2025 Week 35: Off to work #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

My family have been living in Lanarkshire for the past 200 years. Both my grandfathers were coalminers and mining and metal working go way back in both sides of my family. I have already written about the role of mining in my family - see https://rootsshootsandstories.blogspot.com/2023/10/week-43-dig-little-deeper.html - and it is well documented that the miner's life was a very hard one.

Recently I have come across other documents relevant to a miner's life. The one below details a typical wage for a miner in Lanarkshire around the time of my grandfathers and it is interesting to note how it went up and down. The average being around 4-5 shillings a day - according to the National Archives currency converter that would anunt to roughly £15 a day and this would be for a 12 hour day, six days a week.

And as a job it wasn't without danger. Here is only part of a list for deaths in Lanarkshire coalmines in January of 1887!!

Source: http://www.scottishmining.co.uk/Indexes/1887deaths.html

You can see that these deaths weren't what we would think of as a typical mining death - a crush by falling rock. The pit was a dangerous place. So many wives and mothers must have watched members of their family head "Off to Work" not realising that they would never see them again.

And as they years and decades passed, the dangers still remained. One of my dad's older brothers, James, was killed in a pit accident in 1940 at the age of 36, leaving behind a wife and two small children.

Fortunately no-one in my generation followed our ancestors down the mine. However, my mother's sister Ann married a John Loudon, a chartered accountant, who rose to become a Director of the National Coal Board in Scotland and who in later years was also a director of the Scottish Mining Museum Scotland Trust until he resigned in 2000, the year he died.

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