This book, published in 1875, is compiled from notes originally published in the Glasgow Herald newspaper in early 1875. The text covers sometimes in vivid detail the often relatively poor quality of miners rows in the Scottish coalfield area, and is peppered with remarks that are very much 'of their time'. The writer also regularly references having used the Nessler's test on water samples he has taken, and often outlines the results he has seen. It is in books such as these that we can clearly see that the general standard of living has much improved for many over the last 150 years.
Inquiry
into the
condition of mining villages
in Scotland
by the special correspondent of the "Glasgow Herald"
[Reprinted from the "Glasgow Herald"]
March, 1875
PREFACE.
It has been thought desirable to reprint these "NOTES ON MINERS' HOUSES," which originally appeared in the Glasgow Herald at various dates between January and March. Their scope and purpose are sufficiently indicated in the Introduction to the "Notes," and it is only necessary to add, that certain peculiarities in the structure of this pamphlet are due to its being made up of a series of newspaper articles, instead of being prepared in regular book form.
"GLASGOW HERALD" OFFICE,
March, 1875.
NOTES ON MINERS' HOUSES.
Mr. Alex. McDonald, M.P., spoke out recently, and with characteristic emphasis, in reference to the condition of miners' houses in Scotland. He declared them to be in many cases no better than pig-styes, and indicated his intention of seeking to have them improved.
With this view, we believe he has sent out to mining districts in England printed circulars containing a number of queries relative to the water supply, drainage, and the prevailing sanitary and social arrangements, and is about to circulate similar interrogative leaflets amongst the villages of Scotland.
We are glad for once in a way to be found in the same lobby, to use the Parliamentary phrase, with the hon, member for Stafford; and as the method which he has adopted for getting at the hard facts of the case, the only course he could well follow, necessarily implies delay, we have thought it right, since the subject is one in which the public generally are interested, to instruct one of our staff to make a run through several of the mining villages, and procure at once such information as the miners themselves or their employers are able to furnish.
In an inquiry of this kind, it is of course impossible to obtain statistics which are as reliable as the returns of the Registrar General; but on the other hand, personal visitation enables one to see the dwellings of our mining population in their broad, every day aspects, and to glean facts which are not officially procurable. It is not the purpose of our correspondent, in what follows, to write merely picturesque sketches or tell harrowing stories of the sufferings of the sick and the poor, or to propose any special scheme by which homes may be made sweet and wholesome. His duty is simply to state with perfect impartiality what came under his own observation in passing through villages where the miners dwell in comfortable houses, as well as others where families are reared amid dirt and squalor.
We subjoin his notes on:
THE GLASGOW (WESTERN) DISTRICT.
As reform, like charity, begins at home, I first made a pilgrimage to a district west of Glasgow, and lying equidistant from Maryhill and Partick, where I had reason to believe miners' houses were not altogether in a satisfactory condition.
Our road from Maryhill lies along the towing path of the Forth and Clyde Canal. After walking a quarter of a mile or so, we come to a row of miners' houses erected on a higher level than the canal, and, as if the prospect were not an inviting one, looking the other way.
This is Balgray Row, belonging to Mr. Addie of Langloans Colliery, and consisting of 22 room and kitchen houses, all occupied. They appear to have been built for a dozen years, and are not bad houses of their class, although in certain details they might be easily improved. In front of the row are two large ash-pits; an open drain is carried along its whole length; and at each end is a public closet. The ash-pits and drain are well kept, but the closets are untidy.
Internally, the construction of the houses is good. There are two beds in the kitchen and one in the room, the floors of both apartments being of stone. On an average there are eight or nine people in each house. Few lodgers are kept, and the general health of the row is good. No fever or other epidemic exists. The people complain that for want of chimney cans there is a good deal of smoke in the houses, and also that the supply of Loch Katrine water is defective.
For the last three weeks they have carried water from the Maryhill Gas-Works. Mr. Hislop, the manager of these works, having kindly allowed them to do so. The rent paid for all the houses is 9s a-month of four weeks, or £5 17s a-year. The tenant is liable to ejectment on leaving the service of his landlord.
Quitting Balgray Row and finding our way to Crow Road, the Blue Row next craves attention. This is a line of 15 houses, chiefly occupied, I was informed, by miners, and of the most wretched description. With two exceptions they are all single apartments, having ceilings six or seven feet high, and are very insufficiently lighted. Going to the back of the row, I counted four small windows, the other houses being lighted only by the equally small windows in front. None of the tenants keep lodgers, for the reason, perhaps, that they find it difficult enough to stow away their own belongings. The ground in rear is of considerable extent, and might form excellent kitchen gardens. It is, however, anything but well kept. A couple of piggeries have been set down, but there is no closet for the whole row, and only one ash-pit, which is formed by staking off a bit of ground at the end of the line of houses. Loch Katrine water is drawn from a well at the back. The rent paid for these houses is 5s 4d for four weeks, or £3 9s 4d per annum. The only way to improve them is to sweep them away.
After Blue Row, Scaterigg may be called the Miners' Paradise. This hamlet is situated near Anniesland Toll, on the Crow Road, and forms three sides of a square. The houses, of which there are 20, were built by the Rev. Mr. Oswald of Scotstoun, whose minerals are worked by the Monkland Company. The company are the nominal proprietors of Scaterigg, under an arrangement with Mr. Oswald, as I was informed, by which the rents are regulated so as to yield only a very moderate percentage. The plan of construction is in all respects admirable. In the centre of the square coal cellars for each house are erected, and here also are two wells, from which Loch Katrine water is drawn. Two washhouses with boilers enable the housewives to keep their kitchens clean and tidy on days when chaos would otherwise prevail, and four closets are erected where they are least offensive to sight and sense. The square is well kept, and three of the houses which I visited were bright and neat, the room windows curtained with white muslin. They are all of two apartments, with two beds in the kitchen and one in the room, and the moderate rental paid is 6s per month, including water, or £3 18s per year. Occupancy legally ceases when the tenant leaves the employment of the company, but my informants all concurred in saying that this power of ejectment is never exercised, The health of the place is good; epidemics are unknown.
In connection with Scaterigg there is a store, which is managed on the co-operative principle, and is entirely apart from the company. The premises are old and incommodious, but a new building of brick is in course of erection at a little distance, and will soon be ready for occupancy. I was not fortunate enough on the day of my visit to find the storekeeper, but his youthful deputy informed me that the quarterly balances generally yielded a dividend of 2s a £, some of the members with numerous families getting in this way a bonus of from £4 to £5 every three months. A careful young fellow, one of a family of three, allowed his dividend to lie until at the New Year it reached £15, of which he uplifted £12, leaving the remainder as a nest-egg.
On the whole, Scaterigg is doing well, and forms a marked contrast to the “Red Toon,” as it is called, the place at which I afterwards halted, and which is connected with the Jordanhill Company. The Red Town makes what appearance it can with two rows of old, dirty brick tenements fronting each other, and having broken, irregular ground between, covered here and there with mounds of ashes. One of the lines is self-supporting, but the other, consisting of two blocks, is propped up at either end. The gables incline outward, and would probably tumble down altogether but for rude, insecure buttresses of timber, which a strong-limbed miner might kick away without greatly damaging his boots. There is no proper ashpit in the Red Town, and the people shoot rubbish anywhere and everywhere. It lies in front of their doors in heaps, and crops up here and there in bigger lots on the surface of the garden ground which dips down at the back of the houses. The men have put up a closet for themselves, this being the only outhouse of the kind. Thinking of the Local Authority, I asked a young married miner whether any inspector ever visited this charming retreat, and he replied that during a residence of five years he had never heard of any such official coming amongst them.
The interior of the houses, which are all of one apartment, with two beds, is in perfect harmony with the outside. I happened, in the first instance, to go into what turned out to be the worst tenement in the row. The only occupants were an old woman of fourscore years, who crouched by the side of a low fire, and a startled, inarticulate girl of 10 or 11. There was very little furniture in the house, and I was not surprised to find it in a rough-and-tumble condition. With the exception of some boarding in front of the hearth, the black earth formed the floor, scooped out in various places into muddy holes. Passing over to the opposite row, I entered a trimly-kept house, with a "dresser" full of shining crockery-ware, and the walls made cheery with small pictures. The wooden floor of this house was laid by the tenant, as he informed me; and when I asked whether any lodgers were kept in the Red Town, his wife, a buxom, bright-eyed young woman, told me there were none, “because,” she added, "colliers have always plenty of children."
A third house at which I called was pretty much a repetition of the first. The earthen floor fell away at something like the level of Renfield Street, and the mother of the family said she had only been a short time in the house, and the children were already ailing. At the door, the garret hatchway was removed, so that, looking up, saw the sky through chinks in the roof. The rent paid for these houses is 5s a-month.
Knightswood, belonging to the Summerlee Company, is within a stone-throw of the Red Town. There are here upwards of 100 room and kitchen houses, with a population of 600 or 700. The tenements are built in three rows, and in the intervening space, which is considerable, are kitchen gardens and substantially-built and well-kept ash-pits and open drains. The rows have been erected at different periods, the most recent only a year and a half ago. They are all good buildings-the newer rows having a porch or scullery attached to each house ; and the rents are 9s to 10s a-month, according to the accommodation.
As I have said, large ash-pits are provided, but the indolence of of the people shows itself in their tumbling refuse in front of the door rather than carrying it to the proper receptacle. A store in connection with the company has been opened at the entrance to the village. As far as I could learn, provisions are sold at reasonable prices; but complaint is made of a chain which has been thrown across the entrance to Knightswood, the object being, it is said, to prevent traders at a distance from driving in their carts, and so diminishing the sale at the store.
The colliery village of Netherton, to which I afterwards proceeded, lies about a mile from Anniesland Toll, in a north-westerly direction, and in a hollow a little to the south of the canal. It consists of six rows of houses, five of which are in close proximity, the sixth being at some distance. This last, the first I visited, is the best row of the whole number, and but for the condition of the westmost house, would bear favourable comparison with average workmen's cottages.
The house referred to, however, is in a deplorable condition. Abutting the gable, and separated from a bed-room by a brick wall, is an ash-pit with a double closet, the effluvia from which permeates the thin partition and makes the atmosphere of the bed-room exceedingly unpleasant, as well as unwholesome. Damp walls, and imperfect light and ventilation, combine to render the apartment a nursery for disease. Scarlet fever has broken out in a neighbour's house, carrying off a young member of the family; and in the circumstances it was not astonishing that the good housewife greatly feared the consequences of the disease finding a lodgement in her dwelling.
Proceeding to the other rows, I found the existing state of matters to be even worse. Some of them lie below the level of the surrounding ground, and as the drainage is not of the most perfect description, it is easy to guess the result. In one house, an end one, the wall paper of the room, owing to the damp, was peeling off in strips, the bedclothes were moist from the same cause, the furniture was getting out of joint, and indeed the entire contents of the apartment were falling into decay. The kitchen was little better; the bed-places were damp, and had a heavy, unwholesome smell. At one time the two apartments served as a stable.
The houses are all bad, and for the most part uninhabitable in their present condition. In some cases the floors are earthen, in others stone and brick, occasionally all three are combined, but a wooden flooring is a luxury enjoyed by few. In one house water may be seen glancing on the walls of the bed-places, in another the damp can be traced halfway up the gables to the ceiling, in a third rain is dropping from the roof and being caught in pots and tubs, while in a fourth patches of thick paper and cloth are carried across the ceiling to keep out the wet. No doubt, the recent thaw has aggravated the ordinary discomfort of the houses, but even in the best season they must be bad.
I noticed in some dwellings that broken furniture and stray pieces of wood are inserted between the wall and the mattress to keep the bedclothes clear of the damp, but this is not always an effective expedient, and in a single apartment, where the family numbers nine, the children sleep in improvised beds on chairs rather than in the ordinary recess. Smoky vents are another common grievance. To keep out the cold, large fires are burned, and to get rid of the smoke the doors are frequently thrown open even in this wintry weather.
Some of the houses are held from the superior of Garscube, but they are chiefly owned by Messrs Stokes & Dickson, colliery proprietors in the locality. The rents for single apartments are 5s 8d and 7s 8d a month, including the price of water, and for houses of two rooms 10s a-month of four weeks. At one time a scavenger was appointed to keep the closets clean, but for some reason or other he has been withdrawn, and they are in a very dirty state. At present, with the exception of bronchitis, from which a number of females are suffering, little disease exists amongst the families, although last summer fever was prevalent. There is an ample supply of Loch Katrine water, the foul water flowing through open drains.
I afterwards went on to Blairdardie, comprising the Old and New Rows. The former is fully two miles beyond Netherton, and occupies a small piece of low-lying ground close to the canal, the southern bank of which is nearly on a level with the roofs of the houses. Some of these are single and others double, and as regards comfort or the want of it, they are almost on a par with those at Netherton, already described.
Originally the row, which is of brick, was divided into 36 single houses, 18 entering from each side, with a brick wall separating the apartments; but recently doors have been knocked through in some cases, and so a few families have been provided with extra accommodation. The side walls are some 10 feet or so high. On the joists, which are led from either side to the centre, a number of deal boards are laid, and over these a tarpaulin has been placed. This covering forms the ceiling ; there is no lath or plaster-work. Dampness and cold are naturally complained of. In one or two of the houses the rain drips in from the window, and in others it finds its way through the centre of the roof. There are two beds in each apartment, but in numerous cases one is rendered useless by the dampness of the walls. The proprietors are Messrs Merry & Cuninghame (Limited), who charge from 5s a-month for the use of the single apartments. Water is obtained from an adjoining pit, and is spoken of as of good quality. Hooping-cough and eye diseases are said to be prevalent amongst the children. The New Row, which lies on the northern side of the canal, is of modern construction. I did not visit the houses there, but the people at the Old Row informed me that they were much better in every respect.
Garscadden, which I may only further notice at this time, occupies a good situation near the main road leading from Canniesburn to Duntocher. There are five rows of houses, with large air spaces between, each row being divided into 20 houses, of one, two, and three apartments. The rents range from 5s 6d to 8s a-month. Messrs Merry & Cuninghame are the proprietors, and at little outlay might make the village a model one of its kind. The houses are in pretty good order.
THE COATBRIDGE DISTRICT.
Coatbridge is a good centre from which to prosecute inquiries as to the homes of miners. With the town itself, given up as it is to furnaces and steam hammers, we have nothing to do: our quest lies farther afield. All round about are miners' rows and villages, set down as a rule according to no special plan, or rather in defiance of all system, and reached by roads which are generally rough and crooked. The area over which they extend is inconsiderable, and yet a traveller unable to claim the honour of having lived for some time in Coatbridge would experience no little difficulty in finding any particular hamlet of which he might be in search, even although, with “a good Scotch tongue in his head," he had a special aptitude for asking questions. They are, in fact, a series of architectural surprises -and sometimes a good deal more. You catch them up on the outskirts of a wood, or at a quick bend of the road come suddenly in sight of them crowding down in a glen or straggling on a hill-side.
Their nearness or remoteness, until they actually appear, is problematical: the only thing which is reasonably certain is that without guidance you would be as likely to miss as to find them. In these circumstances driving is a necessity, however much one may be inclined to adopt the slower but in such a case the more satisfactory mode of walking through the mining districts. Picking up a machine at Coatbridge, therefore, I was able, during the hours of daylight on Monday, to visit Gargell, Garteloss, Rosehall, Greenend, Calder, Faskin, and Woodhall. In the course of my journeyings I found examples of the best as well as the worst houses, although none were so absolutely miserable as some of which I spoke with all moderation in my last communication. The greatest evil is that in one or two places the water supply is defective, the people being reduced to a variety of shifts in order to supply themselves, and even then only getting water which is more or less impure. In one case, it seems pretty clear that at certain seasons the water must be extremely bad. Throughout the Loch Katrine district good water at least is secured to the poorest, but beyond the range of the Glasgow supply this boon is frequently unattainable.
I would not care to have any great stake depending upon my ability to indicate the exact locale of Gargell. This only I may say, that to reach it we pass through Gartsherrie, where the name of Baird is a name to conjure with, and then strike across an uneven country, with very bad roads, and at length tumble out at Gargell. Gartsherrie, by the way, is quite a town, The numerous rows are tenanted, of course, by the iron-workers, the houses being substantial, and the sanitary arrangements excellent.
Gargell, on the contrary, is extremely small, and on the whole an unpleasant place, also belonging to the Messrs Baird. It consists of one row of eleven houses of one and two apartments, three of which have a roofing of slates, the others of primitive thatch. In front are gardens or “kail yards,” the beauty of which at any time is not great, and which in mid-winter lie in admired disorder. The surface is covered with decayed vegetables, and ashes are deposited in two places in great heaps, in the absence of any proper receptacle.
An open drain runs in front of the houses, intercepted at its centre, and carried down through the gardens to an underground sewer. The drain is cleaned once a week, but in the interim it is not properly attended to, and at the time of my visit was half-full of refuse. In summer, I was told, it is very nasty. Inside the houses, the kitchens, as in the case of all I have seen, are provided with two recess beds, and the inmates complain of damp, which appears on the walls and under the beds. For the single apartments, 4s 10d a month of four weeks is paid, and for room and kitchen houses the rent is something over 7s a month. The water supply is scarce. It is usually got from a well, which was frozen from the beginning of the recent protracted frost until within the last few days. During this time the people were dependent upon what they could find at Gartsherrie Station, where the officials, perhaps finding their own necessities great enough, were unwilling to give them water.
A little farther on we come to the village of Garteloss, a row of 26 houses also belonging to the Messrs Baird, and, with one exception, all single apartments, at a rental of 4s 4d a calendar month.
The floors are all of stone, and the people complain greatly of damp, of which there is evidence in the cold, clammy walls. A few lodgers are kept in the row, but there is no overcrowding, and no fever or other epidemic exists. The exterior of the tenements might be improved at little expense, in the way, for example, of repairing the rhones which carry rain-water from the roof, and which hang loose and broken in front. A sloping bank terminating in a dirty stream grows vegetables, and is also the site of five large and well-kept ashpits, sufficiently removed from the houses.
The water supply is unsatisfactory in the extreme. In winter it is got from what is called “the wee well” in an adjoining field; but this, I was assured, is dried up from April till November, and during the dog-days the people have three courses open to them-either to beg, to borrow, or to steal. In this extremity they beg water at Gargell Station, and don't always get it, or help themselves to a supply which is pumped out of No. 5 Pit at Townhead, or take what is collected at a neighbouring moss. The moss water when brought in is said to be of the colour of tea. I saw and tasted the product of the “wee well,” but it is of course impossible in this way to get any notion of its quality, although it looked clear enough.
Returning to Coatbridge, and driving through it, we get to Rosehall, a large colliery village belonging to Messrs Addie & Sons.
There are in all four rows of substantial stone houses, which are so numerous that I did not count them. They are divided by regular streets, and three of them have been built for a number of years. These are all single apartments, with the inevitable two beds, the rent being ls 6d a-week. For the first time in my experience, I found tenants speaking well of their landlord. They did not admit that the houses were all they could wish, but they spoke of Mr. Addie as willing to do all he could to keep them in good order, and were especially grateful to him for having last summer put down wooden floors in the old tenements. There is a want of ashpits, but those for which space has been found are well kept. The supply of water is ample and of good quality. The fourth row is quite new, some of the houses, of which there are 24 in all, not being finished. Those ready for occupancy are tenanted. They are first-rate room-and-kitchen houses, the best which I have seen anywhere-excelling even those at Scaterigg.
There is a neat porch, with a large press in which meat may be kept in hot weather, and both the apartments are of good size, the kitchen being the larger of the two. Each is provided with two beds. The houses are quite free from damp, although only out of the plasterer's hands. At the back are large coal-houses for all the tenants, a closet for every three, and a wash-house with boiler for every six. The closets are kept locked, each occupant being furnished with a key, and the wash-houses are large enough to admit of four women working at one time. I was informed that Mr Addie intends to commence the erection of another row of tenements in spring. As showing the indifference of some miners to the improvement of their dwellings, it may be mentioned that the proprietor found considerable difficulty in inducing the occupants of several old houses which lay in the line of a new branch railway in the neighbourhood to remove into other and better ones.
In connection with Rosehall is a very good school-house, built, like the whole village, of stone, and opened about the year 1836. It is attended almost exclusively by the children of the miners. Last year, the average number of scholars was 150 ; but during recent weeks, owing to the severe weather, the attendance has slightly diminished. The school is still under the superintendence of Messrs Addie.
Greenend, which is reached farther on, consists of two rows of old houses, and a new range 20 in number, The old houses are low in the ceiling, badly lighted, and windy and damp. The floors are of stone. That they are very humble places appears from the rent which is paid - viz., 3s a-month.
The row, built about a year and a half ago, is nothing to brag of; in fact, the houses are by no means good. They are of brick, with kitchen floor also of brick, and are thin and not well finished. The apartments are, however, large, with two beds in each, the room having a wooden floor and a wall covering of paper. Damp and cold are naturally complained of. There is plenty of water, obtained from street wells. Behind the houses are kitchen gardens, and three large ashpits and twelve closets. The outhouses are well kept, and are beyond breathing range of the houses. There are no wash-houses, and the coal-cellars are extremely small. There is too much scrimping and pinching about these houses, the rent of which is 10s per month of four weeks.
The most wretched hovels that I saw on this day were at Calder, belonging to Messrs Dixon. There are here three rows of miserable old houses, two of them facing each other, and the third at some distance, sulkily turning its back upon its neighbours. They are indeed a dismal, disreputable trio. Through a gap in the paling which encloses this place, I made my way into the double row.
The ground at the entrance is below the level of the roadway, and slopes down to the foot of the lines of houses in a broken surface, muddy and dirty. The rent of the houses, which are dear at any money, is 3s monthly. They are lighted by a small window in front and another at the back not much larger than the crown of a man's hat. The first house I called at was full of smoke, and the tenant, an Irishwoman, said it was little better at any time, that she had to keep the door open all day and oftentimes at night. This after all is not an unmixed evil, for if by opening the door she gets cold -and her chest, she says, is very bad- nothing but death from poisoned air could result from keeping it close. I was also informed by this woman that three or four months ago there were several cases of scarlet fever in the village. Another of the houses I visited was quite as bad-dark and dirty, and smelling vilely. An old man and his wife sat by the fire and entertained me with stories of their troubles with the wind and the rain, the one threatening to bring the old house down about their ears and the other pouring in through the loose pan-tiles and down the open hatchway at the door.
