As a family historian, I'm greatly interested in what my ancestors experienced working in the pits in Ayrshire, Fifeshire & Lanarkshire. Some idea of what that was like can be gleaned from the previous "Conditions" page..
But just as important an area of interest is how they lived.

What were living conditions like for them?
Where did they live?
How well did they live?

Overview:

For the majority of us our main period of research is the late 18th & 19th century. Scotland at that time was going through the remarkable period of population growth that marked the industrial revolution. The population of the country increased dramatically in this period, from 1,265,380 in 1755; to 2,888,742; less than 100 years later in 1851.
The population of one county, Lanarkshire increased from 81,700 in 1755 to over half a million (523,800) in 1851.

In the 1830s and 40s the rapid development of the coal fields bought with it a greatly increased population in the towns and villages that supported the mines. The majority of this population was a result of migration. Migration was a great feature of the socio-economic changes of the 19th century.
It took place at various levels from national or international all the way down to movement between parishes within a county.

The Industrial Revolution required a work force and that work force needed improved agricultural methods to feed it. Improvements in agriculture pushed farm workers off the land and into the new trades and occupations of the new industries. Iron working and Coal mining being the two with the greatest demands for this new labour. Coal was sought to fuel the iron-works, the iron in turn used for building machines which being steam-driven also required coal as their fuel!

Housing:

So into the towns poured vast numbers of men with their families seeking employment, and so the towns expanded into dirty reeking collections of buildings, built back to back and with few windows and little or no drainage. Housing this influx of workers and their families meant that many thousands of dwellings need to be rapidly constructed close to the collieries and ironworks.
These houses were usually built in long rows of up to a hundred or more single story dwellings often laid out in parallel to others (see maps of Coatbridge & Blantyre)
Where space for building was at a premium (and cost determined) other houses were provided in the form of tenements, usually 2, 3 or 4 storey buildings providing single or two roomed dwellings.
The vast majority of these dwellings were built as cheaply as possible and provided the barest minimum of amenities. They were not built to last, yet some of them were still being occupied a century later.

Despite the increase of building that took place, the result of the great population explosion and accompanying housing shortage meant that miners (and others of the laboring class) lived in conditions that were by any standard overcrowded.
Census records reflect this overcrowding, despite the fact that many lodgers would not be recorded by census takers. In Coatbridge in Lanarkshire a Mining Commissioner reported that on average six people were occupying a single room dwelling. Throughout the 1800s this overcrowding continued as did the population growth and in 1911 it was such that nearly 50% of all Scots lived in single or two-roomed dwellings.

In Auchenraith in Blantyre in 1892, William Dixons Ltd owned 42 single-roomed and 41 double-roomed houses which provided shelter for at least 492 people. These dwellings had no wash houses or coal cellars (coal would be stored indoors) no running water, had an open sewer behind 12 doorless, henroost privies (so called because you couldn't sit down but had to perch on them!) and two drinking fountains.
I can personally vouch for the authenticity of these dwellings as I lived in one during the 1950s by which time they were condemned, but had the luxury of piped cold water.

The parish of Old Monklands (now known as Coatbridge) where a lot of my ancestors lived, worked and died had more than it's share of poor housing. The following excerpt comes from "Coatbridge 3 Centuries of Change", by Peter Drummond & James Smith.

The Rows - The Miners Housing

The population of Old Monkland Parish in 1801 was just over 4,000.
By 1851 Old Monkland contained 27,333 people dependent for their living on more than 50 blast furnaces, malleable iron works, tube works and innumerable coal and ironstone pits scattered across the parish. This continually increasing population had poured into an unprepared rural economy, from Cornwall, Staffordshire, Ireland, Wales and the Scottish Highlands (including 70 crofters who were brought to Cambroe in the 1840s as strike breakers), and later on from Lithuania. This was to create serious problems in a district where there was no overall body effectively responsible for the organisation of its basic welfare and public health services, let alone the provision of housing, until the creation of the burgh in 1885.

In most cases the coal and iron masters were responsible for the erection of their own workers' houses - Dixon at Calder, Baird at Gartsherrie, Wilson at Dundyvan, Merry and Cunningham at Carnbroe and Addie at Langloan. They were therefore 'tied houses', tied to jobs: the sack and eviction thus went hand in hand, thereby punishing a worker's wife and children very harshly should he be deemed guilty of industrial misconduct.

