No More Learning

But as soon as I went to work in the bookshop I stopped buying books.
Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly
sickening. Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if it is a book that I want to read
and can’t borrow, and I never buy junk. The sweet smell of decaying paper appeals to me
no longer. It is too closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and dead
bluebottles.


SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT (1936)

In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people — the only time in
my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divisional
police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was
very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the
bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As a police
officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a



nimble Bunnan tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman)
looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than
once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the
insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young
Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town
and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at
Europeans.

All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my mind
that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it
the better. Theoretically — and secretly, of course — I was all for the Burmese and all
against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly
than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close
quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey,
cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been
Bogged with bamboos — all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I
could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think
out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I
did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great
deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I
was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited
little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of
the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, IN SAECULA
SAECULORUM, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the
greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts.
Feelings like these are the nonnal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian
official, if you can catch him off duty.

One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It was a tiny
incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature
of imperialism — the real motives for which despotic governments act. Early one morning
the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of the town rang me up on the phone
and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do
something about it? I did not know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was



happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my rifle, an old . 44 Winchester
and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought the noise might be useful IN
TERROREM. Various Burmans stopped me on the way and told me about the elephant’s
doings. It was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a tame one which had gone “must. ” It
had been chained up, as tame elephants always are when their attack of “must” is due, but
on the previous night it had broken its chain and escaped. Its mahout, the only person
who could manage it when it was in that state, had set out in pursuit, but had taken the
wrong direction and was now twelve hours’ journey away, and in the morning the
elephant had suddenly reappeared in the town. The Bunnese population had no weapons
and were quite helpless against it. It had already destroyed somebody’s bamboo hut,
killed a cow and raided some fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had met the
municipal rubbish van and, when the driver jumped out and took to his heels, had turned
the van over and inflicted violences upon it.

The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me in the
quarter where the elephant had been seen. It was a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of
squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palmleaf, winding all over a steep hillside. I
remember that it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We began
questioning the people as to where the elephant had gone and, as usual, failed to get any
definite information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds clear
enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes.
Some of the people said that the elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had
gone in another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant. I had almost
made up my mind that the whole story was a pack of lies, when we heard yells a little
distance away. There was a loud, scandalized cry of “Go away, child! Go away this
instant! ” and an old woman with a switch in her hand came round the corner of a hut,
violently shooing away a crowd of naked children. Some more women followed, clicking
their tongues and exclaiming; evidently there was something that the children ought not
to have seen. I rounded the hut and saw a man’s dead body sprawling in the mud. He was
an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he could not have been dead many
minutes. The people said that the elephant had come suddenly upon him round the comer
of the hut, caught him with its trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into the
earth. This was the rainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had scored a trench
a foot deep and a couple of yards long. He was lying on his belly with arms crucified and



head sharply twisted to one side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the
teeth bared and grinning with an expression of unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the
way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish. ) The
friction of the great beast’s foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins
a rabbit. As soon as I saw the dead man I sent an orderly to a friend’s house nearby to
borrow an elephant rifle. I had already sent back the pony, not wanting it to go mad with
fright and throw me if it smelt the elephant.

The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and meanwhile
some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was in the paddy fields below,
only a few hundred yards away. As I started forward practically the whole population of
the quarter flocked out of the houses and followed me. They had seen the rifle and were
all shouting excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant. They had not shown much
interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it was different
now that he was going to be shot. It was a bit of fun to them, as it would be to an English
crowd; besides they wanted the meat. It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of
shooting the elephant — I had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary — and
it is always unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down the hill, looking
and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing army of people
jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the huts, there was a
metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across, not
yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. The elephant
was standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took not the slightest
notice of the crowd’s approach. He was tearing up bunches of grass, beating them against
his knees to clean them and stuffing them into his mouth.

I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I
ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant — it is
comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery — and obviously one
ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating, the
elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think now that his
attack of “must” was already passing off; in which case he would merely wander
harmlessly about until the mahout came back and caught him. Moreover, I did not in the



least want to shoot him. I decided that I would watch him for a little while to make sure
that he did not turn savage again, and then go home.