There is an abundant supply of good water from Shettleston. At Faskin, belonging to the Messrs Baird, there are 13 single apartment houses, all occupied by miners. They are under the level of the roadway, the greatest depth being between three and four feet. All of them are badly lighted and otherwise inferior, the worst being the end house. The beds in this dwelling are against the gable, and the walls of the recess are quite black with damp, which also appears in other parts of the kitchen. An Irish couple are its occupants. It is kept very tidy, and the young mother, who, like her husband, is the picture of health, laments the damp for the appearance of the thing, but has no real notion of its unhealthiness. The rent of these houses is ls per week.
There is no proper water supply. The people catch the water which flows from one of the fields, and in dry seasons, when this source is exhausted, they beg for it at a farmhouse a short way off. Woodhall, which I visited last, belongs to Messrs Merry & Cuninghame. In early summer last year, while the miners on strike were living under canvas, I found myself at this place, which is charmingly situated, although the natural beauty of the surroundings has been greatly marred by industrial encroachments.
The houses, which are all of stone, were built about thirty years ago.
At that time they were doubtless of a very superior class, and even now, with some repairs, they might be made quite comfortable. The estate has, however, been acquired by the Messrs Baird, who take possession of it in May next, until which time we need not expect much expenditure in the way indicated. The houses, which are built in five rows, number 70 or 80 in all, and, with some 20 exceptions, they are all single apartments. The floors, so far as I saw, are all earthen, and there is a good deal of damp on the walls. One of the tenants told me it was necessary to keep large fires burning night and day in this weather. In summer, however, they are said to be quite agreeable houses, and, with such fine air as they have, I can quite believe that Woodhall is then a capital place of residence. The rows are swept every day, and the ashpits well looked after. The closets, however, are doorless and dirty. As for water, it is to be had in abundance - good spring water for cooking purposes, and stream and canal water for general use.
One the rows is erected under a railway embankment, which slopes down at the back of the houses, and the summit of which is higher than the chimney tops. A drain has been laid along the bottom of the embankment, but it is partially choked up, I believe, for as darkness had now set in I could not see it, and of course in wet weather the rain creates dampness in the houses. The health of Woodhall is said to be excellent, fever and small-pox being alike unknown.
MOTHERWELL AND HOLYTOWN DISTRICT.
I suppose it is understood that, in describing the sanitary and other arrangements in connection with miners' houses, I do not profess to exhaust the whole number of villages where the need for reform may be found to exist, or in which the necessities of the case have already been recognised and in some measure dealt with. To do so would be to extend these Notes far beyond the limit assigned me, and probably also to tire readers who are not personally interested in the subject. The field is too wide to be overtaken within reasonable time, even if a thoroughly exhaustive survey were necessary for my purpose; and accordingly the course I have adopted is to select well-known mining centres, in the neighbourhood of which I have reason to believe inferior as well as superior houses are to be found, and then, spending the day in the villages round about, taking the good and the bad as they come, to present Notes of these as fairly representative of the district generally. It may be thought that one is not likely to get accurate information from miners and their wives, who were born long before School Boards were in existence ; but I am satisfied that this is not the case, and that by carefully weighing the testimony of the people the truth may as a rule be got at.
The facts, too, which I seek to ascertain relate to the daily experiences of the miners, who are hardly astute enough to mislead, even if they wished to do so. Indeed, I have found more difficulty in verifying the statements of persons of position, who are fully alive to the bearing of questions, and quite as much interested in making out a good case as the miners are in exaggerating existing evils.
One day, I happened to speak with one of the younger members of a large firm, and, referring in the course of conversation to a specially dirty quarter which I had just visited, he assured me that the health of the people there was better than in any other part of the village. When I expressed incredulity, he proposed to introduce me to the medical man; but I did not choose to place the doctor in a dilemma, especially as nothing he could have said would have altered my own opinion. Moreover, a great deal that is pertinent to an inquiry of this kind lies on the surface, and appeals directly to the eye, and sometimes strongly to the nose. There are one or two general remarks applicable to all mining villages, so far as I have yet gone, which may here be offered as preliminary to my Notes on the Holytown and Motherwell District. In every instance the occupancy of houses legally ceases when a miner leaves the employment of the owner or lessee. The power of ejection is considerately exercised by the managers, who do not expel a tenant unless there is a demand for houses, in which case, of course, he must clear out. But all the same the power exists, and may naturally be supposed to operate in the way of rendering miners careless as to homes which they hold so insecurely. In connection with the old houses, again, there is usually an absence of coal-cellars and wash-houses and sometimes of ash-pits, while in those of more recent construction out-buildings of this description are provided. The favourite place for storing fuel is below the kitchen bed, in front of which the coal lies in heaps.
Amongst the lowest class of miners, Scotch as well as Irish, little attention is paid to cleanliness or to the decencies of life, and even in villages where the houses are well-constructed, and the general arrangements excellent, the habit of throwing ashes and refuse in front of the doors is much too common. On the other hand, I have seen very many houses as well kept as could be desired. The tidiest colliers, however, have no notion of a house arranged after the English fashion, with the sleeping-room away from the kitchen, and would in all likelihood rebel against any attempt to make them go into cottages of this description. They prefer that cooking and eating and smoking and sleeping should all be continued to the one apartment, the kitchen, with its everlasting two beds.
The district of Holytown and Motherwell is distinguished above all others I have visited for the vileness of its water supply. Carfin, to which I first drove from Motherwell, is a large village, with a pretty equal admixture of old and new houses, belonging partly to Mr. Simpson and partly to Messrs Dixon. Of the former class, a handy example on the main road presents itself in a row of single apartments and room and kitchen houses, the rental of which is 6s per month of four weeks. They are not very uncomfortable houses, I was told, although smoky and in bad repair. The stone floors are above the level of the street, which is of course greatly in their favour. Mid-way in the row are the ashpit and closet, the only conveniences of the kind in the row, and erected against the corner gable of one of the tenements. When I saw them, both were in a disgraceful state - literally heaped up with filth, which also lay strewn all round. It appears that the old man who attends to the ashpit is ailing, and, as no ad interim scavenger has been appointed, matters are as I have indicated.
The water for cooking and general use is taken out of one of the pits belonging to Mr. Dixon, and after imperfect filtering is led into a pump near at hand. I got several specimens of this water, and in all found more or less of sediment. In wet weather it is specially foul, and in summer worms and "wee creepers" are found in it, these minute creatures getting into the "stoups” even though a towel is placed over the spout of the pump. I made particular inquiry on this point, and found the most perfect agreement in all the answers. "We don't drink any more water than we can help," said one of the women, "and in summer, when we must do so, we first put meal into it." Going down to the well, I saw the water as taken out, and it proved to be quite as impure as that shown me in the houses.
A woman who was getting a supply told me that during the frost, when the well was frozen, they required to take water from a pond close by. At “The Bell,” two rows of old houses farther on in Carfin, and belonging to Mr. Dixon, a boy died of scarlet fever this week. I went through one of the rows, finding the stone floors generally damp, and hearing many complaints of the condition of the houses. There is no ashpit or closet to this row, the ground behind being nastily befouled. There is, however, an ashpit near at hand, in connection with new houses, but that is not enough. I was told by more than one of Mr. Dixon's tenants that if they wish to remove into another house the rent is advanced a couple of shillings a month. It seems that when wages were high the owners wished to raise the rents. This was resisted by the men, and now the increase is being carried out in this gradual way. I only refer to this matter because, whatever the intention may be, the effect of such a rule is to induce people to stay in bad houses rather than remove to others of a higher class. A large number of new houses have recently been erected at Carfin, which, although not of the best class by any means, are a great improvement upon the old ones.
Take one of Mr. Simpson's for example - a new brick row of room-and-kitchen houses. The kitchen has a brick floor, which is not free from damp, but the room is boarded, and at the back is a small wash-house to each tenant. The rent is 10s a month.
From Carfin we go on past a palatial mansion just erected for Mr. Simpson, and directly opposite the entrance to which is Jerviston Square, one of the most wretched places I have visited. They are all old stone houses, having rooms and kitchens on one side of the square and single apartments on the other, one or two of the number being unoccupied. Mr. Dixon holds almost all the tenements, half-a-dozen or so being occupied by men in the employment of the Clydesdale Iron Company. In all, there are about 50 houses in the square, for which three ashpits and closets are provided on one side. They are erected between the dwellinghouses, and separated from them by a narrow passage a foot in breadth on each side. There is no back ground of any kind.
Taking the row of single apartments, for which a rent of 1s 6d per week is paid, I went into one of the houses next an ashpit, in order to ascertain whether its nearness occasioned any nuisance. There was smell enough in all conscience, but whether it arose from the ashpit outside or the insanitary conditions within I could hardly determine. It might be interesting to describe the interior of one or two of these houses if there were anything to describe. Two stools and a small table in one house, an earthen bowl and a couple of miners' tea-flasks in another, were the only visible furniture-all else was dirt and vacancy. Stone floors, black with damp, walls mouldy and begrimed with smoke-every where “loop'd and windowed raggedness.”
The set-in beds have stone bottoms, and a woman told me that after removing into another house she found that her mattress was rotten with damp. On the other side of the square are the two-roomed houses, with brick and earthen floors, the general appearance of which is little better than those I had just quitted. The rent is 8s a month. In several of these houses two families kennel up, the tenant of both sub-letting her room to others. I asked one of the women whether she got her chimney regularly swept. “Oh, we never see a sweep here," she replied, when the house smokes badly we just set it on fire.” Two years ago overcrowding is reported as having existed in every house ; and last summer small-pox and scarlet fever were prevalent. The wonder is that epidemic is not always rife in Jerviston Square. The water supply is obtained anywhere. No. 6 pit yields a little, such as it is, a field drain in Camp Road gives some more, and at Jerviston Farm spring water is supplied as a favour in necessarily limited measure.
The water in common use is extremely bad. Good water is generally, not always, to be had at Kirklee, but that is a mile and a half distant, so that practically the inhabitants of Jerviston Square require to make a journey of three miles for it. Is it surprising that people of their class should help themselves to what is to be had near at hand?
Within a stone-throw of Holytown are two large squares of miners' houses - Napier and Baird Squares - belonging to the Monkland Company and to Messrs Pickering & Sons. There is not much to be said about the houses in Napier Square, some of which are damp; but otherwise they are in good order. The single apartments are 6s a month of four weeks, and the room and kitchen houses 8s a month. Baird Square is inferior to the other, in respect both of the houses and the intervening ground, The open drains are badly constructed, and not properly flushed, and the closets, which with the ashpits are set down in the centre of the square, are an offence to all decency.
About the month of November there were several cases of fever and small-pox ; at present one man is down with fever. The water here is very much like that at Carfin. Between the squares runs a burn, which has been diverted into a drain carrying it into a well, over which is placed a metal covering. The only attempt at filtration is placing some coal in the drain. In point of fact, it is not filtered at all. The round aperture of the well cover is only large enough to admit a "chappin' can," which is let down and pulled up again by a piece of cord, so that in order to fill a couple of stoups the water is stirred to its dirtiest depths perhaps twenty times in succession. Nor is this all. The ground round about and on a level with the well top is sloppy and muddy, and in wet weather some of the mud must find its way into the water. Again, the sewer water from Baird Square runs past the well, within six or eight feet of it, and I was told that in heavy rains it overflows into the field from which household water is taken. I went to the place and looked at it.
On the field side the sewer is high, and it would require a biggish spate to carry the foul water over, but in other respects the well and its surroundings are precisely as described. In wet weather the water is dirtier than usual ; in summer, the burn gets dried up altogether. Then the people store rain water, which they say is better in hot weather than the burn water, for cooking purposes, or they beg it from neighbours who have springs in their gardens, or they go for it to “the Houdens," at the head of Holytown. Passing through Holytown we come to Mossend, a place which, together with Muirmadkin, now built up to it, contains some 2000 of a population.
I did not seek to enter the dwellings of the whole two thousand, but continued my inquiries to the best and the worst rows of Mossend, belonging to the Mossend Tron Company. "Academy Square," so called because the schoolhouse is built at the entrance to it, may be accepted as a type of the former description. On one side of the square are houses with a kitchen, and entering from it, two bed-closets. The rent is 8s a mouth of four weeks. In some of the dwellings the back walls in the bed closets are damp, but, on the whole, they are tolerably good houses. Those on the other side of the square are very superior houses, having each a kitchen, parlour, and bed-room, all of good size. The rent for these is 12s a month of four weeks, or £7 16s a year. In the centre of the square are three square brick erections, having on one side large ashpits, which are well kept, the square itself being swept daily, and on the other washing-houses with boilers.
It seemed to be washing-day with every body on the occasion of my visit, and lines of clothes were stretched at short intervals across the square, for there is no back ground. As to the water, which is got from one of the pits in the works, the statements made to me were conflicting, but, on the whole, I am inclined to think that it is at least greatly better than the supply elsewhere. The pit from which it comes is standing, and it is filtered through sand, charcoal, and carbon. It looks perfectly clear. Two or three people told me they had no fault to find with it, while others declared that sometimes it could not be used. Leaving Academy Square, we may, as its antitype, take Merrin Street and its continuation called “The Briggate.” Here is a kitchen, and entering from it a small room, for both of which 2s a week is paid. It is ill-lighted and dirty, and what little furniture there is seems to have braved the smoke of centuries. The tenant lives in the kitchen-husband and wife, two children, and a lodger. His sub-tenant in the small room is an old woman and four youths and girls, including an infant now lying ill of bronchitis. Thus we have eleven persons sleeping in a house which would be reckoned by a merciful man an exceedingly bad stable for his horse.
At the foot of Merrin Street is “the Briggate," an exaggeration of all that is evil in miners' dwellings. The row consists of eight single apartments. They are shockingly damp. I went into most of them, and passing the band across almost any part of the wall brought off a mixture of chalk and sand and water, In one of them I even found damp in the ash-hole under the fire. Nor is this in the least surprising. There are two windows - a front and a back one. The latter is level with the ground outside, and in rainy seasons the wet finds ready entrance through broken panes and seamy window frames. The window in front is never visited by the sun.
Over against it, at distance of eight feet, is the high wall of the works, effectually excluding air and sunshine, and the narrow, slushy passage between is full of ashes and all forms of refuse, Merrin Street and the Briggate have only one ashpit between them. It is situated about the centre of Merrin Street between dwelling-houses, and is in a tumble-down state.
Thankerton was down on my list of places to visit, but on getting to it I found that the rows of houses on either side of the main road, which the driver assured me represented this deserted village, were chiefly rootless and forsaken. Some old thatched houses gave out smoke at the chimney-tops, and I went into one of them. Through the gloom of the interior I saw a half-tipsy old man pouring out tea, which an old woman roared to him she didn't want. Neither of them noticed the stranger. When the tea dispute had been compromised, I asked whether I might come in.
“Ye may,” said the old fellow, in a breezy, hearty way, “if ye're gaun to pray for me. I like a guid prayer ” - this almost with a smack of the lips, as if he had said he liked a beef-steak. I confessed to him that my motives were of rather a worldly nature, whereupon he lifted up his hands and said, “Then, if ye're no gaun tae pray, I hae naethin' tae say tae ye." I saw by this time that he was more tipsy than I had supposed-most religiously fuddled, in fact—and fearing that he might soon drop from maudlin piety into undisguised profanity, I made my exit.
In the next house a sooty Hercules, naked to the waist, was combing his raven locks, while a younger woman, with no soft blush or downcast eye, stood at his side and favoured me with a broad stare, Hercules told me that the houses used to belong to Messrs Merry & Cuninghame, but that now nobody claimed them, and they were occupied rent free by the poorest of poor people. I felt shocked at the extravagant neglect of Messrs Merry & Cuninghame. Why, at Netherton, and Jerviston Square, and the Briggate, houses like these bring a shilling a week to their princely proprietors.
FROM SHOTTS TO CROFTHEAD.
When I wrote to a friend telling him of my intention, as explaining certain inquiries, to visit the mining districts lying between Shotts and Crofthead, he advised me to surround myself with disinfectants, if I was really resolved upon entering such a fever-stricken territory. This portentous warning seemed to be merely playful exaggeration; and in any case it was unnecessary to act upon my friend's counsel, because I did not intend to run any great risk. It is enough that one must look into filthy ashpits, and taste impure water, and go into uncleanly dwellings, and thrust one's head into tumbled, ill-smelling beds, in order, by the actual contact of the hand, to feel the damp which stains the walls, without entering houses in which fever has got its victims down and is rolling over them.
As it happens, however, the district in question is really the least objectionable that I have visited, and, so far as I could ascertain, is at present entirely free from epidemic. With the exception of some houses near Shotts, the villages at which I called on Monday are of a purely negative character - that is to say, they are neither very good nor very bad. If there is not much to be said in the way of praise, I found nothing to put one much out of temper-except perhaps the weather, which even a Sanitary Government cannot hope to reform by Act of Parliament. The weather certainly was most objectionable.
It rained at Glasgow when I left in the morning, and it poured as the train drew up at Shotts Station, with the added discomfort of a bitterly cold wind. Fortunately my friend had brought a close carriage, with which, and a couple of horses, we might bid defiance to the chilliest blast and the hilliest road.
Near to Shotts proper is a hamlet which has sprung up in connection with Shotts Iron Company, having in particular two lines of old stone houses, known respectively as “The Tile Row” and “The Cockyard Row," that must not be overlooked. Let us take the Tile Row to begin with. Here there are five houses, each with a room and kitchen. The road in front is broken and irregular, with many muddy pools, in which we may trace, as in the blackest wayside puddle, the perfect drawing of Nature. It is more to the point, no doubt, to say that the road is raised above the entrance to the houses, so that in wet weather, as we see now, the water seeks its level in the nearest kitchen. Right in front of the door is a pipe communicating with a drain, seven or eight feet off. The refuse water of the houses is poured out at the mouth of this pipe, and as it is not all carried away, there is always enough left, I should think, to create a nuisance in summer.
The house we enter, and they are all very much alike, is tenanted by a widow, who tells us she has been 27 years in the house, and has paid for every old stone in it, and for every red tile which forms its ancient roofing. She is the tenant of two houses, consisting of two kitchens on the “but and ben” principle, with a small bed-room entering from each, and for these she pays 10s a month. Lodgers are her hope and mainstay. The apartments are extremely damp, so much so, that the wall at the side of the kitchen fire is moist and cold. The bed is so wet that the tenant has introduced loose boarding at the back to keep the blankets dry. To ordinary people such a house means chronic rheumatism and bronchitis, yet this widow has lived in it for more than a quarter of a century, and she is still hale and hearty, and I hardly dare to say how many stones in weight. Her exceptional good health, of course, proves nothing.
In the early days of the Glasgow Improvement Scheme, I remember visiting “the Blin' Close” in Saltmarket, a long, narrow entry unvisited by a ray of light in the brightest day of summer, and at the extremity of it we came upon an old woman who had lived there in perfect contentment for half a century, and for aught anybody could tell was good for another score of years of Egyptian darkness, if the Commissioners had allowed her to remain.
Cock-yard Row, just round the corner from the Tile Row, numbers six houses, also below the level of the pavement. The floors are of brick, and the rent paid for two apartments is 5s 1d a month. These houses must be extremely unhealthy in wet weather, whatever may be said of them in dry seasons, for the walls show damp everywhere, and I had not the least doubt of the truth of a statement made, that once when a great fall of rain occurred, the floors were flooded to the depth of two feet. In general, miners' houses are entered directly from the road or pavement, and may thus be exposed to the free air by opening the door.
Here, however, is an unventilated lobby after the fashion of city erections, giving access to four single apartments, the rent of which is ls 1d a week. The tenant of one of them is a voluble, clear-voiced Irish woman.
From the torrent of her indignant eloquence, I gather that she is sick of the one room in which nine of a family are compelled to live. The beds are damp, the mystery of sleeping berths for nine being explained by a which protrudes from underneath one of the set in beds, while coals are under the other, She has tried to get better quarters, she says, but they are not to be had, and she has lived in this one upwards of a year. Altogether, she declares it is not fit for human beings "at all, at all;" and although not the worst I have seen, the houses in Cockyard Row are bad enough.
Gray Street, also belonging to the company, introduces us to a very superior class of dwellings, having a large kitchen, a small parlour and bed-room, and a larder. The rent is 12s a month of four weeks. They are of excellent construction, dry and comfortable. In a new row of houses adjoining there are attics, the rent being 6d a month higher. Shotts is supplied with tolerably good water.
It is drawn from two sources - a spring rising near a cutting on the North British Railway, the flow of which is distributed in pipes through the town; and a tank which receives the water off the hills.
Wester Benhar, which we next reach, is a large village, with long rows of brick tenements of comparatively recent erection, most of them room and kitchen houses, and a few single apartments. The rent of the former is 8s a month, and of the latter 5s a month. They are thoroughly dry houses, with wooden floors, beneath which is impervious deposit of tar.
While they were in course of erection, and after the plasterer had set to work, large fires were kept lighted, so that at the very outset they were free from damp. All are raised considerably above the level of the street. The interiors give one a pleasing impression of the houses of miners of the middle class, Kitchen “dressers,” as they are called, show a wonderful variety of useful and ornamental glass and crockery ware, and a pretty little cruet stand which I noticed in one of the houses, and seemingly in daily use, may perhaps be taken as an evidence of growing delicacy of taste at the dinner table. At the back of the houses are coal cellars, large kitchen gardens, and well-kept ashpits and closets, so far removed as to be inoffensive even in the hot season.
The Flat Row, which owes its name to the flatness of the roof, is much inferior. The floors are of stone, and there are a good many complaints of dampness, especially in the gable houses. They are single apartments, the rent being 6s a month, and are unsupplied with coal-cellars or gardens, although there are bleaching greens in front. The Messrs Addie, the proprietors, are spoken of as at all times willing to repair the houses. On the other side of the street from the Flat Row is a line of old room and kitchen houses, the rent of which is 8s a month, and here also the prevailing grievance is dampness. Wester Benhar is not well off for water. Brownhill Pit, not long opened, furnishes a large quantity, which is conveyed to a pump-well at the end of one of the rows. I could not learn that it is subjected to any filtering process, and all that I saw, both in the houses and at the well, held a good deal of matter in suspension.