The exact location of a row was determined by the owners' desire to have it as close to the mine or works as possible, since he would not need to buy additional land for his workers' homes. It also meant that he could keep tight social discipline over his workforce, being able - as Baird did - to inspect the condition of their houses, collect the rent, check up on absentees, and if necessary carry out evictions of the families of the 'troublesome workers'. On occasion of strikes, as in the bitter miners' strikes of the 1840s, whole communities would be put out on the street to fend for themselves within hours of the withdrawal of labour.   For the worker himself it meant he endured a condition similar to that of Orwell's nightmare of the future, '1984', in which the state, 'Big Brother' has full knowledge of personal and social life and thus effectively controls the individual. Over a century before 1984, the mine owner or ironmaster and his overseers were just such 'Big Brothers' to many workers, since their family life and leisure activities were conducted only yards from the workplace. For his wife - after women were banned from working in the pits from the mid-19th century - it meant not only insecurity in the family home but a constant battle against pollution from smoke and grit of the house, the furniture, and the washing.
The 600 yards Long Row at Dundyvan, for example was split in two by Dundyvan No. 5 pit, sunk between two gable ends. For the iron workers at Gartsherrie and Summerlee (the latter in Merrystone Square), whose rows lay only yards from the open-topped furnaces, the only 'blessing' was that being to the west of the works they lay upwind for most of the year.

The pattern made by the layout of these rows was very different from the older hamlets and villages in the area, where variety, although unintended, was the essence. The slow pace of agricultural population growth meant that a house was added when needed, to an existing settlement, often of a different size, style or distance from the street compared to its neighbour. The need however to 'mass produce' cheap workers' housing led to monotonously similar houses arranged in long lines -the essential 'row' - or in squares: in these, the open spaces between were cluttered with common wash houses, dry toilets (with no flush) and middens. The actual construction of the houses was usually of the lowest quality: the possibility of a mine or ironworks having a short life meant that they were not built to last; and investment in the capital equipment of the works was seen as being far more important that investment in the human equipment, the workers and their families. Let us look at two examples.

The Carnbroe Rows of Merry and Cunningham (built 1838) consisted of three single storeyed rows running along the steep bank of the Calder. The most westerly row, known locally as the Monkey Row, consisted of twenty back-to-back single ends containing two hole-in-the-wall beds - 'those cubicles of consumption' as one commentator described this feature. The other two rows were room-and-kitchens. These rows, which stood into the mid-20th century, were served by dry toilets, one common water pipe, and open sheughs (drains) until 1923, when a rude brick scullery with cold water, and a toilet with unfinished inside walls and bare rafters, were added to each house. It was into the 1930s before gas was led into these rows, replacing paraffin lamps for lighting: electricity never managed to get there before the bulldozer. Poor construction expressed itself in peeling wallpaper, rotting floorboards and repeated burst pipes in winter.

Throughout their existence, the workers' rows were visited by recurrent eruptions of cholera and enteric fever (both contracted from polluted water and food) typhus fever (from body lice) or endemic typhus (from the bites of rat fleas). The eradication of these came with the provision of piped clean water, housing improvements, rubbish collection, and personal hygiene in the 20th century. But it was well on into this century before such basic human rights were won.

The Royal Commission of 1912 reported on housing in Scotland and visited the district in March 1914. Their opinion was that: 'As an extreme example of the unsatisfactory housing we may quote the following description of the Rosehall Rows' (these were built by Robert Addie who leased the mineral right of the Douglas Support Estate in 1837 and built Langloan iron works in 1841)

'They consist of four long parallel rows of single storey hovels. Most of them have no roves to carry the rainwater from the roof. Rainfall simply runs down the roof and then runs down the walls or falls down by chance as the wind decides. Coals are kept below the beds. The closet accommodation is hideous. A number of these hovels are built back to back . . . The closets outside are not used by the women . . . In some of the rows 7 or 8 people occupy a single room. The sanitary conveniences were in a state of revolting filth.'

In the 1930s George Orwell's book 'The Road to Wigan Pier', which tried to bring home to his readers the depths of poverty and misery endured by the working class, and in particular by the miners of northern England, used a photograph of these Rosehall Rows for illustration, although by then they had been cleared away. In this they were outlasted by the Gartsherrie Rows, which were built by the Baird company for its workers early in the nineteenth, and were finally emptied in the early 1960s. They had managed to keep one pace ahead of the demolition gang and bulldozer by modifications; in the 1890s, many of the single-roomed rows were combined to make double-roomed dwellings: in the twentieth century, this reversed version of the normal growth process of cell division, continued as some two-apartments were united in four-apartments with the luxury of an inside toilet. However these spacious abodes had their limitations - in the late 1940s some tenants were still at the stage of having to install electricity at their own expense - and in any case outside toilets and two room accommodation were still standard.

