Accessibility and Archives: “A working man is only of any value as long as he can do a hard day’s work”
In this blog, Philip Milnes-Smith reflects on disability in the memoirs of B L Coombes (1893-1974) and introduces the concept of ‘crip time’.
The title quotation comes from a 1939 book by Bertie Lewis Coombes Griffiths called These poor hands: The autobiography of a miner working in South Wales. The words speak vividly to the present when political rhetoric distinguishes “hard-working families” from disabled people, despite the fact that, as we have seen in previous blogs, disabled people have a history of being workers (rather than helpless dependants, unaffordably burdening the taxpayer). The volume makes clear throughout that disability and disablement were ever present in the sight and minds of the miners.[i] Even in the comfort of their own homes, the air was carrying coal dust “of the mixture that caused silicosis.” A chance encounter later in the book brings him face to face with someone he knows, now dying from silicosis. Rendered unrecognisable, and struggling to speak, he is raffling off his gramophone and 30 records to get money for his soon to be widow – he is too weak to tear the tickets and sign the names.
A mate’s landlord, another collier, had a nose “more blue-black than any other colour, because a falling stone had smashed it into his face”. The same individual had “blue spots” all over his face “showing where a shot had exploded almost in front of his eyes and blown the bits of coal into his skin.” Miraculously his sight was unaffected. Not so, a fireman (deputising as night overman) who was “holding some pencilled notes to the left side of his face so that he could read them”. His right eye had been knocked out by a piece of stone. David Jones “had a claim on the firm for light work – he had been crippled for them,” and Coombes tells the story of him claiming this job in a manner the manager did not like. Switching places to learn how to be more agreeable, he “sat down grandly in the easy chair, laying his injured leg on the low table with the wooden part pointing like a rifle towards the door.” In response to the beseeching tone of the manager Dai Peg averred, with words from the manager’s own mouth, “there’s nothing here for you. There’s too many idling about here as it is. Clear off.”
The first publication was a Left Book Club edition, and its readership were thus open to political, economic and social commentary as well as personal memoir. The phrasing in our title, then, is a miner’s critique of how Capitalism treats the worker in an industry with a grim health and safety record, and an oversupply of potential workers:
“every passing week makes one older, and although age seems a long way off, there is no avoiding the knowledge that a working man must depend on his health and strength to live, so that, if he is wise, he must work every day in such a way that he will be able to work again the next day, the next week, and the next year… A working man is only of any value as long as he can do a hard day’s work; when he cannot keep up the pace, he is an encumbrance… I sympathise with the older men, and watch their struggle to keep up… I watch how the few men who are old come to work;… how desperate they are that the officials shall not think they are slower at the work than the younger men.”
A key moment in the book is the story of Jack Edwards, who had to “do most of his father’s work as well as his own” because the father had a chest complaint, and there were other siblings to support. When Jack, who had postponed marriage, was killed at work, the “only payment allowed [was] for burial expenses”. This was “because he was classed as single”, and the father (who was now unable to work at all) had been deemed the breadwinner. When Coombes says, “There is no place in our industry for the ill or injured, no matter how the incapacity is caused”, he is really talking about ‘crip time’ – the extra time needed to do the same work as other people (which the system makes no allowance for). Jack’s father lacked the capacity to do the work himself at the same pace as the interchangeable unit of production the owners demanded. He relied on his son to do more than his own work to ensure they were paid as two non-disabled people, but without his son he could not earn at all.
When Coombes signs on to work for the first time, clerks check that he “had not suffered from nystagmus, miner’s chest complaints, “beat” knees or elbows, had any serious injury, or been paid compensation due to or arising from the afore-mentioned” and demand he sign an agreement to pay contributions not only for access to a hospital, doctor and district nurse, but the “artificial-limb fund” and “blind institute”. He goes on to note, “There have been very few weeks since that I have not been glad of the Sunday rest to give some cuts or bruises a chance to heal. It seems part of the job, that getting battered about.” A musician, he notes that he had played in a hall of “mental patients”, to blind children and in workhouses, and recalls, “I had three fingers cut with a stone and they had not healed. I could not feel the strings properly if plaster was over the cuts… By the end of my playing my fingers were bleeding.”
On one job the ventilation was so poor that Coombes notes, “nearly every day some of the men collapsed, and I frequently saw artificial respiration being tried.” He subsequently learned first aid and, in his second (unpublished) autobiography, Home on the Hill[ii], suggests that he would “assess at least one slight injury every day and a more serious one every week.” He would not only accompany the injured back to the surface, but in those pre-NHS days, home and then on to the hospital if needed. “We always tried to get the man we were taking home to answer, even if he was on a stretcher, for this eased the shock of the relatives. If he could speak, he was not seriously injured, they would reason; for most of them realised at once what a knock in the night meant.” Will Evans, for example, had “a fractured collarbone and four broken ribs” but pretended first to his wife that there was no work, and “she was reassured by him standing there alone, and we did not show ourselves until he had soothed her by the information that he had ‘only a bit of a clout like’.” An earlier accident had driven a stone “three inches into his skull”. In the middle of winter, another man, a repairer, had sustained “amongst other injuries” “both legs broken, one in three places”, and required stretchering much of the way home as the roads were impassable for the ambulance. In another case, Jonah, who “always stammered a little” is described as speechless through shock following a rockfall that trapped two others: “his mouth worked but no words issued. Suddenly,.. he hit himself in the mouth with his clenched fist,.. I did not need his words to tell me that something had happened. I just unslung the big tin box… and caught under Jonah’s arm to hurry him with me so that I should know where to go.”
Unsurprisingly, Coombes experienced temporary disablement himself. For example, when he wrenched his knee out of joint to free it after a rock fall, he was unable to work for nine weeks and even then “re-started work before I should have done… I was paid compensation, but the amount and the method of paying it did not help me get better… all the injured were treated as if they had crippled themselves deliberately. I had to hobble the distance to the office several times before I had any payment… On the last shift of the first week after restarting, I was injured again on the same knee… The insurance people were quite convinced that I enjoyed getting knocked about.” His second autobiography notes that there were a couple of miners “who made a life study of the compensation laws. Their father was not treated fairly after an accident and ever since they have… guided anyone who was injured at work – and that means an army in numbers every year.”
Coombes complains that Union conferences were held away from the coalfields and that “every year our leaders spend away from the very heart of the industry makes them feel more contented with the conditions of those they represent.” Perhaps with time too, greater distance has lent an enchantment to the age of steam power. We see glorious locomotives, for example, but not the human cost of extracting the coal. Maybe it is worth remembering that for Coombes, “The place to learn the truth about the mining industry is where the sick and crippled miners struggle along the rough roadways in the hope of finding a little coal to warm their bodies.”
Guest blogs are welcome. Please email diversityandinclusion@archives.org.uk. We would also like to hear from you if you have found one of the Allies’ blogs helpful to your work.
[i] Turner and McIvor’s paper notes “over an average working life of forty years more than half of all British miners would suffer from a serious disabling injury or contract a chronic, life-limiting industrial disease, whilst additionally each miner was liable to suffer seven major disabling ‘accidents’ necessitating more than a week’s loss of work”: ‘Bottom dog men’: Disability, Social Welfare and Advocacy in the Scottish Coalfields in the Interwar Years, 1918-1939, The Scottish Historical Review, XCVI.2 243, October 2017, 187-213
[ii] Extracts now published in Jones and Williams (eds.) With dust still in his throat: The writing of B L Coombes, The Voice of a Working Miner, University of Wales Press
Thumbnail image: Henry Moore - http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/19452, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30707575