The bottom and sides of a “stoup,” which I looked into at the well, were coated with a brown, muddy deposit, indicating at once the character of the water and the carelessness of the people. Another, although more limited and less readily accessible source of supply, is the Benhar day level, from which spring water is led in pipes to a field-spout. This is perfectly clear, hard water, and is described by the medical man of the district as of good quality. Surface water from the fields is got in a drain at the back of the kitchen gardens already referred to, and is used for washing purposes.
Quitting Wester Benhar, and glancing at an excellent schoolhouse which the Messrs Addie have erected, and near which a new row of brick houses is being put up, we drive on to Harthill. This is not a mining village of the kind we seek, but a collection of houses, two storeys in height, and a good many of them in need of extensive repairs. Confining our inspection to two tenements of this class, belonging to private individuals and not to coalmasters, we find in the rear a deplorable accumulation of ashes and filth, while the entrance to one of the closets can only be reached through a lake of stagnant impurity. A good many miners live here, and pay high rents for sorry accommodation, rather than live in “the company's" houses nearer the pit. For a single apartment, with such surroundings as I have indicated, the monthly payment is eight shillings, and for room and kitchen houses it is eleven shillings. I asked two of the tenants why they did not seek cheaper and better accommodation in connection with the works, and the reply in effect that they preferred fixed occupancy, even with all its disadvantages, to the uncertain tenure of the company houses. Harthill has no public water supply. A neighbouring burn is utilised for washing, and the getting of cooking water is a matter of diplomacy and private bargain. In several of the gardens there are private springs, from which, as a mark of high favour, and sometimes for a consideration, those not so well off are allowed to help themselves. Some of these garden wells, however, are said to yield water of doubtful quality.
Leaving Harthill and its medievalism behind, our way lies through a long stretch of moorland. The day is still one of the dreariest, and as we look out across miles of bleak monotony, it seems foolish to suppose that anybody has been daring enough to colonise on these windy, marshy uplands. All the same, it is impossible to deny the existence of Easter Benhar, where a village has been erected by the Benhar Coal Company. The houses are of middling class. One of the rows consists of good - sized kitchens, entering from which are wash-houses and stores at the back. A payment of 3s 8d a fortnight covers the tenancy and secures an ample supply of coal - so ample, as one of the miners informed me, that he was able to keep on a fire all night. There are large ashpits and closets behind, well removed from the houses, and tidily kept. This was the only row which I examined, the other houses, although some of them are larger, appearing to be of the same general character.
Here again the water supply is far from satisfactory. There is a spring-well at Fala Hill, nearly a mile away, where the wants of the village are well met in winter, if people will be at the trouble of going for it, but in summer it is often dry. Near at hand is a pond, into which surface water is carried. It is not filtered, the margin of the pond is often unclean, and the pond itself is said to receive more than surface water. One of the miners told me he had seen a dead dog floating in it. Lying between Easter Benhar and Crofthead is Benthead Row, a line of fourteen single apartment houses belonging to Messrs Dixon. I only mention it - for the houses are not specially bad because overcrowding appears to exist here, a great many lodgers being kept.
Ashes are thrown down immediately in rear of the houses, the tenants being apparently unwilling to carry them to the ashpit, the way to which lies through sloppy grass. Crofthead is a large place, with a mining population, including Fauldhouse, numbering upwards of 4000. In communities of such extent the Local Authority is readily exerted, and with the exception of the School Row, which is an unsavoury locality, and Slate Row, where the legend runs that a half-tipsy miner once undertook to run through all the partitions, and had actually demolished one of them before his friends could stop his wild career.
Crofthead does not call for special comment. There are, however, two excellent features in it which are worthy of notice. The first is, that a good many of the cottages are owned by working miners, which I take to be an excellent sign of the times at Crofthead; and the second is, that a co-operative store, of which Mr. John Drinnan is President, is in successful operation. There are fully 100 members, almost exclusively miners, in connection with it, and the weekly turn-over is about £90. Quarterly balances are made, the average dividend being 2s per pound, yielding, in the case of large families, a bonus of from £4 to £5 a quarter. Crofthead, it may be added, is fortunate as regards water.
Ten years ago people were supplied from the clouds or the fields or at far-away springs, and several of the springs came to be obliterated by the Coltness Company and the Messrs Dixon opening new pits. The great scarcity of water was often discussed, and at length Messrs Dixon and the Coltness Company agreed to bring a supply from the Leavenseat, a range of hills about two miles from Crofthead, if the feuars would first make a contribution of £150 for this purpose. This money was obtained, and works were forthwith erected at a cost of about £1000, the water being given gratuitously by Mr. Hair. In this way Crofthead has had an excellent supply for the last seven or eight years.
No local assessment is levied.
Of course, repairs upon the works must be provided for, and this expense has hitherto been met by a voluntary collection once or twice from the work people, and by a tax of 3s, morally not legally exigible, which has been laid upon all feuars of later date than the first subscription. In some instances, the new feuars decline to recognise the moral law, and then they are told (for some such stinginess was anticipated) that as all the wells are laid down on private property they can be prevented from drawing a single gallon of water. I do not know whether this argument is always convincing, but at any rate you may drink without stint at Crofthead.
FROM BATHGATE TO SLAMANNAN.
From Bathgate to Slamannan across country must be a breezy drive at the best. In such blustry Weather as that which I experienced the horse and his rider run a fair chance of being blown over one or other of the storm-swept hills across which the road is carried. A more desolate landscape than that presented amidst the wind and the rain could scarcely be found in the Lowlands - the low-lying fields on every side for ten miles at a stretch laid under water by swollen streams which had overtopped their banks; farm-yards apparently deserted and perfectly still, the be-draggled poultry crowding together under the hay-ricks; blasts of rain impelled as by a whirlwind ; and overhead the storm-cloud drifting rapidly across the shy. At one part of the road, just after we had passed through Slamannan, the horse for some 60 or 70 yards required to wade through three or four feet of water, which lay apparently to the same depth in fields all round. I was rather anxious to get out to this district, having heard that the hamlets of Jawcraig, near Slamannan, were not all that could be desired, and I found that this was a very mild way of putting the case.
There are here three rows of houses at some distance from each other, and tenanted by miners in the employment of Mr C. J. Alexander, of Jawcraig. They are called Cornfield Row, Low Jawcraig and High Jawcraig. We may begin with Cornfield Row, consisting of twelve houses, eleven of one apartment and one of two rooms. They are built on mossy ground, covered with red tiles, and the floor is partly of brick and partly of old pieces of loosely-laid wood. All the houses are damp, some of them to such an extent as to make it impossible that the people can live in them save at great danger to health. In one house two plies of canvas cloth were laid on the middle of the door, and both were wet through in several parts. Here also, as at “the Briggate" in Mossend, unmistakable damp was found in the ashpit under the lighted grate. The old woman who lives here told me that sometimes during the night, when the door is shut and a large fire burning, she sees steam rising from the floor.
In another house the occupants, whom I found on the eve of removal, had a good eight-day clock (miners, by the way, are very fond of a handsome clock), and the ceiling being only about six feet high, it was necessary to make a hole in the floor and set the tall timepiece in it. On lifting it the other day, the bottom of the case fell away, and the hole was full of water. It was in this state when I saw it.
There are two beds in each house, of the recess kind. They are placed against the inside partition of the houses, and the back of the beds in most cases is wet from the floor almost to the ceiling. The outside walls are, of course, very damp. The rent of these single apartments is 1s a week.
If their internal condition is bad, the outside is still worse. There are no ashpits or closets - filth of all kinds being thrown into the road in front. Neither is there any drainage, for the irregular cutting in front of the houses is really a cesspool. At the back a drain has been partially formed, but it is quite stopped up, and the surface water soaks in at the foundation of the houses. The people are all Scotch, and keep their houses in as good order as is possible in the circumstances.
As for water, they depend chiefly upon rain, which is caught in barrels, and is of course charged with atmospheric impurities. They know nothing of filtration, and last summer I was told that bowel-complaint was common in the row. This, however, was attributed not to the rain water but to the use of water taken out of a stream that flows from a neighbouring pit under working.
The houses at Low Jawcraig, also built on mossy ground, are in very much the same condition. There are some 21 in the row - single and double rooms - and almost all of them are extremely damp. The rent is 4s and 6s a month, and notice has been given by the proprietors of an increase. Health and decency are outraged by the want of ashpits and closets and drains. One of the houses is used as a school-room, and the back of it will not bear description. Water is got from field drains.
On the day of my visit it was so muddy, by reason of the heavy rains, that the people could not use it, and they have not been educated to great nicety. High Jawcraig is quite as wretched as the other rows-in some respects even worse. Several of the floors are simply soft clay, with large holes in them. Water flows through an opening in the row, and the tenant of the adjoining house, in getting out of bed one morning, stepped into cold water. Drain water is used at High Jawcraig; in summer, when the drains are dry, the people get water where they can.
I should have liked to continue my inquiries in the neighbourhood of Slamannan, if only in the hope of finding a contrast to the Jawcraig Rows; but the day was by this time far spent, and the roads impassable.
FROM BISHOPBRIGGS TO DENNY AND KILSYTH.
BISHOPBRIGGS is an ancient place which has slept through centuries of progress, and now finds itself left far behind by more wakeful communities. It rejoices in a public-bouse, of course, which calls itself inn, but there is no hotel, nor any means of affording what country hostelries are designed to afford, "refreshment for man and beast." Whoever seeks to explore the neighbourhood must therefore do so on foot, and, like the pilgrim of old, be superior to all nineteenth century appetites.
I visited this Sleepy Hollow the other day, because its sanitary arrangements were reported to be bad. It is built close to the North British Railway, or rather the line between Edinburgh and Glasgow has been formed just behind the old village, and between the houses and the railway embankment are considerable stretches of garden ground, exhibiting the sanitary deficiencies complained of. The ashpits are almost all in ruins, and ill kept, their malodorous contents heaped up and overflowing, while the gardens are littered over with ashes and refuse. These remarks must be confined to the old houses, for there are a good many modern buildings, the surroundings of which are as tidy as the most rigorous Local Authority could desire.
Bishopbriggs is not a mining village, nor are its houses of the special class to be found in the neighbourhood of pits. Its aristocracy apart, the population is made up of miners, railway labourers, and the general working class, and the landlords are not mine-owners, but grocers and bakers and well-to-do people in the village. The houses are also of a mixed character-good two-storey tenements of various ages, elbowed by old one-storey erections.
Binnie's Land was pointed out to me as the only one in the village which might be said to be wholly tenanted, or nearly so, by miners. There are two flats in this land - the lower one entered from the street in front, and the upper storey by an outside stair at the back, The houses on the ground floor are single apartments, for which £4 12s a-year is paid, and kitchens with small bed closets, the rent being £4 18s. Four houses enter from a lobby. They are not bright, fresh houses, the lobby system preventing free ventilation, and the families are usually large. Up stairs the rents are £4 18s for the smaller houses, and £6 10s for large-sized rooms and kitchens. There is no deficiency of water in Bishopbriggs, although one of the pumps, situated in the main street, is in Chancery.
It seems that for many years it has been regarded as a public well; but the property upon which it stands having passed into other hands, the owner claims it as his own, and in the meantime it is locked up, pending the decision of the Glasgow sheriffs. Excellent spring water, I am told, is got from this well, and enough of it to supply the whole place. At a little distance from it is a pump, also leading from a spring, but the water tastes of iron, especially after remaining in the house over-night, and for this reason it is unpopular. Farther away in the opposite direction is Connalton public well, where the water is plentiful and good; and behind the inn of the village is another pump, the use of which, however, is restricted to the tenants of the owner.
On the whole, if you cannot dine here you need not die of thirst. Auchinairn, about a mile and a half off, resembles Bishopbriggs in its external characteristics, with the unlovely features to which I have adverted a good deal enlarged. The houses belong to private landlords as distinguished from mine-owners, and its sanitary condition is most discreditable. The road leading to it is a reproach to the trustees - the metal in bad repair, and the drains ill formed. It would be easy to drain the village, which stands on rising ground, and I noticed that an ill-sustained effort is being made to carry the surface water into a field-drain about the bottom of the hill, but reform advances slowly at Auchinairn.
In the village itself, the jawboxes at the top of the outside stairs of two-storey houses run into basins on the pavement, which communicate with an underground sewer. These basins are clean and free from deposit, but otherwise the drainage of the streets is not attended to as it ought to be. The houses are many of them very old, and I think also very dear.
The first one I went into, an extremely small kitchen, (in which four people could scarcely find room to sit by the cradle of a dying child), and an equally small room, is rented at £4 10s a year. In one of the houses underneath, the front walls, and also the beds, are black with damp. The ground behind slopes down into the close, bringing water freely when rain falls; and a sort of porch in front leaks in the roof, so that the people are assailed from both quarters in the rainy season, and find it necessary sometimes to desert the recess bed and sleep in the middle of the floor, which is of stone.
Taking next a row of one storey houses tenanted chiefly by miners, I find that six and seven shillings a-month are paid for single apartments, with earthen floors broken and damp, small back windows, and walls and ceilings from which the plaster has fallen in large pieces. The beds in many cases are quite wet along the back walls, and smells strongly of damp, which appears all round. Several of the doors are below the level of the street, one woman telling me that on New Year morning, after the thaw had set in, her kitchen floor was flooded with water. At the end of the village is a row of small single-apartment houses, two of them which I entered being only seven feet broad.
The rent is 5s a month. If the drainage of Auchinairn is bad, the ground at the back of the houses is infinitely worse. The ashpits, with hardly a single exception, are heaped up and overflowing; and where they do not exist at all, the refuse lies all round. The closets are extremely dirty, and little used, as one may readily satisfy himself by glancing at the rear. The tenants all complain of this state of things, and of course refer the irregularities and uncleanliness to their neighbours. What is wanted is early and prompt action on the part of the Local Authority.
I spoke to Mr. McLelland, the inspector of the district, who told me that he was about to take action against the proprietors, and had already done so in some instances. As for its water supply, Auchinairn is not so badly off at this season as the people themselves seem to suppose. There are a good many wells in the village, owned by proprietors, and available to their tenants, including Marshall's, Cleland's, Weir's, Hutcheson's, Colquhoun's, and Findlay's pumps, and a public pump near a quarry.
One of the sewer pipes is discharged in a field close by the public well, which is, however, enclosed by substantial walls, and the proximity of the sewer and the quarry has created a suspicion that the water is tainted. In one of the houses I got a sample of the worst of this pump water, by which I mean that it was taken from the lees of the “stoup." I applied Nessler's test, without finding any indications of organic impurity.
Everybody objects more or less to the water which is got from all the wells, but no one has any very sufficient reason to explain this antipathy. The common complaint is, that it does not make good tea, which is hardly a convincing argument. One of the wells, opened a year or two ago, was so much spoken against that the Local Authority got the water analysed by a Glasgow chemist, the result of which was that it was condemned, and the well closed. No analysis, however, of the water now in use has been made. In summer, these wells are frequently dry, and then Auchinairn is really in extremity. Marshall's pump is the only one which gave a continuous supply during the hot months last year, but the quantity got from it is limited, and only the tenants having a right to it were furnished with water. “Our neighbours would soon carry it all away,” said one of the women; "but we don't allow them to take it during the day, and at night the well is locked." There is nothing for it in such a case but to go to the Connalton well at Bishopbriggs, and when this is impossible, rain water is used, or any which can be got either by favour or strategy - strategy in this case meaning a good deal. On the way back to Bishopbriggs we pass through Myremailing, a cluster of half-a-dozen houses inhabited by miners, and owned by the farmer on whose lands they are erected.
These are all very wretched places. The doors are below the level of the road, the floors are of clay, the ceilings low, and damp glistens and actually smells everywhere - on the walls, at the back of the beds, and under the beds. They are most unhealthy houses, and could not be made decently habitable by any amount of tinkering. Burn water is the only available supply at Myremailing, and Nessler's test produced unmistakable discolouration. In summer, even this impure flow is frequently stopped, and then the people obtain water from a neighbouring farmyard.
Denny, which we get to by the Caledonian Railway, is a large town, including in its population a considerable number of miners. It is not kept as clean as might be desired, the main street at some parts and the ground behind many of the old houses being in such a condition as to lead one to suppose that the Local Authority is not particularly active. The only part of the town where miners are to be found without admixture is the Nob Row, belonging to Mr. Miller, a manufacturer in Denny.
Strictly speaking, the Nob Row is in Dunipace, not in Denny, but they are so near as to be practically one community. The houses at the beginning and end of the row are comfortable enough, although not of the first class, but in the middle there are some of a very inferior kind, the entrances slightly below the level of the roadway, and damp showing itself on the roof and over some of the beds. These middle houses again have no back or front ground, while the others have kitchen gardens or greens before the doors. The ashpits are some 13 or 14 feet from the houses, and are cleaned out as often as the tenants arrange for this being done. There is no closet for the whole row. The rents of these houses range from £2 12s for single apartments to £6 a year for three rooms.
There is no public water supply in Denny. There are, however, a number of springs on private ground from which good water is to be had in plenty in winter and summer. A drive of four miles or so brings us to Haggs, a mining village, in which the houses are owned by Mr. Wilson, of Banknock Colliery, and by persons living in the village. The Haggs, in various respects, is in a disgraceful state, and some of Mr. Wilson's houses are much in need of repair. The old evil of dampness is present in almost every house I visited - damp in the beds, and in wet weather water drips from the ceiling and is caught in a bowl. The back room of one of the houses was cold enough and damp enough to give one toothache in ten minutes. Stone floors are laid in the kitchen ; wooden floors in the room. Farther along the row are half a dozen houses belonging to other proprietors, one of them most objectionably situated - the floor being a couple of feet lower than the street in front and the garden ground behind. They are all damp and dark - so damp that three of the number are not tenanted.
The houses here are rented at about £2 12s for single apartments and £3 10s for rooms and kitchens. The worst feature of Haggs, however, is the indescribably filthy condition of the back-yards. There are no ashpits, and the only closet I saw was so dirty that it could not be used. The result is that the kitchen gardens are poisoning the air, and are allowed to do so all the year through, no one providing for the refuse being removed. It is hard to guess what the Local Authority for Haggs conceives to be the proper discharge of its duty. The water supply is also far from satisfactory, owing to neglect on the part of those who should interest themselves in the wants of the village. It is got from springs led into various pumps, and when procurable is of excellent quality.
There are four of these pumps in the village, and I was told that all of them are at present out of repair, so that no water can be obtained. In these circumstances, the people go to the "smiddy” near the pit, where there is a spring, and their wants are supplied, but in summer they are not allowed to take this water, which is reserved for cattle grazing in fields belonging to Mr. Wilson. I asked several persons why the proprietor would not allow them to take the water in summer, and the first reply, “Because he keeps't for his beese," was the explanation given in every case, or at least the answers were of precisely similar import. The last resource is to go to Castlecary, where a farmer gives water on condition that he shall receive a day's work from the recipients during the season.
Just outside Haggs is the “New Row." The houses, which are of brick, are held from Mr. Wilson, the single apartments being rented at 5s 6d a month, and the rooms and kitchens at £3 12s a year.
The floors in the kitchen are of stone, the rooms being laid with wood. They are not bad houses but the surroundings are ill kept. Ashes and other refuse are thrown in front of the houses although a large ash-pit is provided behind. One of the tenants told me it was not customary to lay the ashes down before the doors, but I fear it is too general. The only water available for the people in the New Row is that which is taken out of a burn down at Holland Bush, and the banks of which sufficiently indicate its quality. It was in flood when I saw it. A wine glassful which I got in one of the houses assumed a deeper brown on Nessler's mixture being added to it, showing that it was impure. The children, I was told, wade in it, and otherwise increase its pollution. In summer, when the burn is dry, the villagers have no water. “What do you do then?" I asked.
"Weel, we get it frae a neebor's well doon at the Bush, but he doesna' let us tak' it." “In short, you steal it?" “Ay, we jist steal it, when we can. Then we catch rain water, which is better than the burn at ony time.”
Driving on to Kilsyth, a few miles away, we come to Barwood, on the outskirts of the town. Barwood is a little group of tumble-down houses at the foot of a hill, on the top of which is an old quarry, now full of water. The hill is stony, and in wet weather the rain rushes down and makes havoc with the houses, which are held by private landlords, not by colliery owners. The walls of one of these houses glistened with water, which literally runs in through the foundations in the wet season, and has to be taken up in saucers and pails. One morning lately, the woman of the house required to get her neighbour to assist her in baling out the water before her children could get out of bed. There are no drains, or other water-courses, although at the time of my visit I found two women up to the elbows in "glaur” clearing out a rain-track, which, even if they succeeded in making it, would be obliterated in 24 hours.
Midway up the hill, and right in the course of the houses, are the closet and ash-pit, the nasty discharge from which found its way down and created a most offensive nuisance. On New-Year's Day some of the men closed up the closet and formed an imperfect drain from the ash-pit leading into a field. Spring water is got on the hill, and also from a spout farther along the road. It is very good water. Barwood is an inconsiderable place, the sanitary condition of which appears to be unworthy the attention of anybody. The people are old residenters, and family associations induce them to remain in it notwithstanding its discomforts.
At the entrance to Kilsyth, “The Brick Rows," belonging to Messrs Baird, first invite our attention. There are three parallel rows, with a fourth built along one of the ends. I did not count them, but there must be some 200 altogether, in single and double apartments - the former with bed-closet, rented at 5s 1d a month, and the latter at 7s ld a month. They were built about a dozen years since, at which time they were probably reckoned very superior houses of their class. Even now, although the people complain of damp, they are not bad miners' dwellings, and the sanitary arrangements are excellent. There is ample space between the rows, the ground being laid under grass, and large ashpits and closets are set down at regular intervals, while substantial drains carry off the surface water. The household supply of water is ample. A man is daily employed keeping everything clean and orderly; and an inspector, appointed by the firm, looks after the behaviour as well as the comfort of the tenants. On the whole, the government of the Brick Rows is firm and intelligent.
