Black Diamonds (13 page)

Starting at the top of Firbeck Street, the police worked their way down. At every house the procedure was the same: the miners and their families were asked to stand to one side while their possessions were removed from their homes. The heavier items were lowered down ladders from the upper windows by chains of policemen. Linoleum was torn from the floors, pictures taken from the walls, beds unfastened, the babies’ cots and dolls bundled out. By midday, the streets resembled an impromptu open-air market; household effects were strewn along the length of them: mattresses, beds, chairs, tables, sofas, fenders, clocks, sewing and wringing machines, piled in heaps.

Reporters from local and national newspapers stood with the miners and their families, watching the evictions. ‘There goes my beautiful Turkey carpet,’ one man was overheard to say as a policeman deposited a tattered old hearthrug, woven from bits of old rags, on the road in front of him. On Annersley Street, one of the miners took on the role of auctioneer, ringing a handbell, shouting out inflated prices for the meagre possessions littering the streets. But despite the black humour, the distress – particularly among the women – as one reporter observed, was acute:

Their eyes were strangely big and their white faces wore a look like that of the hunted hare when the dogs are on it. ‘It isn’t the police fault,’ they said, ‘they’re only servants who’ve got to do as they’re bid. It’s him,’ and their eyes went in the direction of the handsome colliery offices where the all-powerful managing director worked. One would break down and, with a sudden turn, would seek a corner alone in a still open house. In a minute or two she would come out again, her eyes red and swollen, but walking proudly as though to defy those who accused her of crying, and the men stood quietly whispering to one another.

On the first day of the evictions, the police cleared eighty-two families out of their homes.
The expected trouble
did not materialize; as one miner was heard to say, ‘We have been quiet so far, and it will be better to be quiet now.’ That night, the temperature in Denaby dropped 10 degrees. Hard frosts and snow were forecast. A further 650 families were to be turned out on to the streets over the next three days.

The evicted families had to find somewhere to go. For many it was difficult. Few had relatives in the area. Most of Denaby’s inhabitants were immigrants who had come to the village in the last decades of the nineteenth century from Ireland, and from worn-out pits in the North Staffordshire and Shropshire coalfields. Many of the families – like Ernest Godber’s – were large: ‘My father moved to Denaby from Derbyshire. “There were fourteen of us altogether, mother, father and fourteen children. They didn’t all come to Denaby though, one got run over with a steam-roller, and one got shot, doing summat he shouldn’t a done I expect – that were afore I were one year old, but we heard about it anyways.’ The Godbers were lucky to find accommodation at a shopkeeper’s house in Mexborough. Others too crowded into small cottages belonging to friends in the neighbourhood. One woman, the mother of seven children, moved into a house where there were nine children already.

But of the 3,500 evicted, there were 267 men, women and children who had nowhere to go. They were looked after by the Reverend Jesse Wilson, Denaby’s Methodist minister. A hundred and forty of them were housed at his chapel and at the school he ran; the remainder were put up in local authority tents erected in fields on the edge of the village.

Jesse Wilson was a miner’s son who had grown up in the Yorkshire pit village of Castleford, south of Leeds. Before going to Denaby, he had preached for seventeen years in the Welsh valleys. There was a strong Methodist tradition in the pit villages in south Yorkshire, as there was throughout England’s coalfields. The Church of England clergy owed their livings to the landowners and coal owners who were careful about the political outlook of the person they appointed to look after the souls and spiritual wellbeing of their miners. To be a Methodist was a mark of independence: as well as spiritual solace, it offered the miners a means of unguarded self-expression and conferred a sense of self-respect. Wilson’s strong sympathy for the families sprang from his own experiences as a child. On the Sunday following the evictions, speaking from the pulpit, he told his depleted congregation why he wanted to help them:

When I was a boy
a bitter struggle rose between Capital and Labour and my Father was thrown out of work through no fault of his own and I learnt to know what scarcity of food meant. During the strike, my mother was taken dangerously ill and I accompanied my father on foot to Leeds, a distance of about nine miles, to fetch medicine. Returning to the village, when we entered it, we were accosted by a neighbour who told us my mother had died. I’ll never forget my father at that moment – a strong man bowed down by grief. Shortly after, two of my brothers also died. A kind friend came to our relief, and I now feel duty bound to do likewise.

