The Privateersman (A Poor Man at the Gate Series Book 1) (21 page)

The building would take three months, at a cost of a
little more than three thousands, extra cash that would have to come from the
speculative pot, which was a pity but could not be avoided. Typical rent, Tom
discovered, was four bob a week, which for eighty places amounted to… £832 in a
year, on three thousands, that was, quick scribbling and crossings out said a
mite more than twenty-seven per cent! Perhaps he should give some thought to
speculative building next year.

Building the coke ovens took much the same time as
the houses, and the canal spur was no more than a four week job – everything
would be ready for spring.

Three months passed but no underground manager
appeared – the word from Cornwall was that the bulk of skilled men had gone to
the coal in South Wales and the rest had crossed the Atlantic to mines in Upper
Canada and the States. None had wished to go ‘foreign’ to the north of England,
and Lancashire was especially anathema; enquiry divulged that the Cornishmen
had risen against the Crown a while before, a mere two or three centuries back,
with the assurance of aid from the North West, which aid had never materialised
– they had long memories in the West Country.

Tom recalled Joseph’s words of five years before –
it was all new, there were no experts, merely a few men who had been doing it
for a longer time and knew a bit more than the others. What they had learnt, he
could, must, indeed.

He bought picks, shovels and wheelbarrows and a mile
of wrought iron rails for a trackway; Roberts ran cast iron wheels and axles
and frames for tubs and he bought deals to make the sides for two dozen.
Wincing at the outrageous cost, he bought a ship load of Canadian fir for pit
props and sleepers for the trackway. Finally, all in place, money spent and no
revenue coming in, he could delay no longer, set out for the docks to find his
labour.

There was, yet again, famine in Ireland, in the part
called the Midland Counties this year; there was starvation in one part or
another most years from all he could gather – not enough rain, or too much at
the wrong time, and the potatoes failed – they were not a native crop to
Ireland and the conditions were only almost right for them. The potatoes had
become the food crop for almost all of the poor and they had only pots for
boiling them over open fires; when the spuds failed they could not eat, even if
given flour as an alternative, for they had no ovens and no knowledge of dough
making, of kneading and proving either. The old died quickly and the young took
disease and followed more slowly; the survivors tramped in search of work and
reached the cities where there was a little in the way of poor relief until
they became a burden on the funds and were bundled aboard ships, mostly to be
dumped at dockside in Liverpool or Bristol or Cardiff within a couple of days.
A few of the ‘lucky’ ones ended up in Boston or New York, half of their family
typically dying on the way, most often to end up despised in the slums there.

There was little for the Irish in Liverpool; the
chapels reluctantly performed good works amongst the Papists and supplied a
roof and a blanket and a couple of scanty meals a day; the corporation, not
wanting disease to spread, provided a little as well and pushed them out on the
road to the Welsh mines as quickly as they could. The offer of work brought a swarm
of hungry, pleading men and women to surround Tom.

For lack of any organisation he had gone to the
warehouse where a harassed Methodist preacher was providing bowls of stew with
the assistance of some of the ladies of his congregation. The nearly exhausted
minister had fallen on his shoulders, blessing him for bringing some release
from his burden, had happily handed the load over.

“I need eighty men, sir, no more – I have eighty
cottages to put them in, and you must have three hundred here, reverend. They
must be strong men who can wield pick and shovel, but there will be work for
the women and older children as well.”

“Families then, Mr Andrews, no single men. None of
the sick or enfeebled.”

“The work would kill them, sir – it is hard labour I
am offering, but a roof and a full belly and a living wage besides.”

The minister, a firm believer in salvation through
work, had no difficulty with this and was able to make the bulk of the choice
for Tom. Some of the men and women had made an effort, helping with the
cleaning, tending the cooking fires, nursing the sick, scrounging firewood, and
these had come to his attention as worthy souls – a pity they were inveterate
Papists, but they might yet save themselves – and he in turn recommended them
to Tom. They let the chosen fifty make up the numbers with relatives and
acquaintances from their home villages, it seeming likely that they would look
after each other and work together more successfully than a random collection
of strangers might. They loaded up onto six wagons and set off in holiday mood,
their time of tribulation perhaps coming to an end.

They gawped at the big red-brick buildings of the
town, the great mass of people in the streets, the shops for the rich people,
chattering and nudging each other, dropping silent in awe as they pulled up at
a market on the outskirts of the industrial area near the old village of
Anfield. There were at least a hundred stalls, mostly foodstuffs.

“So much, sir, and is it all for sale to ordinary
folks?”

Tom nodded, told them he had made arrangements with
a stallholder here, a farmer, to pick up a little food for them until they had
been paid and could get in the way of buying their own in town.

They loaded twenty one-hundredweight sacks of
potatoes, eighty cabbages and strings of onions and four flitches of bacon; as
an afterthought, a treat, Tom had a bag of apples put up for each family at
thruppence a time, an extra pound, but he had not realised just how badly-off
they had been, felt a rare compassion for these people who had been less than
slaves for not even having a sale value.

It was raining when they reached the pithead and
looked about them for their cabins; pointed towards the brick houses with slate
roofs, dry and on two floors, they could not believe their luck.

“Get coal from the heap, get your fires lit and put
the cooking pots on. There’s not much in your places – a kitchen table and a
couple of stools and a bench, pallets and blankets, a stewpot and a kettle and
a few plates and knives and spoons and mugs. Anything else you must buy for
yourselves.”

There was a couple of ounces of tea and a jug of
milk and a teapot as well, George Mason having said that the Irish lived on tea
and ‘taters’ and could not function without either.

Every man woman and child was silently outside at
first light, waiting to work.

“Are any of you tradesmen – carpenters or masons,
perhaps?”

Two chippies and a blacksmith identified themselves.

“Good, that will be very useful! The rest of you get
picks and shovels and wheelbarrows.”

They set to levelling a path for the trackway to
follow from canal wharf to coke ovens to coal heap and then into the drift
itself. The three skilled men set to building a first tub and then cutting
sleepers to lay the rails to exactly the gauge of the tub they had made; it was
a wooden box on wheels, about five feet wide, six feet long and a yard high,
would carry some three tons of coal, half that of coke, could, just, be shoved
along by two or three of the older children. A week and they pushed a first tub
along the whole of the roadway they had built, and then they laid rails inside,
almost to the working face.

The seam sloped slightly downwards and was,
inevitably, wet; they dug a drain, a leet, along the side of the track. Dakers
had ignored the problem, cutting his coal only above water level, often leaving
half of the thickness of the seam untouched, but that made no sense at all that
Tom could see. The ditch, a yard wide and five feet deep at first was run
diagonally across the slope to reach the stream below the header pond; it was
black and full of dust, but that hardly mattered as long as it was kept clear
of the canal.

By the end of the month they were cutting coal, men
at the face and the carpenters with a couple of hands apiece measuring and
wedging props behind them, the gallery more than fifty yards wide and giving
working room for the women and silent children to shovel and sort.

It had surprised Tom at first that the children were
so quiet, until he had looked closely, so many of them dull-eyed and listless,
starved as babies and never developed inside their heads as they should have;
there was nothing to be done now, it was too late for them. They worked,
performing the simple repetitive tasks of wheeling the tubs in and out, would
probably do nothing else in the whole of their lives – Tom had no religion, was
rather glad that as a result he need not examine the condition of his soul, but
he had no love for himself at the end of the working day in their company.

Patrick Reilly, the smith, took charge of the coke
ovens, it being natural that he should work with fire and things mechanical,
soon showed a talent for organising his little domain; two months and he was
running all of the above-ground operations, pocketing an extra two pounds a
week, riches beyond his previous imagining; the two carpenters, Edward and
Michael, naturally became chargehands below ground for they were in a position
to see everything that was going on and to direct the hands to where they were
needed.

“Frederick! Coal tar, from the coke ovens – how do
we get rid of it? Has it any use? Can we sell it?”

Frederick did not know, pledged himself to find an
answer, came back in a fortnight.

“Soap, sir. There is one manufacturer over on the
Cheshire side who makes toilet soap using the tar, though he does not say how;
he will supply his own clean barrels and will collect them – he pays very
little, but it gets the problem off of our hands. I visited Baxter’s pit where
they have ovens and just burn off the tar - I have never seen so much smoke and
filth in my life, sir! And at Norton’s they throw it away, just dump it, and
the stream runs black and the ground stinks and the wells nearby taste of the
stuff. We would need to use the labour of one man to fill the barrels and the
price we will be paid will barely cover his wages, but I think it will keep us
cleaner and healthier. The shipyards will pay four shillings a barrel,
delivered to them, us to supply the barrels – too much effort, I think, sir.”

“I agree, soap it is. See to it for me, please. As
well, can you discover the market for occasional surpluses of coal and coke?
Not regular contracts, but it will be best to run the pit at full every week,
and Roberts may not need all of our output, when the furnaces are being cleaned
and relined, for example.”

Frederick nodded and noted the instructions in his
little journal.

“They have iron coal barges working on the River Severn
below Ironbridge, sir; I understand that the iron sides take the bashing from
coal being thrown on and off much better than the ordinary wooden narrow boats,
require much less in the way of repair.”

“What would the costs be?”

Frederick pledged himself to find out.

A year, during which Tom forced himself underground
every working day, and the coal seam dipped sufficiently that they needed to
deepen the leet, making the expected discovery of a second stratum, another
seam; they began the digging of their first shaft at that point, Tom ordering
in a new-built steam engine, powerful enough to run a pump and turn the wheel.
Reilly rubbed his hands in glee – he had heard of steam engines, had never
expected actually to see, and work, one; he suggested that they build another
terrace as well, and then hire on another fifty or so families to make a
thorough start on the second level.

“Certainly, Patrick – but I will not be having the
running of it,” Tom replied. “You must train up another man to run the ovens
and yourself take over the whole pit, above and below ground. Will you do it?”

“A Paddy from the Irish bogs, sir? In charge of
everything? And will your customers and suppliers be willing to take that? Will
it not besmirch your name, sir?”

“Probably, Patrick – but not enough for them
not
to take my money – and if they say a bloody word, I shall build a bloody church
here and hire one of your priests on to say Masses in it – and that would learn
these chapel-going buggers a lesson!”

Tom was finding the businessman’s life increasingly
tedious; he knew that he ought to be seen in chapel twice on a Sunday if he was
to stay in the area and expand; as well, it was time for him to take a wife, a
respectable daughter of one of his associates, chosen for her virtue and her
portion rather than any personal attributes; he had to
fit in
, to be one
of the community, and he did not need the money sufficiently to do so. He was
well-off, could easily become rich if he crossed the border from medium-size to
big; Joseph wanted to, he did not.

The weaving mill had been a success; despite early
teething problems the demand for cloth had been so great as to make them a
profit from the first, but Joseph was worried.

“The problem is, Tom, that the looms need the
strength of men and a little skill as well, though that can be taught easily,
it’s mainly about keeping an eye on quality, not a dexterity of hand and eye
like the cottage looms demanded. The hand loom weavers won’t come into the mill
still, that has not changed, and they are starting to complain that I am
undercutting them, driving their prices down – and they’re right! Next year I
shall produce nearly twice as much, going onto double shifts, and the price
will fall for sure, more for them than for me because I will guarantee quantity
and quality. Sooner or later, they are going to try to do something about it –
burn me out, I expect.”