It is almost a pity that the Messrs Baird have not the administration of affairs in Kilsyth, which is, without exception, the dirtiest town I have visited, although its situation is such that its rulers might easily reverse this state of things if they wished to do so. The town is built on the slopes and summit of a hill, having therefore a fall on each side, but its streets and pavements are nevertheless ill-drained and muddy. In all communities of the same size, there are lanes and closes which will not bear inspection, redeemed by others of cleanlier appearance, but Kilsyth is consistently dirty throughout Ashpits are erected right under house windows, and lie reeking and smelling with accumulated filth, which is not removed with regularity.
Indeed, I was told by some of the tenants that it is not taken away at all, but simply laid under ground when the season for delving the gardens comes round. Many of the tenements are very old and ricketty, but they are not by any means exclusively miners' houses; and even though they had been, I could not pretend to describe them in the brief space at my disposal. This at all events is plain, that Kilsyth is very much in need of a sanitary revival, if not an Improvement Act.
After the squalor of the town it was quite a relief to come upon Auchinstarry which lies between Kilsyth and Croy Station on the North British Railway. Auchinstarry consists of three rows of substantial one-storey houses of stone, the last row being not quite finished, while the foundations of a fourth have been laid. These also belong to the Messrs Baird, and are occupied by miners. They are all rooms and kitchens, the rent being £6 a year. Below the floors, which are of wood, tarpaulin is laid, and ventilators on both sides of the house carry a current of air underneath. The through ventilation of the houses is secured by the front window being “double hung," as joiners phrase it, the upper and lower frames sliding up and down, while one of the panes in the back window is hinged, and may be opened or closed at will. Two iron beds in the kitchen and one in the room are put in by the proprietors.
I went into one of the houses in the dusk of evening, and found the tea things laid out on a tablecloth of snowy whiteness, with which the general appearance of the kitchen pleasantly corresponded. Here at last, I thought, is evidence that if miners get really good dwellings they will take pride in them, and rival their neighbours in home attractions. But the other houses, although most of them were clean and tidy, did not realise the ideal which I had formed. Three large out-buildings are erected for each row, comprising a wash-house and boiler for every six tenants, coal-cellars for all, and closets and ashpits for every three tenants.
The doors of these outhouses are all kept shut, ventilators being introduced carrying the foul air through the roof. The ground is well drained, and everything is in perfect order. Here also a scavenger and an inspector or policeman look after the cleanliness of the place. “The Twicker,” a couple of miles off, which I was unable to visit, the Messrs Baird are erecting about 100 houses similar to those described.
EASTERHOUSE AND BAILLIESTON.
In ordinary affairs, Baillieston doubtless takes precedence of Easterhouse as being the larger community, but in the matter of miners' houses we shall deal first with Easterhouse as in certain respects the more remarkable or notorious of the two. In both places, scarlet fever has been prevalent for several months, and although now somewhat abated, it is still cutting off its victims. The cases which have occurred are chiefly but not exclusively amongst children. At Baillieston, I heard of the recent death from scarlet fever of a young woman, a dressmaker, whose two brothers are said to be lying dangerously ill under the same disease, and in the two worst rows in Easterhouse which I visited, scarcely a household has escaped this fearful scourge. I do not pretend to say how far the epidemic is attributable to the sanitary condition of the district.
Easterhouse consists of two divisions, both erected on high ground, and between them is the valley in which the North British Railway has been formed. We begin our inquiries at the end of the village having for its termination a neat little iron church, bearing on its front the intimation that it is "The gift of the children of the Free Church." Close at hand is a row of five miners' houses owned by Mr Nish, belonging to the village. They are old stone houses with single apartments, the rental being £4 5s a - year.
The end house has a stone floor, and is damp in various places, even in the bed, but the others are dry and comfortable, although lacking the conveniences of modern dwellings. The ashpit and a double closet are built within a foot of the back windows, one of which looks right into the closets. It is difficult to understand why these places should not have been erected farther away, with the entrances from the opposite direction, or why the Local Authority should not yet insist on this change being made.
But if a complaint of this nature be justifiable in regard to such old houses, what shall we say of precisely the same provocation to disease being offered in connection with new tenements? A hundred yards away is a brick row of nine room and kitchen houses, built by Messrs Ferrier & Strain, of Airdrie, and not yet fully occupied. The coal-cellars, one for each tenant, are carefully placed at many yards’ distance in front of the houses, as if they were unclean and contagious, while the ashpit and closet are set down within a couple of feet of the back windows. The tenant who has this delightful prospect more directly under the eye than her neighbours, complains that even now she must keep her window hermetically sealed, and in summer she dreads plague. In other respects these houses are unobjectionable, and are occupied at a rental of lls a-month. The ceilings are lofty and the floors of wood. They are still damp and raw, being so recently out of the hands of the plasterer, but there is no reason why they should not, when they have become thoroughly dry, be as warm and snug as any similar class of brick houses.
These are the most modern erections in this part of Easterhouse, which tenaciously clings to the past. There are several clusters of old buildings occupied by miners and others, but only one row of any length, which is called Swinton Row. The Swinton houses - roofed with all the varieties of slate, and red tile, and thatch-are as frail as they are venerable, consisting generally of a ground floor, and an attic chamber reached by a narrow and dark wooden stair, which creaks ominously as we clatter up to the ceiling. The first house we enter is of this kind a kitchen and attic, for which together a rent of £6 a-year is paid. The interior of the kitchen is dark and damp and untidy, and in the attic, which is used as a sleeping room for children, it is only possible to stand upright in the centre of the floor, the ceiling sloping to both sides. Many of the houses are of this general character, but the dampness is not so common, nor where it exists so great, as one might suppose from the outward appearance of things. The explanation of this probably is, that the soil is sandy, and the situation of the village favourable to natural drainage.
The water supply here is from Airdrie, and is good and plentiful. Going down hill and across the line of railway, we may just glance at five very old thatched houses to the left. They are under the level of the roadway, and built of undressed stones. An old woman in feeble health says she has occupied her present house, a miserable enough hovel, for four years, and has paid £2 12s per annum for it, which she thinks should entitle her now to sit rent free, while her neighbour, also an old woman, but strong and in good spirits, lives “but and ben wi' the coo,” her kitchen being in the one end and a byre in the other. Leaving this ancient settlement, a minute's walk takes us to a new row of brick houses, erected a year since, I was told, by Mr. Reid, a coalmaster in the neighbourhood. There are 14 houses in the row, all rooms and kitchens, with high ceilings, wooden floors, and three beds - two in the kitchen and one in the room. The rent is 10s a-month. They are not first-class houses, some of them showing spots of damp on the walls, but there is not much to complain of.
Open drains are constructed in front of the houses, and beyond these coal cellars, ashpits, and closets.
For the rest the sanitary regulation of the place is lax. The ashpits are overflowing, and the closets in such a state that they cannot be entered. "A man comes and gies the 'siver' a bit soup,” one of the colliers said, “but the middens are never cleaned.” One of the tenants has lived for five months in the row, during which time the filth has been allowed to accumulate unchecked. The people complained of the state of the ashpits at the end of last year, but nothing came of it. I met with two women here who had recently returned from America, after a lengthened stay in the New World. They compared the mining villages of America with those of the Old Country altogether in favour of the former, where a tenant is fined in five dollars for every such breach of cleanliness as is daily committed at home, and nothing thought about it.
Be this as it may, the state of things at Mr. Reid's row is not satisfactory, and might easily be remedied. This part of Easterhouse does not enjoy the Airdrie water supply, but is dependent upon as much as can be hail from what are called “tea-spouts” that run into a burn which passes the foot of the row.
This water is believed to be good, and a sample which I tested gave no evidence of organic impurity. In rainy weather, however, when the burn is high it rises above the spouts, and so the people are driven to beg or steal. I went along and examined two of these spouts, which issue from under the fields and run into the burn at its lowest level, rendering it impossible to get the water of one without a liberal admixture of the other.
Pushing up the hill, and crossing the Monkland Canal, we come to “The Dandy Row” and "Wester Maryton," two rows of old houses, with red tiles, the one forming a continuation of the other. In the Dandy Row there are twenty and in Wester Maryton ten houses. The tenants are miners employed in Dungeon Hill Colliery, and the rent of the houses, which are all single apartments, is 5s per month of four weeks. A more unhealthy class of houses than those which are known as the Dandy Row - a name bestowed upon them by some local satirist - I have seldom seen, nor have I ever found so much disease existing within the same limited range. Wester Maryton is not a whit better in either respect, the two rows being jointly known in the district as “The Hole." Let us first look at them from the outside. In front is the parish road, and beyond it the Monkland Canal, securely fenced in the interest of the lieges. Behind is a field which has considerable fall towards the houses, and at the bottom is only about two feet below the level of the roof. It is not, however, carried right down to the houses, a deep trench having been formed extending along the whole length of both rows.
An attempt has apparently been made to cut a drain at the bottom of the trench, for pipes are seen at either end; but no tile has been laid down to carry the water away, nor does the drain appear to be properly levelled.
In short, judging from present appearances, choked as it is with dirt and refuse, it is practically useless. We shall learn when we go into the houses whether or not this is the case. Note also, that along the whole double row there is not a single back window, nor any means of ventilation. Ashes and filth of all kinds are thrown down at the beginning of the Dandy Row, and in an opening which divides it from Wester Maryton is the only ashpit of the place, overflowing and abominable. There is no closet, and coal-cellars or other conveniences of a similar kind are undreamt of. Entering the first house in the Dandy Row we find that it is quite as dismal as the outside led us to expect. The roof is rotten and stained with rain at various places, and the brick floor is also damp. The people tell us that in wet weather the rain drops from the ceiling, and soaks in through the back wall, and streams out at the door. This statement is confirmed by several of the neighbours. In the second house the rain comes through the roof over the beds. In the third house damp appears on the back wall, and at the back of the beds, in which boarding has been placed between the wall and the mattress, and water lodges under the beds. The fourth house-a wretched place, in which there is almost no furniture-has a cold, mouldy smell. The woman says she has often lifted as many as four bucketsful of water from the floor. The fifth is spotted with damp on the ceiling.
In the sixth house a child is ill with bronchitis. "Water comes in on wet days and floods out to the door,” is the explanation given of the appearance of the Hoor, stated, too, without any feeling rather in the hard, hopeless tone of people who have been taught to expect nothing better. In another house the baby is ill with scarlet fever, from which an older child has just recovered, and the mother suffers from sore throat. In yet another, one of the children is lying with scarlet fever. The father tells me that he has lived 16 months in the row, and during that time has scarcely ever been free from colds. Wester Maryton, as I have already hinted, is in much the same state.
Sitting in the centre of the first house, you may study the stars through a hole in the ceiling and openings in the tiles. In wet weather, of course, the astronomer would require to provide himself with an umbrella. On 11th December last one of the children died from scarlet fever. The woman of the house says that two Sundays ago she carried out about twenty pails full of water, which found its way in from the back. In the next house all the children have had scarlet fever, and one was buried at the beginning of December. In another house, a child is ill with bronchitis, and a door or two farther on. I am told that one of the children, a boy, died of scarlet fever, and was buried a fortnight ago. The water used at "The Hole” is got from a pump at some distance. I could not learn where the water comes from, but it is evidently not from a spring, The Nessler test showed distinct contamination. This pump is often out of order, and the people then take their water from any burn at hand. I was very thankful to get out of “The Hole.”
Baillieston is supplied with good water from Airdrie, and to this extent is favourably situated as compared with part of Easterhouse, but a number of its houses, while better than those at “The Hole,” are of a very bad description. The worst classes are to be found in the rows on each side of the main road from Easterhouse to Baillieston, just as the latter village is entered.
On one side of the street the houses belong to private proprietors, and on the other some of them are "company houses," leased by Mr Reid from a lady at Easterhouse. The former are small single apartments, rented at 5s 5d a month-dark, dirty, and some of them extremely damp -and rooms and kitchens at 8s a month. The ground at the back is filthy and untended. The worst houses which I saw are those leased by Mr. Reid, especially a back row of single apartments, for which 6s a month is paid. They are old stone houses, having at one end a large ash-pit of a very offensive kind. One of the tenants told me that during the rainy season last summer the water was a foot deep in his kitchen. The floor rises towards the door, and it became necessary to lift several bricks in order that the water might escape. The walls of this house are damp from floor to ceiling.
Another tenant, on turning out her bedding last week, found that the mattress was rotten with damp. One of the houses, recently vacated because of the damp, was let to another family, but on seeing its condition, they refused to take possession. The houses in the front row are not much better than those behind, and the rent is 6s 6d a month. Near to these old tenements Mr. Reid has erected a large number of brick houses, furnished with iron beds, and having large well-kept ashpits and closets outside. They are good rooms and kitchens, with wooden floors and high ceilings, and the rent is 10s a month.
Walking on to Crosshill, a suburb of Baillieston, I looked at two rows of brick houses belonging to Mr. Young, coalmaster-rooms and kitchens on one side, and single apartments on the other ; and at a row of single apartments belonging to Mr. Reid. These are all good, but not first-class dwellings, and the sanitary arrangements are at least less faulty than elsewhere. The two-room houses in Young Square, with wooden floors, are £6 a year, and the single apartments, both in the Square and in Reid's Row, are 7s a month.
AYRSHIRE.
To write of the county town of Ayr, and yet have nothing to say about Burns, is to a Scotchman a species of self-denial.
But poetry and miners' houses, whatever may be said of freedom and whisky, do not go together, and so we may at once proceed to our “Notes.” I spent three days in Ayrshire, examining the mining villages, while daylight permitted, in the neighbourhood of Ayr, Dalmellington, and Kilmarnock. The tourist who goes to Ayrshire naturally finds his way in the first instance to the county town, but for our special purpose it is not a very productive centre.
Indeed, I have half a notion that the honest men of Ayr take no great pride in the black country, and would rather ignore its existence, regarding it as kind of bar sinister on the fair escutcheon of the district. They tell you “There are miners' hooses hereawa. Ye maun gang tae Kilmarnock - side" if you are not contented with the prospect all around of flowing streams and cultivated uplands, which even in mid-winter are not without harvest promise. Nevertheless, there is one mining district nearby which had in the past an evil reputation not yet wholly outlived-I refer to Annbank, the only considerable village of the kind near Ayr.
Before, however, entering into detail regarding it, there are one or two remarks of a general nature which may be made as applicable to the three divisions of the county in which my inquiries were prosecuted. Whatever may have been the condition of miners' houses in Ayrshire a few years ago, they are now, on the whole, well-constructed, commodious, and cheap. From the large number of new rows to be found in all directions near pits which have long been in operation, it may be supposed that the past condition of things was not satisfactory, and this is borne out by the statements of the miners themselves. Nor can it be said that sanitary requirements are even now properly attended to, for I found populous villages with houses only two or three years old which yet lacked altogether the outhouses necessary to decency and convenience.
In this respect, Ayrshire compares unfavourably with the other districts referred to in my former communications. The water for domestic use is also objectionable in some places during wet weather. But if the purely modern houses, while more numerous, are less complete in external arrangements than some in Lanarkshire, I did not find, in connection with the older hamlets, anything approaching to the filth and squalor of several districts within twenty miles of Glasgow. We have in Ayrshire, in short, neither the very best nor the worst class of miners' dwellings, but a higher general average than I have found to exist elsewhere. The rule as to keeping the drains free from accumulation and cleaning out the ashpits is much the same everywhere.
An old man is usually set apart for this daily duty, which he performs with as much regularity as chronic rheumatism or asthma permits. For the rest, all is left to the tidiness or untidiness of the tenants. In some rows, one cannot help noticing, filth is thrown down in the kitchen garden or at the back of the houses, even where ashpits are provided, while in others cleanliness generally prevails. The truth is that a couple of slatternly women will ruin the amenity of a whole row, and I have no doubt that a great deal of the prevailing mischief arising in this way might be averted by stricter supervision, and the exercise of a little wholesome severity towards those who are notoriously guilty of setting a bad example.
So far as I could ascertain, there are not many Irish people amongst the miners of Ayrshire, There is a considerable infusion of Englishmen and their wives, who sigh for the “up-stairs and down-stairs” of home. Another circumstance which strikes one is the extreme youth of many of the Scotch wives, as well as their fruitfulness.
I had addressed a young, girlish creature several times as "Miss,” until she began to speak of her husband, and I discovered that a frightful error had been unwittingly committed. With ladies of uncertain age it is best to give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they are still in the spring-time of life, but a young wife, barely out of her teens, is jealous exceedingly of her dignity, and resents the imputation of being still a school-girl. In another case, a woman of two or three and twenty, deploring the want of bleaching-ground, asked me how I thought she could get along at all on washing days, with only a single apartment, and “wi' five wee weans, and no a place to pit a steek o'claes on!”
Annbank is distant about five miles from Ayr, I had heard a good deal of an uncomplimentary nature said about it, but a visit to the place showed that it is only necessary to give a mining village a bad name and it will stick to it. The pits here are now being worked under trustees, the firm having got into difficulties. Under the former management, all my informants concurred in saying, everything was allowed to get into disrepair, and Annbank became a byword and a reproach.
Now, however, a spirit of improvement has been awakened, although it is not sufficiently developed. While far from being a model mining village, Annbank is by no means the worst I have seen. It consists of two long rows of houses built on sloping ground, and having two "squares” in the centre. The houses, which number 233 in all, were erected about 15 years ago, and are of brick, with slate roofs, the great majority being single rooms, and the remainder of two apartments.
For the former ls a week is paid, while the rent of rooms and kitchens is 2s a week. I only entered one of the two apartment houses, and was surprised to find the accommodation so extensive, both apartments being about 12 feet square, and in good repair. I went into a great many of the single apartments or kitchens. They are much too small for the families living in them, and numbering in many cases from six to nine persons each. There are two beds in the kitchen, in addition to which a "hurley” is brought out after dark when the family is large.
The floors are all of square brick, and quite free from dampness. The most serious objection to the houses is that they are only lighted from the front, and as the windows are fixtures, the doors are thrown open for air. This is not the sole means of ventilation, although perhaps the only really effective way of securing it. Last summer, Mr. Clark, manager of the works, caused a small ventilating shaft to be driven through the back wall, which may be opened or closed by a sliding cover, worked from the inside. It is better than nothing. Smoke is a good deal complained of, especially during the winter nights, when the doors must be kept closed.
The sanitary arrangements of the village are defective, chiefly in consequence of the nasty habits of the people. Behind the houses are ashpits and closets, but the surroundings show that they are little used, great heaps of ashes and filth being deposited at the gable walls, although the proper receptacle is only a few feet off. There are no coal cellars, fuel being stored under the beds or kept out of doors. The single street which stretches the whole length of the village is on a lower level than the pavement, having on each side well-formed open drains, and as there is a considerable fall the refuse water runs off freely. At Annbank, as well as at the other two settlements belonging to the company which I afterwards visited, every one spoke highly of Mr. Clark as being at all times anxious to promote the comfort of the miners and their families. If he were to knock out windows in the rear of the single-apartment houses, and build a few more ashpits outside, and insist upon greater attention to cleanliness on the part of the housewives, the contrast between the appearance of Annbank now and that which it presented seven or eight years ago, would be still more marked.
A plentiful supply of good spring water is obtained from a well in the village, and a pumping engine, which was erected by Mr Clark on the bank of the river Ayr at a cost of about £300, conveys water for washing purposes to a couple of boilers in the rows. In connection with the works there is a large store, a friendly society, a reading-room and library, and a school. house, the village terminating in a little iron church, which stands at the top of the hill, and within whose corrugated interior Established Churchmen, U.P.'s, Frees, Baptists, and people of all sections of religious belief, worship together undisturbed by any vain speculations as to the province of the civil magistrate. The school accommodates about three hundred children, and the reading room, which is free to all for a penny a week, is provided with a bagatelle board and a summer ice-table, while the library, recently opened and as yet in its infancy, offers the best thoughts of Carlyle and Darwin, and Macaulay and Gibbon, for a weekly payment of a halfpenny.
A pleasant drive of half an hour brings us to Woodside, and a row of miners' houses also belonging to the Annbank Company. They are of brick, 31 in number, and were almost all erected only a short time since. Of these, 18 or 20 are single apartments, and the others rooms and kitchens. The few older houses have brick floors, but in those of recent construction wood has been put down. The rent here is the same as at Annbank-ls a-week for single houses, and 2s for double ends. They are warm, comfortable houses, the only fault I have to find with them being that the back windows are extremely small, so that they are dark. There are no wash-houses, no coal-cellars for the single apartments, and only one ash-pit, the refuse being laid down at the back of a detached series of double closets. It is creditable to the miners' wives at Woodside that they really make the best of the situation and do not throw ashes under the windows, but proper ash-pits should be provided at once, if the character of the place is to be maintained. The water at Woodside is drained from a neighbouring field.
It is apparently free from organic impurity in ordinary weather, but I was told that during heavy rains it is discoloured and therefore unwholesome. Here also is a school-house erected by the company, a reading-room, and a library which was opened a few weeks ago. Between Annbank and Woodside lies the hamlet of Burnbrae, belonging to the same company. It consists of three small rows of very old houses, huddled together on an eminence overlooking the Water of Ayr. The houses have stone floors, small windows, low ceilings, and roofs of slate and thatch. In all, fifteen or sixteen families live here, paying, like their neighbours elsewhere, one shilling and two shillings a-week for single and double rooms respectively. Dampness is not complained of, but rather certain domestic plagues which are born of heat and old wood. In summer, to be quite plain, bugs are said to make their unwelcome appearance “not singly, but in battalions.” The door-steps are below the level of the outside, and in wet weather the rain finds its way inside. There are two sources of water supply at Burnbrae--a spring well, which gives sparingly in winter, and not at all in summer, and a field drain at some distance, the water coming from which in the rainy season is often quite brown. The only other colliery village near Ayr of which I could hear anything is, or rather was, Whitletts, for it has now ceased to exist. It was a stirring enough place at one time, but a good many years ago the pits were shifted, and now only a few of the houses are occupied by farm-labourers. My Notes on the Dalmellington and Kilmarnock districts must be reserved for another letter.
DALMELLINGTON AND KILMARNOCK DISTRICTS.
DALMELLINGTON is reached by a branch railway from Ayr. I was advised to leave the train at Patna, between which and the town lie the principal mining villages of the district. Patna can scarcely be said to belong to the number, as one is disappointed to learn, after descending the hill and crossing the Doon, which flows in the valley between the railway and the village picturesquely perched on the high ground opposite.