By the mid-1960s these last examples of the housing conditions of many nineteenth century working class families had finally been cleared, and largely replaced by terraced or semi-detached housing built to twentieth century specifications.

Sanitation:

In 1842 a report was completed by Edwin Chadwick, who was a reformist and a prominent campaigner for social justice and the general improvement of sanitary conditions within British society. Chadwick was hoping to introduce a Public Health Act, he had gained several years of experience as Secretary to the Poor Law Commissions and this experience had without doubt contributed to his views on the causes and effects of poverty, which differed from those of the majority of his peers.
The reasons behind the terrible health problems of that time, according to Chadwick, were due to a lack of sanitation. This cannot be attributed to the fact that working class people were often considered filthy by nature, on the contrary, Chadwick realised that due to their extreme poverty these people were unable to afford the simple luxuries of cleanliness, and people were washing in and drinking from often contaminated water supplies, much as we see happen today in third world impoverished nations.
In 1840, Edwin Chadwick had set about collecting data and compiling his report.
By 1842 the Poor Law Commissioners finally published his report on the "Inquiry into the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain."

[Report...from the Poor Law Commissioners on an Inquiry into the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain. London, 1842, pp. 369-372.]
"After as careful an examination of the evidence collected as I have been enabled to make, I beg leave to recapitulate the chief conclusions which that evidence appears to me to establish.

First, as to the extent and operation of the evils which are the subject of this inquiry:--

That the various forms of epidemic, endemic, and other disease caused, or aggravated, or propagated chiefly amongst the labouring classes by atmospheric impurities produced by decomposing animal and vegetable substances, by damp and filth, and close and overcrowded dwellings prevail amongst the population in every part of the kingdom, whether dwelling in separate houses, in rural villages, in small towns, in the larger towns--as they have been found to prevail in the lowest districts of the metropolis.

That such disease, wherever its attacks are frequent, is always found in connection with the physical circumstances above specified, and that where those circumstances are removed by drainage, proper cleansing, better ventilation, and other means of diminishing atmospheric impurity, the frequency and intensity of such disease is abated; and where the removal of the noxious agencies appears to be complete, such disease almost entirely disappears.

That high prosperity in respect to employment and wages, and various and abundant food, have afforded to the labouring classes no exemptions from attacks of epidemic disease, which have been as frequent and as fatal in periods of commercial and manufacturing prosperity as in any others.

That the formation of all habits of cleanliness is obstructed by defective supplies of water. That the annual loss of life from filth and bad ventilation are greater than the loss from death or wounds in any wars in which the country has been engaged in modern times"...

All this was very much in evidence in the tenements and miners-rows that had shot up all over lowland Scotland. Often shoddily built as cheaply as possible and as a rule plagued with inadequate drainage. Open middens often overflowed sewage into houses, these same middens only being cleared once or twice a year in carts and more often than not dumped into the local canals and rivers.
Water supply in most cases came from an outside tap which served the whole neighbourhood and might only run for a few hours on certain days of the week.
The quality of the water was often highly suspect, and even as late as 1895 the high rates of mortality from Enteric Fever from poor quality water in Blantyre in Lanarkshire, was twice the death rate of anywhere else in the country.

In his Book, "The Lanarkshire Miners" Alan Campbell, makes several references to the village of Rosehall in Old Monklands and it's sanitation.
Apparently in 1864, the local newspaper (Airdrie, Coatbridge, Bathgate & Wishaw Advertiser) ran the headline "The Filthiest Puddle in the World" regarding an open cesspit near Rosehall.

"This drain on both sides of the public road receives all the filth from Rosehall Colliery houses & from other houses in that direction, and in that state it is allowed to lie & stagnate, and decompose... till the stench is absolutely intollerable (sic); while there are a great many families immediately above it's brink who, during the day, while obliged to look upon its odious & unsightly appearance, must have their bedrooms filled with its miasma during the night"...

10 years before this report, in 1854 there was an outbreak of Cholera in Rosehall, the bad sanitation & poor water supply providing a fertile breeding ground for the disease. At this time Rosehall had no piped water & 27 died in the overcrowded village.
Other comments on the village are hardly complimentary, relating to the riots over religious bigotry & drunkeness.
In the same year as the Cholera outbreak a miner was killed in a drunken brawl of which it was reported: "This village is one that has sprung into existence in the course of the last few years, from the many pits around, and has, from its beginning, been one of the most unruly"...

