The life of a child in the mines.

Adult life for the children of a mining family in South Wales, could begin at a very early age.  Boys and girls as young as six years old worked underground in the early years of the coal industry.  Many of them were employed as doorkeepers.  Their job was to open and shut the doors which cut off sections of the workings underground and which helped to control the ventilation of the mine.

In 1842, 10 year-old Elizabeth Williams who worked at a mine near Dowlais told a Government inquiry, that she earned 2d a day as a doorkeeper.  Every day she risked being involved in an accident with a full truck of coal.

Some boys and girls as young as nine had the much more demanding job of dragging carts loaded with coal along the underground tramlines.  If they stumbled and fell they risked being run over and crushed by the carts.

June 7th 1842, Lord Ashley detailed to the House of Commons, the horrors of women's work underground in mines.  The two-volume edition complete with illustrations of women harnessed like horses to mining equipment, resulted in legislation that prohibited women and children from working underground.

Before this 1842 legislation, women were employed in the mines mainly as hurriers, loading small wagons with coal, or as drawers, drawing the wagons behind them in places too low for horses to go.
They worked twelve to sixteen hours a day, often under the direction of their father or husband, who loaded them up with a hundred pounds of coal at a time.  There were over six thousand women and girls so employed, primarily in the most primitive and least productive mines.  The work paid about 2s. a day or less, although men were earning 3s. 6.  But for the women who lived in otherwise un-industrialized areas, especially in parts of Wales and Scotland, mine work was the best available source of wages.

1842 - Margaret Gomley, aged 9: