The Life of a Miner

1820-1884

These extracts are taken from ‘My Autobiography’ by John Harris, published in 1882. John Harris came from a very ordinary working class family, however they were a very Christian family and respected the Bible and the words in it. Unlike many of his contemporaries John learnt to read and write and became ‘addicted’ to the written word. From an early age he had a talent for composing and writing verse and became a notable poet. However in these extracts I am concentrating on what he reveals of the everyday working life of a miner. John Harris’s family lived near Camborne in the west of the county. The woodcuts were all created by his invalid son.

I was the eldest child of my parents, who like the smittem patriach in the land of Uz, were blest with seven sons and three daughters. One of my earliest recollections is a little white coffin, in which my eldest sister was carried to the grave. The place of my birth was a boulder-built cottage, with reedy roof, bare rafters, and a clay floor, where I first saw the light of day on Saturday, October 14^th, 1820. The rough house had no back door, nor any windows looking northward, except one about a foot square in the little pantry: but on the south side it had four windows, and a porch of primitive granite, literally small unpolished boulders. The wood-work of the roof was all visible, and sometimes the stars through the thatch; though my father was sure to have a thick layer of reed put on as winter approached. There was no partition in the sleeping-room, which ran from one end of the building to the other.

My father’s name was John, after whom I was called; and my mother was called Kitty, though I believe her proper name was Christiana.  In addition to a small farm of seven or eight acres, which my father held on leasehold from W W Pendarves, Esq., he was also a copper miner, and was well known as a tributer at Dolcoath. He followed his daily avocation underground, and performed his farm-work in the evenings and mornings, and on holidays and leisurable opportunities. He was a diligent man and a humble Christian. Owing to the precarious nature of his employment in the mine, having only a certain portion of the mineral he discovered as his own share, his earnings were sometimes almost next to nothing, so that it was difficult to procure food for his household.

The little farm which my father rented on Bolennowe Hill was one which my grandfather, Ben Harris, had redeemed from the wild. He must have laboured hard to do this, as the huge boulders in the rude wide hedges testify. On my father’s death, which took place on Sunday April 23^rd, 1848, accelerated by a fall in the mine, the farm fell into the lord’s hands, the steward refusing to renew my mother’s lease, heeding not the orphan or the widow’s tears. The consequence was that she had to leave the farm, dispose of her little stock, and retire with her six children to a small house at the foot of the hill, to struggle through life as best she might.

At nine years of age I was taken from school and put to work in the fields, to drive the horses in the plough to Uncle George Harris, Bolennowe. I was only with Uncle George for a few months. I do not recollect whether I had any payment for the long days work, save the dinner of cold meat and roasted potatoes. 

I then went to work with an old tin-streamer of the name of Waters. The old tin-streamer gave me threepence a day to throw sand from the river in the Forest Moor. Here I stood with bare feet in the running water, with a small shovel in my hands, and ate my dinner in a peat-built rush-covered hut. 

At ten years of age my father took me with him to Dolcoath Mine, to work on the surface, in assisting to dress and prepare copper ore for the market. Sometimes I had to work at the keeve, sometimes at the picking table, sometimes in the slide, sometimes on the floors, sometimes in the cobbing house, and sometimes at the hutch. Sometimes I had to wheel the mineral in a barrow until the skin came off my hands, and my arms were deadened with the heavy burden. Sometimes I was scorched with the sun until I almost fainted; and then I was wet with the rains of heaven so that I could scarcely put one foot before the another. I left home at six in the morning, and returned to it again at six in the evening. 

