What’s in a Name?
I sing you a song of collieries,
Whose picturesque toponyms
Cloak any subterranean pandemonium
With the poetry of a landscape.
I sing you a song of the Forest of Dean,
And its 44 pits and 6,000 miners
In the year of the General Strike;
I sing you a song of these collieries:
Silent Standing, Bridworth and Mailscot Gale, Berry Hill, Cross Ash, Crump Meadow, Dark Hill, Farmer’s Folly, High Meadow, Hopewell Drift, Lightmoor, Fetter Hill, Mapleford, Gorsty Knoll, Nine Wells, Pastor’s Hill, Pluck Penny, Prosper Hill, Howlers Slade, Weavers Pitch.
What’s in a Name?
Let us hear from Jesse Hodges:
“I have left too much of my blood in the mines to ever want to go back down and I would not wish it on anybody. It was a pity it was ever discovered. I don’t believe God meant it for a man to grovel in the bowels of the earth and to leave blood on coal.”
What’s in a Name?
Coal, coke, anthracite, ash, slag, scoria, charcoal, cinders, culm, fuel,
Cinderford, Coleford,
Coal. Blood.
Blood on Coal.
Today is Armistice Day, November 11th 1926; I’ve been out since May 7th. I’m back in tomorrow. And in that long time, I’ve never had a penny off anyone. There was no official lockout pay available from the Forest of Dean Miners’ Association. And do you know, the money I’m going back to. Why I’d be better off on the dole. I’m back tomorrow on the owner’s terms and at this rate they’ll be dancing on my grave before long. Talking of which.
When the police first came in, I heard one or two of them having a laugh at us, quietly singing, “Don’t go down the mine, daddy.” But living round here in the Dean, you’ve no choice. There’s nothing else.
I don’t think I’ll ever forget what I’ve seen over the past few months. Those mounted police down from Cheltenham escorting men into work round Bream way. The Metropolitan Police stationed at Lydney, riding out like a possee on the cowboy films, patrolling Whitecroft, Parkend, Fetter Hill, and Coleford with their noses in the air and then clip clopping back to Lydney after seeing what was going on at Sling and Bream. To think what we went through in the trenches and No-Man’s Land and to be treated like this after fighting for King and Country.
But back to the here and now. I must tell you what happened to me at Ranters Green a few weeks back. Mustn’t forget this one. I was there with a few mates. And who should come motoring down the road but Percy Moare, the managing director of the Princess Royal Colliery. He wound down the windscreen when he got to us, all smiles, “When you coming back to work, boys?” Jimmy shouted back, “When you pay us all a living wage.” Mr Moare didn’t smile then. It was more of a grimace, “I’ll see you all eat bloody grass, first.”
Talking of which during the lock-out, the children had a cooked meal every day at school, thank goodness. They took their knives and forks and plates with them every day. And now I’ll tell you another tale about the Princess Royal Colliery. The underground manager there was a Mr. Burgess. He was also on the Board of Guardians for the Poor Law and the workhouse. He was a penny-pinching type of fellow, like Scrooge before his redemption. He wanted to cut back on these meals. But we colliers stood up to him, arguing and winning our case that growing children needed nutrition and sustenance. He was trying to starve families back to work if you ask me. And when the three men who fought the case went back to work, there on their first day back, to greet them as they walked across the top of the pit was Burgess.
“There’s no work for you three. You can bugger off.”
But there was a lot more kindness shown around the Forest and the pits and not just for people but for animals too. I well remember sitting on the trunk of a fallen beech tree, watching my mates bring the horses up out of the mine. The squeal of the horses on seeing sunlight for the first time was a sight and a sound I shall never forget. We put sacking over their poor heads to stop the direct sunlight hurting them. The poor beasts didn’t know where to go, though. They couldn’t see, could they? They just stood there. They’d been in the dark so long. It made my heart weep.
It made my heart weep to see men drift back to work too. I felt anger too, of course. But they went back out of necessity as they saw it. Their hearts wept, too, in the main.
But we had to express our opposition to maintain solidarity. So we’d often creep round to the front of their houses and hammer pots and pans and tins to make one hell of a racket. No fighting or anything like that you know. Just noise and a bit of name calling. But even so, the police would arrive to escort those men into their shift. Easy money for the police, really.
That caused a lot of resentment, of course. There they were on horseback getting their easy money while down the road there was despair. A mother and her collier son were turned out of their home because they couldn’t afford the rent. A man who had given his all in the Great War and no bloody home fit for a hero for him. Westbury Workhouse instead and charitable handouts of food. He told me that one day a load of fish arrived from Russia and was doled out around Ruardean Hill. It came up on the railway and was shared out for all who gathered there. But can you imagine such a thing? Fish all the bloody way from Russia. But it was bloody welcome, I can tell you.
