again.

The Black County, indeed, seems to have been regarded by its inhabitants as a far more desirable home than the countryside, a feeling perhaps more common in the industrial districts of that day than our historians would have us believe.

As soon as the strangeness of their surroundings began to wear off, the colliers discovered that their new locality had a great advantage inasmuch as there was a considerable shortage in the labour market.  Thenceforward, for several months, the letters are full of references to strange or abominable conduct on the part of the men, beginning on a day when they all came up the pit some quarter of an hour before the end of their 12 hours' shift and ending in an epidemic of absenteeism among the "holers" or "pikemen", on whom the output, of course, mainly depended.

The partners at first instructed their manager to deal "gently but not timidly" with the men, but on no account to send for those who stayed away.  Later they told him that "when the holers played all must play," and finally he was ordered to take out a summons against every man who absented himself from work without notice.  This apparently stopped the trouble, and the year ended very amicably, its last letter instructing the manager to make fitting preparation for the colliers' Christmas feast.  He was told to provide 1.1/2 lbs. of beef for every person employed and free drink at the rate of two quarts for each man and one quart for each boy, but above all to remember to wish the men a Happy Christmas from John and William Pearson.

The epidemic of "playing" may be understood when one remembers that the working shift then lasted 12 hours, though one hour was occupied in rest and eating, and there was no attempt to work the shift through with only a pause of 15 minutes, as is usual in the modern seven or eight hour day.  The only colliers who worked a short day in the fifties were the pit sinkers who sank the shafts, and they only worked eight hours, as the work was hard and required special skill.  They were not allowed to work their period straight through, but had to rest in the middle of their own time, lest their work should suffer through fatigue.  The master sinker who directed operations was usually a sub-contractor, and well able to bargain with the mine-owners, the contract often entering into curious detail.

Mention is made of a certain James Harrison, who had contracted to sink a pit in Kingswinford "for 20/- a yard of depth, and 3/6 per day, and two quarts of beer".  He came later to the Clee Hills, and drove a harder bargain for 35/- a yard, but the shafts must have been wet ones, for Harrison bound himself to pay his men 2/6 a day "while working in the water", and John and William Pearson, for their part, undertook to give every sinker a good pair of flannel trousers.  Both these contracts are rather odd in that the price per yard is the same for the whole depth of the pit, whereas it was more usual for the rate to vary so that the sinkers were underpaid for the upper half of the shaft and overpaid for the lower, lest they might desert as soon as the easier half of the work was done.  They were usually credited with a belief in the Staffordshire rhyme
"Where it's soft we'll mow,
  Where it's hard we'll let it grow"

Where wages are mentioned there is of course no word of collective bargaining, and each road or stall of the pit was usually the subject of a separate contract, based on output, between the manager and the man or men employed in it.  Each job was practically put up to auction, and the man got it who would take it at the lowest figure per ton or per yard.  This competition between the men probably did not entail any great hardship upon them for the very good reason that labour was scarce, and other opportunities of work were plentiful.  Thus, one letter mentions a coming rise in the thin seam miners' wages in the Black Country, and the probable difficulty of manning the Shropshire pits in consequence, while on another occasion the scarcity of colliers in Staffordshire necessitated the temporary transfer of 60 men from the hill.
The letter of 16 years make no mention of unemployment, except in 1857, when there seems to have been a trade crisis, which the partners in the Clee Hill venture, more far-sighted than some of their neighbours, cautiously anticipated.  In a letter in October of that year the manager was warned that "the bank and other failures in America will make things very bad here", and in November he was told to take no notes upon the country banks.

By December he had news of the blowing out of 40 blast furnaces in South Staffordshire, and the partners told him that they estimated the unemployed in the coal and iron trades as numbering 16,000 men and boys, not counting those put upon short time.  Fortunately, the trouble seems to have been of short duration, but several banks failed in the Midlands before it was over.

If the workpeople competed with one another in wages their competition was no keener than that among their masters in the matter of selling prices.  A letter of 1865 gives the market prices of various coals, and the best coal from Cannock Chase was then only 19/7 a ton delivered carriage paid at Ludlow Station, while South Wales coal of first quality was delivered there at 16/3.  The industrial grades of coal were, of course, incredibly cheap, and long remained so, good iron-works fuel in the Black Country costing about 2/6 a ton, including delivery within a considerable radius from the pit, while the fine coal was often given away to clear the pithead.

