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
Licence: Public Domain Mark
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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![that the men, for ijcrsons who are engaged in a laborious and exhausting occupation, do not get a sufficiency of nutritious food, more particularly fresh butcher's meat. The miners are, as has been before said, very thin, sallow, and ill nourished, and for men engaged in athletic pursuits are not generally very muscular; and, though their condition may be in part ascribed to the profuse perspiration when they are working in the mines, the deficiency in the quantity of nutritious food is probably influential in its produc- 10 tion. It was not easy to ascertain the precise quantity of butcher's meat which enters into the diet of the men, but I met with no one who stated that he got more than half a pound of uncooked meat in a day, and they assert that they only obtain this amount of fresh meat very occasionally. The irregularity with which they get their meals was assigned by one man as a cause of the indisposition under which he laboured. I have been informed that the men indulge too largely in beer ; and this may possibly be the case on the pay days ; 20 for the practice of paying in notes, adopted in some instances, almost necessarily drives the men to the public house to get the notes cashed. I however made frequent in- quiries of the men working in different districts and of the overseers, and, if not entirely misniforined, conclude that the Cornish miners are not an intemperate race of men, at least when compared with the working population of Lon- don and other large towns. I was assured that they rarely drink spirits. 1 cannot think that their habits in this resjject can be blamed as the cause of their unfa-\'Ourable .30 sanitary condition. The men are also said to be much addicted to smoking, and they excuse this habit with the assertion that it is necessary to smoke in the mine to avoid the injurious effect of the air and of the smoke of the blast- ing powder. The practice is certainly very objection- al5le. Other causes which may be blamed for the state of the miners are the absence of fresh air and sun light, the breathing of a deleterious atmos]ihere, the inhalation of gritty particles, the heat of some of the workings, the violent muscular exertion, and the exposure to sudden 40 chiUs after working in the mine or on coming to the surface. Absence of Sunlight, Sfc.—At all seasons of the year some of the men must be very little exposed to sun hght and fresh air. Working as they do in spells of 8 hours, they must even in summer be much in the dark, and in winter can scarcely have any sunlight at all. This will go far to explain the peculiar blanched appearance, the glassy eyes, and pale lips which are constant among the miners, and even in the men who regard themselves as in robust health. This is the more striking from the peculiarly fresh com- 50 plexions and the healthy appearance of the other portions of the population of the same district. By the politeness of the Rev. Mr. Elhs, I visited, in conjunction with Mr. Temple, the National Schools at Pool, which are attended by a large proportion of miners' children. On the day of our ^'isit, Monday, the attendance was smaller than usual, but in the female school we found 46 infants and 82 girls, and in the boys' school 140 boys ; and I have certainly never seen a more healthy set of children collected together. I did not, on close inspection, detect a child with swelled 60 glands or other signs of scrofula, and was informed on inquiry that such were very rare. The older children also, both boys and ghls, who are seen working at the surface in dressing the ores, are usually very healthy looking ; and the young women who are employed in breaking the ore and picking it before it is crushed and dressed, have remark- ably clear, bright, healthy complexions. The married women who are seen in the cottages are also very healthy looking. No contrast can indeed be more striking than that which is presented by the children employed at the surface and 70 those who work in the mines ; and the men often have the appearance of being thoroughly worn out and decrepit when their wives, at about the same age, are healthy and young looking. Deleterious influence of the air of the Mines.—There can be no doubt that the air of the mines, especially in the deeper workings, and at considerable distances from the shafts, becomes extremely impure from the very imperfect ventilation, the deteriorating influence of the respiration of the men at work, and the combustion SO of the candles which they burn. This cause seems indeed to be by far the most important in determining the unhealthy condition of the miners. The ventilation generally becomes more difficult and defective with the increasing depth of the mines, and the state of the miners is therefore iisuaUy found most unsatisfactory in the dis- tricts where the mines have attained the greatest depth. The ventilation is, however, most seriously interfered with by the distance of the levels from a shaft, and several of the inen comjilained much of the character of the air which 90 they had breathed in workings which were