In the 19th century, women and girls used to work underground alongside men and boys in small coal pits. On 4 July 1838, a flash flood at the Huskar Pit near Silkstone in Yorkshire caused 26 children aged from seven to seventeen who were drowned while trying to escape. After this disastrous incident, the Mines and Collieries Act of 1842 was passed prohibiting all women and girls from working underground in coal mines. However, women continued to choose to work on the surface, or pit brow, loading coal wagons and grading the coal. The working conditions were also terrible. Women used to work in everyday clothes without any safety equipment. They wore heavy-duty trousers, like men’s, jackets, and skirts rolled up, resembling aprons. By the 1880s, around 11,000 women had found work aboveground at the coal mines, sorting coal. Women were also working in producing bricks in many parts of the country and South Wales in the Tredegar Iron Works. Most of the women were generally single, the daughters of colliers, but there are several married women amongst them and widows. In most collieries where the pit brow lasses are employed, if a collier is killed and his widow applies for work at the pit brow, she is invariably given a place.
Wigan’s Pit Brow Women: Photos Depicting Poor Working Conditions Of Women Miners In Victorian England