The cost sheets of one of the partners' Staffordshire collieries, apparently sent to the hill for comparison, show the total underground cost in the celebrated thick coal seam as only 2/7 a ton.  This figure included 2d. per ton for "candles and drink", the latter being consumed in the middle of the 12 hour shift, when the hour's rest was always enlivened with free beer, and frequently with readings from the Bible.  In one district especially, the Anglican and Nonconformist clergy at one time made a practice of seeking out a congregation, and frequently held a service in the mines at mid-day, while in their absence some collier of scholastic attainments above the ordinary read the Bible aloud to his fellows while they rested.

Most of the 1850s correspondence, as might be expected, consists of instructions to the manager how best to surmount the various difficulties which beset him and, if he had few troubles such as we know, he had many peculiar to his day.  Even the higher ranks of workmen were illiterate, and one letter instructs him to give a printed copy of the safety rules  "to every butty, doggy, and overman", but this apparently being a vain precaution, to be sure to read it aloud as well!

It was difficult to find anybody sufficiently educated to act as check-weighman, and to oversee the cash sales and finally a man was sent from Kingswinford.  He was exhorted to think of the career open to a talent, and ordered to write a letter to his employers every day to prove that he was practising his handwriting.  He was so puffed up by pride in his new office that he was shortly reported as being too high-handed with the customers, and had to be rebuked for abusing them and warned not to use foul language to those that he disliked.  A year or two later he embezzled the proceeds of the cash sales, but was forgiven and reinstated, and his defalcations do not seem to have caused his employers nearly so much concern as the news that he no longer went to the Wesleyan Chapel, so that to his many other duties the manager had now to add the supervision of the check-weighman's Sabbath.

The lack of ready trained subordinates is not astonishing when one remembers that there were none of the modern technical classes and almost no technical books.  The manager himself had no mining certificate and was not legally required to hold one.  He could not do the work of a mining surveyor, and the owners had to come over periodically to do it for him, although his salary is mentioned as being higher than that of any other manager employed in Staffordshire by his firm, which was a large and successful one.  In some things, however, he seems to have been a capable man, for in the course of many years only one fatal accident is mentioned, though this may have been due in part to the fact that the seams of coal were thin, and thus probably free from the crushing falls of roof for which the neighbouring Thick Coal of South Staffordshire was long notorious.

The manager, Richard Randall, found the keeping of accounts extremely difficult, and his fortnightly cost sheets were often late, and earned him many a letter of rebuke, but even so he often had to check the accounts of the lime works manager, who wrote when forwarding them that, "he had done his best, but of course there would be some blunders".

The office work was in no way lightened by the customers, whose handwriting and spelling render much of the correspondence almost illegible.   The sales were mostly in country towns and districts and the credit given was long, and many were the strange excuses put forward for slow payment; one debtor told the coalmasters that all would be well by Christmas, this being the only time in the year when he collected his own debts; another assured them that his credit was quite good for, when short of money, he borrowed from the squire; a third blamed his creditors for his own non-payment, and said that it was their own fault, for they should have pressed him before he had spent his money.  Most of the orders were booked and most of the payments received at fairs and markets, where the manager, who often played the part of traveller and collection agent, was a frequent attendant.  In one letter to his employers he naively defends himself against a charge of inefficiency by vowing that he has only been drunk seven times in the last five years, and then only through drink with customers, "for there is none that will do business without his glass."

Perhaps the intemperance of the workpeople was not so well calculated as that of the manager to promote the welfare of the firm, for one letter orders a search at all the wayside inns for one 'Old Tom' who was lost on the road from Kingswinford to the Hill, and even the trusty 'Whimsey Man' while hurrying to start the 'Whimsey', or simple engine used in pit sinking, got lost for several days.

The Shropshire enterprise was of course not without troubles of a technical nature.  Part of the area had been worked before, by other people, but as there were no plans of their workings remaining, since plans of abandoned mines were not then registered it was impossible to tell how much of the mine was already exhausted.  In addition to this, owing to the faulted strata, there was a good deal of barren ground.

