Letters and Papers Concerning the Trans-Persian Railway and Other Railways in Persia [‎176v] (352/442)

275
Coal Mines
[LORDS]
{Northumberland) Bill. 276
strain upon the women of the family, and
that it limits and curtails their opportuni
ties for taking part in the social life of
their district, and particularly in attending j
meetings of their own trade unions. It
does not require an expert in coal-mining
or in anything else to arrive at the con
clusion, where there is a house inhabited
by a family the male members of which
work in turns practically the whole round
of the clock, that the home life of that
cottage is, to put it mildly, very seriously
threatened. Men are coming in and going
out constantly. I am informed that the
women have to get up shortly after mid
night, and that there is changing and
washing and cooking and the rest of it
going on in the household until getting on
for midnight on the following evening.
The boys in particular suffer from lack of
sleep. I am well aware that there are
certain hours in which they could sleep.
But, after all, human nature is human
nature, and if the hours in which the boy
can sleep are hours of daylight you are
not going to be able to control him in such
a way as to keep him at home. He there
fore goes out to play, and the figures given
to me show that since the introduction of
this system there has been an increase in
the accidents in the mines to boys owing !
to their falling asleep w r hile at work.
But this is not all. The principal thing
that these men complain of is that, owing
to the life which they have to lead under
the three-shift system, their opportunities
for meeting together for purposes of organ
ising recreation, attending classes of various
kinds, and particularly attending meetings
of their ow r n trade unions are very seriously
limited, and that those things which used
to be capable of being done, as they ought
to be done, on a week-day now have to be
performed on a Sunday, which is not a
desirable state of things. All this and
more than this I believe has been laid before
Lord Joicey. He wrote in reply a letter
which I will not read to your Lordships,
but it is not an unfair description of the
noble Lord’s letter to say that, without
answering categorically the complaints
contained in the communication addressed
to him, he contented himself by a general
proposal that in order to make it possible
to do away with the three-shift system
the hewers should work longer hours than
they do at the present moment. You may
assert that the time which the Northumber
land hewer now works from bank to bank,
Lord Willoughby de Broke.
which I am told is six hours fifty minutes,
is too little, and that in order to get rid
of what he desires to get rid of under this
Bill he should work for a longer period.
If we are going to assent to that proposition
I think we ought to take into account the
frame of mind of these men.
I have not come here this afternoon for
the purpose of setting employed against
employer or employer against employed.
We have quite enough of that and to spare
in this country already. I am not going
out of my way either to attack anybody
or to flatter anybody. But I shall not be
going beyond the mark—I believe Lord
Joicey will agree with me in this—when
I say that the Northumberland miner,
so at any rate I have always been told,
is the fine flower of the mining population
of this country. He has won for himself,
after a great deal of trouble, a position with
regard to the regulation of his hours of
labour to which he considers himself
entitled and of which he is probably justly
proud, and it is not in the nature of things
to think that it will be a sufficient answer
to his demand that the three-shift system
should be done away with to say that if
only he will give up the main thing for
which he and those who have preceded
him have been working, then everything
will be all right.
At the same time it will not be out of
place if we take this opportunity of point
ing out to the miners and to other members
of trade unions in this country that their
position would be enormously strengthened
in the respect and confidence of their fellow-
men if, at the same time as gaining advan
tages for themselves, they were to insist
upon such a standard of excellence among
their fellow workmen that they in their
turn would have some advantages to offer
to society. The mere fact that I have
introduced this Bill into your Lordships’
House has already secured something of
the kind. This Bill was introduced here
in the first instance with the idea of eventu
ally inducing the miners to give something
to society generally, to their own industry,
and to the owners, by setting up a standard
of excellence and good behaviour and
moderate action among their own men.
The introduction of this Bill has already
had that result. A few days after the Bill
was put down for First Reading in your
Lordships’ House two Socialists got all the
men at one of the three-shift collieries