Iron, Steam & Money

by Roger Osborne

  Food industries like sugar-making and baking, which were increasingly being carried on outside the home by specialist producers, as well as production of salt meats, tallow, vinegar and the like, all increased greatly and used significant amounts of coal. The growing chemical industry was a significant consumer too; by 1647, for example, around 8,000 tons of Sunderland coal were sent to the Yorkshire coast alum industry each year.

  In 1611 Thomas Percival gained a patent giving him the exclusive right to manufacture window glass using coal as fuel; he converted furnaces to coal use by using enclosed clay crucibles which prevented contact between coal fumes and the raw materials of the glass. Three years later another patent banned the use of any other fuel except coal in glass-making – the Crown awarded itself a royalty on the licence, glass-makers were coerced into using coal. In the seventeenth century the smelters of copper, lead and other metals had also adapted to using coal and in the 1730s Benjamin Huntsman’s crucible method allowed coke to replace charcoal in steel-making.

  Soap making: Coal was used in vast quantities in industries like soap-making, where chemicals were boiled in open pans.

  While manufacturers benefitted from the availability of cheap coal, people were keen to do the same in their homes. Coal was used for making bricks but houses were traditionally heated by wood. A medieval cottage usually had just one room with a hearth in the centre, surrounded by stone or tile to constrain the wood fire; smoke went up into the rafter space and out through a hole or louvre in the roof. Grand houses might be bigger but the hearths were essentially the same type. This was a safe arrangement for timber houses; it kept the fire away from the walls, and allowed everyone to get round the fire.

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  Climbing Boys

  The advent of narrow chimneys brought in one of the enduring symbols of industrial Britain: the climbing boy. Flues were narrow (usually nine inches by fourteen inches), and were often built with angles in the belief that this would help the fire to draw. Chimney sweeps therefore hired or acquired boys from workhouses to climb up the flues to remove the soot. It was a dangerous, filthy job with soot full of carcinogens and the flues often left hot. Boys died of cancer, suffocation or heat exhaustion. From 1803 effective brushes and even a mechanical sweeper were available, but these were not taken up by most sweeps, who continued to use children. The following is from evidence taken at the Parliamentary Committee on Climbing Boys held in 1817 (the committee recommended ending the use of boys, but this continued until 1875):

  ‘No one knows the cruelty which a boy has to undergo in learning. The flesh must be hardened. This is done by rubbing it, chiefly on the elbows and knees, with the strongest brine, close by a hot fire. You must stand over them with a cane, or coax them by the promise of a halfpenny, if they will stand a few more rubs. At first they will come back from their work with their arms and knees streaming with blood: then they must be rubbed with brine again. Some boys are awkward and suffer more, but all are scarred and wounded.’

  Mr Ruff, a Nottingham sweep

  ‘On Monday morning, 29 March 1813, a chimney sweeper of the name of Griggs attended to sweep a small chimney in the brewhouse of Messrs Calvert and Co. in Upper Thames Street; he was accompanied by one of his boys, a lad of about eight years of age, of the name Thomas Pitt. The fire had been lighted as early as two o’clock the same morning, and was burning on the arrival of Griggs and his boy at eight. The fireplace was small, and an iron pipe projected from the grate some way into the flue. This the master was acquainted with (having swept the chimney of the brewhouse for some years), and therefore had a tile or two broken from the roof, in order that the boy might descend the chimney. He had no sooner extinguished the fire than he suffered the lad to go down; and the consequence, as might be expected, was his almost immediate death in a state, no doubt, of inexpressible agony. The flue was of the narrowest description, and must have retained heat sufficient to have prevented the child’s return to the top, even supposing he had not approached the pipe belonging to the grate, which must have been nearly red hot; this however was not clearly ascertained on the inquest, though the appearance of the body would induce an opinion that he had been unavoidably pressed against the pipe. Soon after his descent, the master, who remained on the top, was apprehensive that something had happened, and therefore desired him to come up; the answer of the boy was, ‘I cannot come up, master, I must die here.’ An alarm was given in the brewhouse immediately that he had stuck in the chimney, and a bricklayer who was at work near the spot attended, and after knocking down part of the brickwork of the chimney, just above the fireplace, made a hole sufficiently large to draw him through. A surgeon attended, but all attempts to restore life were ineffectual. On inspecting the body, various burns appeared; the fleshy part of the legs and a great part of the feet more particularly were injured; those parts too by which climbing boys most effectually ascend or descend chimneys, viz. the elbows and knees, seemed burnt to the bone; from which it must be evident that the unhappy sufferer made some attempts to return as soon as the horrors of his situation became apparent.7

