Gunpowder and Geometry. Benjamin Wardhaugh

yourself and your relationship with God: about getting a new sense of what a life and a self could be. It was Christianity made both primitive and experimental, with doctrine founded on scripture, experienced and confirmed emotionally, and integrated into your personal habits, into who you were both internally and visibly.

      Several of the anecdotes we have about Charles Hutton in his youth are concerned with his piety. He threw away his collection of profane stories. He built a cabin in the woods where he could pray on the way to school. He read devotional tracts. Time would eventually lower the temperature of Hutton’s enthusiasm, but he would remain a follower of Methodism – later shifting towards Unitarianism – until his thirties.

      Some of the practical characteristics he gained at this time he would take to his grave, and they laid the foundation of much he achieved as an adult. ‘Never be unemployed for a moment,’ wrote Wesley; ‘never be triflingly employed.’ Charles Hutton would retain into old age a reputation for the good ordering of his time and his thoughts. Hard-working, self-disciplined, cheerful yet grave, and gifted at organising both ideas and people, he could have been a model for such works as Wesley’s Character of a Methodist. But perhaps the most important lesson Charles Hutton took from Wesley was that you could reinvent who you were, remake your mental world and your character. You could forge a destiny of your own choosing, both in the next world and – perhaps – in this.

      By his early teens Hutton was living with his family in the village of Heaton, and attending school half a mile away at Jesmond. His teacher, Jonathan Ivison, was a would-be clergyman: a university graduate marking time while he waited for his first benefice.

      Ivison represented another link to a wider world for Charles Hutton. He was no spectacular example of worldly success, but he illustrated the very different kind of life that could be reached through education. And his teaching provided direct access to parts of that education. He taught Hutton some Latin and some mathematics, and Hutton discovered talents for both. These were whole new worlds to explore: ancient literature or the heady abstractions of algebra and geometry could easily occupy a person for a lifetime. Meanwhile Hutton’s ability at accounting drew some attention, and presumably provided evidence to his family that keeping him in school remained a reasonable choice. And he was also learning practical geometry and surveying: food for the mind, but skills that could one day be of use in the world of the collieries, too.

      His continued success at school reportedly made Hutton a favourite with those who taught him. He seems to have become quite close to Ivison. Ambitious, always keen to be at the top of everything in hand, he was envied by other students.

      But time was running out. Hutton couldn’t remain the hope of his family for ever, and unless an unexpected opportunity opened up the only route his family or his world could offer him was a career in the coal pits, perhaps working up to overman or viewer if he was very lucky. At fourteen he passed the age when schooling for boys of his class ended and work or apprenticeship began; and it wasn’t clear what was going to happen next.

      Indeed, it’s not clear what did happen next. Jonathan Ivison gained his benefice in the autumn of 1751, when Hutton was fourteen, and after hasty ordination he was licensed as curate at Whitburn, near the coast in County Durham, a couple of days later. Whitburn was nine miles from the schoolroom at Jesmond – a dozen by road – and commuting between the two was scarcely feasible. Schools were transient things, and there was no particular reason this one would stay open once its single teacher was gone.

      Yet Ivison’s new salary was just twenty-five pounds a year: barely enough to live on. He badly needed more money. One report says Hutton acted as Ivison’s assistant. It’s possible he acted as his substitute, keeping the school open while Ivison performed his parish duties half a day away. There was nothing awfully unusual about the head of the class helping to teach the younger children, and nobody ever denied that Hutton was the head of this and every other class he ever entered.

      Whatever the truth of the matter, Hutton was spared a return to the pits for a few more years. There’s no hint in any of our sources that he ever did the kind of work to which teenagers normally graduated in the mines: ‘putting’, that is, dragging or pushing the heavy wicker baskets full of coal from the face to the shaft.

      But his reprieve was not to last indefinitely. The next firm fact we have about him is a pay bill from the Long Benton colliery for September 1755, when he was eighteen. He was working as a coal hewer in the ‘Rose’ Pit, under his stepfather Francis Frame as overman.

      Put one leg through a loop in the rope, and hold it hard for the breathless minutes of descent: three hundred feet down. At the shaft bottom the darkness is total, outside the reach of a few brief candles. Long, dreary galleries lead off in every direction, and it’s oppressively warm. Walls of coal; wet under foot. Fossils in the roof to remind you of the weight of rock, the inexorable crushing force ever-present above your head. Constant noise: rushing water and the distant thud of the engines; corves of coal being dragged past by teams of exhausted, shattered boys. Grimy, weary men everywhere, bustling in the gloom.

      Strip to the ‘buff’: short breeches, low shoes, cotton skull-cap (or even less). Take your wedge, hammer and five-pound pick. Kneel, sit, stoop to get at the coalface. Or just lie down. Coal seams could be as little as two foot six high, and Hutton was a tall young man. Channels of sweat in the coal dust on your face.

      First, make vertical cuts from the top of the seam to the bottom, dividing the coalface into what the men called ‘juds’. Then, undercut the juds one by one: skilled and, by some accounts, athletic work. Next hammer in wedges at the top of the jud, and bring down the coal section by section. It could take an hour or two, and then, of course, you did it again. And again, all day. A hewer could bring down four tons or more in a shift. Putters bundled it away in the wicker baskets, and up it went to the daylight.

      At the coalface.

      It was hard, it was dirty, it was dangerous. But coal hewers were actually the elite of the pit; indeed, it’s surprising Hutton was allowed to do the work as young as eighteen, and without working his way up through gruelling years at the back, and then the front, of a corf of coal. Francis Frame perhaps used his own position in the pit to make it happen. Hewers were relatively well paid: quite possibly better paid than manual workers in other fields like agriculture. And they worked shorter hours than the trapper boys and the putters: seven or eight hours of the day, starting in the very early morning.

      The stars are twinkling in the sky,

      As to the pit I go;

      I think not of the sheen on high,

      But of the gloom below.

      Not rest or peace, but toil and strife,

      Do there the soul enthral;

      And turn the precious cup of life

      Into a cup of gall.

      That was Joseph Skipsey, the ‘Pitman Poet’, in the 1860s: but the words could have applied to Hutton, or to many and many another.

      Charles Hutton had known, briefly, the life of a country schoolteacher, and had felt the stirrings of a talent for both languages and mathematics. A world wider than the pit had come into view more than once during his short life, in the person of John Wesley and in that of Jonathan Ivison: university graduates both, and holders in their different ways of promises about what life could be.

      In a pamphlet for children, printed in Newcastle, Wesley wrote that you shouldn’t ever wish for more than you have. Men are fallen, grace is a gift, and if we had what we deserve we’d all be in hell. But however docile Hutton was, and however resigned to the will of Providence, it’s hard to imagine he didn’t wish.

      I think Charles Hutton’s return to the coal pit must have represented desperation