Gunpowder and Geometry. Benjamin Wardhaugh

miners’ world may have been rough and simple; squalid it was not.

      They were proud of their appearance. Like sailors, you could tell the miners anywhere by their clothes: checked shirts, jackets and trousers with a red tie and grey knitted stockings. Long hair in a pigtail. And of course the pall of coal dust, almost impossible to wash out completely. Rings of it circled their eyes, and it made the cuts and abrasions of underground work heal into distinctive blue scars.

      Charles Hutton would remember his stepfather Francis Frame as a kind man. But he was not Lord Ravenscroft’s land steward, nor anything like it, and there was no avoiding the fact that the family’s expectations had fallen. There had probably never been any question about what work the boys would go into, but if there had been hopes of climbing the ladder to become viewers and overmen they probably now hoped for nothing more than the status of plain coal hewers.

      And by the age of six, or certainly by the age of eight, little Charles was old enough to start work. One report says he spent some time operating a trapdoor in the pits. For a miner’s lad this was typical entry-level work, done by the youngest boys. Different areas of the pit were isolated from each other by trapdoors, usually kept shut to make sure the air flowed where it was supposed to and reduce the risk of gas build-up and explosion. Each trap had a boy to pull the cord that opened it, and shut it again after men or coals had passed. Boring but crucial work; mines blew to smithereens if a trapper lad fell asleep on the job and let the bad air reach the candles. Solitude, silence and darkness worse than any prison. You learned not to fear the dark.

      You learned much else, too; starting in the pits was not so much a training as total immersion in a culture. The all-male environment had its traditional ways: ancient facetiousness and long-lived jokes; bravado in the face of shared danger. Men died in the pits, often: candles in the gassy dark (there were no safety lamps as yet); shaft collapses; suffocation. Firedamp and chokedamp, the miners called the bad airs, and they were especially common in the northern pits. By the 1750s coal owners were asking the newspapers not to print reports of pit explosions; they were bad for morale, bad for trade.

      So you learned the feel of the mines and the smell of the different airs, good and bad. You gained the true pitman’s instinctive sense of danger. You also learned to cling to the rope that pulled you up and let you down the shaft. Shafts could be a few hundred feet deep, and there were no cages to ride in. You just clung on, with your leg through a loop of rope. If your hands grew tired, you died. If the horses pulling the rope were startled and bolted, you died. Eventually that would happen to Francis Frame, in an accident at Long Benton colliery after Charles had left. Over the course of a life’s work in the pits your chance of dying in an accident was probably as high as one in two.

      By the time the exploitation of children in the pits became the subject of official inquiry – in the 1840s – it had attained the proportions of a national disgrace. Boys were working twelve- or even eighteen-hour shifts that started at midnight; they were seeing the sun on only one day a week and they were getting rickets, bronchitis, emphysema. They were prostrated by exhaustion and they were not growing properly.

      There’s no real reason to suppose conditions were better in the eighteenth century, but Charles Hutton was spared the very worst of it. There were schools in some of the local villages. Some pit villages had them, too, with practice varying seemingly from pit to pit: near-universal illiteracy at one; school provision built into the miners’ contracts at another. Hutton attended schools. He was bright, and neighbours were already saying the lad could go far, urging his parents to keep him at school. Kept in school he was: the hope of his family, even while his brothers went down the pits.

      It must have made for some friction at home and in his village. The few pennies per day he would have earned on the trapdoors might not have been a real sacrifice for his family. But the fact that others were being prepared for a life in the coal mines and he wasn’t must have made for a difference, and not perhaps a pleasant one.

      About this time Hutton injured his arm. The story he would tell many years later involved variously an accident or a quarrel with some children in the street. Nothing more than ordinary horseplay, perhaps, but by the time he confessed it to his parents the bone wouldn’t set properly, and it left him with a lasting weakness in his right elbow. Another reason to train his mind rather than his hands, at least for now.

      A schoolteacher named Robson taught him to write, at a school a short step across the hill in the village of Delaval. Hutton may well have studied from a new, locally produced grammar book. Written and printed in Newcastle, Anne Fisher’s New Grammar promised to teach spelling, syntax, pronunciation and even etymology through its carefully graded series of exercises. Unlike other grammar teachers she kept it practical, and there was time set aside in her programme for taking dictation from a newspaper read aloud (the London Spectator was her preference) as well as spot-the-mistake games. Like every textbook author, she hooked her learners with aspirational promises. By the time you were done, she said, you’d be able to write as correctly as if for the press, engage in polite and useful conversation, and compose a properly styled letter to any person of quality. London and its cosmopolitan values were never far from her thoughts. Yet she had her other foot firmly in the North, and her correct pronunciation was a distinctly northern one. Say the following words, she advised, as though the o was a u: Compasses, Conjure, London.

      As well as his schooling, young Hutton was indulged with pennies for books of stories, and – perhaps more precious – time in which to read them. He was fond of the so-called ‘border ballads’, the traditional songs of north Tyneside and the Scottish Borders: True Tom and his visit to Elfland, Tam Lin and his rescue from the fairies. By his early teens one of his lifelong habits was already in place: book collecting.

      The routine of these years was disrupted more than once by events from outside the North-East. In September 1745, when Hutton was eight, the southward march of the Bonnie Prince and his army sparked panic in Newcastle. Some citizens hastily signed a pledge of loyalty to King George. Others spent their time walling up the town gates and mounting cannon to repel the Jacobite horde. Some fled from the northern villages to the dubious safety of the town. Others fled further south with all they could carry.

      The events developed as farce rather than tragedy as far as Newcastle was concerned. Charles Stuart and his army came nowhere near; they took a western, not an eastern route down through England. The gates were unbricked, the cannon dismounted, and the King’s soldiers moved on. People came back to their homes and their work, some of them presumably feeling rather shamefaced.

      One eyewitness to the ’45 in Newcastle was a visitor whose presence would ultimately wreak rather more upheaval, both for Newcastle and for Charles Hutton. John Wesley first visited the town in 1742. He was one of the middle-class commentators who was shocked by the drunkenness, cursing and Sabbath-breaking he found there, and he considered the field ripe for his mission.

      He preached in the fields, and he preached in the churches, including the Huttons’ old parish church of St Andrews (where he found the congregation notably well-behaved). He visited some of the pit villages, and preached there too. Over time, Newcastle became John Wesley’s northern headquarters, the third point of a triangle whose base was London and Bristol, and he would visit again and again over the years.

      The founder of Methodism was a small neat man in a gown and bands; he had been an Oxford tutor and he was good at calm, reasonable argument. But he had also been in the mission fields in North America, and he knew how to reach his hearers’ hearts, with an explosive combination of plain language and restrained rhetoric.

      The results were extraordinary, with people crying out from a piercing sense of their sins or falling down in dread of the wrath of God. The dramatic personal changes, or some of them, lasted long after Wesley himself was gone. Charles Hutton was deeply impressed – he started to think of himself as a Methodist, and to call himself one.

      It wasn’t about leaving the Church of England: