Now! Then! Patience Kershaw (17) tells the Children’s Employment Commission (Mines) about her work at Joseph Stocks’ Booth Town Pit, Halifax

15 May 1841: Patience Kershaw (17) tells the Children’s Employment Commission (Mines) about her work at Joseph Stocks’ Booth Town Pit, Halifax

Later version of the hurrier depicted in the Samuel Scriven report: feminised to play on the sensation caused by revelations of semi-naked white girls in the mines, and falsified to mitigate sexual excitement in readers – the chain passed between the legs of boys and girls alike, not over their buttocks (Anon 1842).

Samuel S. Scriven. 2000. Report … of the Employment of Children and Young Persons in the Collieries of the West Riding of Yorkshire. Ed. Ian Winstanley. Ashton-in-Makerfield, Wigan: Picks Publishing / Coal Mining History Resource Centre. I confess that I do not understand the hierarchy of the various appendices and reports. Get it:

Excerpt

My father has been dead about a year; my mother is living and has ten children, five lads and five lasses; the oldest is about thirty, the youngest is four; three lasses go to mill; all the lads are colliers, two getters and three hurriers; one lives at home and does nothing; mother does nought but look after home. All my sisters have been hurriers, but three went to the mill. Alice went because her legs swelled from hurrying in cold water when she was hot. I never went to day-school; I go to Sunday school, but I cannot read or write; I go to pit at five o’clock in the morning and come out at five in the evening; I get my breakfast of porridge and milk first; I take my dinner with me, a cake, and eat it as I go; I do not stop or rest any time for the purpose; I get nothing else until I get home, and then have potatoes and meat, not every day meat. I hurry in the clothes I have now got on, trousers and ragged jacket; the bald place upon my head is made by thrusting the corves; my legs have never swelled, but sisters’ did when they went to mill; I hurry the corves a mile and more underground and back; they weigh 3 cwt [152 kg]; I hurry 11 a day; I wear a belt and chain at the workings, to get the corves out; the getters that I work for are naked except their caps; they pull off all their clothes; I see them at work when I go up; sometimes they beat me, if I am not quick enough, with their hands; they strike me upon my back; the boys take liberties with me sometimes they pull me about; I am the only girl in the pit; there are about 20 boys and 15 men; all the men are naked; I would rather work in mill than in coal-pit.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Abbreviations

Comment

The image of a hurrier used in Scriven’s report (Fig. 1) and in the First report of the commissioners (Children 1842) may be of a boy or girl and is more realist:

Denise Bates summarises the sensationalisation of the reports (Bates 2012/10/03).

Scriven comments of Kershaw:

This girl is an ignorant, filthy, ragged, and deplorable-looking object, and such an one as the uncivilized natives of the prairies would be shocked to look upon … A deplorable object, barely removed from idiocy. Her [large] family receiving £2 19s. 6d. per week… In the Booth Town Pit, in which Patience Kershaw … hurries 11 corves a day, I walked, crept and rode 1800 yards to one of the nearest “faces.” The most distant was 200 further. The bottom or floor of this gate was every here and there three of four inches deep in water, and muddy throughout.

Denise Bates:

She was from Northowram, the daughter of John and Elizabeth Kershaw. Her siblings were William, Sarah, Hannah, Alice, Sybil, Caroline, Bethel, Solomon and James. After leaving the mines, Patience became a wool comber at Illingworth, and then a servant and then a washerwoman. During 1867 she entered the workhouse in Halifax. In December she was admitted to the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum, where she died in Quarter 1 1869 (Bates 2015).

I think, but haven’t checked, that original scans of the Halifax material appear here. Source information here.

Joseph Stocks was the colliery owner who originally supplied the wealthy lesbian diarist Anne Lister with information about the profits to be made from mine owning (Rafa 2021). I don’t know what life was like for women in her mines, and doubt she would have cared. Scope for some lurid fan fiction, surely.

The Unthanks perform a cover of Frank Higgins’ 1969 song, “The testimony of Patience Kershaw”:

From the lyrics:

I praise your good intentions, Sir, I love your kind and gentle heart
But now it’s 1842, and you and I, we’re miles apart.
A hundred years and more will pass before we’re standing side by side
But please accept my grateful thanks. God bless you Sir, at least you tried.

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Original

All my sisters have been hurriers, but three went to the mill. Alice went because her legs swelled from hurrying in cold water when she was hot. I never went to day-school; I go to Sunday-school, but I cannot read or write; I go to pit at five o’clock in the morning and come out at five in the evening; I get my breakfast of porridge and milk first; I take my dinner with me, a cake, and eat it as I go; I do not stop or rest any time for the purpose; I get nothing else until I get home, and then have potatoes and meat, not every day meat. I hurry in the clothes I have now got on, trousers and ragged jacket; the bald place upon my head is made by thrusting the corves; my legs have never swelled, but sisters’ did when they went to mill; I hurry the corves a mile and more under ground and back; they weigh 3 cwt.; I hurry 11 a-day; I wear a belt and chain at the workings, to get the corves out; the getters that I work for are naked except their caps; they pull off all their clothes; I see them at work when I go up; sometimes they beat me, if I am not quick enough, with their hands; they strike me upon my back; the boys take liberties with me sometimes they pull me about; I am the only girl in the pit; there are about 20 boys and 15 men; all the men are naked; I would rather work in mill than in coal-pit.

331 words.