Now to talk of Cinderford. Well, practically every man in Cinderford was a miner. There was quite a congregation of them in the Triangle one day; women and children too, and the police turned up as expected. I was standing by the railings at Bilston School and saw a man with his wife stagger past with his head all bleeding. He’d been hit with a police baton. Another wounded hero of the Great War. The mounted police were billeted at the “Feathers’ and the police station in case of rioting. But to be honest, there was no rioting in the Forest. Just a bit of skirmishing at the pit heads. The police ate well, I can tell you. We used to stare through the windows of the Feathers and watch them guzzle. There was a lot of resentment at their luxury you know. Dining out at our expense, so to speak.
Well, that’s almost that for the diary. Just one last recollection: the meeting that took place at Speech House just after the termination of the General Strike where John Williams declared: “They can bring troops and police here, with their batons and their guns, but they cannot make us go down Lightmoor or Foxes Bridge or the Princess Royal.”
That seems a lifetime ago. It’s back to work tomorrow.
Goodnight.
Believe you me, I took no pleasure or pride in doing what I did and little profit either. But it kept body and soul together. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve always been a rock-solid union man but after the General Strike was called off the writing was on the wall once the railway unions refused an appeal to place an embargo on the transport of imported coal and after the TUC rejected an appeal to impose a levy on unions to support a strike fund for the miners.
I had no money coming in. No strike pay. And my children were too old for free school meals. They found charity and soup kitchens degrading. And my wife had lost her job at the laundry. So that’s why and when we decided to follow in the path of Sid Cooksey and Stan Rogers. They’d been on at me for a while about this.
We went up to an old colliery, Woorgreen, just above the hospital. And there, no word of a lie, about a hundred men all scavenging for coal in holes they’d dug. We gazed around. All the best plots had gone. So we wandered off down to an old siding where the heavy wagons used to run and I started to scrape at the gaps between the sleepers. And soon enough I hit coal – 18 inches of coal in depth all the way along the railway line.
We got 3 and a half tons of coal out of that line in about five hours. We sold it to Westbury Workhouse for £3 10. But that was nothing compared to what Fred Warren and his gang got up to, digging coal in the strike pits.
They did it at night in secret so the pickets and the police were none the wiser. And they slept in the nearby woods in the daytime. Mallard’s Pike was their favoured pit. They cut a four to five feet hole, then went down a short distance, making a sort of bell pit like the miners did in the old days. They’d start in one corner, getting the coal out, then move on, filling the corner with dirt. They went underground in a level and propped up the roof too.
Rossiter & Jones of Parkend came to the site with a lorry, loaded up the coal, and paid Fred and his men accordingly. But, in the end, the Union prevailed, and convinced Fred that they should stop.
But that’s enough of us men.
Let’s hear the women’s side of things from Elsie.
These are some of my memories of what occurred in the Forest during those long months of the spring, summer and autumn of 1926. I’ll speak mostly of family life. After all, it was us women who had to keep the households ticking over when there was no wage coming in. I hope you find my stories interesting. You couldn’t call me an omniscient narrator but I’ve got a pretty good memory of what happened twenty years ago when I lived in the Dean.
I’ll start with the children and what they did. Back then, there weren’t so many motor cars on the roads and the boys used to play marbles in the streets. That was a great pastime for them when out of school. But that changed once the men refused to work on the owners’ lock-out terms.
All work and no play might make Jack a dull boy but all play and no keeping an eye out can weaken a strike.
So the boys used to hide in the bracken to keep an eye out for any men drifting back to work and when they spied any furtively slipping down the lanes in the direction of a pit head, they would slip away to inform the striking miners in the village.
The men would then hurry along to make sure that the appropriate and necessary address would be given to the disloyal miners. Some of it, abusive name calling, no doubt. Feelings were running high of course, But no violence or physical intimidation despite what the papers said.
I have to confess that I shouted my piece at times and on one occasion, I must relate, I was punished for an outburst when a policeman on horseback pushed me back and the force of it sent me hurtling down bang on the pavement and flat on my back. Only words from me but violence from the police. You didn’t see that in the papers, of course. Any road, my leg went black and blue with the bruising. There was an irony in my having a blackleg wasn’t there? We often had a laugh about that.
But back to the children. Now everybody remembers the evacuation from London in the War. But what I’m about to tell you now is going to startle you: there was evacuation of children from the Forest to London in 1926. They were miners’ children from large or medium-sized families. During the lock-out, down the way, every child was given a meal ticket from the Westbury Workhouse Poor Law Board of Guardians at Monmouth. But then the Guardians in their wisdom changed the rules. Families with four or more children would lose a meal ticket; so, these families were asked to let children go to foster-parents in London and the surrounding districts. The foster-parents were supportive working-class people, in the main.