Besides housing as many of the homeless as he could squeeze into his school and chapel, Wilson distributed food parcels and blankets and clothing to the families living in the fields outside Denaby. ‘There were two classes of tent,’ he recorded in his journal, ‘the marquee and the bell-tents. In the former a large stove was fixed up for heating and cooking purposes: the latter being too small for a stove, it was fixed outside with pieces of wood nailed together to prevent the wind blowing out the fire. Beds were placed on wooden floors a few inches from the ground in the marquee, while in the bell-tents straw was spread over the wooden floor, and the mattresses placed on top.’

The tents had been erected at the bottom of a slope. Someone had hoisted a Union Jack on a pole, prominently displayed, at the entrance to the field. Water from the sleet, snow and rain that fell in the days after the evictions poured down the hill and saturated the grass, transforming it into a carpet of mud. Two children were born in the tents that January, both christened Jesse, a mark of gratitude to the Reverend. Two also died – one from blood poisoning after grazing his knee.

Sightseers in their thousands came by train to Denaby to look at the marquees. ‘
Many seemed to think
it was a kind of peepshow minus the usual fee for admission,’ wrote the Reverend Jesse angrily. In caring for the families, he saw at close hand the reality of their lives:

I was returning from an appointment in Conisbrough and determined to see how the people were faring. The air was dry, the wind intensely bitter and the ground crisp. I was muffled up to the mouth and yet shivered with cold; I failed to keep warm even when walking briskly. I reached the field and entered. I went into the marquee first and saw a sight which saddened and sickened me. A few feet from the stove were a man and a boy lying on a mattress with a thin covering over them. The boy was lying with his face to the man’s back and with his arms over the man, pulling himself as closely to the man as possible to create warmth, and yet he shivered with cold. His teeth rattled in his mouth. I went to the bell-tents, and in one were five lovely children fast asleep, forgetful of the hard lot they were passing through. They lay on a mattress with a thin sheet thrown over them, while a few inches above their little heads was the tent canvas, blowing in and out at the pleasure of the wind.

10

It was first light, the Monday after the evictions at Denaby.

Along the road to the colliery, a sharp east wind shook the overhead gas mantles in and out of incandescence. Out of the gloom, shadowy figures converged. The stark mathematical outline of the colliery rose ahead of them, the spokes on the still pulley wheels grimly distinct.

That morning – 12 January 1903 – 3,000 miners had made an early start to attend a union meeting in a field adjoining the pit. Walking from their temporary lodgings in the neighbouring towns and villages, some had covered distances of seven or eight miles.

Two hundred yards behind the colliery, a few solitary policemen banged the last nails into the boarded-up windows in the houses. It had taken three days to turn 750 families out on to the streets, now deserted. ‘
Thank God it’s over
,’ one policeman said, ‘such pitiful work has never before been my lot.’

Fred Croft, the Chairman of the Denaby and Cadeby Main Strike Committee, addressed the men from a dray that had been wheeled into the field and now served as a makeshift platform. ‘If we are beaten we are ruined,’ he told them. ‘If the struggle lasts another two years I hope you’ll stand like braves to the foe. We have shown the world what we mean to do. We intend to fight on. We have put up with things thousands would not have stood. It is time the men of this country arose and said what should be done. If we do not take this step, conditions will become worse and worse. It is the men with the money who make the weak suffer.’

Croft’s words – and the loud applause – carried over the empty streets behind.

‘Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.’ The colliery company, in what it believed to be a ‘wicked and causeless strike’, was equally determined not to give ground. It had taken the roof from over the miners’ heads. To crush them into submission, its next step, in effect, was to threaten them with death.

