Down The Mine

Not exactly but the next best thing. Today saw my first visit to the Scottish Mining Museum in the Lady Victoria Mine at Newtongrange, Midlothian. I went for one very good reason: one strand of the family tree, going back to at least the 1770s, was composed entirely of miners. Under The Act Anent Coilȝears and Salters, which was in force from 1606 until 1799, the earliest members of that group, working in pits in the parish of Airth, were serfs, bought and sold like chattels with the mines they worked in. Slightly later members of this family line, in Carron Company mines in the parish of Larbert, are recorded in the 1841 census, taken the year before the 1842 Act put a stop to women and girls working underground. In 1841 Elizabeth, aged 18, Margaret, 16, Rowena, 14, and George, 11, were all down the mine. The evidence from the Larbert pits gathered by the commissioners investigating conditions prior to the Act include that from a 16 year old girl who had been working below ground for eight years for 15 to 16 hours a day: 'I draw in harness and sister hangs on and pushes behind....the work is gey sair.' They continued to work above ground, however: the delicately named Rowena is described in the 1851 census as 'labourer on a coalhill.' Later still in the 19th century the family had moved to Bothkennar Parish where in the 1871 census Adam, 14, my great-grandfather, is 'a drawer in a pit.' There were masses of them, a big extended family, all down the mine and in the colliery band. My maternal grandmother provides the link to this group and her brother was my vivid, visual connection to that life, a man whose hands were dotted with blue flecks where the coal-dust had been blown under the skin by exploding charges. So, I had a lot of baggage with me today and I found the experience deeply moving, at times having to take a grip of myself to keep control of my emotions. Buying a replica miner's lamp at the end seemed more justified than the usual semi-obligatory purchase from some other museum shop. It is one sort of reminder, the picture at the head of this post showing wives and children waiting for news of a flooding in a local mine in 1923, which took the lives of forty miners, illustrating the real cost of the business, is a more important one.