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Hetton Colliery Office.
Notice. [Coal mining ephemera].
Publisher: J. Beckwith, printer. Houghton,
Date of Publication: 1832
Stock Code: 14384
Broadside approximately, 29 x 22 cm. Single sheet titled in bold. Very slight offsetting to right edge, slight minor crease, minor toning to edges, otherwise crisp and clean. Printed just weeks, if not days, after the end of the 1832 Miners Strike this Notice warns that police have been directed to check interference with the ‘strangers’ bound to Hetton colliery. Following labour shortages in the late eighteenth-century, collieries bound workers to them, forcing them into indenture. The 1831 Miners Strike produced a new miners labour union that sought to improve working conditions and wages for the pitmen and the Northumberland and Durham Miners Strike of 1832 was an an attempt by the colliery owners to break that union. Bitter and divisive, the colliery owners eventually won out through a combination of blackleg labour, forced evictions and starvation to break the miners resolve. Hetton Colliery was the first colliery in the Great Northern Coalfield where miners and their families were forcibly evicted from their homes. Working hours were lengthened and wages systematically reduced following their victory. Rare and unsurprisingly unrecorded. £150.00