Appendix B to the report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the condition of all mines in Great Britain to which the provisions of the Act 23 & 24 Vict. Cap. 151 do not apply, with reference to the health and safety of persons employed in such mines. / Presented to both houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty.

Great Britain. Royal Commission on Mines

Date:: 1864

Credit: Appendix B to the report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the condition of all mines in Great Britain to which the provisions of the Act 23 & 24 Vict. Cap. 151 do not apply, with reference to the health and safety of persons employed in such mines. / Presented to both houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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MEDICAL REPORT On Condition of Miners in North Wales. By Thos. B. Peacock, M.D., F.RC.P., Physician to St. Thomas's Hospital, and to the Hospital for Diseases of the Chest, Victoria Park. After being in the mining districts of the north of England, I visited the neighbourhood of Mold in Flintshire. In that district I was informed that the lead mines had been generally closed about 20 years ago, and the men employed in them had either gone to other occiipa- tioiis, left the neighbourhood, or died off. The newly opened mines had not been long in work. There are not therel'ore, at the present time, many ailing miners to be met with in the district, but the medical men who had been in ] 0 practice for a sufficient length of time, were well acquainted with the different forms of affection to which the miners are subject, and through them I was enabled to see and examine three men who were suffering in this way. Two of them were old men, 56 and 77 years of age, who laboured under miners' asthma, in its most characteristic form, which they had contracted while working in the former mines. The third case was that of a man 30 years of age, who had been a miner only for two years. He was suffering from a a feverish attack with bronchitis, which he ascribed to hav- 20 ing taken cold at the surface, but he was apparently predisposed to consumption and in delicate health before he commenced to work under ground. The particulars of the cases of these men will be found in the Appendix. At Minera I also examined 100 men whom I found at work. A considerable number of them had, however, only worked underground for a short period, so that they could not be regarded as fairly representing the condition of the mining population. Many of them also spoke only Welsh, and the informatron obtained through others could not be 30 thoroughly depended upon. I have not therefore given the results of the examination of these men. The general im- pression produced by their inspection waS, however, that they are a less robust race and less healthy than the miners in the north of England. Scarcely any of the men had com- menced to work underground at a very early age, and many of them had become miners at somewhat late periods of life, and it struck me that those who had commenced only after having attained adtilt age, were especially delicate looking. As regards the causes of disease among the miners, 40 there was sufficient evidence that they correspond with those which have been shown to operate in Cornwall and the North of England. The recently opened mines are apparently generally well ventilated, though I was in- formed that in some places and at some times, the air was dead or rather slackish and that choke damp or carbonic acid gas was occasionally given off from the shaly strata. The defect was reported not however to be such as to prevent the men working, for the candles can always be got to burn, though they require to be some- '^0 times much held on one side, listed. No artificial system of ventilation is usually employed, except a fan occasionally, in driving. The men enter and leave the mines as in Cornwall, by vertical shafts and ladders, but the workings are at present not so deep as to make the climbing very injurious to the men, though I was told that the ladders tried the men who were getting into years, and whose breathing was at all affected. Some of the levels are said to be very wet. The older mines, from the information which was given 60 me by the men whom I examined, must have frequently been in a very defective state. One of the invalided men stated that he was in a mine at Brongwyn on the 4th of Se])tember 1864, when 7 men were suffocated by choke damp. He said that the air of the mine was generally good, but became very defective about nine days before the occurrence of the accident, as shown by the candles being with difficulty got to burn, and only burning when they were held on one side. On the morning of the accident the men did not return at the changing time, and he was sent down 70 to see what was the matter. On getting to the bottom of the shaf he found that the damp was in the mine, and with difficulty escaped, and was only got to the surface with the assistance of others. He was not sleepy and knew everything that passed, but had no power in his limbs, could not take hold