From the Forest Page 19
The Free Miners of the Forest of Dean have clung on to these rights tenaciously; seeing off serious threats from large-scale mine-owners from South Wales in the nineteenth century and winning an exemption for themselves from the Coal Industry Nationalisation Act in 1946. Once registered as a Free Miner by an official rather splendidly named the Deputy Gaveller, a man may to this day claim up to three unworked gales from the Crown; he becomes the owner of the underground area and can work the minerals there. These mines have always been small. Until the 1838 act, the Crown had the right to put its own miner in to work with the Free Miners in each mine and share the profits; this individual was traditionally know as ‘the fifth man’, strongly indicating that these were basically little family enterprises.
There are around 150 Free Miners alive today. In 2010, Ella Mormon successfully used the sex discrimination legislation to win the right to be registered as the first woman Free Miner in history. But the whole tradition is endangered. There are only a handful of collieries still operating, plus one iron mine in the Clearwell Caves in the south of the forest, an ochre10 mine and five small stone quarries. They are economically marginal – like farmers, but without the subsidies. There are other problems too – the insurance costs for employing and training new miners are astronomically high. In safety terms they probably should be, but in terms of preserving this ancient trade, such costs are unfortunate because they make it difficult to qualify – to work the necessary year-and-a-day underground within the Hundred. Recently there ceased to be any maternity provision within the Hunded of St Briavel; this means that, short of the recession leading the government to encourage home births on an unprecedented scale, in the future no one at all will be born within the traditional boundaries that confer the Free Mining rights.
But despite everything, the Free Miners of Dean are still at work. So I went to the Hopewell Mine in the Forest of Dean to meet Robin Morgan, now in his 70s, who has been a Free Miner all his life, working his family’s traditional gale. We met for tea in Morgan’s warm little hut at the Hopewell pithead between Cinderford and Coleford, in the heart of the Forest. Some time ago, Robin Morgan thought he would try some ‘diversification’, and opened Hopewell as a museum and created safe access into part of the old mine. This failed to make enough money, and recently he has decided to cut a new shaft down to the coal seam. He was busy with this task, and before long he handed me over to John Daniels, a friend and fellow miner, to talk to me and show me round. He left us and descended to work through a nearby and alarmingly small entry-hole, very like the one the lad in ‘The Three Feathers’ must have used. Robin Morgan is unusual in that he mines alone. More commonly, miners work with at least one colleague, for safety and company. It seemed clear that he worked alone because he liked to work alone . . . He was welcoming, open, but supremely detached, contained within his tough body and his tiny mine. It was easy enough to imagine him down there on his own in the dark doing what his ancestors have done for centuries.
John Daniels is younger than Morgan and is one of the newer Free Miners, coming into the trade after serving in the Army. He does not mine at Hopewell, but with a partner in a different gale. He was deeply imbued with history. He could see approaching threats – he is one of the most recently registered Free Miners, and it was unclear who might come next, although he spoke of two brothers, younger men, who had opened a gale ‘deep inside the forest’ which they were working now. But he thought that, despite the rigours and the relative low pay, these tiny mines would always have an appeal for some people: the independence, the craft, and what he kept calling the ‘real’ nature of the work – the physical rather than academic skills. He believes that this sort of self-employment will have a growing attraction in an over-bureaucratised world.
‘But they won’t be traditional Free Miners,’ I suggested.
‘No,’ he agreed sturdily; they would not have the right to mine, but they could still apply. ‘We mine of right,’ he kept insisting, but it could be like citizenship – some people had a right to it, but even if you did not qualify automatically, it could still be granted to you if you applied. It was a good life, he declared, but also an important one, historic and meaningful.
Then we went into the mine. We picked up hard hats with head torches and plunged into the side of the hill through a gate big enough for the coal trucks to come up. We walked down a steep-sloping but now cemented pathway. In a very real sense we went down from one forest into another. But the underworld was dark, and it was easy to understand the extraordinary physical effort that had gone into hewing it out. The old mine at Hopewell is elegantly if simply engineered; there is an economy of labour in its design. The entrance passage descends straight into the hillside, but since the coal must be transported up it in carts, pulled either manually or by ponies, the ground is smoothed and the slope very regular. At the end of the tunnel the ground levels off into a hallway, and to either side, above the floor level, there are little narrow shelves, one-miner galleries, where the coal is manually hacked out from the seam and loaded directly onto the truck standing below it. Beyond this centre point, a complex pattern of tunnels and corridors crisscross one another, like a great tree laid horizontal: the main entrance passage forms the trunk, and then larger tunnels branch off that, and ever-smaller drainage runs, galleries and crawl holes form the twigs. The complex of buildings and machinery around the entrance at the surface completes the image, looking like the vertical standing roots of a windblown tree.
Some of these tunnels link Hopewell to the neighbouring Phoenix Mine; some are fully standing height and well lined with wrought timbers; others are more basic, tight-fitted and crudely finished. These allow the miners access to the seam or drain away water in fast, cold open channels. Just as there are on the great trees outside, there are occasional mosses, lichens and ferns clinging to the walls. Daniels told me there were fish in the streams too, which have evolved to live in the dark. Because underground, it was perfectly dark; the lamps on our hats shone on rough walls and created strange shadows from the irregularities of the rock face; outside the narrow beam of brightness there was the mystery of the not-seen, a sense of other passageways, of a whole maze of an invisible world beneath the sunny forest.
