I’ve read with interest the thread on a candle light trip (although with some doubts) but not being a mine explorer I’m in no position to comment. But as this is based on our mining heritage it brought me back to various other aspects that tend, on occasion, to be rather romanticised. So I’m back on climbing ladders which I know has been discussed before but sometimes a single fact drives home the reality.

Reading an account of the death throws of Cornish mining in the latter half of the 19th century (by HJ as it happens) he mentioned the fact that as late as 1886-7 there were only ladders in West Wheal Seton, and the miners in the bottom levels there had to climb 266 fathoms to the surface. They sure were tough men (and boys) having just worked a shift in appalling conditions. Sadly, of course, it led to many dying prematurely. A romantic era it wasn’t. I’m not really sure the heritage angle emphasises this enough and the family (social) angle is somewhat neglected.

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Reading an account of the death throws of Cornish mining in the latter half of the 19th century (by HJ as it happens) he mentioned the fact that as late as 1886-7 there were only ladders in West Wheal Seton, and the miners in the bottom levels there had to climb 266 fathoms to the surface. They sure were tough men (and boys) having just worked a shift in appalling conditions. Sadly, of course, it led to many dying prematurely. A romantic era it wasn’t. I’m not really sure the heritage angle emphasises this enough and the family (social) angle is somewhat neglected.

A good point well made. Having been involved in mining heritage interpretation for most of my working life I have found that the human aspect of mining is the most difficult to get across convincingly. I think that the key stumbling block is that we tend to look at he subject from a 21st century perspective where most people lead an over materialistic and frankly pampered lifestyles with no concept of sustained physical labour. Understanding a lifestyle devoid of what we would consider to be the essentials of life seems to be beyond most people.

Gwennap United, Hot Lode is the one I find the most telling. Great Beam comes in No2 in Jenkin's tales of awful mining conditions....

http://i60.photobucket.com/albums/h22/mrjazzpiano/united.jpg 

Fascinating stuff. Are there any other good books? (apart from The Cornish Miner).

this process has become much accelerated in quite recent times.

I first came to Cornwall in the early 70s, at that time it was nothing particularly unusual to meet old men showing various symptoms of exposure to silica dust and blasting fumes.

'white finger' and various vibration-related effects such as rheumatism, were widespread among miners working on stoping and development work with airlegs and drills, along with crushing injuries to hands and feet.

there were a range of bad practices, often involving grizzlies and tramming, also entering blasting areas before proper ventilation, which were 'turned a blind eye' to.

a contemporary of mine from RSM suffered a fatal accident in Wheal Jane involving a chain ladder up a raise which was, quite simply, unsafe and known to be so.

so no, don't let us be too romantic about it all.

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There's a fair bit of information on the working and social conditions in Lanner: A Cornish Mining Parish 1998 (reprinted in 2001 as Tin Mines and Miners of Lanner), Schwartz and Parker, Halsgrove.

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My great uncle ran Plashetts Colliery up at Kielder for many years post war. He died long before I was born but both my mother and my aunt used to spend their school holidays up there as children.
Talking to my aunt about it a few years ago (now in her 60's) she said she always used to think as a child that a lot of the miners were fairly horrible men, hard drinkers, wife beaters, prone to fighting at the drop of a hat, not all of them but a high proportion.
It wasn't until more recent years that she reached the conclusion that these miners weren't really bad men but that in many cases they were teetering on the edge of mental breakdown.
The stress and strain of working in a privately owned colliery was pretty heavy and working conditions extremly harsh and took a heavy toll on the men.
For many, nationalising the pits (I don't think Plashetts ever was) was a great step forward which led to great improvements.

Richard D. Dawe's Cornish Pioneers in South Africa touches on the subject. If I remember correctly Philip Payton wrote extensively on what he called the 'paralysis' that engulfed Cornwall with the collapse of the mining and fishing industries. Unfortunately help required as I can't remember the title.

Also an interesting paper The Profits of Death: A comparative Study of Miners' Phthisis in Cornwall and the Transvaal, 1876-1918 by Gillian Burke and Peter Richardson.

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My great uncle ran Plashetts Colliery up at Kielder for many years post war. He died long before I was born but both my mother and my aunt used to spend their school holidays up there as children.
Talking to my aunt about it a few years ago (now in her 60's) she said she always used to think as a child that a lot of the miners were fairly horrible men, hard drinkers, wife beaters, prone to fighting at the drop of a hat, not all of them but a high proportion.
It wasn't until more recent years that she reached the conclusion that these miners weren't really bad men but that in many cases they were teetering on the edge of mental breakdown.
The stress and strain of working in a privately owned colliery was pretty heavy and working conditions extremly harsh and took a heavy toll on the men.
For many, nationalising the pits (I don't think Plashetts ever was) was a great step forward which led to great improvements.

my father worked in the London Docks in the 1930s and after the war, and the same could be said of the docks. It's often forgotten now, the harshness of conditions obtaining within living memory, and the extremes of bitterness and resentment which this produced.

the railways generally had a reputation for paternalism, by the standards of the day at least, although smaller lines could be very primitive. I recently read a book about the Leek and Manifold Light Railway, which referred to the men getting a week's paid holiday for the first time on being absorbed into the LMS. The Ffestiniog is generally seen as setting the standards these days, but this wasn't so in its later commercial days, when the footplatemen complained to the NUR about lax safety practices on more than one occasion

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I deeply dispute the great paralysis hypothesis postulated by Payton and have challenged this in an article in Cornish Studies 10, as well as in my doctoral thesis and other papers. Payton's hypothesis is too simplistic. While some communities were driven into an inexhorable decline by mine closure and out-migration, to suggest that the whole of Cornwall was thus stricken from the mid-1860s onwards is untenable. The housing stock in Redruth actually went up by 11 per cent in the 1880s and this was the town's heyday in terms of architecture, designed by the redoutable James Hicks. Camborne too, was growing at a phenomenal rate during this time even though it was losing people to migration. There is a clear danger in making region-wide generalisations.

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