But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an
immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road
for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish
clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was
going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to
perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was
momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the
elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their
two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I
stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of
the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing
in front of the unanned native crowd — seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in
reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces
behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own
freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the
conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend
his life in trying to impress the “natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to do what the
“natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot
the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got
to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite
things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my
heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing — no, that was impossible. The
crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one
long struggle not to be laughed at.

But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against
his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me
that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not squeamish about killing
animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always
seems worse to kill a LARGE animal. ) Besides, there was the beast’s owner to be
considered. Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only



be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly. But I had got to act quickly. I
turned to some experienced-looking Burmans who had been there when we arrived, and
asked them how the elephant had been behaving. They all said the same thing: he took no
notice of you if you left him alone, but he might charge if you went too close to him.

It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to within, say, twenty-
five yards of the elephant and test his behavior. If he charged, I could shoot; if he took no
notice of me, it would be safe to leave him until the mahout came back. But also I knew
that I was going to do no such thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle and the ground was
soft mud into which one would sink at every step. If the elephant charged and I missed
him, I should have about as much chance as a toad under a steam-roller. But even then I
was not thinking particularly of my own skin, only of the watchful yellow faces behind.
For at that moment, with the crowd watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense,
as I would have been if I had been alone. A white man mustn’t be frightened in front of
“natives”; and so, in general, he isn’t frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if
anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught,
trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that
happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.

There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and lay down
on the road to get a better aim. The crowd grew very still, and a deep, low, happy sigh, as
of people who see the theatre curtain go up at last, breathed from innumerable throats.
They were going to have their bit of fun after all. The rifle was a beautiful German thing
with cross-hair sights. I did not then know that in shooting an elephant one would shoot
to cut an imaginary bar running from ear-hole to ear-hole. I ought, therefore, as the
elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight at his ear-hole, actually I aimed several
inches in front of this, thinking the brain would be further forward.

When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick — one never does when a
shot goes home — but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that
instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a
mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but
every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely
old, as though the frighfful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him



down. At last, after what seemed a long time — it might have been five seconds, I dare
say — he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed
to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired
again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with
desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head
drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony
of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in
falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he
seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree.
He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me,
with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.

I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was obvious that
the elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead. He was breathing very
rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his great mound of a side painfully rising and
falling. His mouth was wide open — I could see far down into caverns of pale pink throat.
I waited a long time for him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I fired my
two remaining shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be. The thick blood
welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. His body did not even jerk when
the shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause. He was dying, very
slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet
could damage him further. I felt that I had got to put an end to that dreadful noise. It
seemed dreadful to see the great beast Lying there, powerless to move and yet powerless
to die, and not even to be able to finish him. I sent back for my small rifle and poured
shot after shot into his heart and down his throat. They seemed to make no impression.
The tortured gasps continued as steadily as the ticking of a clock.

In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that it took him
half an hour to die. Burmans were bringing dahs and baskets even before I left, and I was
told they had stripped his body almost to the bones by the afternoon.

Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant.
The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally
I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner



fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was
right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie,
because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I
was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me
a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others
grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.


DOWN THE MINE (1937) (FROM “THE ROAD TO WIGAN

PIER”)

Our civilization, pace Chesterton, is founded on coal, more completely than one realizes
until one stops to think about it. The machines that keep us alive, and the machines that
make machines, are all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal. In the metabolism of
the Western world the coal-miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs
the soil. He is a sort of caryatid upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy
is supported. For this reason the actual process by which coal is extracted is well worth
watching, if you get the chance and are willing to take the trouble.

When you go down a coal-mine it is important to try and get to the coal face when the
‘fillers’ are at work. This is not easy, because when the mine is working visitors are a
nuisance and are not encouraged, but if you go at any other time, it is possible to come
away with a totally wrong impression. On a Sunday, for instance, a mine seems almost
peaceful. The time to go there is when the machines are roaring and the air is black with
coal dust, and when you can actually see what the miners have to do. At those times the
place is like hell, or at any rate like my own mental picture of hell. Most of the things one
imagines in hell are if there — heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all,
unbearably cramped space. Everything except the fire, for there is no fire down there
except the feeble beams of Davy lamps and electric torches which scarcely penetrate the
clouds of coal dust.

