Snap Tin

Artefact 4 | Introduction to Snap Tin

The Miners’ Snap Tin

The fourth artefact in the Memory Theatre is the miners’ Snap Tin, a metal, waterproof and rat-proof container that was used to carry food underground.

James Walker @MemoryTheatre

D.H. Lawrence grew up in a community of miners and came from mining stock – whether he liked it or not. In Eastwood, mining replaced hosiery and agriculture as the dominant industry in the mid-19th century thanks to various technological innovations, making it a lucrative form of employment. The wages of a piece-work collier in the area more than doubled between the 1850s and 1914 earning a miner 9s 10 ½ d a shift (Griffin, 1982) [i].

In ‘Nottingham and the Mining Countryside,’ written towards the end of his life, Lawrence railed against the ‘ugliness ugliness ugliness’ of industry, lamenting the gradual destruction of the environment as well as processes of mechanisation that had a dehumanising effect on workers. Conversely, he recognised in mining culture ‘a sort of intimate community’ whereby working semi naked underground and bonded by the fear of physical danger, created ‘the continual presence of danger’ which ‘made the physical, instinctive, and institutional contact between men very highly developed, a contact almost as close as touch’ [ii].

Lawrence depicted mining culture in his trilogy of Eastwood-based mining plays written between 1911 and 1913, though these were dismissed by Edwardian critics as a ‘sordid picture of lower class life’ and for a ‘lack of verbal beauty’ in his writing [iii]. Central to this criticism was Lawrence’s use of dialect. To outsiders, the language of miners lacked ‘beauty’ because they had no experience of the culture he was describing. Yet these words captured an entire way of life, and often with great humour. It’s for this reason we’ve asked David Amos, a fifth-generation miner, to select an artefact that represents this integral aspect of Lawrence’s life and explore it over four essays.

David has selected a snap-tin, the waterproof metal tin that would protect the miner’s food from dirt and chemicals as they burrowed their way into the bowels of the earth.

However, it is worth noting that Lawrence never explicitly refers to a snap-tin in any of his works, instead he opts for a ‘snap-bag’ which is referenced in The White Peacock, Sons and Lovers, Daughters of the Vicar, A Sick Collier, The Daughter in Law, A Collier’s Friday Night.

For example, in Sons and Lovers, we see Mrs Morel preparing her husband’s food and work for the following day:

‘She moved about at the little tasks that remained to be done, set his breakfast, rinsed his pit-bottle, put his pit-clothes on the hearth to warm, set his pit-boots beside them, put him out a clean scarf and snap-bag and two apples, raked the fire, and went to bed. He was already dead asleep.[iv]’

Whether in a snap-bag or a snap-tin, food was lovingly prepared by the wife for the husband who risked his life daily. It is for this reason that the ‘snap’ break was not just a welcome respite from hard labour but an opportunity for debate and humour, and bonding with your brethren.

References:

[i] Griffin,A.R and C.P. Griffin, ‘A Social and Economic History of Eastwood and the Nottinghamshire Mining Country’ in A D.H. Lawrence Reader, ed. Keith Sagar, (Manchester University Press, 1982), 129.

[ii] D.H. Lawrence, ‘Nottingham and the Mining Countryside’ in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence, (Penguin Group USA, 1972), 135-6.

[iii] See James Moran, The Theatre of DH Lawrence: Dramatic Modernist and Theatrical Innovator. (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015).

[iv] D.H. Lawrence. Sons and Lovers, ed Keith Sagar, (Harmondsworth Penguin, 1981), 62.