in Great Britain as women, and these were mostly in the West Riding, Lancashire and Scottish pits. Some miners still worked by the flickering light of a candle, even after the perfection of the Davy safety lamp which, they complained, did not give enough light. The danger from an explosion of firedamp was great. For those who were spared this holocaust the daily accidents of broken limbs and lacerations, and the final inflammation of the lungs (‘black spittle’) left them scarred for life. In the coalfield areas it was easy to pick out a miner from among other people by his peculiar physical development and his habit of squatting on his heels. The coalminer was not normally a town worker, but lived in industrial villages in Northumberland and Durham, South Yorkshire or the Midlands. Mining communities tended to be self-contained and semi-rural, dependent on the single industry.
The urban labourers were much less homogeneous. They included dock workers of many different kinds; labourers in gasworks, brickyards, breweries and ironworks; hodmen and helpers on building sites; carters, draymen, porters and sweepers. None of them enjoyed anything that could be called security of employment; they were paid by the week or the day. In ‘good’ times they could normally look forward to having a job for most of the year, subject to the important fluctuations of the weather and their own health and strength. But in times of depression, which were all too numerous in the 1830s and 1840s, the job outlook was bleak indeed: the weakest quickly went to the wall, and the strongest were reduced to the position of casual labour. In some occupations, such as work on the docks, labour was always hired by the day. The following account of the London coalheavers, based on Mayhew, gives a fair impression of what the term casual labour really meant in a pre-mechanised industry.
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