When you have finally got there — and getting there is a in itself: I will explain that in a
moment — you crawl through the last line of pit props and see opposite you a shiny black
wall three or four feet high. This is the coal face. Overhead is the smooth ceiling made by
the rock from which the coal has been cut; underneath is the rock again, so that the



gallery you are in is only as high as the ledge of coal itself, probably not much more than
a yard. The first impression of all, ovennastering everything else for a while, is the
frightful, deafening din from the conveyor belt which carries the coal away. You cannot
see very far, because the fog of coal dust throws back the beam of your lamp, but you can
see on either side of you the line of half-naked kneeling men, one to every four or five
yards, driving their shovels under the fallen coal and flinging it swiftly over their left
shoulders. They are feeding it on to the conveyor belt, a moving rubber, belt a couple of
feet wide which runs a yard or two behind them. Down this belt a glittering river of coal
races constantly. In a big mine it is carrying away several tons of coal every minute. It
bears it off to some place in the main roads where it is shot into tubs holding half a tun,
and thence dragged to the cages and hoisted to the outer air.

It is impossible to watch the ‘fillers’ at work without feelling a pang of envy for their
toughness. It is a dreadful job that they do, an almost superhuman job by the standard of
an ordinary person. For they are not only shifting monstrous quantities of coal, they are
also doing, it in a position that doubles or trebles the work. They have got to remain
kneeling all the while — they could hardly rise from their knees without hitting the
ceiling — and you can easily see by trying it what a tremendous effort this means.
Shovelling is comparatively easy when you are standing up, because you can use your
knee and thigh to drive the shovel along; kneeling down, the whole of the strain is thrown
upon your arm and belly muscles. And the other conditions do not exactly make things
easier. There is the heat — it varies, but in some mines it is suffocating — and the coal dust
that stuffs up your throat and nostrils and collects along your eyelids, and the unending
rattle of the conveyor belt, which in that confined space is rather like the rattle of a
machine gun. But the fillers look and work as though they were made of iron. They really
do look like iron hammered iron statues — under the smooth coat of coal dust which
clings to them from head to foot.
It is only when you see miners down the mine and
naked that you realize what splendid men, they are. Most of them are small (big men are
at a disadvantage in that job) but nearly all of them have the most noble bodies; wide
shoulders tapering to slender supple waists, and small pronounced buttocks and sinewy
thighs, with not an ounce of waste flesh anywhere. In the hotter mines they wear only a
pair of thin drawers, clogs and knee-pads; in the hottest mines of all, only the clogs and
knee-pads. You can hardly tell by the look of them whether they are young or old. They
may be any age up to sixty or even sixty-five, but when they are black and naked they all



look alike. No one could do their work who had not a young man’s body, and a figure fit
for a guardsman at that, just a few pounds of extra flesh on the waist-line, and the
constant bending would be impossible. You can never forget that spectacle once you have
seen it — the line of bowed, kneeling figures, sooty black all over, driving their, huge
shovels under the coal with stupendous force and speed. They are on the job for seven
and a half hours, theoretically without a break, for there is no time ‘off. Actually they,
snatch a quarter of an hour or so at some time during the shift to eat the food they have
brought with them, usually a hunk of bread and dripping and a bottle of cold tea. The first
time I was watching the ‘fillers’ at work I put my hand upon some dreadful slimy thing
among the coal dust. It was a chewed quid of tobacco. Nearly all the miners chew
tobacco, which is said to be good against thirst.