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  By the sixteenth century English houses had more rooms, and fires began to be placed against stone walls. Hoods were put over the fires to guide the smoke, and these hoods or mantles were made into decorated features. The practice of having several fireplaces in one house spread from the great houses to the gentry, to yeoman farmers and merchants. These houses had chimneys protruding from the rooftops to help the smoke disperse.

  In his Description of England (1576–7), William Harrison reports the changes that had happened in the village of Radwinter in Essex during his lifetime: ‘the multitude of chimneys lately erected’ was one of ‘three things to be marvellously altered in England’ within the ‘sound remembrance [of] old men yet dwelling in the village where I remain . . . In their young days there were not above two or three [chimneys], if so many, in most uplandish towns of the realm (the religious houses and manor places of their lords always excepted, and peradventure some great parsonages), but each one made his fire against a reredos in the hall, where he dined and dressed his meat.’6

  Hand in hand with the move to place fires against walls, and to build chimneys, came attempts to heat houses with coal rather than wood. While wood fires were big structures with the fuel held in an open basket and the flues often a yard across, coal needed to be kept in a small mass, and to have a strong draught to generate enough heat for it to keep burning. Just as important, coal smoke, being denser than wood smoke, needs to be drawn upwards; the flue must be specifically designed for this purpose.

  However, converting to coal was easier said than done; the problems of smoke and stench were notorious and pioneers often had to call in ‘smoke doctors’ to save themselves from choking to death in their own homes. Hearths were reduced in size by building brick hearths within old hearths, or by the use of cast iron ‘cheeks’ (i.e. side baffles) and firebacks. These were among the most common cast-iron products made before the eighteenth century. Probate inventories show the growing popularity of iron coal hearths, as well as the tools that went with them. In the coal region of Gloucestershire hearths were common by the seventeenth century; around Telford by the late seventeenth century almost every household had at least one coal-burning grate while bigger houses had more. In 1673, Zachary Kyrke, a gentleman of Lichfield, had a grate in his great chamber, one in the hall and another in the kitchen. By the seventeenth century tongs and a shovel were common household items while houses started adopting fenders to protect floors from cinders. The fireplace was only part of the system needed to burn coal. Chimneys had to be narrow and high with the opening away from the roof or from other buildings.

  The rapid increase in urban populations led to a boom in house-building with most houses built to be heated by coal. Builders experimented with different designs of hearth. Georgian houses put up in London, Bath, Bristol and fashionable spa towns around the country, as well as the brick terra
ces of workers’ dwellings, all had coal-burning fires, vastly increasing the demand for coal. Indeed, coal fires and coke boilers remained the main source of heat in British homes until the second half of the twentieth century.

  By the 1760s, therefore, coal had become central to the British economy and the lives of most British people. Its use enabled the country to produce more food, to improve the efficiency of its manufactories and to keep their houses heated at relatively low cost. But there was only one device in existence that was able to use coal to produce mechanical, as opposed to thermal, energy. That was the Newcomen fire engine, which by then was approaching the venerable age of fifty. The engine was a device for pumping water out of mines using the suction induced by condensing steam. It consumed huge amounts of waste coal kept in heaps at the shaft heads, though its use also spread to the tin and copper mines of Cornwall. The power of the Newcomen engines was evident to writers like William Brownrigg who visited Whitehaven in the early 1750s: ‘It would require about 500 men, or a power equal to that of 110 horses, to work the pumps of one of the largest fire-engines now in use . . . As much water may be raised by an engine of this size, kept constantly at work, as can be drawn by 2,520 men, as is said to be done in some of the mines in Peru.’10

