Butty

Artefact 4: Snap Tin | Article 2 of 4

Butties image by Reverend FW Cobb, Rector of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, from 1907 to 1917

David Amos worked at Annesley Colliery from 1974 to 1998 and is now a mining historian. He has lived in Eastwood for over two decades. In the second of four essays he discusses the role of a ‘Butty.’

David Amos

Lawrence’s father, Arthur (1846-1924), began work down the pit aged seven and worked his way up as a contractor or ‘Butty’ as they were known locally. Butties were the middle men between the company and the colliers and often had social and economic control in the communities. Colliers wages were based on piece rates, a type of contract-work, and small disputes between teams of colliers and the butties was a common feature of coalmining. The butties took their share of the total money earned in a stall and did the bartering with the Company. The landowners got royalty rights for minerals under their estates.

The Butties controlled a section of the longwall coalface called ‘stalls’ and each stall was split into ‘stints’. This is where the well-known phrase comes from ‘that you have done your stint’. Each collier had a stint to do, there were three-to four colliers per stall. This was in the days prior to full mechanisation of the coal industry, the local term for this type of work was ‘hand-got’. A collier had to shift the coal out of his stint which could be anything from six to ten yards in length depending on the height of the coal seam. It involved much hewing of the coal, shovelling (sometimes with forks to get large lump coal) and setting of props. Coal was won on only one shift out of three, the production shift. The other two shifts were for undercutting the coal and holing, which was boring the face with holes in preparation for the coal being exploded. Once the coal had been won on the production shift, a laying up shift would happen. On this shift all the equipment was moved forward to take the space where the coal had been won. Coalmining worked on a principle of ‘seam extraction’ and it relied on seam continuity which didn’t always happen smoothly.

Deep coalmining at Eastwood came to an end in July 1985 with the closure of Moorgreen Colliery. It was a planned closure because of exhaustion of viable reserves.  Coal had been produced there for just short of 120 years. Moorgreen was the Minton Colliery in Sons and Lovers.