Probably you have to go down several coal-mines before you can get much grasp of the
processes that are going on round you. This is chiefly because the mere effort of getting
from place to place; makes it difficult to notice anything else, In some ways it is even
disappointing, or at least is unlike what you have, expected. You get into the cage, which
is a steel box about as wide as a telephone box and two or three times as long. It holds ten
men, but they pack it like pilchards in a tin, and a tall man cannot stand upright in it. The
steel door shuts upon you, and somebody working the winding gear above drops you into
the void. You have the usual momentary qualm in your belly and a bursting sensation in
the cars, but not much sensation of movement till you get near the bottom, when the cage
slows down so abruptly that you could swear it is going upwards again. In the middle of
the run the cage probably touches sixty miles an hour; in some of the deeper mines it
touches even more. When you crawl out at the bottom you are perhaps four hundred
yards underground. That is to say you have a tolerable-sized mountain on top of you;
hundreds of yards of solid rock, bones of extinct beasts, subsoil, flints, roots of growing
things, green grass and cows grazing on it — all this suspended over your head and held
back only by wooden props as thick as the calf of your leg. But because of the speed at
which the cage has brought you down, and the complete blackness through which you
have travelled, you hardly feel yourself deeper down than you would at the bottom of the
Piccadilly tube.

What is surprising, on the other hand, is the immense horizontal distances that have to be
travelled underground. Before I had been down a mine I had vaguely imagined the miner



stepping out of the cage and getting to work on a ledge of coal a few yards away. I had
not realized that before he even gets to work he may have had to creep along passages as
long as from London Bridge to Oxford Circus. In the beginning, of course, a mine shaft is
sunk somewhere near a seam of coal; But as that seam is worked out and fresh seams are
followed up, the workings get further and further from the pit bottom. If it is a mile from
the pit bottom to the coal face, that is probably an average distance; three miles is a fairly
nonnal one; there are even said to be a few mines where it is as much as five miles. But
these distances bear no relation to distances above ground. For in all that mile or three
miles as it may be, there is hardly anywhere outside the main road, and not many places
even there, where a man can stand upright.

You do not notice the effect of this till you have gone a few hundred yards. You start off,
stooping slightly, down the dim-lit gallery, eight or ten feet wide and about five high,
with the walls built up with slabs of shale, like the stone walls in Derbyshire. Every yard
or two there are wooden props holding up the beams and girders; some of the girders
have buckled into fantastic curves under which you have to duck. Usually it is bad going
underfoot — thick dust or jagged chu nk s of shale, and in some mines where there is water
it is as mucky as a farm-yard. Also there is the track for the coal tubs, like a miniature
railway track with sleepers a foot or two apart, which is tiresome to walk on. Everything
is grey with shale dust; there is a dusty fiery smell which seems to be the same in all
mines. You see mysterious machines of which you never learn the purpose, and bundles
of tools slung together on wires, and sometimes mice darting away from the beam of the
lamps. They are surprisingly common, especially in mines where there are or have been
horses. It would be interesting to know how they got there in the first place; possibly by
falling down the shaft — for they say a mouse can fall any distance uninjured, owing to its
surface area being so large relative to its weight. You press yourself against the wall to
make way for lines of tubs jolting slowly towards the shaft, drawn by an endless steel
cable operated from the surface. You creep through sacking curtains and thick wooden
doors which, when they are opened, let out fierce blasts of air. These doors are an
important part of the ventilation system. The exhausted air is sucked out of one shaft by
means of fans, and the fresh air enters the other of its own accord. But if left to itself the
air will take the shortest way round, leaving the deeper workings unventilated; so all the
short cuts have to be partitioned off.



At the start to walk stooping is rather a joke, but it is a joke that soon wears off. I am
handicapped by being exceptionally tall, but when the roof falls to four feet or less it is a
tough job for anybody except a dwarf or a child. You not only have to bend double, you
have also got to keep your head up all the while so as to see the beams and girders and
dodge them when they come. You have, thehefore, a constant crick in the neck, but this is
nothing to the pain in your knees and thighs. After half a mile it becomes (I am not
exaggerating) an unbearable agony. You begin to wonder whether you will ever get to the
end — still more, how on earth you are going to get back. Your pace grows slower and
slower. You come to a stretch of a couple of hundred yards where it is all exceptionally
low and you have to work yourself along in a squatting position. Then suddenly the roof
opens out to a mysterious height — scene of and old fall of rock, probably — and for
twenty whole yards you can stand upright. The relief is overwhelming. But after this
there is another low stretch of a hundred yards and then a succession of beams which you
have to crawl under. You go down on all fours; even this is a relief after the squatting
business. But when you come to the end of the beams and try to get up again, you find
that your knees have temporarily struck work and refuse to lift you. You call a halt,
ignominiously, and say that you would like to rest for a minute or two. Your guide (a
miner) is sympathetic. He knows that your muscles are not the same as his. ‘Only another
four hundred yards,’ he says encouragingly; you feel that he might as well say another
four hundred miles. But finally you do somehow creep as far as the coal face. You have
gone a mile and taken the best part of an hour; a miner would do it in not much more than
twenty minutes. Having got there, you have to sprawl in the coal dust and get your
strength back for several minutes before you can even watch the work in progress with
any kind of intelligence.