of anything, trembled all over, and could not stir. He was ill for a fortnight, and then got about again, but had never been so good a man since, his breathing being affected and his limbs weak. He, how- ever, only suffered seriously after he had sustained an 80 injury in 1856. He is now 56 years of age; his health first failed when 46 years of age, but he continued to work underground till two years ago. He confirmed the state- ment which was frequently made in the north that when the . miners work in bad au* tneir appetite fails, and they have pains in the bowels, and on leaving the mine spit black stuff, or stuff as black as a cherry or bilberry. Some of the smaller mines in parts of North Wales, which I did not visit, appear to be at present in a very bad state. A man, met with at Minera, a smith who had worked at his trade at different mines, said that at a small 90 mine at Nantfrancon and at other mines in Carnarvonshire, the men suffered very much. He had seen the men come up after working in such places, as if they were almost dying, and he supposed they might have died if they had remained below much longer. They would throw them- selves on the ground quite spent when they first came up, but it would soon go off. The bad air affected them in their heads at first, and it took the power out of their limbs, and after working some time their wind became bad, and they were never fit for hard work afterwards. This 100 was the case with the young men, more or less, but par- ticularly with men who were getting a little into years. One of the medical men residing at Mold mentioned that formerly the miners were subject to lead colic. After special enquiriesof practitioners in other lead mining districts, this assertion has not been confirmed. Both in Cornwall and the North of England the miners suffer much from symptoms of indigestion, pains in the stomach and bowels, and constipation or diarrhoea, especially the former. These symptoms are probably due to the cold and damp to which 110 they are exposed, and to working with their feet in cold water. The bad air which they breathe also produces indigestion, and the symptoms have apparently no con- nexion with lead. In the neighbourhood of Mold, where coal is got on the spot, the ores were formerly in some instances smelted near the mines, and thus the miners may have occasionally worked as smelters, and so have suffered from the influence of lead. Note in reference to the occurrence of fever in cottages at Maes y Safyn, near Mold. 120 At the Maes y Safyn mine, near Mold, I found that fever had been very prevalent. At the mine there are some very good cottages, with slated roofs, four large and high rooms ; properly provided with privies, and underdrained, and with a passage at the back and a large garden in fi-ont. 'J'here are also other cottages which are extremely defective. They are small, thatched, huddled close together in rows, and generally consist of only two small and low rooms ; the upper one in the slanting roof, and reached only by a ladder; the windows too are generally small, and usually 130 do not admit of being opened. These cottages are placed upon the side of a some- what steep and rocky hill, with a rapid descent to a valley in front. Several of them have pigsties ; none are underdrained; few are said to have privies, and scarcely any have any garden ground. From the mode in which they are built in two irregular rows, one behind the other, the drainage of the upper row sets down to the lower. At the time of my visit, streams of dirty water from the pig- sties and dirt heaps were oozing across the foot paths in 140 different places, and the ground around the cottages must be completely saturated. There are about 35 to 40 of these cottages, and only 8 or 10 of the good ones ; the rent of the former, withovit any garden ground, I was told was 3/. per annum, while the good cottages, with a large piece of garden ground, were only Al. 10s. The total population of the hamlet is from 300 to 350. Shortly before my visit there had been many cases of fever, but they had all recovered. P'ever was prevailing 150 in other ])arts of the district; and it was apparently intro- duced into Maes y Safyn from Gwernymynnyd, a village about 2 miles off in the road to Mold. It commenced first in a public house on the opposite side of the valley to the cottages ; then appeared in the good cottages ; and lastly in the bad cottages, and amongst them it continued to prevail for a long time. Altogether I am informed by Dr. Hughes, of Mold, that at least 56 cases of fever occurred, though only one proved fatal. The situation of the hamlet on the slope of a rocky hill in a somewhat shallow valley, affording 160 every facility for drainage, without any elevated hills to pre- vent ventilation, is certainly a healthy one; but huddled together as the cottages are, wanting in every means of ventilation, and unprovided with any proper drainage, it would be scarcely jjossible to select a jjlace in which fever would be more likely to arise spontaneously, or, if intro- duced, to spread.

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