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  The Energy Equation

  The conversion of Britain from an economy based on natural resources derived from the land – timber, crops, animals – to an economy based on coal took around 200 years to complete. When coal began to replace charcoal as a cheap fuel for manufacturing and domestic heating, the land previously used to produce timber could be put to growing food instead; it is estimated that it would take around 100,000 acres of woodland to make 10,000 tons of iron, so freeing the land from the need to provide fuel was a huge bonus. By 1820 the huge quantity of coal used was the equivalent of adding another 15 million acres to the nation’s productive land.8 In addition coal increased the energy input into agriculture through the use of lime and other minerals produced by using coal.

  In a wholly organic economy the number of people that can be fed, given shelter, clothed and kept warm is limited by the amount of material that can be produced by the land; and while this can be increased, it will inevitably reach a limit leading to a stagnant economy. The energy input into agriculture in the form of machinery, fertilisers, transport and so on therefore becomes crucial: in the industrial countries of the twenty-first century such external energy input allows the population to be fed by the labour of just 2 per cent of the workforce.

  At an individual level the fundamental change brought by external energy is just as stark. If a coal miner in the late eighteenth century consumed around 3,500 calories a day mining around 200 kilos of coal, the coal contains 500 times as much heat energy as the food he has consumed. And if the fuel is used in an engine with even 1 per cent efficiency he is delivering many times the mechanical energy he is expending. This mechanical energy is then available to the mill-worker in a steam-powered factory who is able to expand the work he can perform by a factor of ten or a hundred because of the energy that the miner has placed at his elbow. Calculations for other industrialising countries reveal that by the nineteenth century coal-derived energy produced the equivalent of a workforce increased by 250 per cent.9 In contrast, people in subsistence economies where there is no ready supply of energy in the form of fossil fuel are at a huge disadvantage. As it takes about three calories of fuel to cook one calorie of food, the fuel that is required in the form of timber takes up space needed for crops and diminishes the overall amount of calorific energy that can be gained from the land. Having coal-derived energy is therefore a double bonus.

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  Despite this power, and the improvements carried out by engineers like John Smeaton, the Newcomen engines were not adopted by other manufacturers, and remained part of the mining trade. But then, in 1769, James Watt patented his idea for an improved steam engine, which would use far less coal to produce the same results. The first working Watt engine was built in 1776 and Britain began its historic conversion to a completely coal-based economy. Steam engines for mills, mines, furnaces, forges and factories, locomotives, steamships and barges, all consumed vast quantities of coal and the development of gas lighting (first demonstrated by William Murdoch at the Soho foundry in Birmingham in 1802) further increased demand – annual production rose to 15 million tons by 1800, 50 million tons in 1850 and 250 million tons by 1900.

  Rising demand led to improvements in mining techniques. Iron casing of shafts allowed deeper mining – in 1780 one shaft at Wallsend colliery reached 183 metres deep – and ventilation techniques allowed mines to spread further out from their shafts, while the replacement of men by ponies in the Northumberland coalfield brought down wages, making coal even cheaper. Industrial innovation did not, however, radically improve the productivity of coal mining itself. A seventeenth-century miner could produce around 150 to 200 tons a year, while in the early twentieth century a miner could fetch 250 to 300 tons. However, the number of men in the industry grew to cater for the vastly increased demand, and the surrounding transport infrastructure made the industry as a whole more efficient; the simple building of trackways, for example, allowed an ox and driver to move more than five times as much coal per day as a road wagon previously, and once steam locomotion was introduced from the 1820s coal could be moved as fast as it could be mined.