Coming back is worse than going, not only because you are already tired out but because
the journey back to the shaft is slightly uphill. You get through the low places at the
speed of a tortoise, and you have no shame now about calling a halt when your knees
give way. Even the lamp you are carrying becomes a nuisance and probably when you
stumble you drop it; whereupon, if it is a Davy lamp, it goes out. Ducking the beams
becomes more and more of an effort, and sometimes you forget to duck. Y ou try walking
head down as the miners do, and then you bang your backbone. Even the miners bang
their backbones fairly often. This is the reason why in very hot mines, where it is
necessary to go about half naked, most of the miners have what they call ‘buttons down



the back’ — that is, a permanent scab on each vertebra. When the track is down hill the
miners sometimes fit their clogs, which are hollow under-neath, on to the trolley rails and
slide down. In mines where the ‘travelling’ is very bad all the miners carry sticks about
two and a half feet long, hollowed out below the handle. In normal places you keep your
hand on top of the stick and in the low places you slide your hand down into the hollow.
These sticks are a great help, and the wooden crash-helmets — a comparatively recent
invention — are a godsend. They look like a French or Italian steel helmet, but they are
made of some kind of pith and very light, and so strong, that you can take a violent blow
on the head without feeling it. When finally you get back to the surface you have been
perhaps three hours underground and travelled two miles, and you, are more exhausted
than you would be by a twenty-live-mile walk above ground. For a week afterwards your
thighs are so stiff that coming downstairs is quite a difficult feat; you have to work your
way down in a peculiar sidelong manner, without bending the knees. Your miner friends
notice the stiffness of your walk and chaff you about it. (‘Flow’d ta like to work down pit,
eh? ’ etc. ) Yet even a miner who has been long away front work — from illness, for
instance — when he comes back to the pit, suffers badly for the first few days.

It may seem that I am exaggerating, though no one who has been down an old-fashioned
pit (most of the pits in England are old-fashioned) and actually gone as far as the coal
face, is likely to say so. But what I want to emphasize is this. Here is this frightful
business of crawling to and fro, which to any nonnal person is a hard day’s work in itself;
and it is not part of the miner’s work at all, it is merely an extra, like the City man’s daily
ride in the Tube. The miner does that journey to and fro, and sandwiched in between
there are seven and a half hours of savage work. I have never travelled much more than a
mile to the coal face; but often it is three miles, in which case I and most people other
than coal-miners would never get there at all. This is the kind of point that one is always
liable to miss. When you think of the coal-mine you think of depth, heat, darkness,
blackened figures hacking at walls of coal; you don’t think, necessarily, of those miles of
creeping to and fro. There is the question of time, also. A miner’s working shift of seven
and a half hours does not sound very long, but one has got to add on to it at least an hour
a day for ‘travelling’, more often two hours and sometimes three. Of course, the
‘travelling’ is not technically work and the miner is not paid for it; but it is as like work
as makes no difference. It is easy to say that miners don’t mind all this. Certainly, it is not
the same for them as it would be for you or me. They have done it since childhood, they



have the right muscles hardened, and they can move to and fro underground with a
startling and rather horrible agility. A miner puts his head down and runs, with a long
swinging stride, through places where I can only stagger. At the workings you see them
on all fours, skipping round the pit props almost like dogs. But it is quite a mistake to
think that they enjoy it. I have talked about this to scores of miners and they all admit that
the ‘travelling’ is hard work; in any case when you hear them discussing a pit among
themselves the ‘travelling’ is always one of the things they discuss. It is said that a shift
always returns from work faster than it goes; nevertheless the miners all say that it is the
coming away after a hard day’s work, that is especially irksome. It is part of their work
and they are equal to it, but certainly it is an effort. It is comparable, perhaps, to climbing
a smallish mountain before and after your day’s work.