After toiling in this way for two years, my father took me with him into the interior of the earth, nearly two hundred fathoms under the surface. Ascending and descending ladders, some sixty or seventy in number was a fearful task. On my first descent into the mine, when I was about thirteen years of age, my father went before with a rope fastened to his waist, the other end of which was attached to my trembling self. If my hands or feet slipped from the rounds of the ladder, perhaps my father might catch me, or the sudden jerk might pull us both into the darkness to be bruised to death on the rocks. Sometimes the ladder went down through a huge cavern, warping and shaking at every step, and with the candle stuck to my hat crown I could not see from side to side. Sometimes they slanted one way, sometimes another; and sometimes we had to climb over craggy rocks crashed into the void, where a slip of the foot would be our doom. And when at last we reached our working place, a huge cell in the hollowed rock, I looked up in boyish expectation expecting to see the moon and stars, and was quite disappointed to find nothing but the blackest gloom. But the climbing up evening after evening, that was the task of tasks! Ladder after ladder, ladder after ladder, until they seemed interminable, and the top one would never be reached. Panting and perspiring, after stopping again and again, we reached the top at last, where the pure air of heaven fanned our foreheads and filled our lungs with new life, though our flannel dress could not have been wetter if immersed in a river.

My first essay at working underground consisted in wheeling some slabs of mineral from my fathers working along a narrow level to the shaft, here it was upset in what was commonly called a ‘plot’, then filled into the bucket and drawn to the surface. The level was very uneven, so that the barrow, which had a lighted candle stuck in the front end, often slipped from my hands. Some of the corners too, were very jagged and abrupt, against which I struck my joints, knocking off the skin until the blood ran down. Child as I was I had made up my mind not to cry; but the tears forced themselves out of my eyes upon my face, which I wiped away with clayey fingers, and tugged and pushed at the heavy barrow.

Thus the years wore on and I grew inured to my severe toil. After labouring underground all day, we had to return to our home on the hill, which was about three miles off. My father walked before and I followed at a short distance behind him. Thus year was added to year with no abatement in my daily toil, until love found me in the fields, and I became the grateful possessor of my good wife Jane. I was then twenty-five, and up to twenty-three had carried all my earnings to my mother. Our first place of residence was a two-roomed dwelling in the village of Troon. I was then a  tributer in the mine; and for the first ten months of our married life fortune was against me, so that my earnings amounted to no more than ten pence a day. How we contrived to survive on this small pittance without going into debt, I cannot tell; yet so it was. Then the tide turned, mineral was discovered, Providence blest my labours, and I soon became the owner of two hundred pounds. With a portion of this sum I built a house at Troon-Moor by the river, where we lived happily for many years.

Thus with incredible labour I accomplished it all, raising and carrying every stone, every shovelful of clay in the building, and also in the walls of the garden, doing it in odd hours when too many of my own calling were idly smoking their pipes with their hands in their pockets, or drinking away their time and money in the public house. It amazes me even now to think of my perseverance; nor did I rest until the last stone was laid, the roof put on, and the little cottage was our own.

For more than twenty years I was an underground miner, toiling in the depths of Dolcoath. Here I laboured from morning to night, and often from night to morning, frequently in sulphur and dust almost to suffocation. Sometimes I stood in slime and water above my knees, and then in levels so badly ventilated that the stones were very hot, and the rarified air caused the perspiration to stream into my boots in rills, though I doffed my flannel shirt and worked naked to the waist. Sometimes I stood on a stage hung on ropes in the middle of a wide working, where my life depended on a single nail driven into a plank. Had the nail slipped, I should have been pitched headlong on the broken rocks more than twenty feet below. Sometimes I stood on a narrow board high up in some dark working, holding the drill, or smiting it with the mallet, smeared all over with mineral, so that my nearest friend would hardly know me, until my bones ached with the severity of my task, and the blood dropped off my elbows.  Sometimes I had to dig through the ground where it was impossible to stand upright, and sometime to work all day as if clinging to the face of a cliff. Sometimes I have been so exhausted as to lie down and sleep on the sharp flints, and sometimes so thirsty that I have drunk stale water from the keg, closing my teeth to keep back the worms. Sometimes I had wages to receive at the end of the month, sometimes I had none. After the fatigue of the day below, when my bones ached and my heart was heavy, I had to climb the long ladders, one after another, to reach the surface of the earth and home. By this time I was often so weary I could scarcely drag myself along. It was full two miles to my house; and in the winter season it was frequently rain; through which I had to trudge without cape or overcoat, so that by the time I reached my dwelling I was wet to the skin. 

Footnote: After more than twenty years in the mines John Harris eventually escaped the life of a miner by virtue of his talent as a poet.

For detail of a modern biography of John Harris this this site

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