Cylchgronau Cymru

Wages were also subject to other deductions. Where a pit doctor was employed twopence in the pound was docked to pay him.1 Before the days of the checkweighman, the charter master had little chance in a dispute over his bargain with the manager, and complaints of unfair dealing were frequent.2 Then, too, there was the question of short time. In winter work was always slack, and in bad years the average time worked throughout the year might be as low as three-and-a-half days a week. The masters, it was complained, were reluctant to raise coal for stock. Here, then, we have a further inroad on wages.3 These conditions make it impossible to give anything like an accurate estimate of normal wages. An advertisement for colliers at Chirk Bank in 1831 offers fifteen to eighteen shillings a week as an alternative to task work. Ten years later a Ruabon witness before the Children's Employment Commission puts the average for his district at thirteen to fifteen shillings, and another considers thirteen shillings the absolute minimum for subsistence.5 A few years after this there was a slight upward movement; but the general impression in 1842 was that colliers were steadily growing poorer.6 Lead miners, at any rate-and we may perhaps assume the same with colliers-were receiving much about the same wages now as at the beginning of the century, despite the rise in house- rents and other necessaries.7 For these wages the men-and the boys with them-worked twelve hours a day, with an interval varying from half-an-hour to an hour-and-a-half for their midday meal of bread and butter, milk or broth, and sometimes a little bacon. In cases of breakdown as many as 16 or 18 hours were worked at a stretch. Some pits were run on the shift system, with night-work (starting at 6 p.m.) alternate weeks. There were no regular holidays except Sunday; but it seems to have been a local Pari. Pap., 1840, XVII, pp. 379, 386. « Shrewsbury Chron., Jan. 7, 1831 (statement of miners' grievances). « Ibid. Par1. Pap., 1840, XV, p. 112, XVII, p. 394. 4 Shrewsbury Chron., June 10, 1831. 5 Pari. Pap., 1842, XVII, pp. 377, 414 cf. Rept. on Handloom Weavers (Assistant Commissioners' Repts.), Parl. Pap., 1840, XXIV, pp. 553 ff. 6 Wrexham Registrar (Bayley) I (1848), pp. 27~8 Par1. Pap., 1842, XVII, pp. 384, 415. 7 Cf. Eden State of the Poor (1797), III, p. 887, and Davies General View (1810), p. 355, with Pari. Pap., 1840, XVII, pp. 430-1, 454, 459. On house-rents, see statement of miners' grievances in Shrewsbury Chron., loc. cit.