The area now known as Coatbridge was at that time very much a "frontier society" in character, this was referred to in a Mining Commission Report in 1842.
A local poet at the time, Janet Hamilton (1795-1873) from Langloan recalled the area from her childhood in the early decades of the 1800s and later of when it became industrialized.

"On thy green banks I loved to lie When high the sun & blue the sky- Thy silver waters gushing by- Watching the trout & minnow fry O'er pearly pebbles gleam By Fair Rosehall, through greenwood glades Thou glid'st through rose & hawthorn shades."

"A hunner funnels bleezin', reekin', Coal an' ironstone, charrin', smeekin'; Navvies, miners, keepers, fillers, Puddlers, rollers, iron millers; Resstit, reekit, raggit laddies, Firemen, enginemen an' Paddies; Boatsmen, banksmen, rough an' rattlin', 'Bout the wecht wi' colliers battlin', Sweatin', swearin', fechtin', drinkin'."

Health, Wealth, and Poverty:

However, it wasn't just overcrowding and poor sanitation that was responsible for the ill-health and high death rates amongst miners and others of the labouring class, poverty was arguably the most significant factor, as Tom Devine illustrates in the following passage:

"The connection between poverty & urban mortality was vividly demonstrated during the 3 great industrial recessions, of 1816-18, 1825 & 1836. It was these rather than poor sanitation as such that precipitated the first sharp upswing of urban death rates in Scottish cities in the 19th century. Significantly fever was much rarer in the early years of the century despite the fact that then too, sanitary provision was very poor. Typhus only became a major killer in the crisis years of profound economic difficulty following the Napoleonic wars. All three depressions were followed by savage epidemics in 1816-18, 1827-28 and 1837-39 which remorselessly drove up mortality rates in all the larger towns.
Poverty and destitution were obviously as lethal as inadequate sewerage & poor housing."

Miners in the 19th century were poor by any standard, but in comparison with others in the labouring class, they were quite well paid. As a generalization this is rather misleading, as the work that miners undertook was seasonal and wage rates varied from mine to mine as did the number of days in which they could work.
Wages in Scotland on average were significantly less than those paid across the border through the period 1860-1900 they ranged from 5% to around 10% below that of their English fellow miners.
In 1867 an underground labourer could earn an average income of about £20 to £22 per annum, whereas a hewer or fireman might earn half as much more at around around £30 per year. For the next couple of decades wages see-sawed up and down until the 1890's when wages had risen to the point that a miner could earn between 21/- and 24/- per week (but most mines were operating on a 4-day week basis by this time as the industry went into decline) with 20 shillings=£1. While this seems quite a good wage, it should be noted that from this weekly wage, miners had numerous deductions, for pick-sharpening, oil for lamps, blasting powder etc. During this time too, the Coalmasters reduced the daily rate by a shilling, which provoked reaction from the mining unions.

By 1911, most miners could earn 6/- per day at the coalface, with oncostmen earning slightly less at between 5/8d and 5/11d and firemen at that time earning a minimum of 6/- per day. This shows no increase since 1894, 17 years earlier.

But how much in "real terms" were these wages? J.E. Handley in his book "The Irish in Modern Scotland" published in 1947, gives some examples of what costs were in the period between 1850 and 1900.
"Over the half century from 1850 to 1900 the adult male labourer's weekly earnings varied between 12s. and 22s. The weekly income of the average Irish family in Scotland in that period, therefore, probably scaled between 25s and 35s.

Except for tea and sugar, the prices of common articles of food remained fairly steady. Tea, which cost 5s. a lb in the 'fifties, had fallen to about 2/6 twenty years later and sugar from 7d. to 3 1/2d. a lb. Potatoes and bread were also a trifle cheaper, the four pound loaf costing 6d. and potatoes 6d. or 7d. a stone in the 'seventies. Butter had risen in price from 1/2 to 1/6 a lb. By the 'nineties food had fallen in cost by almost 20% of the prices prevailing in the 'seventies, and thereafter prices remained steady until the first world war.

