From the Forest (25 page)

The early iron and coal mines in the Forest of Dean were small domestic industries and presumably ran in tandem with farming activities. But the miners of the Dean were highly skilled and fiercely independent. The area was geographically separate from the rest of the country and the Crown owned the Forest of Dean (rather than merely owning the hunting rights, as in most Royal Forests), so localism and independence could flourish, less afflicted by landlordism (bad barons, or later rich aristocrats) than in many places. The community developed strong traditions and customs, of which the most famous are the Free Miners.

The Free Miners of the Forest of Dean have a long and heroic history. Their present rights and privileges were formally laid down in 1838, in the Dean Forest (Mine) Act.
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It was unusual in the nineteenth century for ancient traditions, especially rural ones, to win out over ‘big business’, but this is what happened in the Forest of Dean. The act conferred perpetual and well-defined rights:

All male persons born or hereafter to be born and abiding within the said Hundred of St Briavels, of the age of twenty one years and upwards, who shall have worked a year and a day in a coal or iron mine within the said Hundred of St Briavels, shall be deemed and taken to be Free Miners.
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A ‘hundred’ is an old administrative district, smaller than a county and larger than a parish. Tradition claims the name refers to an area expected to produce 100 men at arms for the Crown’s wars. About St Briavel barely anything at all is known – legend pleasingly relates that he was a forest hermit, but suggests no dates for his life, nor is there any record of him before 1130.

A Free Miner is one with the right to mine a ‘gale’ – a specific area of the forest – provided it is not being worked by another Free Miner. The Act in fact formalised a very ancient tradition. Although the oldest record of the miners’ laws and customs dates from 1610, there is good evidence that they already had exclusive mineral rights in 1244. The 1610 document contains 41 regulations for the ‘winning of Myne [iron ore] and Sea Cole [coal]’.
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The document lays down clear principles and laws on details like rights of access and the method for defining a claim. The duties of the Gaveller (the King’s representative) included the collection of royalties in cash or kind, whilst the court ‘that is called Myne Lawe’ allowed the Miners to be largely self-governing.

During the medieval period these privileges were not unique to the Dean miners. Edward I, who granted them a Royal Charter, granted similar privileges to other mining districts – for example, in Derbyshire. Legend claims that Dean’s Royal Charter was given as a reward for the services the Dean miners rendered the King in the recapture of Berwick-upon-Tweed from the Scots in 1296. Because of their experience in mining, they provided the army with a range of skills: undermining fortifications, creating earthworks and building timber structures. They were also called upon to serve in France, at the battles of Crécy (1346), Poitiers (1356) and Agincourt (1415). In the seventeenth century a dozen of them were delegated to sail with Frobisher on his abortive search for the Northwest Passage. They were the Crown’s men by feudal law, and were renowned for their mining skills, hardy nature, gritty determination and ferocity in battle.

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 ochre
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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.