The population is of a mixed description, and the houses, of one and two storeys, are altogether different in character from those we seek. For colliers' houses pur et simple we must recross the Doon, and scaling the heights beyond, reach Burnfoot Hill, or as it is popularly called for short, “The Hill.” Having climbed the brae, we come first to three long rows of one-storey brick houses, some 80 or 90 in number, all built about three years ago. In the first and third rows are three double houses-large rooms and kitchens--for which 3s 6d a week is paid; all the others are single apartments, the rent being 1s 9d a week. The plan is uniform throughout the whole line, and the accommodation, so far as it goes, is excellent.
In some of the houses damp appears on the front walls, but not to such an extent as to indicate any serious structural defect. All the dwellings, single and double apartments alike, have an outhouse at the back of the kitchen, for storing coals, and capable also of being turned into a washhouse. It would be much better, of course, if detached coal-cellars were provided, leaving this outer apartment to be used as a larder and scullery and washhouse. The floors are of wood, the ceilings lofty, and the kitchens large, each being furnished with two iron beds by the proprietors. In front of the houses, and only a few feet off, is a line of railway for the conveyance of minerals. It is not fenced, and must form dangerous playground for children.
The Hill contains many more than those described, and has a population, I should suppose, of somewhere about 2000. The houses are all after the same design, but as some of the apartments elsewhere are smaller, the rents are in such instances reduced to ls 6d and 2s 3d for single and double ends. I was, however, astonished to find in the case of houses of such recent construction that the sanitary arrangements are of the most defective character, There is not a single closet or ashpit, so far as I could learn, in the whole place, the full meaning of which can scarcely be conceived by city people. All refuse is thrown into the kitchen gardens at the back of the houses, and as there is no farmer in the neighbourhood who might find it to his advantage to cart it away for manure, it is allowed to lie all the year through.
In spring, when the people delve their gardens, it is returned to the soil. The water supply is also bad in summer. During winter good spring water is got in limited quantity, supplemented by supplies from No. 9 Pit, or from surface drains. In summer the spring is dried up, and the people must either depend upon what is pumped out of No. 9 Pit, or go to Carmean or Patna, both at a considerable distance. No. 9 is not a going pit, but the water is condemned by every one who is compelled to use it, and I made very special inquiry on the point. Not one but several people told me that it made broth and porridge black, and one man said that after it remained in the house over night a thick scum was found on the surface in the morning.
It has also the effect of giving a strong colour and flavour to tea, which may seem to be all in favour of economy, a little tea going a long way. I suggested this to one of the housewives, who shook her head, and said that "oor yin,” meaning her husband, knew the taste of No. 9 tea quite well, and wouldn't take it. In hot weather, “beasts". that is the comprehensive word commonly used -are found in the water. Last summer the complaints about it were loud and frequent, and a filter-box was placed in the pond in which it is stored. I saw the box, or at least the ashes in which it is embedded, and it seems to be about 2ft. square. Ashes from the pithead, I was told, are thrown into the box, through which all the water passes.
It is a rude, and can only be a partially effective filter, but since its introduction the quality of the water has been improved. It is to be hoped that when the hot weather comes round the supply will be found to be better than last year, although I think this is doubtful. The health of the Hill at present is very bad, especially in the three rows which I first visited. A good many deaths have taken place recently, and several cases of fever are reported. The Hill is splendidly situated, and ought to be exceedingly healthy.
Leaving Burnfoot and holding our way across the hill, we reach Benwhat, in which there are two long rows of miners' houses, all belonging to the Dalmellington Company, and exactly similar in style and internal arrangement to those we have just left. They are single apartments and internal arrangement to those we have just left.
They are single apartments and rooms and kitchens, the rent being ls 9d and 2s 3d per week respectively. The water is good and always to be had in plenty. The first row was built about nine years ago, and the last was only occupied last year. Between the two is a considerable stretch of sloping ground, and from the upper to the lower rows cross drains are carried down through the gardens, leading into well-formed drains, by which the refuse water is readily carried away.
Houses are in great demand at Ben what, and a good many lodgers are kept. Here also there is not a single closet or ashpit. Craigmark, on the outskirts of Dalmellington, is a biggish village belonging to the same company. The houses are old and smoky, but not specially unhealthy, and the rents are ls 3d and ls 6d a-week for single and double apartments. Craigmark beats the newer villages in being provided with ashpits and closets, which are regularly cleaned out.
A plentiful supply of good spring water is obtained. Waterside, another hamlet owned by the Dalmellington Company, lies three miles off. I should have liked very much to visit it, for I understand that washhouses and boilers are erected, besides other outhouses of a more indispensable kind. It would, however, have interfered greatly with my arrangements to go there, and I am willing to give the Dalmellington Company credit for having attended to sanitary matters at Waterside, which are inexplicably neglected at Burnfoot Hill and Benwhat.
Starting next morning from Kilmarnock, I drove to Galston. Hurlford is the first mining village we reach after leaving the old town. The Portland new and old rows, belonging to the Portland Iron Works, are altogether occupied by miners. The houses in the new row are dry and comfortable--those in the old quarter are also proof against wet, although weather-stained and time-worn. The latter are two storeys in height, the upper floor being reached by an inner stair, partly of wood and partly of stone, and narrow and dark. In the new row the houses are of two apartments, rent 7s a calendar month ; in the old row they are single apartments both on the ground and on the upper floor, the rent being 1s a week.
Between the two, and about 15 feet from the houses, are ashpits and double closets, which smell a good deal in summer.
Last winter small-pox was prevalent, and about the end of the year there were several cases of scarlet fever. Furnace Row, farther along the village, and just outside the works, numbers 16 families. No complaint can be made of the houses, which are above the level of the road, a room and a bed closet costing 6s 6d a calendar month. The state of things at the back, however, is very objectionable. The high wall of the works is only a few feet off, and the want of free air thus occasioned is aggravated by three closets and ashpits being erected against the gable of the houses. In summer the stench is very bad, and even now the tenants having the misfortune to look out from their back windows into the ashpits, find it advisable to keep them closed as much as possible. The water, which comes from Mauchline, is stored in a reservoir at the railway station, and delivered at a pump in Furnace Row. Near Galston we reach the Goatfoot and Tarry Rows, belonging to Mr. Allan Gilmour. The Goatfoot Rows are two in number, having in all about 30 tenants. They are room and kitchen houses, all of brick, with stone floors in both apartments.
An iron bed in the room, and also the room grate, are put in by the proprietor. They are thin and extremely damp houses - many of them so damp as to be positively injurious to health. Passing the hand across the wall brings off water and paint and lime. The back and front walls are stained with water from floor to ceiling, and the kitchen beds are in the same condition. Boarding has been introduced between the mattresses and the wall to preserve the bedclothes, but this of course does not remove the mischief resulting from sleeping in such a place.
In one house a large fire was lighted in the room, yet here also damp appeared on the wall paper at the side of the fireplace. Other tenants complained that their room fires could not be kept lighted for smoke, and one woman, the walls of whose house were anything but fresh, told me she had only been six months a tenant, during which time she had whitened it five times. I went into a great many of the houses, finding much the same kind of thing everywhere.
Scarlet fever has entered one of the houses, where a child lay ill in bed, and another little patient, now convalescent, sat wrapped up beside the fire. These houses are only a couple of years old, and are in general well furnished. In connection with them are kitchen gardens in front, and coal-houses and ash pits behind. The Tar Rows are three in number, with 18 or 19 families in each. They are rather better houses than the others, although I did not go into so many. The Tar Rows derive their name from the fact that the roofs are covered with tar. It seems to me that a cheap and ready way to keep out the damp so much and justly deprecated would be to smear the outsides of the houses with the rain-proof liquid so liberally used overhead. Galston, to which I afterwards proceeded, is pretty much a weaving village, so that I returned to Kilmarnock, and devoted the afternoon to a run in the opposite direction.
On the main road between Kilmarnock and Irvine, we come first to Kelk Place, a miners' row of thirty houses, belonging to Mr Finnie of Springhill. In outside arrangement these make the nearest approach I have seen to cottages, with little flower gardens in front hedged off from the main road, and the requisite outhouses behind. The accommodation of the houses consists of a large kitchen, with stone floor, entering from which are two small bedrooms. The rent is 6s a - month. They are very comfortable houses, and well kept. The water in winter is plentiful, and as good as drain water can be, but in wet weather it is dirty.
Crosshouse, a village farther on, comprises two old rows of miners' houses, also belonging to Mr Finnie. They are of two apartments, the room being a mere bed-closet, and the rent is 5s a month-not good houses by any means, but infinitely better than those at Jawcraigs or the “Red Toon."
There are no ashpits or closets, all refuse being thrown down in the kitchen gardens, and used for manure in spring. Water is got from a spring well quite at hand. “Lourlin Row," as it is pronounced (nobody knows exactly how it spells), is soon after reached.
Here there are twelve single-apartment houses, Mr. Finnie being again the owner, and the rent is 1s a-week for single apartments. The houses are not architectural triumphs. One of them is quite rent in the back wall, and also at the ceiling, by underground workings. The interstices are filled up with rays, “as the wind from the ceiling," the young housewife naively remarked, “blew out the lamp.” In this house is a harmonium, the first evidence of a taste for higher instrumental music than the concertina affords which I have met with. It is one of the simple sonorous order, without stops, but the master of the house, having overcome the difficulties of reading and fingering, is anxious to exchange it for a better instrument from which he may get a variety of effects. All miners, you see, are not “compact of thankless earth,” but are reasonably endowed with a sense of harmony.
Externally, Lourlin Row might be improved. It is dirty and crowded, and lacking outhouses, for which in the country there is so much room. Thornton Row, the next halting place, is tenanted chiefly by miners from Cornwall. The houses are old, and still less in accordance with modern requirements. Inside, they are dark, damp, and wanting repair; outside, miry and malodorous. There is only one closet, with four compartments, to the row. It is erected at the gable of one of the houses, from which it is separated only by a couple of feet, and in summer it is specially objectionable.
The water supply is very deficient. It is got in winter from a field drain, and in wet weather cannot be used. The people anticipate the discolouration as far as possible by laying in extra quantity when heavy rains appear likely to come, but in the drouthy days of summer they are reduced to extremities, and sometimes require to go all the way to Crosshouse. There are in all 21 houses in the row, the single apartments being rented at 1s a-week, and rooms and kitchens at 2s a-week. Nearer Irvine are other rows of miners' houses of a similar class. Those which I have noticed are, however, sufficiently indicative of the general character of the district.
MID AND EAST LOTHIAN.
THE Lothians, in which I have spent a couple of days, are not rich in mines, and colliers are in a minority. When trade was brisk and wages high, they ran up a total of 2400; but now their number barely exceeds 2000. They are a pacific, strike-disliking class of men, the best proof of which is that, previous to the great dispute last year, there had been no general rising since 1842. From what I have been able to gather, the employers exercise the paternal rather than the autocratic rule, and this system of government has, doubtless, had a restraining and soothing influence upon the usually rebellious class over whom they are set in authority. For one thing, some of them give houses to their colliers at rents which may be described, from a high commercial standpoint, as ridiculously low. Elsewhere, the most wretched hovels, having inside and outside all sorts of provocatives to disease, bring a shilling a-week to their owners. In the Lothians inferior houses are occupied for sixpence a-week, really good rooms and kitchens for eighteenpence a-week, and in the case of one row, which I shall afterwards refer to more particularly, four excellent rooms, on the cottage principle, are held for 2s a-week. A number of years ago, I believe, colliers' houses in the Lothians were usually free; and the Duke of Buccleuch continued this old fashioned generosity until last year, when the "big strike" soured the sweetness of his Grace's disposition, or that of his factor, and now rents are exacted which, although moderate, are yet amongst the highest in the district.
As a result of long years of peace and prosperity, not a few of the Lothian miners are credited with large balances at their bankers', amounting in some instances to as much as £400. I was curious to know whether the wealthier of their number, aspiring to become their own landlords, had invested a portion of their savings in cottages, but I could not hear of more than one or two such cases. They appear to think that money is money only while it exists in the shape of bank notes; when it takes the form of stone and lime it is no longer available capital, and they are not to be tempted to surrender the barren bird in the hand even though the one in the bush may promise a large offspring of percentages. All miners, of course, are not so opposed to investments of this nature, as we learn from the history of a large co-operative society at Tranent, the membership of which amounts to 600, four-fifths of the number being pit-workers.
The association was originated about 13 years ago, and has progressed so satisfactorily that a couple of years since elegant and substantial premises were erected at a cost of £2700. Members who have money invested in the building are allowed 5 per cent., and all shareholders receive a dividend which runs to about 2s 6d a-pound, and a bonus upon purchases averaging about £5 a-year. The society bakes its own bread, makes its own shoes, fashions its own clothes, and also retails groceries, draperies, and household furniture, turning over in this way a sum of about £24,000 annually.
The trade, both as to buying and selling, is conducted on ready-money principles, and the capital of the society at last quarterly balance amounted to £4663. As for the “Company” houses in the Lothians, they are of a middling description ; but the worst I have seen are greatly better than the nurseries of disease and death to be found in the West. Some of them are very old, and ought to be demolished as soon as possible ; yet even these are not to be compared for dirt and squalor with Jawcraigs, or “the Briggate” at Mossend, or "the Hole” at Easterhouse. The sin of which miners' wives here and elsewhere are guilty is that of throwing down ashes anywhere; and a knowledge of this, perhaps, makes managers indifferent about erecting ashpits where they do not exist. Otherwise, the people really make the best of things.
The custom which prevails in the Lothians of sanding lobbies and stone floors lends a certain air of cleanliness and almost of warmth to the houses, and a taste for art finds expression in the cheap engravings and highly-illuminated prints which decorate the walls of the sitting-rooms. Birds are great favourites ; in some houses as many as half-a-dozen cages hang all round. Flowers, too, are not neglected. Plants in pots grow inside some of the houses, and flower-plots in front, where they are provided, are not destitute of culture and design even at this season. These, perhaps, are not important details in themselves, but they give character to a district.
I may here notice, as another token of progress, that the miners in the Lothians have established an Accident, Superannuation, and Widows and Orphans' Fund. Members paying three-halfpence a-week are entitled, in case of accident, to 10s a-week for ten weeks, and afterwards 7s a-week until they are able to resume work. When superannuated, they receive 7s a-week till death; widows get 6s a-week; and fatherless children ls a-week till they are twelve years of age. This society has only been in existence for about three months. The weekly payment, which is the game for all members of whatever age above 17 years, has obviously been fixed at the lowest rate, but power is taken to increase it if this should be found necessary. Members below 17 years of age pay three-halfpence a-fortnight.
In the course of my two days' travelling, I was able to visit in Mid-Lothian, Cowdenfoot, Millerhill, Adam's Row, Newtongrange, Huntersfield, and Stobhill; and in East Lothian, Elphinstone, Macmirrie, and Penstone. I shall not go into minute detail regarding these villages, adverting only to their leading features, whether favourable or unfavourable, which may be done in one letter, At Cowdenfoot the houses, which were erected about thirty years ago, belong to the Duke of Buccleuch, and were free to the tenants till the strike last year, the rents now being 7s a-month. They are stone houses, having each a room and kitchen, a larder entered from the kitchen, and a water closet, ventilated from the roof, or by an opening in the back wall. Ample light is afforded by a double diamond-paned window in front, and a smaller one behind. The apartments are large, with stone or earth floors, and there is a kitchen garden behind all the houses, as well as flower plots in front of some of them. Cowdenfoot comprises somewhere about 40 dwellings, built in two widely-separated rows, with a considerable stretch of intervening grass.
Damp is complained of in some of the houses, but it does not exist to any serious extent. Ash pits are provided, although the villagers are too much in the habit of laying down refuse in the most convenient place. Cowdenfoot is supplied with excellent spring water, rising some three miles away, and filtered outside the village, and it has also a large schoolhouse. Millerhill, originally a mining village, is now largely peopled by the employees of the North British Railway Company. There are two rows of houses, all of them old, and some rather damp. On the whole, however, they are not bad houses.
Sir John Don Wauchope is the proprietor, and the rent for rooms and kitchens is 10d 2-week, and for single apartments 6d a-week. In one of the houses, tenanted by a miner, I noticed a sewing machine in the kitchen, and a small conservatory at the extremity of the kitchen garden behind. There are no ashpits in the village, and closets are only erected for one of the rows. The old Edinburgh custom is observed of laying down ashes, &c., in buckets in front of the door, from which they are carted away daily. In remote villages, otherwise apt to be neglected, this is a very excellent system, A plentiful supply of good spring water is got from two wells.
At Adam's Row, about a quarter of a mile from Millerhill, the houses are tenanted by miners in the employment of the Niddrie Coal Company. There are two rows of old houses, some of them uninhabited, and the remnant of an ancient square, which in its prolonged tussle with time has had greatly the worst of it, some of the houses being roofless, and others reduced to the foundations. No regular ashpit is erected, and the village is in a very dirty state, the roadway in front and the garden ground behind being alike untidy. There is not a closet in the place, but a deposit of bricks near the end of the long row is the forerunner, I am told, of such outhouses. For small room and kitchen houses the rent is 5s a-month, and for single apartments 3s 4d a-month. They are poor houses, but not positively unhealthy. Two wells give a never-failing supply of good spring water. Newtongrange is a large village near the residence of the Marquis of Lothian, who is the proprietor of it and also of Newbattle Colliery at a short distance. This is, I believe, the largest colliery in Mid or East Lothian, employing at least 500 men. Of this number, about a half live at Newtongrange, where there are a great many rows of houses built back to back, with a space of about twelve feet between them, on which coal-houses are erected. In front are long patches of garden ground.
The houses, for the most part dry and comfortable, are rooms and kitchens of various sizes, the rents varying from 3s to 5s 6d a-month, according to accommodation. There are no ashpits in the village, but two men are employed to keep things tidy, and they appear to do their work very thoroughly. Except in connection with what I may call the Cottage Row, closets are also entirely awanting. These cottage houses are of brick, and are simply a continuous line of one-storey erections, to which a couple of years since good attics were added. On the ground storey are a kitchen and sitting-room, both of good size, and in the attics, reached from the kitchen by a wooden staircase lighted from the roof, are two bed-rooms of similar dimensions. The floors on the ground are of stone, those above of wood, and there are two or three “presses” to each house. They are capital dwellings ; and the rent is only 8s a-month. In front are large kitchen gardens, and behind coal-houses and closets--the latter being kept locked. There is a good supply of water at Newtongrange, which is in all respects a well-ordered village.
At Huntersfield the houses belong to or are leased by the Arniston Colliery Company. This firm only acquired the pits in May last, and have nearly completed the erection of a brick row of room and kitchen houses at the entrance to the village.
Beyond this are two rows of old room and kitchen houses, and down the hill other rows of a similar description - my inquiries being confined to the two first mentioned. Some of them are rather below the level of the ground outside, and are generally damp, from which others well raised above the road are free. Several of the houses, too, are lighted only from the front. Ashes and other refuse are thrown into the highway before the doors, and taken away, not every day, but with tolerable regularity. There are very few closets in the village. Huntersfield is badly supplied with water. It is pumped up from the South Esk, which flows down in the hollow, and is delivered without filtration through iron pipes.
In summer youths bathe in the Esk, and in winter, during rainy weather, the water is sometimes so highly coloured that the people cannot use it, but get their wants supplied at Newbyres farm, about a quarter of a mile away. Some of them use rain water, I spoke to several of the colliers as to the appearance of the water during the wet season, and they said it sometimes resembled ale. I saw it at its best. It looked very well, but Nessler's test showed impurity.
Stobhill, which lies close to Huntersfield, also belongs to the Arniston Company. They are old, feeble houses, a number of them torn down, while some of those which are inhabited are complained of as being damp. The rents are ls a week for rooms and kitchens, and 6d for single apartments. Large ashpits are provided, but no closets. The water, which is taken from a draw well at the foot of a field, is of good quality, but the situation is such that in rainy weather it receives impurities flowing from the surface of the field, which slopes down to the well. It is built over so loosely at the back that a heavy fall of rain must add to it what should be excluded by its proper enclosure and the erection of a pump.
Elphinstone is a large village, which, like many of its neighbours, has seen better days. It belongs chiefly to Messrs Deans & Moore. Bellyford Row consists of good room and kitchen houses, at 5s a-month, with coalhouses and kail-yards behind. The floors are of brick, and they are quite dry, being well raised from the level outside. The houses in the other parts of the village are old, and many of them damp, room and kitchen houses being rented at 6s a-month. Good water is obtained from two wells in the village.
In summer it is occasionally scarce. The village of Macmirrie, also connected with the collieries of Messrs Deans & Moore, is remarkable as containing a row of the oldest houses I have seen in the Lothians. They are not peculiar in having red tile roofs, for that is the material commonly employed in the district, even where the houses are new, but they are exceptional as regards age and decrepitude. The floor is below the level of the road in front, which creates damp during rainy weather; the windows in front and back are small, and in most of the houses the slates overhead are only shut out from sight by stretches of paper, which are protected against the detached fragments of the roof dislodged during high winds by sacking being placed above.
The houses are all very much alike, rooms and kitchens being 6d a-week. A number of them are unoccupied, and those which are still let are as tidy as it is possible to make them. The company, I was told, intend to demolish them and erect others. They cannot do so too soon, On the other side of the road is a comparatively new row of good room and kitchen houses with high ceilings and stone floors. The rent is 9d a week. The erection of another row is almost completed, and the houses will soon be ready for occupancy. Good spring water is got from a draw-well, and is sufficient for the wants of the village both in winter and summer.
Penstone, also belonging to Messrs Deans & Moore, is to a large extent a repetition of Macmirrie, with the sweeping exception of the water, which is not satisfactory. They are old houses, imperfectly lighted, generally damp, and with such low ceilings that in going out by one of the back doors I knocked my head against the tiles, and I am not absurdly tall.