Samples of food budgets submitted by a number of working-class households to a Glasgow newspaper in March 1875 supply information about how immigrant families made ends meet. The newspaper in the course of a leader on "How do working men live?" assumed an average of 25s a week as a fair income for a large class of workers in Glasgow and neighbourhood. Taking a representative family of husband, wife and three young children, it apportioned 3s. weekly to cover rent of a single apartment plus taxes and water rates, and another 2/6 for fuel and gas. For food it suggested the following estimate: 8 loaves of bread at 6 1/2d. the four-pound loaf; 4 ounces of tea, 7 1/2d.; 4 ounces of coffee, 5d.; oatmeal, flour and rice, 2/6; milk, butter and cheese, 3s.; butcher meat, 6d. per day, 3/6d.; potatoes and vegetables, 2/6d.; fish, 1s.; treacle, dripping, etc., 1/2; making a total of 18s. and, including rent, fuel and light, weekly expenditure of £1 3 6. This left only 1/6 to pay for church dues, school fees, medical attention, soap, soda and sundries, subscription to friendly society, books, stationery, newspapers, trip to the coast and extras in time of distress. There remained the important item clothing for the family.

An examination of the illustrative budgets the leader called forth from members of the working class shows that the newspaper's estimate was substantially correct. The following weekly budget was typical. It was submitted by a family consisting of husband, wife and five children varying in age from three to fifteen. The man was employed as a bookkeeper at 25s. a week. The yearly rent for his three-apartment house was £13 10/- or about £17 when gas, water and other rates were added. A bedroom was let at 5/6 a week, and the two eldest boys earned jointly' 9/6, bringing a total weekly income to the house of £2 . The money apportioned to food for the week was distributed in the following manner: 7 loaves of bread, 3/6; 7 lb meal and 2 lb flour, 1/9; milk, 1/5; 1/4 lb each tea and coffee, 1/1; 4 lb sugar, 1/1; 2 lb butter, 3/-; 7 lb meat, 5/3; 2 stones of potatoes, 1/2; barley and rice, 6d; vegetables, 4d.; eggs, 1/6; soap, soda and sundries, 1/6; making a total of £1 2 2. To this sum there remained to be added school fees for two children, 6d., and fuel, 2/10, with an allowance of 7s. to cover rent, gas and rates, giving a total of £1 12 6 and a surplus of 7/6 from the income to meet all other expenses.

Rent was another substantial cost to the miner and his family, even though housing was provided by the colliery in most cases, rent still had to be paid. In the latter half of the 19th century, a "single-end" (single room) miners row would cost between £3 and £5 annual rent, depending on where the mine was. Double-roomed houses cost about double that, but could be advantageous as most mine-owners turned a blind eye to those who took in "lodgers" to give them a few shillings extra.

>>>>>>>>>>>> Stats from Merrystone?<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Children and Education:

Out of this horrendously unhealthy domestic environment, men, women and children would set out to work as long as 14 or 16 hours a day in the factories and mines. (It wasn't until June 5th 1870 that the first 8 hour day was won for miners in Fife) Children often had to work from the age of five simply because even the tiny wage they earned was needed to give the family enough to eat, and often the local authorities wouldn't provide poor relief until the children had been sent out to work.
This situation improved somewhat after the 1842 Commission into Children's Employment, but children still continued to work in the factories and mines throughout the whole of the 19th century and beyond.

In his 1842 "Report on the Employment of Children and Young Persons in the Mines and Collieries and Iron Works in the West of Scotland…" Robert Tancred reported:   "Riveters.
The boys employed by boilermakers commence work at a very early age, some before they are seven years old and others at eight…"

"Gartsherrie Colliery
No. 13. April 13th Janet Snedden, aged 9
Is a trapper in the Gartsherrie Pit No. 1, comes down with Janet Ritchie… Comes down a quarter before 6 and goes up again about 4pm…"

"Govan Colliery
No 6. April 1 Francis Conery, aged 9
Is a trapper (ie. Opens and shuts the trap-door for ventilation when the whirleys go past) He comes at six a.m. and goes at six. He gets up and down by the engine. He sits on a board in a niche in the wall without a light, quite in the dark, and holds a rope which is fastened to the door and when a whirley comes either way he pulls the rope and so opens the door and when the carriage has passed he shuts it again….. His brother is a trapper here also, and is older than he is. Neither of them ever went to any school, day or night."

The connection between poverty & urban mortality was vividly demonstrated during the 3 great industrial recessions, of 1816-18, 1825 & 1836. It was these rather than poor sanitation as such that precipitated the first sharp upswing of urban death rates in Scottish cities in the 19th century. Significantly fever was much rarer in the early years of the century despite the fact that then too, sanitary provision was very poor. Typhus only became a major killer in the crisis years of profound economic difficulty following the Napoleonic wars. All three depressions were followed by savage epidemics in 1816-18, 1827-28 and 1837-39 which remorselessly drove up mortality rates in all the larger towns.
Poverty and destitution were obviously as lethal as inadequate sewerage & poor housing.