Snap Cackle Strop

Artefact 4: Snap Tin | Article 4 of 4

Snap Tin – The Movie. Produced as part of the mining heritage project ‘A History of Coal Mining in 10 Objects’ (2013).

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 last of four essays, he gives us a brief overview of the snap tin.

David Amos

The snap tin was a miner’s lunch box made of metal. It measured around 9 inches by 4 inches and consisted of two sections of metal, around two-inches in depth, one which slotted into the other. This was to provide a seal when the sandwiches were inside, protecting them from mice, which were ever present in some parts of the pit. Snap tins were usually made by the ACME company, which was stamped on the lid. On one end was a handle for the miners to carry it on their belt whilst travelling in the pit and to also to hang it up on a strut, a type of hook, whilst they worked at the coalface. The other end of the snap tin was half-moon shaped; one of the theories about this is that it was to accommodate the shape of home baked bread so it could fit exactly in the tin.

‘Snap’ is the local dialect term for food in the Nottinghamshire Coalfield. In the North-East Coalfield of Durham and Northumberland it is called ‘bait’. Miners in the Scottish Coalfields refer to it as ‘piece’. Miners had a snap break usually mid-way through the shift, and this was where intensive debates took place on subjects such as politics, trade unionism, religion, class and a whole range of similar subjects.

Accompanying the snap tin was metal canteen called a Dudley. Due to the absence of water down the pit, this was the only way drinks could be transported. Soiled fingers meant that coal dust and oil mixed with the food and dirty bread-crusts were discarded. For similar reasons, tin miners in Cornwall ate pasties with a thick crust that could be discarded. The hot working environment limited the type of food that would stay fresh underground: The jam sandwich became a staple ingredient of the pit-man’s diet.

Snap tins went out of use in the 1960’s with the advent of plastic tupper-wear style lunch boxes and commercial sliced bread.

The short film at the top of this page was written by Paul Fillingham and is based on the book Coal Miners (1930) by G.A.W. Tomlinson. Chapter VII entitled ‘Strike’ centres around a snap break in which a trainee miner ‘has his arguments smashed…one-by-one to the amusement of the other men’. It was filmed by Joel Footè and directed by myself, underground at Caphouse Colliery, Wakefield. The domestic scenes were filmed at the D.H. Lawrence Birthplace Museum, Eastwood.