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.