very near the surface. Of 45 cases in which the men who were examined assigned specific causes for the failure of their health, in no less than ' 6 they traced their indisposition to having worked in places where the air was dead, bad, thin, light, or poor, as they variously described it, alone or in con- junction with other causes. The miners, however, do not usually speak of the breathing of bad air as directly occa^ sioning the illnesses under which they labour. On the contrary they regard this, and doubtless correctly, as impair- 100 ing their power and giving rise to a state of general weakness in which they become susceptible to any other morbific influences, and often suffer severely and for a long period from indisposition occasioned hj some very trivial exciting cause. Most persons with whom I conversed on the subject, the miners themselves, the underground captains, and indeed almost every one who had ever worked underground, ad- mitted the frequency with which the air of the mines was impure. I was often told that all men who went under- 110 ground had to breathe bad air more or less, and the tables in the appendix afford ample confirmation of the correctness of this assertion. Of 54 out of the 63 fully reported cases of disease amongst the miners, in which the character of the air in which the men had worked is stated, in 38 the men reported that at various times they had worked in bad air ; of the remaining 16, '.i stated that the air in which they had worked had never been particularly bad, 8 that it was generally good, and 5 only said that they had always worked in good air. It is possible that had fuller inquiries been 120 instituted the yjroportion of cases in which the air was defective would have proved to be much greater than this. Of 22 men whom I questioned on the subject, who were still working in mines in the neighbourhood of Liskeard, not less than 18 complained of the character of the air in which they worked. When not at any great depth and not far removed from a shaft, there is often a very ample supply of fresh air, indeed the men not unfrequently complain of suffering from the draughts of cold air in the shafts and levels; but, when 130 working at a close end driving a level, or getting the stuff; or when engaged in sinking a winze, or cutting a rise, or driving crosscuts so as to open up the different levels, the men state that the air is often very dead or bad. In such cases they say that their candles cannot be got to burn, except when the wicks are constantly teazed out, or when they are held on one side. Sometimes they stated that the candles could not be got to burn at all, so that they required to be placed some distance behind the part at which the men were at 140 work. In other .cases the men said that even lucifers if struck would not set fire to the wood ; and more than one miner told me that on going to his work in the morning at a close end, a long way from the shaft, they often could not get their candles to burn at all, and had to take off their coats and beat them about so as to create some little current of air, before the candles could be lighted. That these statements were not overdrawn I had personal proof in Dolcoath mine, otherwise extremely well ventilated, for in one part where some men were at work sinking a 150 winze, at about 40 fathoms from the shaft and 1.00 from the adit, two candles were found burning very badly, and one actually went out while v,-e were looking down. Tlie work of tlie kind which has been referred to is chiefly done by tutwork, and accordingly it is the tutworkers who suffer most fi'om mining. The following amongst others affords a striking instance of the injurious effects of the air which this class of men often have to work in. A man 33 years of age, who had first gone underground when 14 years old, stated that he had been quite well till he worked in a 160 close end, in which the air was so bad that the candles could scarcely be got to burn; the level was 160 fathoms from surface, and the mine was also cold and very wet. Four other men were employed in the same place. AU the others were repeatedly laid hj; but he continued the work for three months when he became seriously ill, and, though five months had elapsed when I saw him, he had never been well since. Another of the men was also laid by ill at the same time. The quantity of unconsumed carbonaceous material 170 thrown off by the candles, especially when burning so imper- fectly as they are reported to do, and the gases and smoke from the explosion of gunpowder, must further tend to ren- der the air of the mines injurious. The very small move- ment of air is also attested by what the men very frequently complain of, the slowness with which the smoke from the blastings clears off, or as they term it the length of time which it lies in the mine. The excessive prostration of strength, altogether dispro- portionate to any evidences of actual disease which can be 180 detected, and the affection described by the men as slow fever are precisely the forms of indisposition which would a priori be expected to lie occasioned by slow poisoning from](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b23983292_0010.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