  Nor did technology radically improve conditions for underground workers. Miners descended the deep shafts by holding on to the chain that was used to haul the corves or baskets of coal up to the surface; twelve hours later they were hauled up in the same way. Access to the face was often along a tunnel dug just big enough to crawl through, and at the face itself the coal was dug out with pick and shovel, often with the miner lying on his side. The coal was then hauled away either by dragging the corves, or later on wagons running on rails. The hauling was often done by children with straps from the baskets tied around their foreheads.11 One early method of dispersing the lethal firedamp gas (chiefly methane) involved a miner crawling along the tunnels dressed in sacking soaked in water. He would then lie in a pit dug in the floor of the tunnel, cover himself with boarding and pull a lighted candle along after him; the candle was intended to explode any small pockets of gas. To aid ventilation miners dug two shafts and burned open fires at the foot of one, in order to draw air through the workings. This was highly dangerous and in some places furnaces were built at the top of the shaft as a safer alternative.

  Despite all the dangers and the physical toughness of the work, there was no shortage of miners; they earned better wages than most workers. In 1800 a Northumberland miner received 2s 6d a day for a four-and-a-half-day week – around double the pay of an army sergeant. Pay was often deducted for broken tools, and miners were forced to buy candles and other goods from the manager above market rate (managers regarded this profit as a legitimate perk). But miners got free coal and a house for their families, as well as beer, bread and cheese for any additional work outside their routine labour. Mining families were eager for their children to work in the mines too, both for the income and (for the boys) as a first step into the mining life. Boys and girls as young as five or six were used as trappers, to sit by the large wooden doors that helped to control the air flow, opening them to let the coal trucks through. In order to save on candles they generally sat through a whole shift in the dark.

  Safety lamps were first introduced in 1815, designed independently by Humphry Davy and George Stephenson; both worked on the recent discovery that a flame burning within a gauze or mesh filter would not ignite firedamp. As Humphry Davy wrote: ‘In plunging a light surrounded by a cylinder of fine wire-gauze on to an explosive mixture I saw the whole cylinder become quietly and gradually filled with flame; the upper part of it soon appeared red-hot, yet no explosion occurred.’12 While this was excellent in theory, accidents continued due to rusted gauze or broken glass, and many miners did not like the lamp because of its lo
w light, so preferred to stick with candles and take precautions. Underground explosions brought a heavy toll of lives lost right up to the present day: this has been the human cost of the coal economy.

  The increasing demand turned coal into big business. Landowners with the good luck to have coal seams under their land did well from the centuries-long boom in production. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries many landowners effectively supervised their mining interests themselves, using their existing stewards as managers. But soon some of these stewards became expert in prospecting for coal, setting up mining facilities, digging shafts, hiring miners and arranging transport, and became highly sought after. Hugh and Thomas Taylor were employed by the Duke of Northumberland, John Curr by the Duke of Norfolk, Joshua and Benjamin Biram were used by the Fitzwilliam estates in South Yorkshire, James Spedding worked for the Lowthers of Cumbria, Alexander and Robert Bald for Lord Mar and W. S. Clark for the Earl of Bute – all became renowned for their brilliance as mining engineers. Spedding oversaw the digging of undersea pits off Whitehaven; John Curr used underground railroads, while Benjamin Biram developed a system of rotary ventilators.

  As demand expanded and exploiting reserves became more complex, coal mining as a business became more sophisticated, requiring a higher level of investment to open or dig new shafts. From around 1750 onwards, landowners began to hand over the entire responsibility for mining to others. These professionals would buy the rights to mine on a lease and pay a royalty on the coal they extracted. As in other areas, therefore, building an effective commercial structure went hand in hand with the revolution in industrial production. The Northumberland and Durham coalfield was the most productive and it was here that a standard system of leasing was worked out. From 1726 an alliance of George Bowes, Sir Henry Liddell and Edward Worthy set precedents for regulating and negotiating mineral leases; and where earlier arrangements were based on royalties paid in coal, landowners now insisted on payments in cash.