Coal Miners' Cottages, Bedlington Colliery, Northumberland, England

In my day to day life my ancestors are never far from my mind.  I wonder about their days—the work they were doing (especially the women and children), what the weather was like, how they cooked and what they ate, whether they planted a garden . . . .  I especially wonder about their home environment.

Not long ago I discovered Bedlington Northumberland Extensive Urban Survey, prepared by the Northumberland City Council.  Several of my ancestral lines lived in or near Bedlington, Northumberland, including my Doyle, Reay, and Laws families.  This survey contains a rich history of the area.  I was especially interested to read a description of the homes where coal miners and their families lived.

Might my ancestors have lived in a cottage like one of these?

Miners Cottages, Pit Village, Beamish Museum, courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Or these?

Miners Cottages, Pit Village, Beamish Museum, courtesy Wikimedia Commons

The above survey noted that in 1849, terraced cottages, likely constructed of brick, were built at Bedlington Colliery for 300 colliers and their families.  This is how they were described: 

. . . each with a small garden behind . . . living rooms of about 14 feet square with a pantry behind, the floor is flagged and generally has a bed in it.  There is a chamber above—reached by a step ladder.  The room is open to the slates.  A detached stone or brick oven in front, serves for baking bread for the inhabitants of a row of some 20-30 cottages.  Pigsties were generally a distance from the house at the bottom of the garden (Rawlinson 1849, 36).

It's unclear to me whether the first floor has just a single, 14-foot square room, or more than one.  From the looks of the cottages in the photos above, I suspect there's one room at the front of the house and a pantry room behind it.  I try to envision my coal mining ancestors and their families living in a room 14" square.  What a different life compared to mine.  Possessions would have been minimal.  

Another description of the miners' cottages and the living environment of coal miners comes from A Memoir of Northumberland, Descriptive of Its Scenery, Monuments, and History by William Sidney Gibson, M.A., published in 1860.  (See pages 32-32.)

He writes that agricultural labourers' homes were favored above most cottages in the pit-villages of the mining population and then describes the cottages of the miners. 

Long rows and aggregations of unsightly cottages, peopled only by those who earn their living from the adjacent pits, mark too many of the colliery districts; and the cottages, especially where the property is leasehold, are generally hideous, sordid, barrack-like abodes, not indeed destitute of cleanliness and homely comfort, but totally wanting in the humanising though humble adornments of southern rustic homes:  no flowers grace these dwellings of dusky toil, no verdure relieves the bare cindery earth around them. . . .

This information certainly gives a perspective of my ancestors' lives that I hadn't considered before, lives that were Spartan, simple, minimal.  And oh, the coal dust that must have been everywhere!  In the absence of physical comfort, I hope their homes were enhanced by love.

-–Nancy.

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