October 15, 2018 - It is thought of as the ultimate man’s world, a sooty-faced fraternity deep under ground. But it is a little-known fact that many women also worked in Britain’s coal mines, doing crucial jobs to keep the collieries in operation.

The role of “tip girls” or “pit brow lasses” in the coal industry has largely gone unnoticed in history books, with women portrayed as wives or mothers, sitting at home.

Women from a colliery in Wigan, Lancashire, 1887

Photo by Herbert Wragg/National Coal Mining Museum for England

A new exhibition at the Mining Art Gallery in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, challenges this long-accepted view. Breaking Ground: Women of the Northern Coal Fields tells the stories of women in the 19th -century mining industry via paintings and archive material, proving they did far more than wash their husbands’ sooty overalls.

Until 1842, women worked underground, as did children as young as eight. Queen Victoria put an end to that following a disaster at Huskar Colliery in Silkstone Common, near Barnsley, in which 26 children were killed. Her inquiry resulted in the Coal Mines Act, banning women and under-18s from underground work.

The new law didn’t prevent women and girls from working on the surface, however, so they did – loading wagons, sorting coal on conveyor belts and hauling heavy tubs up from the pit face. They had to adapt their Victorian dress to suit the environment, wearing men’s breeches underneath hitched-up skirts.

Curator Angela Thomas said she wanted to celebrate these unsung heroines – even if they would never have thought of themselves as such. “It was just a job for them. They couldn’t really see what the fuss was about.”

Few women aspired to be pit brow lasses, according to Thomas. “But for many it was preferable to being stuck in a noisy mill, she said. “They liked being outside in the fresh air.”

Pit Brow Lasses, by artist David Venables, was finished in 2015, using sketches he made in Wigan 50 years earlier

Photo: © The Artist’s Estate

The last pit brow lasses were made redundant from Harrington No 10 mine in Lowca, on the Cumbrian coast, in 1972. One of them, Rita Culshaw from Wigan, told the Daily Mirror this year she had loved the work and, despite being 83, “would go back to the mine tomorrow”.

One of the most striking artworks in the exhibition shows women at Wigan colliery. Pit Brow Lasses, an acrylic by David Venables, depicts two female workers gazing out at the viewer. He finished the painting in 2015, using sketches he made half a century earlier on a visit to the town.

Thomas put a call-out in regional papers for family stories of pit brow lasses. One told of Margaret Morrow, a mother of 11 who was nurse and midwife for her community, using a big book of remedies to patch up anyone hurt in the mine. She also laid out those who died.

“Even though the pits were male-dominated, and when we think of mining we think of men, they couldn’t havedone their work without the pit brow lasses,” said Thomas.

Breaking Ground is at the Mining Art Gallery in Auckland Castle until March 24.