Because it had been opened to the public, Hopewell has been tidied up to some extent – or at least the parts of it I visited had: there are handrails, and the water channels are clearly marked; but it still felt somehow perilous, like where Frodo the Hobbit met Gollum under the mountain, in the Goblin mines. I would not like to be in there alone.
We walked for a timeless while, and never on the same path twice. Daniels told me stories of miners and the forest that were themselves somehow timeless: of accidents and heroism, and of the long-ago fights against the giant mining companies from South Wales that wanted to exploit the coal seams more commercially, and before that of the resistance to the enclosures in the forest above, to quell which the Army had been called out in 1831. He obviously loved the mine and his life; he wanted me to know about it, generously directing me to further sources of knowledge – I should go to Clearwell, where they still mine for iron; I should talk to various other people, whose names he gave me, who knew more of the old stories, both history and legend.
Eventually, far in front of us along the tunnel, there was an almost shocking glimmer of green and gold light. It grew steadily, and several hundred yards down the hill from where we started we came to a metal gridded gate and emerged into woodland that looked even more golden and bright in the sunshine than it had before we set out.
Both Daniels and Morgan reminded me of the hill farmers up on the moor where I live, clinging to an economically marginal way of life, because they experience physically its dignity and tradition. It is their heritage and their right, and they, perhaps unconsciously, create a deep and ancient freedom. They share real and traditional skills, a knowledge of hand and body which is not much valued in contemporary Britain; they all despise the ‘scribes’ (the
surveyors, architects, planning officials and inspectors – possibly because they feel despised by them), the book learning, and the regulations that shackle them; and all of them see self-employment as the highest ambition, preferring to trust to a risky mixture of physical skill, low cunning, self-interest and good luck than to more secure but servile labour in someone else’s interest.
It is easy to romanticise the whole breed. But I believe they are both the creators and the heroes of the fairy stories. John Daniels, Free Miner of the Forest of Dean, from the Hundred of St Briavel, represented this whole history. And I found myself thinking that if I were Snow White in flight and fear, I would like to come upon a group of Free Miners, with ancient skills, a personal sense of freedom and the dignity of labour, and a contemptuous dislike of courts (kings or ‘Health and Safety’) and bureaucracy.
Throughout northern Europe there is a deep connection between mining and dwarves. In fact, it is almost possible to say that what defines a dwarf is that he is a miner. Not every small character in story or legend is a dwarf – ‘Thumblings’ are tiny, but they are human beings and the children of human beings; goblins, gnomes and small devils, who also frequent the fairy stories, are not dwarves, even when they look like them; Rumplestiltskin is described as a ‘little man’ or ‘manikin’, never as a dwarf. Like the Free Miners, dwarves are ‘renowned for their mining skills, hardy nature, gritty determination and ferocity in battle’. They are hard working, loyal and frequently rather grumpy – they live in the forest and they mine for treasure. Tolkein took all these traditional qualities for the dwarves in Middle Earth, and so did BB in The Forest of Boland Light Railway. The most famous dwarves of all are the seven in ‘Little Snow White’, who ‘dug and delved in the mountains for ore’, although they lived in the forest.
In the more modern (and perhaps more middle-class) versions of the classic fairy stories that we tend to know now, the respect for work – for skilled labour and honest endeavour – has rather diminished. But in the Grimms’ collection it is a consistent theme. The forests, villages and towns of the Grimms’ tales are full of young men seeking a ‘good trade’ or a ‘good position.’ This is usually why they set out ‘to seek their fortune’ – magic helps, but actually hard work is the most common key to success. Skilled hard work gains you your fortune. If you go out and seek an apprenticeship, your master may luckily turn out to be a magical master and will give you a magical reward – but it is a reward for hard work and skill.
I described ‘The Magic Table, the Golden Donkey and the Club in the Sack’ in the previous chapter, but it is only one of many similar stories. In ‘The Two Brothers’ the small boys, by accident, acquire a magical ability to produce two gold coins every morning; terrified by this, their father abandons them in the forest, but – despite the fact that they are not poor – they apprentice themselves to a huntsman, who, being a forest worker, is of course kind, thoughtful and honest. Eventually, through their hunting skills and forest lore rather than their gold, one of them marries a princess and becomes King.11 In ‘The Thief and His Master’, a father apprentices his son to a robber – with surprisingly favourable results. In ‘The Poor Miller’s Apprentice and the Cat’, the ‘simpleton’ hero wins a mill, a beautiful horse and a rich bride through faithful seven-year service to a cat. Even in the deliberately funny tale ‘The Boy Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was’, the initial impetus to the youth’s prosperous adventures was his father’s determination that he should learn a decent trade because he was so stupid.