There was a certain amount of trouble with water, and costly pumping was necessary, while no small vexation was caused to the partners by the subterranean trespass of a neighbour, who secretly worked their coal and took it away up his own pit shafts.  The market for the coal was considerably restricted by the fact that it was not a coking coal, and failed as a gas coal.  Fortunately the pits were free from fire-damp, and any great amount of spontaneous fire, though on occasion the carbon dioxide drove the colliers from the workings, so that the manager was forced to report the pit as "at play for the black-damp", with considerable loss of output in consequence.

It is hard to realise the time then wasted by busy men in travelling from place to place, and the owners were repeatedly sending someone from the Hill to the various local horse fairs to buy them fast carriage horses to save their time, John Pearson the more hurried of the two, urgently demanding, "something that will go 14 miles an hour", while his brother William would sometimes ride the 30 miles to the Clee Hills in the morning, with relays of horses, and be back in Staffordshire by nightfall.

Owing to the shortage of capable subordinates, the owners were very much more closely concerned in the detail of the business than would be expected to-day.  There seems to be no department to which they were not called to give detailed instruction and advice.  The method of keeping the books, the exact distance to be holed by the 'pikemen' for the 'stint' or day's work, the setting of the coal on the coking hearth, the care and repair of the machinery, the precautions against an inrush of water in the mine, and a hundred other varying matters, were constantly referred to the masters for a decision which could be based on larger and greater experience than any of their 'overmen' possessed.

If this is characteristic of the period it goes far to explain the unchallenged domination of the 19th century employer, which, in this case at any rate was by no means confined to the affairs of the works and the mines.   Instructions to the manager to direct the colliers' voting at elections were unhesitatingly given, and no argument seems to have been considered necessary beyond the simple statement that John and William Pearson were on this or that side.

The land above the Shropshire pits was farmed, and frequent orders were sent to the manager for the provisioning of the households of his masters, who seem to have given to this department also a close personal attention, sometimes writing for, "another cheese like the last, which all commended", or for cider, described as "the sort that sparkles ten inches above the glass".  Sheep and geese were frequently called for, and large numbers of turkeys sere sent to the Black Country at Christmas to distribute among the Staffordshire customers, while sometimes even the manager himself had to superintend the picking of the bilberries on the Clee Hill.

John Pearson had a firm faith in the medicinal effects of good cheer, and mentions that he was soaked by the rain for twenty miles on the road from Shropshire, but that when he reached home dinner was ready, "with a goose, a neat's tongue, a couple of boiled fowls, a ham, a good roast piece of beef, and many other things, so he enjoyed himself with a few friends, and escaped all ill-effect from the weather".

He believed in the same medicine for other people, and on hearing of the dangerous illness of Thomas Ray, the master sinker, at once wrote to the manager to hurry to his sickbed, " with half-a-dozen bottles of old port and three pounds of arrowroot, because the doctor says that nutritious food may save his life".  Unhappily, a later letter proves that the remedy was unavailing.

Feasts were frequent at the Clee Hills, and the birth of an heir to the royalty owner is noted as an occasion of special rejoicing, while Christmas was usually marked by a letter announcing the dispatch from Staffordshire of a present for Richard Randall, and several of the more responsible workpeople, generally taking the form of a gallon of gin apiece or, if trade was good, a gallon and a half of whiskey.  The practice thus obtained doubtless aided Randall to hold his own when bargaining with the customers.

Religion and duty make frequent appearances in the correspondence, sandwiched between technicalities of mining or complaints of faulty book keeping, as when the cashier at the Black Country branch tells Richard Randall that one of his old friends, "has just gone up to Glory", and hopes that Richard is prepared at any moment to do likewise.  In another letter the cashier informs the manager at the Hill that his brother has been appointed 'horse-fettler' at the owners' Withymoor Colliery, and he should at once write to urge him to do his duty by his masters.  One letter from the coalmasters to the manager is apparently written in sarcasm, for it directs Richard to do his own duty, and thus make certain of his place in Heaven, while John and William Pearson may expect to do a little better at the Clee Hills.

The eating and drinking, the strict Sabbath observance, and the old fashioned mining technique, make the letters of the 19th century industrialists strange reading for their successors, but here and there appears a paragraph which might have been written yesterday.  Great stress is laid upon the continuous operation of the pits by successive day and night shifts, the application of piece rates wherever possible, the provision of stand-by machinery, and the importance of frequent financial statements and costs sheets, while the references to output and overhead costs suggest that some of the principles of industrial management have changed little in the last eighty years.

 

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