Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

2Ö BRITAIN AT WORK. unconsciously belligerent. Anyhow, he is self-reliant and resolute. He is the autocrat of industry. If, as occasionally happens, he comes out on strike there is not only a flutter among the coalowners, but con- sternation in workshop and factory, and on steamboat and railway, for he is “ the prime factor in our industrial system,” and the trade of the country is paralysed without him. However early coal was found in England, Scotland, or Wales, the miner has always risen early to delve it, even when he laboured in crude workings with antiquated iron pick PIT BOYS GUIDING TRUCKS. and wooden shovel. Now at dawn, with his “snap”(his food) in his jacket pocket, and his tea-can slung on his belt, he quits his humble cottage in the colliery village, and joins his mates on their long or short tramp to the pit bank. The bell rings. There is a shuffle of feet, and the cage, crowded with miners, descends the shaft, the return cage gliding, phantom-like, high above them. At the pit bottom, shallow or deep, the men get their safety-lamps, and go on foot, or are conveyed in corves, drawn by ponies, or steel haulage, or electric cable, along the main road to the nearest point to their working places. If the mine is very gaseous they give a careful look to their lamps as they start along the narrow subterranean way to the coal face, note the warning on the heavy ventilation door or clinging brattice cloth : “ There’s fire in Simpson’s gully.” In one pit in South Yorkshire, to which the writer once penetrated in the guise of a collier, there is a curious fault. The coal-seam has been split by volcanic action. The lower part of it is workable on the level near the main road ; but the upper part of it, lifted many yards high, has to be reached either through a subsidiary shaft, cut through the shale and sandstone, or by a rusty ladder flung over the face of the fault, hereabouts covered with lather coating or mud. There are many curious ways to the workings in various mines ; but none too crooked or tortuous to outwit the miner, who is nothing if not dogged and undemonstrative, though he may have to trudge and crawl for an hour underground before he reaches his working place. Here, as seen in the illus- tration, he strips to the waist, tightens his belt, and begins his task of coal- hewing. His safety-lamp, possibly an improved Clanny, hangs from its hook on the nearest prop, and by its light he holes, picks beneath the face of the coal, till what the house- wife familiarly speaks of as nuts, cobbles, and slack heap about him, and the filler loads the corve, which, im- pelled by its own weight when filled, clatters clown the side track to the corve train on the main road for transit to the pit bottom. By-and-by, after the use of lever, or explosive, the mass of coal beneath which the collier has holed comes down with a crash, in mighty slabs, and the wedger, with his vast strength and heavy, long-handled hammer, reduces the huge pieces to handling size, for transit to the corve; and so the work of getting and filling goes on till “ snap ” time, unless toil is sharply checked by the cracking of prop, the move of roof, the deadly fall of bind, or the explosion that riots through the mine with fiery breath. There are two chief methods of working the coal. In the north of England partiality