The importance of work applied to girls as much as to boys. In ‘Mother Holle’, for example, as I related earlier, the heroine is forced down a well-shaft by her cruel stepmother. She arrives in another world, and eventually returns, coated in gold dust. But the reason for her success was that she took service with an old woman, and ‘attended to everything to the satisfaction of her mistress and always shook her bed so vigorously that the feathers flew about like snow-flakes. So she had a pleasant life; never an angry word and to eat she had boiled or roast meat every day.’ So when she goes home, she has earned her reward. Her stepsister, on the other hand, is idle; she accepts the old woman’s offer, but ‘on the second day she began to be lazy and on the third still more so, and then she wouldn’t get up in the morning at all. Neither did she make Mother Holle’s bed as she ought.’ So the shower of pitch, ‘which clung fast to her and could not be got off as long as she lived’, was a fitting payment for her failure.
A significant number of the women in the fairy stories are self-employed, independent and skilled. They often have a relationship – positive or negative – with spinning. Although most women could and did spin domestically, if she became good at it, it was one of the few ways a woman could become financially self-sufficient. (Midwifery was an alternative career.) At her trial in 1431, Joan of Arc was immediately inflamed by the suggestion that she worked as a shepherdess: on the contrary, she snapped, she was a highly skilled spinster.12
To be honest, there are a few stories in which the heroine – and it is always a heroine – succeeds by getting out of work and into leisure. However, these stories are always triggered by the unreasonable demands of more powerful individuals, and they are nearly always humorous. ‘The Three Spinners’ is a nice example: an ‘idle’ girl is trapped by her mother’s stupidity and the greed of the Queen into having to spin a vast quantity – ‘three whole rooms full’ – of flax, even though ‘she could not have spun the flax, not if she had lived till she was three hundred years old and had sat at it every day from morning to night’. She is in despair when three strange old ladies come to her aid. They are particularly ugly: ‘the first of them had a broad flat foot, the second had such a great underlip it hung down over her chin and the third had a broad thumb’. The deal is – and there is always a deal – that they will spin the flax for her and in exchange she must invite them to her wedding, introduce them as her aunts and invite them to sit on the top table. All goes well. The Queen is so delighted with the young woman’s diligent labour she announces: ‘You shall have my eldest son for a husband even though you are poor. I care not for that; your untiring industry is dowry enough.’ The wedding is arranged; the girl keeps her promise and the old women arrive, ‘strangely apparelled’; her fiancé is startled that his bride should have such ‘odious friends’, and questions them about how they came by their peculiar features. They reply, by turns, ‘By treading,’ ‘By licking’ and ‘By twisting the thread’ (the three core actions of spinning with a wheel). On hearing this, ‘the King’s son was alarmed and said, “Neither now nor ever shall my beautiful bride touch a spinning wheel.” And thus she got rid of the hateful flax-spinning.’ This is one of the sillier, shorter and more pointless of the Märchen, and it reads to me like a women’s joke story, rather than a profound moral lesson.
Work is always good. When the dwarves first saw Snow White asleep in the cottage, they responded with a generous delight. ‘“Oh heavens! Oh Heavens,” cried they, “what a lovely child!” and they were so glad that they did not wake her up but let her sleep on.’ However, the next morning, they make their position very clear: ‘If you will take care of our house, cook, make the beds, wash, sew and knit, and if you will keep everything neat and clean, you can stay with us and you will want for nothing.’ Skilled work learned and performed diligently is a source of dignity and well-being in fairy stories; the dwarves epitomise that dogged commitment, particularly as they are self-employed rather than waged.
In Uses of Enchantment Bettelheim suggests that, in these stories, becoming a king or queen is not about political power or even power over others, it is about independence, freedom to manage one’s own life and not be under the control of someone else. Because he sees all fairy stories as being directed at children by adults, he therefore sees this standard resolution to the stories as a metaphor for becoming a grown-up. I agree with his initial observation – the kings in the stories never seem to perform any monarchical or demanding duties
– but I think he has missed the point: the idea is that profitable self-employment is the most desirable state, and that skilled hard work is what will gain it for you.
After I parted company with John Daniels, I left the car and walked through the woods, which grow close around the mine. I knew I was walking over the dark tunnels in the autumn sunshine. Here the trees were close together and had a dense green canopy, through which I could see very little of the sky. The undergrowth was thick too; within less than a hundred yards I could longer see the road or the mine head. It was nearly as quiet as it had been underground. I became convinced that there was a symbiotic relationship between this sort of mining and the forest that enfolds it. Free Mining rights died out on the open peaks of Derbyshire and elsewhere. Perhaps the mines need the forest, and without the trees to hide the mines and to protect the privacy and independence of the Free Miners, such traditions cannot survive. Deep in the forest you can escape the gaze and control of the ‘management’ and the necessary contemporary rules and regulations; going underground, you can be free to make your own life through courage and cunning. Even when the forest above you is reordered, replanted and tidied up in ways which turn out to be contrary to, and not as successful as, the old free forest where the trees grew huge and magnificent, you still maintain your right to carve out your own life by skill and hard work. Free Miners mirror the heroes of fairy stories. And both are imperilled by modernity.