Rats in mines: Killers and Rescuers

Ken, our guide at the National Coal Mining Museum took us down Caphouse colliery(famous for it’s pot noodles!) and told us how they had to hang their snap (lunch) tins (metal to make it more difficult for the rats to gnaw open) from a rope. Even so the rats would walk the rope and fidget at the snap tins-

Before the strike (84-85) rats were populous, during the strike, they left never to return (the mine was closed soon after the return to work). I heard similar from1926, but that time the rats returned to the mines after the miners and the ponies. Rats prefer a mine with full board.

All memoirs and stories that I have found from British mines see the rats as a danger. (Correctly, they could transmit Weill’s disease in their urine, another common hazard of mine work)

Most British miners were acutely aware of this. Bob Smith caught a fellow miner scattering crumbs on the roadway, whistling coaxingly “What the hell are you doing?” Bob demanded angrily His mate wasn’t feeding rats but his ‘wee birds’. Swifts had built a nest 70 yards down the mineshaft, both men watched over them until the eggs hatched and the young fledged successfully. (But seems likely that the rats and not the swifts, insectivorous on the wing feeders were eating the crumbs)

But rats had their advantages, so it’s surprising that they were seen as unmitigated villains-

In America and China men fed and ‘tamed’ mine rats, if your rats didn’t drop by for lunch it was an indication of danger. An internet search gives you many stories of miners saved by rats - a few examples-

An Old miners story( America)

A Russian miner- They can't afford to feed the rats anymore

A miners best friend was the rat: Gary player

Bob Smith despite recounting a time when his and his mates’ lives may have been saved by rats- does not soften to then

In an old working, the passageway was suddenly blocked by an ‘army’ of rather agitated rats, neither he his mate or the fireman (the man responsible for safety underground) wanted to tackle them, so the fireman put up a ‘no road’ sign for the nonce. Bob left his kit there (a financial sacrifice- miners brought there own tools) the road collapsed that night.

Later in the miners hostel men told creepy stories’ that it was not unknown for rats to move out of a building or an area en masse before a disaster.’ It seems the pitmen saw it as ESP, and not a specific ability to detect vibrations or changes inn air or soil quality underground.

But all the same it seems odd that attitudes to rat infestation would be so different internationally, and I wonder what made the difference culturally. And the difference stretches back along way- they say that Yorkshire terriers were originally bred to hunt rats in the mines in the nineteenth century.

We will make it pretty hot for you- boils and beat knee

‘If you come here again, we will make it pretty hot for you :’Chairman of Wingham magistrates' court granting time for payment to a Snowdon miner for poaching. August 1929

I’ve been reading the outstanding Seven Steps in the dark- A miner’s life by Bob Smith He worked at seven Scottish pits, including Ferniegahr in the thirties where he suffered from boils and repeated beat knee.Ferniegahr was very damp, but not hot and observes that these infections were much more common in damp pits.

Beat knee, hand or elbow is a subcutaneous (under the skin) infection which is caused by constant pressure on the afflicted part (housemaids knee= beat knee), miners were naturally prone to it. But the wetter and hotter the mine then the (constant) cuts and scratches were more prone to infection. Resulting amongst other things in boils and beat knee and elbows or septicemia. The poacher the magistrate was sentencing in the opening quote was off work with boils.

‘Men were breaking down with boils, pimps,carabuncles-the heat’ . Mr. Mc Ewan of Snowdon

Other posts on heat at Snowdon

imminent heat stroke

graph

body heat

that hellhole snowdon

That helllhole, Snowdon, not a pit, a pity

I was lucky, but there was always that hell hole across there, Snowdon. They used to carry chaps out of there with heatstrokes (Mr. Sumner)

There's very little collated info available to me on the long term effects of working in heat and damp

Most men at Snowdon carried an eight pint Dudley on their back( a metal water bottle with a cork stopper normally carrying 4 pints ,Ken, our guide, at the national mining, museum had heard they were called Dudleys because they were manufactured in the town of the same name, but also possible this story about the Earl of Dudley connects.). Snowdon men topped up their Dudleys from water tanks sent down the shaft. Men recalled drinking 24 pints a day (the recommended amount for these conditions see HSE doc)

‘It was pitiful at Snowdon. They had tanks there and the lads ‘d swarm around them and the water was cold and you’d see lads gutting the water there. You know the muscles on a fella’s belly-you’d see them go like knotted, cramp, they’d writhe on the floor drinking this cold water, I’d see them bursting and every muscle standing out as if it was knotted all the way down his gut’(Mr Mc Ewan)

AtTilmanstone( less hot) the men would drink from the ponies’ trough, brushing aside black beetles. Perhaps conditions at Tilmanstone were not thought to warrant water tanks for the men. No evidence of ponies at Snowdon, I imagine ponies could not live down there.

‘There was only Snowdon would sign them on and that wasn’t a pit it was a pity-it were red ‘ot.Men had been so long unemployed they were coming and going, coming and going in thousands. ‘ (Mr McEwan)

All quotations from The migration of mining families to the Kent coal fields between the wars

The Jam Jar Winner

Re: The Garlinge children and the Aylesham flower show the morning after Reggie's death

Whilst in Scotland we visited the village flower show at Oldhamstocks and found the wild flower category for children still exists under the name jam jar.

The difficulties and dangers of mine rescue work on the western front

This is a link to a gung- ho article about tunneler's in the first World War,

-The Difficulties And Dangers Of Mine-rescue Work On The Western Front byLieut.-Colonel D. Dale Logan, d.s.o., m.d., d.p.h.

at the site of the Northern England institute of mechanical engineers, which, has some interesting papers on line. Miners were used as tunnellers in both wars(you tunnel underneath something to blow it up, flood it etc- so on top of the dangers of tunneling without industrial safety standards, the enemy would gas any tunneling operations they identified.

I had not known that tunnelers were over 40, I guess if you were young you went to the trenches. So it would be unlikely that any Snowdon miners were ex tunnelers and is I need to rework my plot-