Jess: 1889 – 1890

The Midlothian coal field forms a basin fifteen miles long that stretches from Carlops out into the Firth of Forth. It is made up of seams of varying thicknesses, all named, lying beneath Blackband ironstone. At Mauricewood they mined the edge coals of the widest of them: the Great Seam.

Mauricewood lay within the estate of the Clerks of Penicuik (the family home of James Clerk Maxwell). On September 5, 1889 fire caused the deaths of sixty-three men and boys, thirty-six of whose bodies were not recovered until March 1890. It was owned and run by the Shotts Iron Company.

In 1889 the Shotts Iron Company was under considerable financial strain: start-up costs at Mauricewood were high; costly litigation instigated by local landowners stopped smelting at the pithead so that all materials now had to be transported to Shotts in Lanarkshire. There had been no shareholder dividend for three years.

A Government Inquiry into the circumstances of the Disaster concluded that it was accidental and attached no blame to the Company. A Supplementary Report issued in April 1890 stated that it was obvious from the position the men were found in that a good number had survived for some time.

 

I don’t think you ever get over something like Mauricewood. I suppose I was lucky in that the whole town suffered and I had my mother and father and my sister to help me. I wouldn’t have coped half as well if I hadn’t had them – and Sadie.
Sadie was my best friend from when we were children. We’d stayed in the same street and our mothers were friends. Her father was killed when he was just a young man. He fell off a roof and they brought him home on an old door. After that, my mother would often make an extra lot of soup and I'd be sent over with it in a bowl with a tea towel over the top. I didn't dare trip. Or if she was baking – my mother was a lovely baker – something always went across the road. Sadie was as often as not at our house. She was a right character, full of fun and cheery. She had the bonniest black hair and big brown eyes. She was always small, and I was always bigger than her. And she loved singing. Her father had been a singer; he’d known all the old songs, the bothy ballads, and she was a quick learner, too quick her father said. She shouldn't have been singing some of those songs. We didn't know the half of what they were about. We just giggled because we knew they were about courting and how you got babies and that we didn’t dare sing them at Sunday School.
We both started at Harper’s paper mill on the same day. My father had word from the foreman to send us down. Sadie got a start collecting shavings; with her being so small they must have thought that she'd be better at getting under and between the machines to pick them up. They started me on the rag picking. I couldn't say which of us was worse off. The rags were full of dust from the disinfection powder and I'd breathe it in and half choke sometimes. And the stuff wasn't really clean. It wouldn't be the first time I've come across a dead mouse or dried-in dirt sticking things together. My job was to cut off buttons and hooks and eyes, to cut the bones out of corsets, and get rid of anything sharp or hard that wasn't going into the paper. We lasted about six months there. Sadie left first. She was sick of the fleas! That and doing nothing but crawl about the floor and trail huge bags of shavings from the bottom of the mill to the top. She wasn't scared to speak her mind, Sadie. She told them straight that their mill was dirty and that she was disgusted at having to wash herself out of the same barrel as everybody else before she went home. I left not long after. Sadie had got into Valleyfield and was in the cutting – a cleaner job – cutting the paper as it came off the guillotine and putting it into boxes for the overhaulers. She got me in beside her and we had a great time. It was hard work and we did the same things day in day out but we had a good laugh and it wasn't too long before we got ourselves into the overhauling. We were good workers and we were both smart. The overhauling salle was so clean and big and airy with lots of windows so that we had plenty of light to work in. It was amazing how fast we could check a ream of paper. Although we suffered bad with paper cuts. There would be times when our hands were red raw. My mother bought boracic ointment for me to rub into them. But I was lucky; I was never bothered with dermatitis like some of them were.
We were always together. Saturday afternoons, after we'd got our pay and divvied up at home, we’d go down the street with the money we had left and rake around, maybe buy something for ourselves if we’d saved up enough, maybe some lace to diddle up an old dress if there was a dance that night. Then on Sunday we'd be at Church: Sadie at the Parish, me at the Free, though we never let that bother us. Sadie would call me a Disrupter and I’d tell her that she’d burn in hell with all the rest of them that were damned, but we’d be laughing when we said it.
On Sundays we went to church; we'd put on our best clothes and sit on a hard pew for the best part of two hours. I'd suck pan drops and let my mind wander during the sermon. I'd always try my best to follow the gist of what the Minister was saying but my mind would drift and, as often as not, I'd be dreaming about what I might get up to with Martin Stark if only I could get him to notice me. The Minister would be doing his best to help us stay on the paths of righteousness and I'd be wondering how I might sort my hair for later on when Martin might be in the crowd that went for a stroll to the Roslyn road end.
That was the thing to do on a Sunday night if the weather was fair. All the young ones would walk out there. They'd come from Penicuik, Auchendinny, Roslyn – even some from Loanhead. There would be a good crowd all blethering and carrying on. Many’s a couple got together that way. That's where Sadie met Johnny Glass. He'd just come into the town to work in the mine. I still find it hard to say its name. Johnny was lodging with Davie and his first wife, Maggie. He was a fine lad, Johnny Glass; you never heard a cross word out of him. He was the last one they found, a good few days after Davie. I’d never seen Sadie in such a state as that day they got him out. I went with her when she went to identify the body. It wasn't as if she didn't know what to expect. We'd all been looking for our own since they'd started bringing the bodies out. Jimmy Irvine had lain for three days in that shed they used as a mortuary before they decided it must be him. So we'd seen what the six months since the Disaster had done: turned them red with the rust that had seeped out of the ironstone; mummified some so that they looked as if they were still living. But those who had found them warned us not to touch.