In one of the rooms the roof is supported by an upright and a cross beam, placed there by the tenants. There is plenty of garden land in connection with the houses, but no closets. Water for cooking purposes may be obtained from a draw well and two pumps, although practically the draw-well alone can be used, and that in a continuous way only during winter, for sometimes in summer it is said to be “like glaur.” Even in the cold months it does not serve the village, and about four months ago, at considerable expense on the part of the company, two pump wells were opened. This, however, proved to be one of those good intentions which are doomed to failure. I tested a sample of the water, which on the addition to it of Nessler's fluid became blueish in colour, and curdled like milk which has soured. The home supply of water being thus deficient, the people have to go for it to Henmoor or Ceety, both about a mile distant.
GRANGEMOUTH AND BO'NESS DISTRICTS.
FINDING myself at Grangemouth the other morning, I resolved to spend the day in visiting the various mining hamlets lying within a radius of five miles. We drove first to Skinflets, of the existence of which I had not before heard, and which, looked at from the road, gives promise of excellent things. The houses belong to the Grangemouth Coal Company, and, in virtue of a veneering of cement laid over brick, they present a neat, spruce exterior. Entering the first door in the row, however, we find that this cement has been added to the front, not at the bidding of taste, but by way of excluding the damp, which still searches out other local weaknesses, and proves rather troublesome.
It has only been applied to the back walls along about half of the row, and as the room beds are placed against these walls, many of them are exceedingly unhealthy. The kitchens are very small, with one bed, while the rooms are of good size, and furnished with two beds. There is a window at both sides of the buildings, the back one of the diminutive order so common even in some of the most recent erections I have seen. The walls are thin, but the ceilings are high, and although the floors are of stone they are not damp. There are rooms and kitchens and single apartments in the row, the rents being 5s and 3s a month respectively. The sanitary arrangements at Skinflets are defective. A couple of ashpits and closets, although like the houses comparatively new, are dismantled and dirty, and the back ground is of course untidy.
The company, however, appear to wish to keep the village in repair, and at the time of my visit men were employed constructing front drains and mending the roofs. There are no coal cellars or wash-houses. Farther along the road is an older row of stone houses belonging to the same company, having larger kitchens and smaller rooms.
These seem to be less affected with damp than the others, although they are greatly complained of in this respect. No ashpits or closets are attached to this row. The water for the village comes from a pit, and is led into a cistern, and well filtered. It is very good water. A notable characteristic of Skinflets is that the matrons count their blessings by the dozen. In one house of two apartments thirteen of a family crowd together, ten of them sleeping in one room.
“They're au’ risin' families here, ma freen,” said one of the women, to whom I had delicately expressed my surprise on the point, “but ye ken it's yin o' the commandments that we should multiply and replenish the earth." Skinflets is, on the whole, a much nicer place than Carronshore, to which I afterwards proceeded. This is a large village, with a population of about 1500-a number of the houses belonging to shopkeepers in the neighbourhood, while others are leased by the Carron Company from Colonel Dundas.
Responsibility is thus doubtful and divided, but the fact remains that Carronshore is one of the worst regulated villages I have seen. Dock Street, to which my inquiries were first directed, is in a filthy, neglected state, a badly-constructed drain in front of the houses being filled with stagnant water, and an old ashpit heaped up and smelling. The only recognised ashpit and closet for the street are set down at the end of it and within twelve feet of the door of a dwelling-house, close to which again is a smaller accumulation of refuse.
The houses in Dock Street are two storeys in height. I looked into two or three of them on the ground floor, and found them to be ill-lighted and damp and out of repair, and a couple of feet or so below the level at the back, which is undrained. The other houses in the village, I informed, belong to the Carron Company. Leaving Dock Street we get into what is called “the close," consisting of two short rows of one-storey houses, exhibiting no improvement upon the others either internally or externally. They are old tenements, low in the ceiling, with earthen floors which, in some cases, are never dry. In a room with a lighted fire, damp appears at the side of the mantelpiece. One of the women tells me she fished out a couple of snails from under the kitchen bed one day. Elsewhere in Carronshore, as I afterwards ascertained, these slimy creatures are not unknown.
Open drains in front of the houses carry the sewage to what appear to be the foundations of extinct ashpits at the end of one of the rows, where lie ponds of stagnant impurity, and beyond them is a dirty closet. The Bothy Row, forming a continuation of Dock Street, consists of a series of very good houses, in comparison with those we have just left. Single apartments, with stone floors, are let for 10d a week, and rooms and kitchens at 1s a week. There are wash-houses and coal cellars behind, but no closets.
The "Wee Row," farther along and on the other side of the road, comprises half a dozen houses, fully two feet below the level of the road in front. In the first house, an elderly man tells me he has lived for fully twelve months, and during that time it has been twice flooded to the depth of two or three inches. During rainy weather, the floor is always more or less damp. The tenant next door also complains of damp with great apparent reason, and points to a hole in front of the wooden mantelpiece at the kitchen fire, into which she pours boiling water to kill the “clocks.”
The other houses are not so bad, being slightly raised at the entrance. Single apartments are 8d a week, and rooms and kitchens 2s a week. Scarlet fever was very prevalent amongst children in Carronshore, and a good many deaths occurred, but there have been no cases, so far as I could learn, during the last two or three months. Langdyke, one of the company's villages which we next reach, is in a transition state. The hamlet, in its primitive arrangement, only musters seven small houses, two of them rooms and kitchens, and the others single apartments. The floors are earthen and very damp, and in rainy weather water drops from the open timber ceilings, except in two of the houses, where lath and plaster afford the necessary protection, One of these uncomfortable single apartments gives shelter to a family of 7 persons. The ancient tenements are, however, about to be eclipsed by a group of new brick erections not yet finished, whose number, I believe, is to be largely extended. It can scarcely be said the old houses are yet put out of countenance by two or three nondescripts which are already partly occupied, and consist of the outhouses belonging to a deserted farm-steading patched up and converted into dwelling-houses. The old thrashing-mill, for example, a sexagonal building with pointed roof, round which the patient gin-horse used wearily to pace, has been built up, and forms a series of single apartments which are everything as to length and nothing as to breadth.
It would hardly be unfair to describe them as respectable crevices, which smoke badly. For these, as for the single apartments in the old row, the rent is 8d a-week. Westmains, a village also belonging to the Carron Co., and erected close to one of their pits, has rather a pleasing exterior, but is really “a goodly apple rotten at the core." The houses are rooms and kitchens, the former very narrow and small, and have roomy porches which serve as stores and wash-houses. In many of the houses the back of the beds is extremely damp, and the walls are twisted and rent in consequence of the underground workings. There are three ashpits and closets in the row, but they are not attended to, and the kitchen gardens in front receive most of the refuse of the houses. The drains also are ill kept. Water is got from a pump near the houses, and under the Nessler test became quite thick.
The houses at Kinnaird village, at short distance from Westmains, are leased by the Carron Company. They are old houses, many of them very damp on the floors and walls, and others more comfortable than the newer tenements at Westmains. Single apartments are rented at 7d and 8d a week, and rooms and kitchens for ls 2d a week. Coal-houses are provided, but no closets or proper ashpits. Here, as at all the Carron villages I visited, sanitary matters receive no consideration, and a good deal of overcrowding exists. In a kitchen about 8 feet broad with one bed, and a rather larger bed-room, 11 people are housed ; and I was told of two single apartments which each hold 9 persons. I came across a woman in Kinnaird who is 62 years of age, and has been in bed for 43 years. She worked in the pit, and met with an accident by which her back was broken, and she has ever since been an invalid. Still a comely, healthy woman, her early youth must have been full of gladness and promise. As it is, life is not without its sweetness. She is a cheerful, intelligent, Christian woman — very poor, but also, I believe, very happy.
Her only support is derived from an elder sister, a mute. My day's work in this quarter was brought to a close by a run to Quarrel, a row of fifteen houses belonging to Colonel Dundas, The ceilings are low, and the windows small, but they are not such uncomfortable houses as they appear from the outside, just as many externally more attractive prove to be really very inferior dwellings. Coal cellars, ashpits, and closets are all conspicuously absent, refuse remaining on the ground until the gardens are delved.
The water used runs through drain tile into a trough, which, being under the level of the field, receives surface impurities in rainy weather. The sample which I got stood the Nessler test without blushing. In summer, however, the people require to help themselves from a burn which passes behind Stenhousemuir, and is polluted in its course to Quarrel. It was described as being very nasty water.
From Grangemouth to Bo'ness is five miles by road, and in point of time fifty by railway. I chose the latter mode of travelling in the evening, and didn't like it. We had to change at Polmont and wait a little; to get out at Manuel and shiver in the frosty night for a very long time, and even when we did find a train, the road so rough that it seemed as if we should all be shaken to pieces.
Bo'ness is not an interesting town after dark. It has just two main streets, which are tolerably lighted ; all beyond is unfathomable darkness.
These streets together form a kind of circle, and the stranger wishing an airing who makes the round half-a-dozen times begins to feel as if he were in the Zoological Gardens and had got on the wrong side of the bars.
In the morning I walked out to the mining village of Kinneil, in connection with the company's works there. It consists of a long row on the main road, with garden ground behind half the number of houses, and a short row built on sloping ground, beyond which is the Forth, lying this morning under a haze so dense as completely to obscure the Fife shore opposite. Taking the long row, I find that it illustrates, more strikingly than I have observed elsewhere, the possibilities of miners' houses — that is to say, the possibility of dwellings being made tolerably good or very bad, according to the habits and inclination of the tenants.
There single apartments with two very small bed closets and rooms and kitchens of good size, and while some of them are bright and clean, others which are kept by very poor, or aged, or lazy people-and all three classes are represented at Kinneil-are precisely the reverse. A good deal of damp appears in several of the rooms, and smoke is loudly declaimed against. The houses are entered through an outer and an inner door, and another at the back provides cross ventilation.
In the Low Row the houses are almost all untidy, and really the people have not much encouragement to be cleanly in their habits. In front of the doors lies a great sheet of water, which comes from one of the pits. When the Forth is at full tide, this pit water is retained, and only flows out with the ebb. Between the two rows ashes and filth of all kinds lie in heaps, ashpits and closets not being provided. As for water, Kinneil is ill supplied in winter, and in the coming summer matters will reach a crisis.
Just now the people use what is called "the Black Box" water, got up the opposite hill, which being mixed with Nessler's solution became thick and curdled. A more favourite source is a pond on ground belonging to a neighbouring distillery, but this water on being tested presented the same appearance. In summer, I understand, these sources are not available.
Formerly, the people got good water in the hot season from the distillery, but a new proprietor last year prevented them from taking it, and when they stole it he caused it to be led into a barrel, to which a padlock is attached. however, was not done until the season was well advanced, so that the pinch of the dog days remains to be felt when this bitter spring has passed away. On making inquiry as to their hopes, I learnt that they were not of the brightest. There is the Gilburn, where water is got from some holes at the bottom of a brae nine or ten feet high, and into which, even if it were good to start with, surface impurities are carried by rain.
Then there is the "big hoose" at Kinneil, near which is a well that they are sometimes allowed to help themselves from; and lastly, there is the "store spout," which I tested, and which is water of the vilest quality.
One or two of the neighbours tell me they are glad to make tea with the store spout water in summer, but others say they never use it for cooking, and, on the whole, I am inclined to think that it is not taken for other than washing purposes. It is abundantly clear, however, that Kinneil is very ill provided with water.
I have written the above in a country hotel on the Fife shore while the instrumental band of the village were practising in a hall adjoining my room. I mention the circumstance as explaining, if it does not justify, any savagery of expression which may be detected in my narrative. The full orchestra was preceded early in the evening by the man who plays the trombone and another who fancies the cornopean, and they relieved the tedium of waiting for their accomplices by practising, the one his "scales" and the other the "Flowers of the Forest"-scales and flowers being alike detestable. I sent a message, which, in a politely vague way, imported that their performance was greatly desired on Ben Nevis, and they returned for answer that the big drum would soon arrive, and then I wouldn't hear them. The big drum came, but I still heard them, and much besides.
FIFE AND CLACKMANNAN DISTRICTS.
A good reputation, if it be undeserved, is a troublesome possession, especially when people begin to find out the truth. I went to Fife and Clackmannan with high expectations as to the character of the mining villages, and I have returned to say that they are no great things after all.
Perhaps I am disposed to judge them severely, just as one is apt to be rather hard upon a fellow who, having long passed for "a very superior person," turns out to be no better than his neighbours, if half so good. They were represented to me - some at least of these mining settlements - as so many Happy Valleys, in which life had no more envious strife than that of growing competitive flowers, and
where miners sat under vines and fig trees, their own property and of their own planting, breathing an atmosphere of contentment and high moral purity. This is much too serene a picture.
There are, it is true, several instances of colliers living in houses of their own at Townhill, near Dunfermline; and I am told that Mr. Stevenson, the proprietor of the neighbouring pits, takes great interest in the social well-being of his people, yet the old rows in the village over which he presides almost equal, in disrepair and discomfort, any to be found in the district.
In simple truth, Fife and Clackmannan are no way superior, in so far as miners' houses are concerned, to any of the other counties which I have visited. They present a lower average than Ayrshire, and come a long way behind the Lothians, where some of the mining villages are the finest I have seen.
As compared with Lanarkshire, Fife and Clackmannan reach neither to its lowest depths nor to its very few heights of excellence. I found nothing beyond the Forth equal to Auchinstarry houses and their surroundings, or even to those recently erected by Mr. Addie at Rosehall; and on the other hand, although disease is prevalent in one of the villages in Fife, I did not find any place so terribly squalid and filthy as two or three of the fever dens in the West.
The houses in the mining hamlets near Dunfermline are both very old and comparatively new, regarding which the general remark may be made that the proprietors do a great deal for the old rows, and comparatively little for those of modern date. Nobody will be disposed to quarrel with them for mending decayed floors and making crazy roofs watertight, but it is hardly creditable that they should so entirely neglect sanitation in the newer villages. These look wonderfully well from the outside, but they will not bear close examination. At King's Seat, a large and rapidly-extending community near Dunfermline, as at Burnfoot Hill, near Dalmellington, there is not, so far as I could learn, a single ashpit or closet provided for the company houses. This may not create much mischief in winter, but one can scarcely realise the consequences if an epidemic should break out in summer, with the very essence of contagion lying all round.
In the Lothians, as I indicated in a former letter, miners' houses used to be free to the servants of the company, and in Fifeshire this was also the rule until quite recently. Now, however, fortnightly payments are exacted, which, in the case of the proprietor of Wellwood, are said to have increased his yearly revenues to the extent of about a thousand pounds.
All over the district I learned that the rents, which were merely nominal before, have been increased, or "heighted," as the women term it, and there is a good deal of grumbling in consequence. In Clackmannan district, again, the free holdings are continued, but the men complain that indirectly they require to pay enormously high rents. It is the custom, they say, to give the employers 25 cwts. of coal to the ton, instead of 20 cwts., the extra five being rendered in name of house rent. If we take 30 tons of coal per month as being the average product of a miner, and allow him 1 1/4d for every hundredweight, it appears that he pays 15s 7 1/2d for houses which are dear at 8s a-month; and if a father and three sons, living under one roof, are in the same company's service, the payment is four times as great. The miners certainly contend that this must be regarded as house rent, and deplore the continuance of such a system; but as I afterwards ascertained that in Fife, where houses are not now free, the men give, in some instances, 24 cwts. to the ton, it would appear to be simply the usage of the trade, irrespective of occupancy.
With reference to the internal condition of the houses in both districts, they are better kept than similar dwellings in the West. One reason for this, probably, is that Fifeshire miners are a settled, untravelling brotherhood, who cling to the scenes of their youth, entertaining towards them a warmer feeling than is possessed by the shifting classes nearer Glasgow, who have no such home ties. Perhaps, also, we may seek for a partial explanation in the fact that very few Irish families are located in Fife or Clackmannan. Be this as it may, I can only say that in Fifeshire I visited miners' dwellings consisting of single apartments and two rooms which were as cozy and bright and well furnished as any one could desire.
These were not model cottages either, but very old houses which had been put into such repair as encouraged the housewives to be orderly and neat. In some of the villages there is a good deal of overcrowding, which does not arise from keeping lodgers, but from the largeness of the families.
Miners as a rule seem to marry very early, and are as much averse to the family name dying out as the owners of broad acres, who trace their descent from kings and nobles. All over Scotland the tenure of occupancy appears to be the same. The miner is only entitled to remain in the house while he continues in the service of the company. For this reason many of them prefer to live in large towns, where these exist in the neighbourhood of the pits, and, as far as I have been able to gather, they pay higher rents than those which are charged for company houses. I should like also to make a remark, before proceeding to transcribe my notes, with reference to the demeanour of the people amongst whom I have spent a good many days during the last three or four weeks.
It is generally said that miners and their wives are offensively coarse, and I was told to expect much incivility in the course of my inquiries. This, however, I have not experienced. There are, of course, many rakish-looking characters amongst them, but I have always got civility, even from the least refined, and frank, smiling courtesy from by far the larger number.
Within a short distance of the quiet old town of Clackmannan are two or three mining villages belonging to the Clackmannan Colliery Company, Messrs A. & A. Mitchell. The nearest is "The Pottery," which stands just outside the municipal boundary, as if too modest to seek inclusion within the county town. It is a biggish village, with several rows of old houses built on ground which falls away to the Devon. The first is the best row of the number, the houses being rooms and kitchens of large size, with brick floors in the kitchens and high ceilings. They are dry, comfortable houses. The second row, running at right angles from the first, compares unfavourably with it, the houses being older, and not in such good repair, while a third range of buildings is of a decidedly objectionable character.
I had gone into two or three houses on a level with the road, supposing them to be all that the block contained, when I was told that on the other side there was a lower level, and houses underneath. These are extremely unhealthy houses, lighted only from the front, and damp on the floors and along the wall. As the wall is backed by the solid earth, it is hardly possible that it should ever be dry. The tenants complain loudly of the unhealthiness of their houses, and one cannot accuse them of exaggerating evils which are as real as they are apparent. Kitchen gardens are attached to some of the houses, but there are no conveniences of any kind -neither ashpits, closets, wash-houses nor coal cellars. All refuse is laid down in the gardens, or in the most easily-reached corner.
No rent is paid for these houses, although as I have said the miners consider the indirect payments heavy enough. Last year, when the big strike took place, the colliers remained out for eight or nine weeks; and when they resumed work, rents were charged for the "stand" period, varying from 6s for single apartments to £1 for a large room and kitchen. The water supply of the village is got from various irregular sources. Field water is generally used, and when it is not procurable the Devon is laid under contribution.
Now, the sewage of Clackmannan runs into the Devon, from which the water supply for the town is also taken. One of the town drains empties itself at the Pottery, and the people go beyond that point, but the water which they get is contaminated by another drain farther up still. Clackmannan supply is taken out beyond the reach of the sewage. I used Nessler's solution in testing the surface water, which gave evidence of impurity. Leaving the Pottery, I proceeded next to Westfield, where there are three rows -the Long Row, the Middle Row, and the Low Row, consisting of between thirty and forty in all. Taking them in this order, we go into the first house in the Long Row, a room and kitchen. Fires are lighted in both apartments, and on the hearthstone of the room the woman of the house has placed two trunks with the lids thrown open in order to dry the clothes which they contain.
This she requires to do every other day, and the contents of the boxes are often quite moist. The room beds are placed against the back walls, and as the ground outside is above the level of the floor it is not surprising that the sleeping places are damp. In the next house the kitchen is very damp, and the room is altogether deserted. The neighbours have pretty much the same story to tell, and at the end of the row several of the tenements are unoccupied.
The middle row houses are a shade better than those we have left. They are on a better level, and therefore less liable to damp. The low row is, however, the worst of the three, the houses being all unhealthy during wet weather, and more or less so even when the sky is bright. In one of them the tenant finds it necessary to remove her room furniture to prevent it from being destroyed, and in another a piece of sacking laid in front of the room fire is quite black with damp. Here there are no fewer than ten persons living in a small room and kitchen. There is no regular water supply for the village, but Mr. Allan, a neighbouring farmer, kindly allows the people to help themselves from his well. In summer this permission is often necessarily withdrawn, and then the villagers go to Wellmyre, fully half a mile away, where good spring water is obtained.
Watermill is a small place with three old houses, giving indifferent shelter to as many families. One of these comprises eight persons, who sleep in a small kitchen and a bed-closet entering from it. There is a room to the house, but the ceiling is so much broken that it is impossible to sleep in it, and the children are laid on "shake-downs" on the kitchen floor. This house is two feet below the level at the back. In these hamlets no attention whatever is paid to sanitary matters. There is absolutely nothing beyond the four walls of the house, except piggeries, and of course dirt reigns supreme.
Returning to Clackmannan, I made my way next to "the Green," where there are three old houses connected with the Clackmannan Company which are, I believe, to be taken down at the next term. The sanitary arrangements here are of precisely the same negative description as elsewhere. The houses are below the level at the back, and very damp -so much so, that in one of the kitchens the careful housewife has lifted her chairs from the stone floor and placed them in the bed, lest their limbs should be seized with the dropsy of the district. Near the Green is "the Square," consisting of two parallel rows with an end row, and comprising in all about twenty new houses, not yet finished.
These are built on the site of an old square of dilapidated houses, some of the walls of which have been utilised in the construction of the new buildings, which promise to afford good accommodation, although the apartments are small. There are large windows on both sides, providing for through currents of air, and ventilators are placed below the floors, which are well raised from the ground. So far there is no appearance of any outhouses.
Returning to Clackmannan, I looked in at one house in Castle Street belonging to the company. The kitchen wall was wet all round, and the ceiling also was spotted with damp, while the room was little better. In the afternoon I went on to Dunfermline, where two days were spent in visiting the villages of Wellwood, Milesmark, Parkneuk, Townhill, Kingseat, Halbeath, Crossgates, Fordell, Donnibristle, Cowdenbeath, Lumphinans, and Lochgelly. The story of my experiences in "the kingdom" must be reserved for another letter.
Dunfermline has a proud history. Its venerable abbey and royal ruins might form a tempting theme for one whose commission, more elastic than my own, permitted him to go back to the days of the Bruce. Thirty or forty years, however, are all that my historic tether may include, and even this finger-length of time I can only deal with in a sentence.
Within that comparatively brief period Fifeshire has undergone a remarkable transformation by the development of railways, and the opening up of coal pits. Bleak moorlands of that early time are now populous mining villages, to which extensions are almost continually being made, and the modest hamlets of forty years ago have assumed all the bustle and importance of modern burghs, with ale-houses, and churches, and police stations.
