Mining Stock

Artefact 4: Snap Tin | Article 3 of 4

Hand holing 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 third of four essays he traces Lawrence’s family history to mining.

David Amos

D.H. Lawrence came from a family of miners, his father was a Butty. Two of his brothers, Walter and James, were ‘holers’ at one time at Brinsley Colliery. Their job would be to bore holes along the length of the coalface prior to it being blasted down with explosives. It would then have to be manually moved by the ‘hewers’ and ‘colliers’ into tubs to be taken out of the pit by the ‘gangers’.

James was tragically killed in an underground accident at Brinsley Colliery on 28^th February 1880 by a fall of roof. He was just 28 years old. This was the influence for Lawrence’s short story, ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’, which was published in The English Review in July 1911. In this, Elizabeth Bates, a coal miner’s wife, is suspicious when her husband does not return home from work. She suspects he is boozing away his wages and they desperately need money as she is pregnant with their third child. However, it transpires that he has been killed in an accident at work when the walls ‘fell over him clean as a whistle’ and ‘shut ‘im in, like a mouse-trap’ [i]. When his body is returned to the family home, Elizabeth reflects on how little she really knew her husband. The setting for the home was based on Vine Cottage, which is now a derelict building on the path leading to Brinsley Colliery. The story would later inform the play The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd.

During this period, miners had a reputation for drinking as well as accidents. This is most famously demonstrated in Lawrence’s dialect poem, ‘A Collier’s Wife,’ which I read as part of the BBC Radio 4 series,Tongue and Talk: The Dialect Poets The poem captures the humour and frustration of a miner’s wife who is informed that her husband has had yet another accident at work.

“It’s a shame as ‘e should be knocked about

Like this, I’m sure it is!

‘E’s ‘ad twenty accidents, if ‘e’s ‘ad one;

Owt bad, an’ it’s his!”

 

Reference

[i] Lawrence, D.H, ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ in The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, (Penguin Books), 219.