Coal Black Heart by John Demont Page A

loaded by schooner lighters carrying some sixty tonnes of coal, each “at a secure place of shipment some distance from the harbour.” On nights when sleep wouldn’t come he could stare out at the GMA ships, winking in the dark, before they weighed anchor and glided east, bound for the United States market his GMA bosses coveted so.

CHAPTER FOUR
Who Could Live in Such a Hole?
    M y great-great-great-great-grandfather, James Briers, was born twice, as far as I’m concerned. The first time was sometime around 1767, depending upon which tombstone or church registry you consult. The second time was 240 or so years later, when I discovered that he had come into this world amidst the flat farmland, ancient hedges and stone walls that mark the land like inukshuks in the south corner of England’s Lancashire County. How his people got there, I don’t precisely know; according to the family genealogist, the first mention of the Briers name was in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, where they were some kind of border clan—a mixture of Gaels and Celts “whose original territories ranged from Lancashire in the south, Northward to the south bank of the Clyde river in Scotland.” Not a lot is known about James Briers, either, other than that he was a coal miner and had a son named Peter who followed his father into the pit. Andrew Alston, my redoubtable third cousin and a whiz with a family tree, figures Peter and his wife Ann moved around a bit in the Lancashire area.
    One thing’s certain: in 1842 they had a son named John who was baptized at St. Mary’s church in the town of St. Helens. And somewhere along the line John took up pick and shovel, and he too became a coal miner.
    It makes perfect sense. In mid-sixteenth-century England the locals, unaware of the immense coal seams which ran beneath their feet, were still burning turf when they couldn’t get timber to heat their homes. The move to coal, when it came, was rapid. By the early seventeenth century St. Helens coal was travelling by pack horse to fuel the salt factories in Cheshire and Liverpool. Within decades, as the country’s transportation revolution bloomed, coal from there was travelling via road, canal and railroad to new markets and customers. St. Helens—which later used its coal to build a great glass-making empire—was one of the miracles of the Industrial Revolution. There were so many. England, with its capital, technological know-how and global empire that provided a built-in market for homegrown manufactured goods, had a huge lead on other countries as this massive cultural, economic and social shift occurred. An economy based on manual labour was being replaced by one built around machines and dominated by heavy industries: shipbuilding, coal-mining, steel production and textiles. In the process, England became the workshop for the world. And at the very centre of it—coughing and wheezing, clanking and hissing—was Lancashire, whose cotton mills emerged as one of the most telling symbols of epochal change.
    Before the rise of the factory, Lancashire’s towns already had a tradition of small textile workshops and cottages where hand-loom weavers made yarn into cloth. Then along came a couple of Lancashire men with big ideas—John Kay, who invented the flying shuttle, and James Hargreaves, the creator of the spinning jenny—who took the spinning industry out of the cottages and countrysideand into the mills. Not everyone was overjoyed. Throughout the country, Luddites—followers of a mythical leader named Ned Ludd, who was rumoured to live in Sherwood Forest—ran amok, breaking into factories and smashing machines that threatened to take textile industry jobs. In 1813, fourteen of them were hanged. Others were jailed, fined or deported to Australia. Ultimately, of course, the power lay with the mill owners. “We may see in a single building a 100 horse power steam engine (which) has the strength of 880 men, set in motion 50,000 spindles,” one mill