In my last letter, I enumerated the villages which I had overtaken during two days' driving in Fifeshire, and I now proceed to refer to them in the order then indicated, this happening also to be the order in which they were visited.
It is perhaps necessary to say that Baldridge Row, to which I first proceeded, is not set down in my list of places. Baldridge Row is connected with Wellwood Colliery, but I rather think it enjoys no other local patronage or alliance. It is within 20 minutes' walk of Dunfermline Cross, but nobody cares to confess that it belongs to Dunfermline. It is indeed a most unsavoury place, and is only saved from discreditable rivalry with some other rows I have seen by the proprietor bestowing a little more care upon the houses, which must be somewhere about a hundred years old.
A trench has been formed behind the row, which keeps the interior a trifle drier than it would otherwise be, and ashes laid in front, terminating in a tile drain, serve to make the doors tidier than one might expect to find them. The interior of some of the houses, however, is enough to make the boldest hold his breath for a time, the people themselves being more to blame for this than the landlord, although he is not altogether guiltless.
Baldridge Row, to state the case frankly, is one of many similar places which should be improved off the face of the earth. In the first house we are introduced to an old woman of fourscore, living in a single apartment which is low in the damp-stained ceiling, badly lighted, and altogether miserable. In her young days she worked in the pit, and is now permitted to sit rent free. Similar places farther along the row bring a rent of 8d a-week, and two apartments 4s 6d a-month. In the second house, the rain finds its way through the roof above one of the beds, and on a recent wet Saturday the tenant removed her bedding, the "tick" and the sheet being both wet.
In other houses along the row, damp appears on the wall at the back of the beds and discolours the ceiling and blackens the floor. They are very untidy and ill-furnished dwellings; one of the rooms which I went into smelt so abominably that I was glad to beat a hasty retreat. Just think of twelve people sleeping in a room and kitchen such as I have indicated, and furnished with three beds. No wonder we hear of a case of intermittent fever having occurred in one of the houses a few weeks ago; the marvel is that the row is just now free from any serious disease. Outside the houses there are no conveniences of any kind. The Dunfermline water supply is available at Baldridge Row.
Milesmark at a short distance, affords a pleasing contrast to the hamlet we have just left. It consists of the School Row, the Cottage Row, and the Castle, which are also furnished with Dunfermline water. In the School Row there are seven, and in the Cottage Row six houses. They are uniform in style and internal arrangement-large rooms and kitchens, with lofty ceilings, lumpy stone floors, and ample window space on both sides. The rent for such houses is 7s 8d a-month. They are very well furnished, several of the rooms having tester beds with damask curtains, engravings on the walls, and on the tables family Bibles and other books, showing that the people do not belong to the lower class of miners.
I refer to these things more particularly because there are many complaints of damp on the walls and floors proving injurious to the furniture. The lighting of the houses has been recently made better by cutting away the eaves, but as no rhones have been put up on the roof, the rain streams down the outer walls and occasions the damp of which we hear so much. Coal cellars are attached to these rows, but no other kind of outhouses.
The Castle is a two storeyed building, tenanted by a humbler class. At one end of the block, containing some two and twenty houses, is an old ruin which has been made a depository for refuse, and proves a nuisance to the neighbouring tenants. An ashpit has been set down at the opposite end of the houses, from which it is well removed, and its contents are regularly removed. The two flats of the Castle are both reached from the front entrance, two houses on the ground floor being entered at the foot of an inner staircase leading to the upper storey, where there are other two tenants. Single apartments with small bed closets are rented at 5s a-month. In one of these lives a family of ten, including three grown up daughters, who are employed at a factory in Dunfermline.
Parkneuk, another mining village, consists of three rows of one-storey houses. Mrs. Greer, who owns a colliery near at hand, is the proprietress of one of the rows. These are very damp houses, but as the tenants are not called upon to pay rent, they cannot with any grace insist upon repairs being executed. There is no drain at the back of the houses, and both the walls and the earthen floor are extremely moist, a pair of boots which were brought from under the drawers in one of the rooms being white with mould. Only one of the houses has a back window. In the second row, forming a continuation of Mrs. Greer's, there are 17 houses belonging to the Wellwood Colliery, in much the same condition as those already noticed. The rents, which were laid on for the first time at the beginning of the year, are 7s a-month for rooms and kitchens. Only one ashpit, with two or three closets attached, are provided for the row, and these are not very well kept. A third row originally consisted of stables, which were converted four years ago into dwelling-houses. They are quite as comfortable as the others, although that is not saying much.
The village of Wellwood, which we next reach, is larger than any we have so far visited in Fife. Taking first a row of stone houses, only occupied during the last three months, we find that they are large rooms and kitchens with wooden floors in both apartments. They were well raised from the ground, and appear to be excellent houses. There are no ashpits for the row. Engine Row, which stands opposite, is of quite a different description. The houses are very old, and 5s 8d a-month is charged for two apartments, rents having been exacted for the first time a few weeks ago. The proprietor is endeavouring to repair them, now that the free list is suspended, but little progress has yet been made, and in the meantime his tenantry are in unveiled rebellion. There is a great deal of damp in the Engine Row. "What is your room floor like ?" I said to an elderly woman who was detailing her grievances. "Deil a floor I hae," she said; "it's naething but earth, and I hae cloots laid doon and every dagon't thing to keep it dry."
I saw the floor, and "every dagon't thing" seemed to be little better than nothing for her purpose. Single apartments in Engine Row are rented at 4s a-month. The road in front of the houses was simply a mud hole on the day of my visit. "Palace Row," another of the glories of Wellwood, has been so called, I presume, because it is the very antipodes of what the name suggests. The houses entering from the main street are good enough, but those on the lower level at the other side are dark, dirty places, and, as may be inferred from their situation, very damp. For two apartments, a rent of 5s a-month is charged. In the "Store Row" I went into some houses of peculiarly narrow construction, one of them having only a space of a foot and a half between a small trunk in front of the room bed and the opposite wall.
Six of a family reside here, the rent being 3s 4d a month. A woman living in this row told me that going from home on one occasion from Friday till Monday, she found on her return that water had lodged in her house to the depth of several inches, to the detriment of an eight day clock, which she holds in great regard. "The North Square" consists of 23 very good room and kitchen houses, the rent, only recently imposed, being 7s 4d a-month.
The pits at Townhill are worked by Mr. Stevenson, the lands belonging to the town of Dunfermline. Townhill is a large village, and I believe the morale of the place has been greatly improved under Mr. Stevenson's rule. That, however, does not come within the scope of my inquiry. So far as its houses are concerned, Townhill does not stand very high. There are a number of excellent rows in the village, and quite as many of which it is impossible to speak in terms of approval. Take the Back Row, which first invites our attention as we enter the village. The houses are old and decidedly inferior, with stone floors and damp beds and walls - single apartments being rented at 3s a-month.
One of the women told me she had not been a month in Townhill when she found that one of her mattresses was rotten with damp. At the end of this row, which seems to be the worst in the village, are a few houses erected about three years ago, yet even these are not of a high class. The tenants have only the four walls in which to stow away their belongings, "presses" being apparently regarded as modern superfluities.
Ashes and all refuse are laid in front of the doors, but as they are regularly taken away there is little ground for complaint on this score. In the centre of Townhill we come upon five houses, the property of the miners who occupy them. There may be more of this class, but if so, I was unable to discover them. They are good room and kitchen houses, two of stone, and the others of brick, and are finished in a superior style. One of the brick houses was built by Mr. Stevenson, and purchased from him about six months ago for £150.
It was the wife of the proprietor with whom I spoke on the subject, and she was not sure of the exact sum paid. This cost is inclusive of about fifty yards of garden ground at the back. In "Loch Row," the houses are above the level of the roadway, notwithstanding which some of them are not quite free from damp, and the tenants say they are "sair bothered wi' reek." In front are a capital pavement and drain. The people give Mr. Stevenson credit for keeping the roads tidy, but I saw at least one huge ashpit, overflowing with filth, set down within a dozen feet or so from the back windows of dwelling-houses.
The most conspicuous rows in Townhill are three, painted outside in vermilion, and belonging to the Muircockhall Coal Company. Although the exterior is rather garish, these are amongst the best houses in Townhill. They are single apartments and rooms and kitchens, the rent for the double ends being 8s 6d a month. Attached to each of the rows are ashpits, and closets, and coal cellars.
Kingseat is connected with the Halbeath Coal Company Messrs Wallace & Henderson. It is a large village which has sprung into existence within the last few years. The houses on the line of the main road are owned by private proprietors, but all the others, I was informed, belong to the company. I only went into two or three, as they are all built on the same principle and are apparently very good dwellings, although liable to the objection that they are destitute of all needed conveniences. There are no ashpits or closets over the village, as far as I could learn - certainly there are none connected with the row which I visited; and the back ground is very nasty. Good rooms and kitchens here are rented at 6s 8d a month.
The water for the village is got from a field near at hand. It is surface water, and becomes dirty in rainy weather. In summer it is frequently necessary to get a supply from the Chance, which lies away down hill in the direction of Halbeath. To get there implies a walk of twenty minutes, and as the return journey, with brimming vessels, is made up a steep brae, the procuring of water in the hot season becomes a matter of considerable difficulty. Halbeath, belonging to the Coal Company of that name, is a scrambling village, chiefly built on a hill-side. It is continued down in the valley, and on the opposite slope claims recognition with a few straggling tenements.
Rows and small groups of houses, planted here and there, have grown up on the brae face in contempt of all notions of symmetry or perspective, and if it were not that some of them are half-buried at the back, they might be expected some fine morning to tumble down hill altogether. The first one I went into was an isolated hut, occupied rent free by an elderly woman who worked in the pit in her youth, and who says she is afraid that the wind will blow it about her ears before long. The best way to deal with the houses at Halbeath would doubtless be to pull them down from roof to basement, but in the meantime, it must be admitted that the company are doing what they can to make them decently habitable, and show how much might be done in such places as the Dandy Row and the Red Toon to improve the dwellings of the poor.
Wooden floors have been put into some of the frailest, and in other respects the houses have been greatly altered for the better. There is still much damp in many of them, and this will continue to be the case until a thorough system of drainage is carried out.
One of the old houses down in the hollow is occupied by a young couple whose honeymoon is presumably scarcely over, since the cradle is not yet a necessary article of furniture. It is one of the brightest, freshest homes I have seen in a mining village, and this although everything is against it. There is no back window to the single apartment, which is thus dark as well as damp. The husband has been off work since before the new year with an affection of the chest, and in consequence of the damp the young folks are obliged to sleep with some relatives in the village. On the day of my visit, his wife was mending his "pit breeks" in the hope that he might be able to go below ground on the morrow.
Crossgates is a large village of old houses tenanted by miners in the employment of the Halbeath, Fordell, and Netherbeath coal companies, and is situated in the parishes of Dunfermline and Dalgetty. This division of responsibility has an unfortunate effect, each proprietor and parish leaving it to the other to inaugurate much-needed improvements.
The houses, so far as I saw them, and I was in a good many, are low in the ceiling, badly lighted, and have damp, earthen floors, scooped out into what may almost be called mud holes. Coals are kept below the bed, ashes thrown where they must be offensive, and open drains within a foot of the doors in one of the rows lie choked up and smelling.
Fordell, which is next reached, was represented to me as being a model village, belonging to Mr. Henderson, of the Fordell Company. Simple candour, however, compels me to say that it is nothing of the kind. It is true that there is one very fine row of houses which we reach through long kitchen gardens and neatly arranged flower-plots. These are rooms and kitchens, entered from opposite sides of a passage, which is ventilated by doors in front and rear. They are large and well finished houses, the rent being 6s 8d a month.
Mr. Henderson, I am told, stimulates a love for flowers by offering prizes in summer for the best kept gardens, and I have no doubt the result of the competition thus created is abundance of colour and fragrance; but as there are no outhouses of any kind, the chances are that the odours in warm weather will be unpleasantly mingled. Right opposite this row is an old range leased by Mr. Henderson from the Carron Company.
The first house we enter is tenanted by a young man who is confined to bed, his leg having been broken in the pit. It is "house and a-half," as it is called, or a kitchen with stone floor and damp walls, and a room barely seven feet broad, for which 6s a-month is paid. Single apartments along the row are 5s a-month. They are all well kept, but very damp. Elsewhere is "the Square," in which the houses are quite as bad as any we have seen. Scarlet fever has entered one family.
Donnibristle, belonging to the Donnibristle Coal Company, consists of three old rows and one new row. In the first house which I entered in the first row, I found three children in bed, recovering from scarlet fever. This disease has been specially rife in the opposite row of new houses, three children having died since the beginning of the year, and others were down with fever on the day of my visit. No grown-up people have been seized, the eldest victim being a boy of nine years, who died.
The houses in this new row are all good rooms and kitchens, rented at 7s 8d a month. In one of them ten of a family live-father, and mother, three grown-up sons, four daughters, and a boy. The ground at the back is untidy, the only out-houses being pig-styes and hen-coops. Moss Road, near Cowdenbeath, is built on a moss, which extends for miles around. The houses are comparatively new, rooms and kitchens being 7s 8d a month. Outside are coal-cellars for each tenant, and ashpits and closets, the cleanliness of which is daily looked after by an old man.
The water for Moss Road comes from a going pit, led into pump wells placed near the ashpits and closets. One sample which I tested showed slight impurity. The people complain bitterly about the water, and have a fixed belief, in which I do not share, that it is polluted by the neighbouring ashpits. Somehow they got hold of the notion that I was making official inquiry into the quality of the water, and the women swarmed out of the houses "as bees fizz oot wi' angry fyke," and kept up a deafening clamour of entreaty and reproach.
One of the pumps, which they said held the foulest water in the village, was out of repair, and the iron top was whipped off in a trice and a tumblerful of the contents of the basin taken out. The basin, I observed, is built round with bricks, and the water taken out proved to be less objectionable than the sample previously tested. As I have said, I do not think the water is contaminated by the ashpits, but at the best it is not good.
Cowdenbeath is so large that I cannot pretend minutely to describe the houses, which chiefly belong to the Cowdenbeath and Lochgelly Companies. A number of them are old, and the sanitary arrangements of the defective character which is generally applicable to all the Fife villages I have visited. There are also several brick rows of modern date, and a range of two-storey stone buildings, as yet only partially occupied, belonging to the Cowdenbeath Company, which, for internal convenience and the completeness of the arrangements outside, are far and away the best in the whole country side. On the ground floor, entered from the common highway, the rooms and kitchens (rented at 9s 4d a-month) are still damp in the walls, but otherwise they are all that could be desired. The walls, as I observed from tenements in the block still in course of erection, are not lathed, and there is thus the danger of a tendency to permanent dampness.
The upper floor is reached by an outside stair at the back, the houses, which are of one and two rooms and kitchens, being quite as roomy as those below. Coal cellars are provided for each tenant, washhouses for every four families, and closets in sufficient number. These are grouped together in one outside building, ventilated from the roof. The village of Lumphinans belongs to the colliery of that name, and consists of continuous rows of houses, partly of brick and partly of stone, many of which are damp in the back wall, the ground behind being undrained. Piggeries are the only out-houses. Refuse is laid down on the main road and removed every week. The water supply is objectionable. In winter it is got from a field, and in summer it is carried from Cowdenbeath or taken out of any hole where it is to be found.
I examined the source of the winter supply, and found that the water issues from a field into a burn on a lower level, into which, during rainy weather, a good deal of surface impurity must be carried down the sloping sides. Lochgelly, the last place which I visited in Fife, is a large town with a mixed population. Walking through it, we come on the outskirts to a mining settlement in connection with the Lochgelly Company, and consisting of new brick rows and old stone houses, either owned or leased by the company. The former are rooms and kitchens, with wash-houses and other conveniences. They are very good houses, and being well raised from the ground, promise to be dry and comfortable when they have been occupied for some time. The old stone houses are much complained of as regards damp, and would be greatly the better for immediate repair. Water is got from a general pump, but is scarce during dry summers. There are a number of private wells in the village, and I was told that two summers ago the miners' wives had to pay for every "rake” they got.
FROM SLAMANNAN TO AIRDRIE.
WHEN at Slamannan the other week, I was unable to do more than visit the picturesque region of Jawcraig. It blew a perfect hurricane, and as rain had fallen so heavily that the roads were converted into running streams, further journeying was then impossible. I returned to Slamannan the other day, intending to drive to the various villages lying between that town and Airdrie. It was a lovely day, bright and balmy, and but for the leafless trees and bare hedgerows, one might have fancied that spring had stolen a march upon summer, and that we were already enjoying the sunshine and flowers of June.
In such circumstances, I did not anticipate any difficulty in the way of getting through my work expeditiously, but on asking for a machine at the principal hotel in Slamannan, I was told that in consequence of the heaviness of the roads, I could not be accommodated. Well, this was rather disappointing, and seemed nothing short of a libel on the Road Trustees; but after walking for the better part of three days in the district, I am not disposed to blame the hotel proprietor for sparing his horses, for, in the bewildering language of pantomime, the Slamannan roads "are the beastliest of beastly roads you ever did see." For many miles round, the country is one universal moss, or rather swamp.
My way for a couple of miles was along a good footpath over soft, spongy moss, and when this came to an end it was only possible to get forward by stumbling along the lines of railway connected with the various collieries. At one point I had to wade through a quarter of a mile or so of sludgy moss, and when I had got out of it, congratulated myself on still retaining my boots.
As for the roads, where there are any, it is no exaggeration to say that at many parts they are knee-deep in mud, even in such lovely weather as we had at the time of my visit. An indignant miner presented me with a document acknowledging receipt of road money for last year, and then pointed triumphantly to my own boots and pantaloons as showing the kind of return which he got for payment of this tax. With reference to the character of the miners' houses between Slamannan and Airdrie, the villages, in so far as mere stone and lime are concerned, are rather above the general average of districts within the same distance from Glasgow.
There are one or two decidedly bad rows, but the great bulk of the houses are of recent erection, and are at least decent and tolerably comfortable. The great evil is the want of good water. Beyond the range of the Airdrie and Coatbridge Company, the supply is obtained from pits or from field drains-in very few cases indeed from springs, and in summer, when surface water is not obtainable and pit water is scarce, the people just get it, as they tell you, in the cleanest hole they can find.
It is difficult, in some villages, to ascertain where water is got in any weather, or at least to find out any common source of supply, every one having his or her own favourite puddle. Leaving Slamannan, a walk of twenty minutes takes us to Bowatson, a row of houses belonging to Mr. John Watson, whose pits are in the neighbourhood. The first four houses in the row are occupied rent free, the tenants being the superior servants of the company. They are rooms and kitchens, with a scullery entering from the kitchen and a larder from the room. Wooden floors are laid in both apartments, which are large, and ventilation is secured by back and front doors.
The first house we enter is nicely furnished and faultlessly clean. It is not enough to say that this is a model miner's dwelling; the fact is that James Baird of Cambusdoon does not live and move and have his potential being in a better-appointed household. Next door the domestic arrangements are of much the same character. The remaining houses in the row-single apartments and rooms and kitchens are all substantial and well finished, although they have not the same air of order and cleanliness as those first visited. The background is also in excellent order, large ashpits and closets being provided. Good spring water and plenty of it is had at Bowatson.
The Burn Row, also belonging to Mr Watson, is reached half a mile farther along the road. It is a village of some pretensions as to size, consisting as it does of two old rows and three new brick rows. Giving our attention first to an old row of nine stone houses, we find that they are single apartments with wooden floors, and that the beds are placed against the back wall, in which there is no window. They are poor houses, rented at 1s 3d a week. On the opposite side of the road, which, by the way, is in a disgraceful state, is what appears to be a still older row of single apartments, the interiors being quite as dark and uninviting as those we have just quitted. The houses in the new rows, which are of brick, have high ceilings and a small window at the back. They are much healthier places to live in than the others, and the rent is 1s 6d a week. There are also in the village a few room-and-kitchen houses, with scullery, for which a rent of 1s 9d a week is charged. The old rows are not provided with ashpits or closets, and the cleanliness of the village is looked after by a man who was recently appointed for this purpose.
Water is taken from a going pit, and after being filtered is led into a large barrel at the end of the village. In rainy weather it is said to be dirty, but at the time of my visit it looked well enough. Leaving Burn Row, we cross the fields and climb the slope leading to Binniehill, of which Mr. Watson is proprietor.
This is a large village, consisting of old rows, constructed without regard to comfort, with low ceilings, insufficient light, and faulty ventilation. There are also several new rows hardly out of the plasterer's hands, which have been erected in accordance with modern notions of health and convenience. At present some of them are very damp on the back walls. They are, however, well raised from the ground, with lofty ceilings and apartments of fair size, and will doubtless become dry in summer.
There is a great want of ashpits and closets at Binniehill, but a large place of this kind was being erected at the time of my visit. It is built right over the water-course partly supplying the village with cooking water, which will not be safely available when this outhouse comes into use. It seems rather extraordinary to erect such a structure on this particular spot. The water is collected in a pond at hand, and is led through a drain underground, and delivered at the mouth of an iron pipe a dozen feet or so in length. I went to see the pond, which is not fenced in any way, and, I was told, is polluted by children. Another source of supply is from No. 9 Pit, an old working which receives additions from Nos. 3 and 7, going pits. In summer the people have generally to depend upon this pit water.
At Binniehill, as at Newfieldykes, less than a quarter of a mile away, there are large families living in small two-roomed houses, seven, eight, and nine persons being common numbers. Newfieldykes consists of two rows of single apartments and rooms and kitchens, some of them being unoccupied. They are old houses, having no back windows, and there are no outhouses of any kind in connection with them. Water is got in various places in winter, and in summer it is difficult to be found anywhere. Whiterigg, belonging to Messrs Black & Co., is a large village, consisting, for the most part, of new brick rows, and a large square, also new, called Airdriehill Square. These are excellent two-roomed houses, with wash-houses and ashpits and closets behind. The rent is 2s a week. There is, however, an old row in Whiterigg, consisting of very inferior houses. There are no back windows, and the interiors are poor in the extreme, both as to accommodation and furniture. Everybody declares that they are not fit for human beings to stay in, and I quite agree with everybody.
They are not decently habitable even for Irish human beings, the least tidy of the mining class, who seem to keep this row all to themselves. Pit water is used at Whiterigg. Northstone Rigg, belonging to Mr Rankin, comprises two rows of old houses having earthen floors and no back windows. Surface water, occasionally mixed with moss and burn water, is used here. In rainy weather it becomes discoloured, and in summer it is very scarce. At Upper Avonhead the houses, which are of brick, belong to Mr. Muir, and have been barely a year in occupancy. Large room and kitchen houses, with wooden floors and high ceilings, are rented at 12s a month. Water is got from the moss, or anywhere. In summer the difficulty is to procure any supply by which the necessities of the household may be met. Meadowfield, belonging to Messrs Black & Co., and Longrigend, belonging to Messrs Nimmo & Co., are modern villages of inferior character. The houses are by no means first-class, the sanitary arrangements are defective, and the roads are in a very unpleasant condition. At Drumrig End is a new row of 18 capital room and kitchen houses belonging to Mr. John Nimmo. They are large and well-constructed, and outside are coal cellars for all the tenants and ashpits and closets. The water here is said to be very dirty in wet weather. At the Lodge, removed by a single field from Drumrig End, the houses belong to Mr Watson. They are poor single apartments, with very small back windows, and the rent is 5s a month. Longrig, belonging to Mr. James Nimmo, consists of two long rows of brick houses, which seem to be thin, and are complained of as being cold and damp. Pit and surface water are got here, and in summer the people require to forage about for it. This is also the rule as to water at Wester Longrig, where there are several rows of new brick houses belonging to Mr Gemmill. A supply is sometimes got from a farmer in the neighbourhood, who charges 1/2d for each "rake."
Within half-an-hour's walk from Slamannan, but in the opposite direction from that which leads to Airdrie, are two rows of houses illustrating the worst features of the district. Nappyfaulds, belonging to Mr. Hay, comprises only three or four families, whose abodes are the funniest places I have seen since I set out on this mining tour. They are twisted and rent in the roof and walls, some of the crevices being wide enough to admit one's hand. This, of course, is due to the underground workings, which are so directly below the houses, that during the night the people while in bed hear the miners blasting underneath.
The houses gave way some time ago, and would seem to yield now in one direction and now in the other, as the gaping, zig-zag interstices of to-day may be closed up to-morrow and re-opened on the day following. The end house has fallen out altogether, the gable wall having parted company with the roof, and the mass of bricks, some adhering in lumps and others broken and chaotic, now lie precisely as they fell to earth. Through the walls of the houses which have not yet tumbled down, one may see into the next room, and as one of the women remarked, "ye canna flyte on the gudeman withoot everybody hearin' o't."
Pit water of very bad quality is used at Nappyfaulds. Mr. Hay, let me add, is only blameable, if he may be blamed at all, for not compelling the people to quit the houses. He has not charged any rent since they gave way, and has offered his tenants accommodation elsewhere, but they prefer to sit rent free in happy Nappyfaulds.
Quite as remarkable a hamlet is a row a quarter of a mile away, which goes under the name of Strathaven Mines. The houses, which are very old and much out of repair, are leased by Mr. Watson, and there are in all 11 single apartments, for which a rent of 4s a-month is paid. Ashes in great heaps lie all round about, there being no outhouse of any kind, and are removed just when it suits the convenience of a neighbouring farmer to do so. The interior of the houses is in keeping with the outside. The ceilings are low and much broken, and the floors and walls are dirty and damp. In some of them there is almost no furniture, and ragged children run about with uncombed hair, and faces so dirty that one hardly knows to what race of beings they belong. From what I have said, it will be seen that the villagers in Strathaven Mines are largely the authors of their own domestic discomforts.
Good spring water is got half-a-mile away.
Nearly midway between Slamannan and Airdrie is the village of Easter Glentore, built on a swamp of black moss. It is an exceedingly unhealthy situation, and the water also being bad, it is not surprising that the mortality is high. The hamlet consists of two brick rows, the one forming an angular continuation of the other, and although I did not count the doors, I should say there are not over forty families in the whole place. The proprietor is Mr. McFarlane. There are houses on each side of the blocks, so that they are only lighted in front, with no means of securing through ventilation. An ashpit and closet have been built behind the rows, but much too near the houses. Water is taken from what, by a stretch of politeness, is called "the well." I went down to it through oceans of mud, and found that the well is simply a hole at the foot of a brae, which receives field or moss water, and in heavy rains is added to by a dirty burn alongside.
A line of loose stones has been laid as a kind of breakwater between the burn and the well, but in wet weather it cannot be of any service. I tested this water, and found it to be very bad. Typhoid fever has been very prevalent at Easter Glentore, and a good many other forms of disease also exist. During the last ten months there have been some 30 cases of undoubted typhoid fever, and several deaths. At present there is one well-authenticated case in the village, the patient being a woman, and I spoke with one man just recovering from a severe illness. His wife and five children have all been down within the last few months, and two of the children died. On the way down to the well, I looked in at three very old houses with red tile roofs. They are dark, dismal holes, one of which is rent free, while for the other two £1 19s a-year is paid in one case, and £1 in the other.
The ground at the back is level with the roof, so that you may walk up the tiles and reconnoitre the interior down the chimney.
Let us now go to Rawyards, which may be said to be a suburb of Airdrie. Rawyards is a big and apparently a flourishing village, with a mixed class of houses and a corresponding diversity of population. There is a large factory in the place, to which crowds of young women were trooping during the breakfast hour, when I happened to be there. At the end of the village is Baird Square, a mining settlement owned by various proprietors. Here there are two rows, belonging to Dr Robertson, which are quite as miserable as those already described. They are single apartments, lighted from one side only, with earthen floors patched with pieces of wood, and are all terribly out of repair. The earthen floors are broken up into a series of watery holes, some of which the tenants have filled up with clay and mud from the street. Everything is untidy inside and outside. The ashpits and closets are filthy in the extreme, and the road in front of the houses is a dirty puddle.
A good deal of overcrowding exists in these rows. In two of the single apartments which I entered there are eight of a family. The rent is 7s a month. I was informed that Dr Robertson became proprietor of the houses two years ago, and before that time they were held for 2s a-month, which, I take leave to say, is their full commercial value.
In Black's Place, also at Rawyards, I found single apartments rented at 5s a-month, which, relatively to Dr Robertson's, are worth 12s a-month. The sanitary condition of Black's Place, and indeed of all this portion of the village, is highly objectionable. A couple of miles from Rawyards we come to Rig-End, in which there is a row of houses belonging to Mr. Macdonald, M.P.
Rig-End boasts of a row of miners' houses belonging to various private proprietors, and another row on the opposite side of the street, the owner of which is Mr. Macdonald, M.P. We may confine our attention to those for which the hon. member for Stafford is responsible, and which are fourteen in number. Mr. Macdonald is not a mine-owner in the neighbourhood, and therefore his tenants are not of the class whose occupancy comes to an end when they cease to work in a certain pit.
Looked at from the outside, these houses do not promise great things, the roof being low and the structure evidently dating back to the beginning of the century. Certainly one cannot find fault with the surroundings. The roadway in front is dry and clean, and a grating placed at the centre of the row, communicating with an underground sewer, carries off all the refuse water of the row. In the background are two well-kept ash-pits and closets. Now let us go inside. The first house, like all the others save one, is a room and kitchen, with broken stone floors in both apartments. It is not by any means a first-rate house, but still it is snug and clean. The next one is unoccupied. In the third house, the woman complains much of damp, which shows itself on the back walls, and renders the room bed, in which a miner on the night-shift lay sleeping at the time of my visit, a very undesirable resting-place. The fourth house is unoccupied. In the fifth, the mother is lying in bed with cold. It is an extremely damp house, even the fire-place, under the burning coal, giving proof of it, while the back of the bed in which the woman lies, has a cold, moist feeling, although not actually wet.
Since coming to the village, she says, the children and herself have scarcely ever been free from illness. The house, she adds, is draughty as well as damp, so that when "I hang up clothes on the rope in the kitchen, they blow jist as if they were oot by." I did not find any confirmation of the last statement on the occasion of my visit, but in breezy weather I have no doubt the winds whistle cold enough in these old tenements. In the sixth house the stone floor is black with damp, and during storms the rain finds its way into the room through the back wall, and trickles below the drawers and the table. In one of the room beds, one may take off with one's finger-nails the paint and whiting on the wall like soft clay. The seventh house has, in the kitchen, an earthen floor full of holes, and is extremely damp in the room. During rain, the woman of the house says, "the weet jist rins doon the wa's." The eighth house is not so damp as some of the others, and is on the whole in better repair.
The kitchen floor is of earth and wood. The ninth house is superior still; damp is rather suggested than actually presented on the kitchen floor. The tenth house has a very bad kitchen floor, and is also damp a little. In the eleventh house-clean, dry, and well kept-lives an old man, a weaver, who has been very many years in the village, and whose looms occupy the tenement next his own.
The twelfth is damp on the kitchen floor, on the walls, and at the back of the beds, where it appears half-way up from the floor. The thirteenth house, a single apartment, is a narrow strip without a fire-place; and the fourteenth, a room and kitchen, is just a repetition of the others as to discomfort. This single apartment is tenanted by an old woman who keeps her son's family next door, and therefore may be said only to sleep in the fireless room, which has for furniture a small table, a chair, a trunk, and a bed. In a corner lies a heap of bricks and rubbish, the debris which has followed the fall of a portion of one of the inner partitions of her son's house, and which is stored here until the tenants have time to build it up again. For all these room and kitchen houses £4 a-year of rent is paid, while for the fireless apartment £2 10s is charged.
In the Lothians, coalmasters give such houses for 6d a-week; the three rooms for which £6 10s a-year is got at Rig-End would be let in that district for 9d a-week, or £1 19s a-year. It was explained to me that this £6 10s is a fancy rent, and was originally fixed by a tenant who, being specially anxious to get the three ends, offered £6 10s, and would probably have given more if it had been asked. He only remained in the house for six months, and sub-let it to the present tenants. Good spring water is got at Rig-End.
I was doubtful as to Mr. Macdonald being really the proprietor of these houses, and I spoke on the subject to an old woman and an old man who have lived in the village for many years. They told me in effect that Mr. Alex. Macdonald, the member for Parliament, became proprietor about ten years ago. He spent a good deal of money in improving the houses and the drainage, but did not succeed in effecting any great change for the better, at least in so far as the interiors are concerned. He was often about the village for a time, but at length he entrusted the management of the houses to a school teacher in RigEnd, now dead, who neglected them, and gave such poor account of his stewardship that for seven or eight years during which he remained in office the landlord only got some £28 altogether.
Of late, they have been factored by Mr Archibald Macdonald of Armadale, brother of the member for Stafford, who on the day before my visit to Rig-End, was arranging for their sale, although the rents remain payable to him till May next. It is thus apparent that Mr. Macdonald, after becoming proprietor, was anxious to improve the houses; but I can only say that, even with all possible repair, they would still remain poor miners' houses, much below the average of many provided by coalmasters in other districts.
Mr. Macdonald is also proprietor of the village inn, the landlady of which told me that he has not been in the neighbourhood for a long time. She does not remember to have seen him for at least twelve months.
DALTON-IN-FURNESS.
SCOTCH miners may wish to know how their brethren in England are housed, and perhaps general readers also may take some interest in my notes about Dalton-in-Furness, North Lancashire, which I visited the other day. There is now regular steam communication between the Clyde and Barrow-in-Furness, to which travellers are also carried by rail, en route for Douglas, Isle of Man, where many tourists from Scotland have of late years taken up their quarters during the summer holidays.
Barrow is a large and thriving town, its population having mounted up from about 500 twenty years ago to its present total of 40,000. Everything is spick and span Its streets are formed in long, regular lines of houses, too uniformly plain and identical in style to produce the architectural effect which comes of variety; but, on the other hand, the town does not seem to be afflicted with the lanes, and vennels, and crowded closes which are the bane of older communities.
Iron and steel are the sources of Barrow's wealth, which is very considerable. The people, I am told, are very proud of it-its prospering industries and continuous extension in all directions. It is not, however, a mining town, and therefore lies outside my brief. Let us get on to Dalton, which is essentially a mining community, full of years, yet abounding in healthy life, and animated by the spirit of social progress.
Furness Abbey lies midway between Barrow and the mining town, and it is worth while to get out here for an hour or two, if only to note how curiously, in this engineering age, the centuries are linked together. As we near the station, the train shrieks and snorts as though in contempt of the past and its shattered monuments, and finally draws up close to the stately ruins of the old Abbey, which lie down in a richly-wooded valley. It is a perfectly sequestered spot, lovely even in this bleak wintry weather, and as the train rattles out of the station, relapses into stillness which seems the more profound for the momentary jar and discord.
The Abbey grounds belong to the Duke of Devonshire, who makes every one welcome to wander among the ruins, beautiful still in their decay, reading in them such sermons as they suggest, and perhaps wondering whether, after all, our Parliamentary rulers were not guilty of legislative sacrilege in sanctioning the formation of a railway through a valley whose very silence is soothing. Furness Abbey Hotel is a palatial structure, partially furnished in the antique, and filled with the air of repose which one seems to breathe all around-except at train time.
Dalton-in-Furness, which is reached after a few minutes' drive by rail, is not an average English mining town, but one of the best-if, indeed, it may not be said to be the finest south of the Tweed. It is larger than the mining villages in Scotland, and its history extends over a much longer period than that of towns in the North which cannot for a moment be compared with it. Nobody knows how old Dalton is-or, to put it another way, nobody knows how old it isn't. One of its charities dates back to 1626; and an old castle in the centre of the town, now belonging to the Duke of Buccleuch, was once the residence of the Abbot of Furness, who held his courts here, and doubtless exercised supreme temporal as well as spiritual authority.
Originally, Dalton was the capital of the Furness district, a large tract of hilly country-hilly, that is, for England-whose base is washed by the waters of Morecambe Bay and the river Duddon; but of late years Barrow has gone to the front, and is now the most considerable town in this part of England. Dalton lies on the north side of the Valley of the Nightshade, where grew the deadly plant of that name, still preserved, I believe, by a commemorative root or two.
It has been a prosperous town for the last 30 or 40 years, being situated in the very centre of the iron ore district, and during the last 12 years has doubled its population, which now amounts to 6500. The social progress of the place is largely to be attributed, I believe, to the establishment and development of co-operative and building societies. On this point I had the testimony, amongst others, of the Vicar of Dalton, who said he regarded these societies as having proved a blessing to the town. He is a large-bodied, and I should say also a large hearted person this Vicar, who roundly declared that every man (even a Vicar) had a right to sell his labour at the highest rate.
Be that as it may, it would seem that Dalton has been greatly improved in many respects by the formation of these societies, of which several are now in prosperous operation. I have before me the 54th quarterly report of the Dalton Co-operative Society (Limited) for the period ending Nov. 30, 1874, from which it appears that the members number 1910, of whom 1800 may safely be assumed to be miners. The money lodged by members is £28,714; and, after writing off £118 to depreciation of buildings and other sums, and, allowing interest on all paid-up shares at the rate of five per cent. per annum, the committee declare a dividend of ls 6d a £l on members' purchases, and 8d a £1 on non-members' purchases. This is an unusually small dividend, the rates for several years previously having averaged 2s 6d a £1. New buildings for the society were erected four or five years ago at a cost of somewhere about £8000.
I went through the premises, which form an immense block of two storeys and attics, having a frontage of fully sixty yards to two streets, with large carting space in the centre. All the ordinary departments of commerce are covered by the society, which carries on the business of bakers, grocers, tailors, shoemakers, linen-drapers, and hardware and earthenware merchants.
There are in the society buildings a reading room and library, and a hall for public meetings capable of accommodating from 800 to 1000 persons. Dalton has besides three building societies, two of which have been ten years in existence, the third being a stripling only eight months old. The contributions to one of these old societies, including money invested and the interest on borrowed capital, amount to about £200 per month, and are steadily increasing. Money is generally sold to the highest bidder, but in one of the societies a more or less fixed rate is adopted.
At present the rate is five per cent., which may be raised or lowered at the discretion of the committee, according to the demand for money. When a borrowing member becomes ill, the committee suspend his contributions for a time, and he is thus enabled to resume payment on his restoration to health without being subjected to any penalty. If, however, he should not fulfil his obligations while at work, the committee take possession of the property which he has acquired, and collect the rents for a time, in the hope that he may see the error of his ways; but if he remains obdurate, they sell the subject, reimburse themselves, and hand over the proceeds to the defaulting member.
The most direct and obvious result of the origination of these building societies is, that no less than 40 per cent of the houses in Dalton belong to miners, some of whom, indeed, are proprietors of two and three tenements. This is no mere guess, I was informed, but a fact ascertained by a sort of census taken for the purpose of getting at the exact truth. Of course, the principal has not in many cases been paid up, but as two of the societies have been carried on for ten years, we may assume that a large proportion of the miners are now absolute proprietors of their own dwellings. Indirectly, also, the formation of these societies, by fostering habits of saving and self-denial, has been all in favour of temperance, and order, and social progress.
One of the members of the Local Board, which corresponds to our Town Council, is a working miner, Wm. Turner by name, whose supporters, unprotected by the ballot, felt themselves in such an independent position that they were able to vote for him openly, whatever the local gentry might think of it. Dalton miners do not seem to care for fighting by striking, but rather seek to get money of their own, and then assert their position.
This Local Board, by the way, appears to act with intelligence as well as vigour. Dalton does not need an Improvement Act, but there are several old and objectionable buildings in the town, which have been recently purchased by the Local Board, and are about to be pulled down. The drainage of Dalton is by no means neglected, yet the Board, feeling dissatisfied with it, are now obtaining tenders for a more thorough system being carried out as soon as possible. At present the sewage is drained into the Abbey Beck or Burn, about 200 yards below the town.
Complaints on this score have been made by Sir James Ramsden and Mr. Wadham, the Duke of Buccleuch's steward in the district, and it is proposed to purify the sewage before running it into the stream. Educationally, Dalton occupies a very respectable position. It has a grammar school, a proprietary school established half-a-dozen years ago, attendance being restricted to the children of subscribers, and schools in connection with the Wesleyan body, the Primitive Methodists, and the Independents.
It has no School Board, but an order for the formation of such a board is daily expected — I do not know that it is desired. At any rate, it may be said that, if the existing buildings are properly utilised, little should require to be done by the new board in the way of providing additional schools.
As I have hinted, Dalton-in-Furness is not without an admixture of inferior houses, the number of which, however, is relatively inconsiderable. "Gibraltar," which lies down hill, overlooking the Abbey Beck, consists of three or four dwelling-houses, which are somewhat of an eyesore, and in the upper parts of the town I came across several others long out of date, and, as I was informed, about to be taken down. The general appearance of the town is exceedingly creditable to the Local Board, and the sanitary arrangements are as nearly as possible perfect.
Company houses were never common in Dalton, and at present not more than twenty of this class are to be found. There are many rows or rather streets of new houses erected within the last few years, and all on the English self-contained principle, each tenant occupying the building from roof to basement. The greater number are two-storey houses, the main walls being of stone, which is got in the neighbourhood, and the inner partitions of brick, the three-storey houses, of which there are a goodly number, being constructed in the same way.
Wash-houses and boilers are erected outside, with, in the case of two-storey houses, a small bed-room overhead. Like all English houses of the same class, the frontages are narrow, occupying about 15 feet, with 28 feet from back to front, and ground in the rear extending to about 30 feet. This back-ground is walled in, so that the tenant may not come under the eye of prying neighbours, and the closets and ashpits, attached to each house, are placed against the back wall, and are thus 30 feet removed from the windows.
A few of the houses have a piece of garden ground in front, and are finished with oriel windows on the ground floor. The cost of the houses may be stated generally at £100 for each flat, or £300 for those of the highest class. The tenants, being also proprietors, are specially interested in keeping everything neatly and in good repair, both inside and outside their houses; and so far at least as the exteriors are concerned, nothing can well be said that is not complimentary to Dalton. As for the interiors, I am hardly in a position to speak. I heard the music of a piano in passing a miner's house, and glancing from the outside through oriel windows, with flowers and books in view, one could not help contrasting the evident comfort and refinement of Dalton with the dirt and wretchedness of colliers' houses in many districts in Scotland.
This, however, is pretty much all that I can say about them. An Englishman's house is his castle, which must not be invaded by curious visitors, however laudable the object of their inquiries. My cicerone at Dalton for the day is a member of almost every public Trust, and is known, I suppose, to every miner in the town as their friend, yet even he was averse to calling uninvited, and in the circumstances I was unwilling to risk a cold reception.
We did venture to visit one house, which I may describe as being a good average specimen of the whole number. The door, with fan-light above, is painted in oak, and bears the name of the tenant on a brass plate. Entering from the lobby is the parlour, an apartment of good size, and comfortably furnished. The mantelpiece, it may be stated, is of marble. The corniced ceiling is nine feet high, this being the general height, although some rise to twelve feet. A large kitchen also enters from this floor. The walls are papered, like those of the parlour, and it is furnished with a large cooking-range, beside which is the cupboard. In the window are geraniums growing in pots. An inner staircase, a foot and a-half broad, oak painted and carpeted, leads to two bedrooms, one larger than the other, also carpeted, and papered on the walls. Indeed, all the rooms except the kitchen, are laid with carpets, which are eked out and their frailties covered over in a way that indicates at once thrift and neatness.
From the second floor we go up to the top flat or attics, where there are other two bed-rooms. This, it will be seen, is the home of a miner with a large family. Where children are less numerous, one or more of the upper apartments may be used as sitting rooms. There are other details, such as the laying of tessellated floors in lobbies, to which I need not advert, but which greatly improve the appearance of these houses. I went through two or three others in course of erection, which were all precisely similar to the one described in general arrangement, as well as in dimensions.
Dalton is supplied from Powka Beck with good water, which is stored in a reservoir two and a half miles distant from the town. The Powka Beck is within the parish of Dalton. Thirteen or fourteen years ago the Barrow-in-Furness authorities obtained Parliamentary powers to turn it to account for the water supply of the district, and seven or eight years since it was conveyed to the town of Dalton. The feeling is entertained, if not exactly expressed, that the Barrow people, in thus appropriating the parish water, are chargeable with Yankee smartness. On the whole, however, Dalton-in-Furness has little ground for grumbling.