Starvation was the company’s chosen weapon of execution; the law courts, the executioner.

On 14 January, four days after the last families had been evicted, a judge in London ordered the miners’ strike pay to be stopped.

From the outset, the company had claimed the payments were illegal. When the men walked out of the pits, they had been in breach of the Yorkshire Miners’ Association’s rules. It was a spontaneous action: no ballot was taken, nor did the men serve notice on the company. The union’s rules stipulated that before strike action could be endorsed, any stoppage had to have a two-thirds majority by ballot, and that the men had to serve notice on their employers. Unless these rules were observed, the strike was unofficial and no strike pay could be disbursed. On 17 July, three weeks after the miners at the Denaby and Cadeby pits had gone on strike, to circumvent its rules for the purpose of issuing strike pay, the Yorkshire Miners’ Association ordered the men to return to the collieries to serve notice on the company.

Days later, William Howden, a miner at Cadeby and one of the few opposed to the strike, took out an injunction against the union to prevent it distributing strike pay, claiming the stoppage was both illegal and unofficial. Howden was a company stooge. Lord Beveridge later remarked: ‘The colliery company, wishing to make the strike impossible, were almost openly financing the nominal plaintiff and were really at the bottom of the action. Why they don’t get sued for maintenance of another’s suit I can’t say.’

The company paid Howden’s legal expenses and gave him a subsistence allowance while he pursued his case. It dragged through the courts for months. When it finally came to appeal in January 1903, the judge was clearly biased against the striking miners. At one point during the hearing, as Beveridge noted, he made his prejudice quite obvious, openly stating that he wanted the strike pay stopped in order to bring the strike to an end. He directed the jury to uphold the injunction on the grounds that the men had illegally broken their contracts on 29 June, and that they could hardly return to work on 17 July for the purpose of handing in their notices to terminate contracts that had been terminated three weeks earlier.

Strike pay was all the miners had to survive on.
The weekly allowance
of 9 shillings per man,
^*
1 shilling for every child under the age of thirteen, and 4 shillings and sixpence to lads – boys between the ages of fourteen and eighteen who worked at the pit – meant that, while many of the families in Denaby went hungry, they were not starving. But without strike pay, they would.

‘It was a terrifying time for our people,’ recalled Robert Shepherd, who was nine in January 1903, when the payments were stopped.

In the absence of the Welfare State, short of uprooting and seeking work elsewhere, whether the miners starved or not depended largely on the kindness of others. In Edwardian England, the poor and the needy were looked after by their communities. Charity was part of the weave of society, the threads running through it from the bottom to the very top.

As Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan, Duchess of Marlborough, recalled, the poor ate the scraps of food from ‘Society’s’ plates:

It was the custom at Blenheim to place a basket of tins on the side table in the dining room and here the butler left the remains of our luncheon. It was my duty to cram this food into the tins, which we then carried down to the poorest in the various villages where Marlborough owned property. With a complete lack of fastidiousness, it had been the habit to mix meat and vegetables and sweets in horrible jumble in the same tin. In spite of being considered impertinent for not conforming to precedent, I sorted the various viands into different tins, to the surprise and delight of the recipients.

At Wentworth, once a week, the slaughterman from the Home Farm drove round the Fitzwilliams’ villages in a cart, piled high with the carcasses of animals the house had not managed to consume. They were cut up into joints of meat and distributed among the poor. At Christmas, every tenant on the estate was given a ham and a side of beef.

The culture of giving was also dominant among the working classes. In mining communities, when the pits were working, people helped those who had fallen on hard times. The miners were clannish: their common bond was their knowledge of one another. Often, they lived in the same village from birth to death, and many never travelled far from it. At Denaby, there were no gardens to separate the houses, or hedges or high walls; the partition walls were so thin in the terraced cottages that you could join in the conversation next door. Coal and food were shared; from an early age children were brought up to run errands for the elderly in the village, or for families who had been brought down by injury or illness.