equally insidious delights of the public-house, usually the property of the butty or the colliery masters. The Newport rising of November 1839 was engineered wholly in such public-houses in the remote hill districts.[1]
Respectable people in the neighbourhood seem to have considered the collier population as utterly hopeless and irredeemable and took little steps to ameliorate or improve their lot. The masters, we are assured, never entered the pits to see what was going on, and abuses went unchecked.[2] Parents were allowed to bring their children into the pit almost at any age. Women were even allowed to become hewers of coal.[3] The dress of both sexes was so alike as to be practically indistinguishable, even in the light of day.[4] Thus the blame for the horrific condition of the mining population seems to be distributed amongst all the classes concerned—masters, butties, parents, and the public generally. There was a fearful awakening of the public conscience when the Report of 1842 was published, and the exclusion of women and children from the mines was voted in Parliament without a murmur.
The task of those who had previously sought to make an impression upon this population was hard but not hopeless. They met with no great sympathy from those who had the means to help. The Rural Dean of Birmingham[5] was quite unable to persuade a landowner to give a quarter of an acre of land to build a church, although his land was annually increasing enormously in value. Another wealthy owner, who drew £7000 a year without ever seeing one of his employees, openly boasted of the fact.[6] The vicar of Wolverhampton applied to a man who was supposed to have £50,000 a year from mines for funds to build a church, but the man of wealth said his mines would be worked out in seventy years and the church would then be of no use.[7] But though the task of reformers was hard, it was occasionally successful, as at Oldham where, owing apparently to the development of education, mainly in Sunday schools, a public opinion had grown up which made the mining population there an honourable exception to the general state of semi-savagery.[8] On the whole it is the isolation, geographical and social, of the mining population which
