Women and Mines

“They are forc’d to spread it upon a Board and so pick out with their hands the trash and stones that remain.”

In a previous blog, I wrote about a Lindegaard family visit to the Great Laxey Wheel on the Isle of Man. I regret it does not contain one word about the women who also toiled in the mines at Laxey and Snaefell carrying heavy loads up the tortuous ladders described, because I didn’t know about them then.

There are few women mentioned in “Killed in a Coalpit: Lives of the Kingswood Colliers” and I was perplexed by a similar dearth of women when writing “KIACP II: Lives of the Somerset Colliers”, (Chapter 9, pages 261-281), but didn’t give the matter any more thought until April 2025 when we were on safari again, this time travelling the Wild Atlantic Way in the Republic of Ireland. The  following appears in blog concerning the Allihies Mines Museum and explored the surrounding area but repeated again here for relevance in the next four paragraphs.  Allihies mines were owned by the Puxley family with a seat in Wales, plus Bristol connections, but the mine bosses were imported from Cornwall, as were the experienced miners. The museum itself is in a defunct chapel: the “Cousin Jacks” and their families, as Methodists, needed their own place of worship in which to pray.

At the 1842 Government Enquiry (“Children and Young Persons……”), six statements were taken, first the manager, “Captain” Reed, who had been in the job 26 years, was praised for good order in the mine. A boy of eleven, John Trewhella, might just as well have worn a sign round his neck – “by Tre, Pol and Pen” – worked the bellows for the blacksmith at 5d a day.  (A variation of John’s Cornish surname appears in my article, Newsletter 67, “If there’s a hole dug anywhere on earth….”). Cornelius Kelly, aged 15, preferred work as “a jigger to wheeling stuff for the budlers.” Three women, Catherine Leahy, Mary Reen and Joan Tobin, worked at picking, budling or trunking, the various stages in washing the ore. The Inspector was hampered by the necessity for an interpreter as most of the people spoke only Irish. The comments are bland. Only 18-year-old Mary Reen dared make a mild complaint that her wages of 4d a day were insufficient.

Behind a glass case in the Museum my eye was caught by a page photocopied from a ledger, a pay roll from May 1812 with the names of employees with the days and hours worked. Irregular toil, which I compared in my mind to the infamous zero-hours contract, regrettably still with us at the time of writing. More exciting, those on the list were female. (These names are reproduced on my blog).

Several girls were written as “Gwarnish” – say it like a true West countrywoman with a long double A and a throaty rolled R – and you can hear them speaking or at least how their birthplace was heard by the scribe who recorded them.

I thought I’d spotted a new opportunity to research a neglected subject – women mineworkers. I knew of “Bal maidens” of course but at the time of KIACP II, I scoured censuses in vain for Mendips women doing such work.

When we returned home, I dived into the subject full pelt. The result, though pleasing and helpful, was still a bit disappointing. There is nothing new under the sun. The subject has been covered in the Balmaiden database. 

The database names women working in metal mines worldwide; in the UK, (Wales of course), also Laxey and elsewhere in the Isle of Man, and Ireland. Unfortunately, it does not include coalmines. Women in our SGMRG area, (coalmining), as is often stated, did not work underground, but I have yet to find females, named or otherwise working above or underground, in Kingswood or Bristol. (If you come across any, please let me know.)

Too late for inclusion in KIACP II, there were women listed for the lead and calamine mines of Somerset; for example, at Rowberrow, 1851 census, Emma Wilkins, (24), and her sister, Ann, aged 18, were “employed at the lead mines”, likewise their younger brother Frederic, aged 10, the children of Hester Wilkins, aged 55, a widow. There is also a list of women or girls of an earlier vintage, coincidentally 1813-14, about the same date as in Ireland, associated with the Shipham calamine industry, paid a shilling a day, some working at the mine, others engaged “selling ore to the Shipham bailiff”, (Somerset Heritage Centre DD/CC/111567), perhaps having picked over the good stuff from the trash, as shown in the drawing of the old German mine of 1556. Ann Athay, of 1813, who was probably doing much the same three centuries later must have been a relative of Thomas Athay, aged 60, who appears in KIACP II, buried alive,1823, in a roof fall at Shipham.

I was lucky enough to come across “A History of Calamine Extraction on Mendip”, a learned dissertation by Stephen Charles Hawkins for his Masters’ Degree, Bristol University, 2003. This is a rewarding read, including for a lay-person like me who usually skims over the nitty-gritty of mining to get to the humanity. I had never heard that “Groover” is the Mendips term for a miner; it is intriguing too that “Jigging”, and “Budling” which are in Hawkins’s glossary, as terms used on the Mendips also existed in Ireland in 1842, presumably carried there via Cornwall.

The boom time for calamine came in 1702, when the Bristol Brass Wire Company, established in Baptists Mills, created an important market for calamine.  Here I have a personal interest. Two of my direct ancestral families were the Craymers and Varoys (whose surname morphed into “Fray”: Jane Craymer married John Fray in Keynsham). They were brassmakers, immigrants from the European low countries, loosely called Flanders, and were collectively known as “the Dutchmen”, presumably originating from “Deutsch”.

Calamine extraction received a further boost when William Champion obtained a patent for making metallic zinc from the ore. He broke away from the Bristol Brass Company and set up the Warmley Company in 1746. (Champion’s works, locally known as the Tower of Babel (alleged) now houses the Kingswood Heritage Museum.)

Unfortunately, the area of Rowberrow and Shipham where the ore was mined remained in miserable poverty. The people seemingly too abject to even raise a protest, were praised in the New Times, London, 2 February 1821 for the loyal address they had “spontaneously” sent to the King in 1816 and for the numbers who had rallied to the colours “during the late war, even at a time of greatest distress when they had been forced to dispose of article after article of furniture and clothing”. One mother in such circumstances “bore up”, and said, “Sir, when I had nothing to give my children, I knelt down and prayed with them.” The rest of the article dissolves into a paean for Miss Hannah More and Robert Raikes, the founder of Sunday Schools.

Bristol Times & Mirror 21 December 1816 has the facts without the piety:

Production of calamine had dwindled further by the 1850s and ceased altogether in the 1870s.

Budling and Jigging (the task which Cornelius Kelly preferred) as depicted by Agricola, 1556.

After 1842 women were specifically banned from employment underground, though female labour continued; the young, the spinster or widow, continued to work above ground. Such tales may be found in the myths and legends of family history. I can always hope.

By the mid-20^th century, some women wanted to be coalminers. It is not something I ever thought of for myself; too much like hard work, but it was supposed to be a free country. These women were ridiculed as well as objectified, for example, “shapely Karen, 19, wants to work down the pit”, (Wolverhampton, 1977) etc.

Terry Deary, the author of “Horrible Histories” was quoted recently as saying “It’s appalling. I can’t find enough history of women, because they didn’t matter, or if they did matter, they were ignored by the historians who were part of the patriarchy.”

I was as guilty as anybody and am now trying to rectify the omission.

—o-0-o—

Title picture: Women picking over the ore at a German mine (Agricola, c1556).

With special thanks to Stephen Charles Hawkins for “A HISTORY OF CALAMINE EXTRACTION ON MENDIP”. All the sources to Rowberrow & Shipham appear in this dissertation as do the Agricola drawings.

The names, biographies and background of the colliers, “Killed in a Coalpit: Lives of the Kingswood Colliers” & “Killed in a Coalpit II: Lives of the Somerset Colliers”, can be obtained from South Gloucestershire Mines Research Group,  and from Kingswood Heritage Museum.

A similar article to this one will appear in Mining Matters, the newsletter of SGMRG.