Cylchgronau Cymru

ATTITUDES TO WOMEN AT NORTH WALES COALMINES C1840-1901 Val Lloyd There are as yet no women miners in contemporary Britain but the voices of miners' wives have been heard eloquently and vociferously during the various disputes of the recent past. However, in the last century they were very much a part of the mining workforce, doing work that involved moving wagons, tipping, sorting and washing coal at the colliery surface. Most studies of the coal industry have concentrated on the male-dominated areas of technology, politics and the unions. Until a few years ago the role of women as the traditional 'support' of the collier was only tacitly acknowledged and the only major account of women workers in the coal industry was Ivy Pinchbeck's Women Workers in the Industrial Revolution 1750-1850.1 Chapter XI of that work deals with women in coal mining and is largely based on a summary of the evidence contained in the Children's Employment Commission Report of 1842. She deals solely with the work of women underground and as her study ends in 1850 the subject of women surface workers is not mentioned. 2 However, Angela John's Ph.D. thesis 'Women Workers in British Coalmining 1840-90: with Special Reference to West Lancashire' examines the role played by women in the coal-mining industry in both underground and surface work and analyses the problems of, and attitudes to, this work and its relevance to the problems of working class life in nineteenth century society.3 Her subsequent book By the Sweat ofTheirBrow .Women Workers at Victorian Coalmines represents the first serious exploration of the historical and social relevance of the women's story and investigates on a more general basis the attitudes to, and lifestyles of, female surface workers in the different colliery districts of Great Britain.4 'Pit brow lass' was a generic term to cover all women who worked at the pithead, that area of a colliery, where, when the coal had been wound up from the face, it was cleared, sorted and loaded into wagons. They performed a variety of jobs and were known by different terms in different coalfields; in Lancashire they were 'pit brow lasses', in South Wales 'tip girls', in Scotland 'pit head women', in Cumberland 'screen lasses' and in South Staffordshire 'pit bank women'.5 I have, as yet, come across no evidence as to the term used for such women at North Wales collieries. Angela John describes the contemporary battles to exclude women from the pit brow on physical and moral grounds, at a time when their numbers were in any case in decline. Throughout the nineteenth century they formed only a fraction of all surface workers and even less of the total colliery workforce. There were only four to five thousand of them at the most and they made up fewer than seven percent of all surface workers; in addition they were concentrated in only certain areas, principally West Lancashire, Scotland, South Staffordshire and South Wales with smaller numbers in North Wales and Cumberland.6 North Wales never experienced coal-mining on the massive scale associated with the South Wales coalfield, but it did sustain the traditions and cultural life associated with mining communities, as well as suffer the problems inherent in mining life. The coalfield is confined to the county of Clwyd (previously the counties of Denbighshire and Flintshire), with a very small