While I was at the Manchester Signing Event at Astley Green Colliery last weekend, I took the chance to visit the mining museum there. Running on a loop was a film made in the early 1900’s, which brought home to me how lucky us women are now.
The film showed a group of women working in the colliery’s yard in about 1912. Clad in scarves and heavy clothing from neck to ankle, the women looked cheerful as they pushed trucks of coal along railway-like tracks ready for tipping and eventual delivery, two women to each truck. The tracks are still visible today, as were one or two old trucks, and Sam and I took the chance to walk along the rusting ironwork when we returned for the evening gigs. I imagined the women I’d seen on the film pushing the trucks, and realised how physically strong they must have been compared to us women today.
Here we are with our washing machines, dishwashers, electric irons, vacuum cleaners, and … puny biceps (well, I have anyway!). The women of 1912 had none of these labour-saving devices. Household laundry took a whole day to do by hand, carpets and rugs had to be physically beaten to get the dust out, flat irons had to be heated on a coal-fired range, and crockery and cutlery were washed by hand in a big enamel sink. Hot water had to be carried to a tin bath in front of the fire. It was all hard, sweaty work, with no air-conditioning to help cool the hot flushes. The women were probably old at 40 and dead soon after, worn out from physical work and repeated childbearing.
This was the normal way of life then. How they would feel short-changed if they came back to visit 100 years later! How would they cope with the internet, Sky TV, MP3 players and driving a car, not to mention trying to deduce how to work all the labour-saving devices? It makes me wonder what I am going to be missing out on, which my great-great grandchildren will take for granted; a pill to stop ageing and all diseases perhaps? Ooh -er, the world will be packed with people like sardines in a tin, all living to 200+! Perhaps I’m living in the ‘good old days’ now?
What do you think?
Stevie Turner 
Next time I am in Manchester I will see that museum. Old photos and films alway make a huge impact on me. Thank you for sharing this Stevie. It’s so true we are privileged many of us. We put the laundry in the mashine and can leave the house and do something else. We can buy clothes ready to wear instead of creating “new” clothing from old worn stuff or from material bought for the purpose
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Yes, we are so lucky. The women then didn’t know any different; they had such hard lives.
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I just finished reading a Blue Thread. The main character says that only thing that really bothers her about dying is that she won’t know how everything turns out. This about sums it up for me too. You do wonder, right? Thanks for posting today Stevie.
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I’d love to come back in 500 years time and see how everything has turned out!
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The work might not be as physically hard these days, but the exploitation is creeping back. In 100 years time anyone lucky enough to be working will probably be owned by Amazon or GoogleSportsDirect, Like Malcomarchibald’s ancestors, people will be company assets like chairs or air conditioning units!.
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Too true.
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When I researched my family history I found one branch containing young children who used to work collecting the bits of coal that fell from the trucks above ground. I was truly shocked. Up till then, child labour was something I’d read about in history books and I’d got used to reading of master carpenters, bespoke tailors, shopkeepers, small business men and so on. I was quite taken aback, because history had just come alive to me.
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Thanks for your comment. Yes, history came alive to me too while walking around the colliery – very atmospheric!
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It’s amazing what a picture of train tracks overrun with grass can evoke. Everything is a story if you take time to listen.
Perhaps you were hoping for a lighter answer to your question, but it prompted some serious thoughts for me. The workhorse women you mentioned reminded me of the lyrics in the song ‘In the year 2525’: … If woman can survive they may find… in the year 5555, your arms hangin’ limp at your sides. Your legs got nothin’ to do, some machine’s doin’ that for you…
A hundred years isn’t what it used to be. We live in times when the natural dynamics of rising and falling occur in a blur of warp-speeds that make Roman Empires appearing and disappearing seem like relative pan flashes. It begs the elephant in the room question: underneath all the insane ‘progress’, how is the poor old earth holding up?
Humans are ‘ME’ creatures. We’re hardly clear thinkers in the long term. It’s an all for one and one for all, right this minute, world. That worked fine for three musketeers but it’s a rather less successful strategy for a population of millions fine-tuned to the internet. We even call ourselves internet ‘USERS’. Well, right on cue, abuse wasn’t far behind.
In the natural order of things, ‘things’ peak and fall apart in good time. GOOD time. But nowadays, bandwagons overflow at alarming rates and they aren’t fast enough or capacious enough to carry everyone past ‘go’ and not everyone collects that hundred dollars. There’s won’t enough room in the lifeboats (or will it be spaceships) for the everyman or everywoman to brave relocating to a new planet.
Echoes of ‘too little too late’ have become mantras of ‘too much too soon’. Humans push the limits and then some. What do they say? … there’s always one. Often that’s all it takes to get the buffalos to run off a cliff. But worse, it refers to human sheep. We didn’t need to clone Dolly. We are predisposed to follow fashion trends, bestseller lists (even infamous poorly-written titles), and our competitive instincts, all the way to someone else’s bank.
Progress reaches a fever pitch of too much of everything (including the good things) and ends up as nothing for anyone. For writers it’s already too many books. For the planet it’s the mind-numbing depletion of natural resources. Who and what will prevail over natural selection vs. unnatural destruction is hard to say.
Wherever, and more importantly WHEN-ever we live: in the exciting beginning phases, the first flush of progress or the pinnacles of success, or the following plateau of brief perfection or the peak turning points of a slippery slope, or the eventual inevitable declining cycles of overkill and breakdowns, two things are clear to me: humans eventually get too big for their boots, and time measured in modern technology is out of sync with anthropology.
The women in your post had little choice to break the molds of their time and culture, and hats off to their collective resilience. Womenfolk have always relied on each other but I can imagine how much more difficult it would have been when isolated from community such as immigrants leaving their homelands to eke out a future in an unfamiliar country.
My parents emigrated to Canada from England in the 50’s. That truly was the good old days. In this country, it was the first pioneers who braved the arctic temperatures of the Canadian prairies much earlier. I might have survived a first winter in nineteenth-century Alberta out of sheer willpower but not a second. Did I mention hats off to the women colliery workers of Astley Green.
Humans may have a hardy phoenix gene ingrained in our DNA but the environment recovers in slow motion. We tend to peak early and burn out. More and more, the hare wins over the canniest tortoise. As for one-hundred-years from now, sadly, the term ‘pales in comparison’ springs to mind.
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Wow, what a reply! Thanks Veronica. Yes it’s true that even now as machines take over many jobs, our planet’s resources are dwindling as the population expands. What will there be left for successive generations? Not a lot I’ll wager…
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You are talking about my ancestors there! I have upwards of two hundred years of colliers, men and women, going back to at least the mid 1700s, the days when children of five and six were working underground to help with the family income. i m not sure about England, but in Scotland they were also slaves until 1799 – they were tied to the mine, bought and sold with it and were bound by law not to leave. At the same time the mine owners, gentlemen and ladies who owned the land, the Duke of this and Lady that, lived in luxury and privilege that we still can not dream of. Thank you for that reminder.
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Slaves? Oh goodness, I didn’t know that. Living in the ‘soft’ south all my life I can only feel sorry for what those women endured, although to them I suppose it was a case of ‘that’s life and get on with it.’
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