It was such a sight to see the children with their parcels marching down to Whitecroft railway station to commence their journey to Paddington and beyond. There were tears on the platform as you can imagine and not even the arrival of the steam engine could totally efface the sound of the sobbing. But life was hard and we just had to get on with it.
And it was still hard after the men returned to work in the November of 1926. There might have been a wage packet on the table for the first time in months but wives and mothers had a struggle to make ends meet. It wasn’t just the fact that the wage packet was lighter, so to speak, it was also the fact that we’d all had so much on the slate and on tick for food and groceries and those debts had to be paid back. It took years for some folk.
But the shop-keepers had helped us out and they deserved their repayment. But apart from them, another thing that kept us going during the lockout was the sharing of vegetables and fruit from allotments and gardens. And when rabbits were shot, they were passed around too. But a God-send for us was Mr. Pope, the headmaster at my children’s school. He called a meeting of parents, formed working parties, you might say, and commandeered the Chapel school room. The older children helped out too: the boys collecting firewood and salvaging coal from the top of the tips. Mr. Pope issued stern orders that the girls should only help at the bottom: “All girls picking coal must stay at the bottom.” The boys also had to collect water for cooking from a spring behind the school with a yoke across their shoulders and two buckets on the ends.
A farmer, Mr. Hoare, donated spuds, swedes, and skimmed milk. And in return we would help him out at harvest time. When it was time to eat, down they would march from school to chapel with their knives, forks and spoons. It was mostly spuds and vegetables with meat once a week. There were newspapers for tablecloths, usually the Forest Gazette. Copies of the Gloucester Strike Bulletin were revered and saved for reading, Never for a so-called tablecloth. The Forest Gazette instead.
At the end of the meal, the utensils were then washed in a bath of hot water.
So it was a real community in the Dean in those hard days. People broke the strike, of course. Some by underhand collecting of coal and selling it on. And others, of course, drifted into work. That first happened in the smaller collieries usually. It was a melancholy sight, watching them go on furtive and hangdog. You hated them for weakening the struggle but you knew them too and you knew those who had nothing. They were going back out of necessity. So you felt sorry for them at the same time. But you never felt anything but loathing for those mounted police escorting them into the pits.
But that’s enough from me going down memory lane. I think it’s time for a historian now. Here’s Mr. Butler.
Some statistics to finish the evening.
Remember that May meeting that took place at Speech House after the termination of the General Strike where John Williams declared: “They can bring troops and police here, with their batons and their guns, but they cannot make us go down Lightmoor or Foxes Bridge or the Princess Royal.”
How did it go with no official lockout pay after that?
In July, the Forest of Dean Colliery Owners’ Association opened some pits with a new 8-hour day but numbers returning to work were scant: Eastern United 206; Norchard 47; New Fancy 20; Cannop 0; Flour Mills 0, and Princess Royal 0.
With hardship gnawing away at both resolve and sinew, however, international aid was sought; by late summer, the statistics showed an increasing number of colliers returning to work in the Dean. A total of 720 had returned to work at Lightmoor, Eastern United, Norchard, Oldcroft, Waterloo, New Fancy, New Regulator and Slope, Drybrook (none at Flour Mill, Princess Royal, Parkend Deep, Cannop and Crump Meadow).
This figure had increased to 850 within two weeks and then to 1,754 three weeks later – with 200 at Princess Royal. A week later, the combined figure had climbed to 2,349. The proportion retuning to work in the Dean exceeded the national trend of 5-10% of the total workforce going back down the pit. It was about 30% in the Forest of Dean.
Arthur Cook addressed a meeting of over 3,000 at Speech House towards the end of September: ‘… When I meet the Prime Minister and tell him our men will not accept longer hours, I am told that in the Forest of Dean there are men working eight hours at reduced wages. I have been made a liar by every single man who has gone back … The battle will not be won in London but in the colliery villages, in the soup kitchens and in the homes of men who have made history in 1926.’
Despite this exhortatory speech and despite the despatch of Miners’ Federation of Great Britain emissaries, some two-thirds of Dean colliers were back at work by the end of October. And the writing was on the colliery walls throughout the country … in the Forest, a final meeting took place at Speech House with only 450 colliers present out of 6,500 with the news that 1,500 would lose their jobs.
Ralph Anstis concluded: ‘Then came to an end the saddest story in the history of the Forest coalfield. After thirty-three weeks of strife and suffering none of the miners was a winner but those who lost most were the men who stayed out to the end. The men who ceased to support their union and had decided enough was enough and returned to work, either early or late in the dispute, had come off best – at least they had got their jobs back.’
Ralph wrote in 1999: ‘A last reminder of miners’ trade unionism in the Forest can be seen in the Miners Welfare Hall in Cinderford, where the NUM banner is proudly displayed high on the wall.’
This has been adapted for performance from the memories collected within Blood on Coal The 1926 General Strike and Miners’ Lockout in the Forest of Dean by Ralph Anstis