This book sheds new light on the human cost of industrialisation by examining the lives and experiences of those disabled in an industry that was vital to Britain's economic growth. If disability has been largely absent from conventional histories of industrialisation, the Industrial Revolution has assumed great significance in disability studies. The book examines the economic and welfare responses to disease, injury and impairment among coal workers. It discusses experiences of disability within the context of social relations and the industrial politics of coalfield communities. The book provides the context for those that follow by providing an overview of the conditions of work in British coalmining between 1780 and 1880. It turns its attention to the principal causes of disablement in the nineteenth-century coal industry and the medical responses to them. The book then extends the discussion of responses to disability by examining the welfare provisions for miners with long-term restrictive health conditions. It also examines how miners and their families negotiated a 'mixed economy' of welfare, comprising family and community support, the Poor Law, and voluntary self-help as well as employer paternalism. The book shifts attention away from medicine and welfare towards the ways in which disability affected social relations within coalfield communities. Finally, it explores the place of disability in industrial politics and how fluctuating industrial relations affected the experiences of disabled people in the coalfields.
overwhelmingly lived in family settings, not institutions. The families in which they lived, however, could vary quite widely. Many types of working-class household existed during the Industrial Revolution, including those tightly focused on the nuclear family unit, others that were more fluid and contained non-nuclear kin and others unrelated to the nuclear unit, such as lodgers.50 Mining families were no different. A sense of the range of households in which disabled miners lived is found in Scottish Poor Law records and the census of 1871. When the census was taken, William
himself.12 Even in areas where women were not employed underground, as in the north-east of England, sending very young children to work in coal mines was a familiar survival strategy for mining families struggling to cope with the effects of disability or other family misfortune. Ann Mills testified that she had sent her son Matthew to work underground to open and close the doors used to ventilate Blaydon Main Colliery at the tender age of six ‘on account of her husband’s bad breath’.13 According to Robert Franks in his report on the east of Scotland for the 1842
-changing injury was, for many mining families, very real. Disablement of the main breadwinner, whether temporary or permanent, also brought about a reconfiguration of social relations between fathers and their children. The contemporary definition of masculinity cast the man as a father with responsibilities to his children as much as a husband to his wife, and disability had consequences for this part of the man’s identity and social relations also. In the first instance, disability, and particularly the reduced income brought about by its effects on earning capacity, led some
. Kentish documented the widespread use of opiates to relieve pain in mining communities during the late eighteenth century.96 How frequently mining families could access, or indeed afford, these drugs, however, is difficult to ascertain. It seems likely, though, that few working-class Britons who experienced chronic pain would have enjoyed a ready and uninterrupted supply of opiates. The belief, then, that miners were impervious to pain may have proved a serviceable myth in an era when pain management was basic.97 The physical trauma of accidents and injuries was easy
tended to cause severe hardships for mining families. Such hardships often affected disabled people particularly badly. In matters of industrial politics, courts commonly upheld the interests of mine owners and their representatives at the expense of workers. As we have seen, judges frequently imprisoned miners for defying employers and Edward Rymer’s experiences indicate that men with impairments also shared this fate. Yet the courts were not the only state institutions used to discipline insubordinate or troublesome mineworkers. Sometimes the Poor Law was also
character across British communities and it is possible to discern some that were crucially important to mining communities and to the support of impaired miners. Blind and deaf charities, for example, were numerous in coalfield districts. For instance, the Cambrian Institution for the Deaf and Dumb in Swansea operated a ‘Wonderful Penny’ fundraising scheme, starting in the 1860s, in which workers from local collieries – alongside iron, copper and tinworks – donated a penny from their wages to the institution, many of whose pupils came from mining families.16 Another, the
inhabited them. Miners’ families tended to be larger than average, since the possibility of men earning relatively high wages by their early twenties encouraged early household formation and resulted in higher fertility rates.69 In addition, many mining families looked to ease the burden on household resources by taking in lodgers, while other families sub-let part of the house to another family in the form of ‘apartments’, which served to increase the overcrowding; in fact, 10 per cent of all houses in the north-east of England and south Wales were sub-let in 1911, and