When you have been down in two or three pits you begin to get some grasp of the
processes that are going on underground. (I ought to say, by the way, that I know nothing
whatever about the technical side of mining: I am merely describing what I have seen. )
Coal lies in thin seams between enormous layers of rock, so that essentially the process of
getting it out is like scooping the central layer from a Neapolitan ice. In the old days the
miners used to cut straight into the coal with pick and crowbar — a very slow job because
coal, when lying in its virgin state, is almost as hard as rock. Nowadays the preliminary
work is done by an electrically-driven coal-cutter, which in principle is an immensely
tough and powerful band-saw, running horizontally instead of vertically, with teeth a
couple of inches long and half an inch or an inch thick. It can move backwards or
forwards on its own power, and the men operating it can rotate it this way or that.
Incidentally it makes one of the most awful noises I have ever heard, and sends forth
clouds of coal dust which make it impossible to see more than two to three feet and
almost impossible to breathe. The machine travels along the coal face cutting into the
base of the coal and undennining it to the depth of five feet or five feet and a half; after
this it is comparatively easy to extract the coal to the depth to which it has been
undermined. Where it is ‘difficult getting’, however, it has also to be loosened with
explosives. A man with an electric drill, like a rather small version of the drills used in
street-mending, bores holes at intervals in the coal, inserts blasting powder, plugs it with
clay, goes round the corner if there is one handy (he is supposed to retire to twenty-five
yards distance) and touches off the charge with an electric current. This is not intended to



bring the coal out, only to loosen it. Occasionally, of course, the charge is too powerful,
and then it not only brings the coal out but brings the roof down as well.

After the blasting has been done the ‘fillers’ can tumble the coal out, break it up and
shovel it on to the conveyor belt. It comes out first in monstrous boulders which may
weigh anything up to twenty tons. The conveyor belt shoots it on to tubs, and the tubs are
shoved into the main road and hitched on to an endlessly revolving steel cable which
drags them to the cage. Then they are hoisted, and at the surface the coal is sorted by
being run over screens, and if necessary is washed as well. As far as possible the ‘dirt’ —
the shale, that is — is used for making the roads below. All what cannot be used is sent to
the surface and dumped; hence the monstrous ‘dirt-heaps’, like hideous grey mountains,
which are the characteristic scenery of the coal areas. When the coal has been extracted to
the depth to which the machine has cut, the coal face has advanced by five feet. Fresh
props are put in to hold up the newly exposed roof, and during the next shift the conveyor
belt is taken to pieces, moved five feet forward and re-assembled. As far as possible the
three operations of cutting, blasting and extraction are done in three separate shifts, the
cutting in the afternoon, the blasting at night (there is a law, not always kept, that forbids
its being done when other men are working near by), and the ‘filling’ in the morning
shift, which lasts from six in the morning until half past one.

Even when you watch the process of coal-extraction you probably only watch it for a
short time, and it is not until you begin making a few calculations that you realize what a
stupendous task the ‘fillers’ are perfonning. Normally each man has to clear a space four
or five yards wide. The cutter has undermined the coal to the depth of five feet, so that if
the seam of coal is three or four feet high, each man has to cut out, break up and load on
to the belt something between seven and twelve cubic yards of coal. This is to say, taking
a cubic yard as weighing twenty-seven hundred-weight, that each man is shifting coal at a
speed approaching two tons an hour. I have just enough experience of pick and shovel
work to be able to grasp what this means. When I am digging trenches in my garden, if I
shift two tons of earth during the afternoon, I feel that I have earned my tea. But earth is
tractable stuff compared with coal, and I don’t have to work kneeling down, a thousand
feet underground, in suffocating heat and swallowing coal dust with every breath I take;
nor do I have to walk a mile bent double before I begin. The miner’s job would be as
much beyond my power as it would be to perform on a flying trapeze or to win the Grand



National. I am not a manual labourer and please God I never shall be one, but there are
some kinds of manual work that I could do if I had to. At a pitch I could be a tolerable
road-sweeper or an inefficient gardener or even a tenth-rate farm hand. But by no
conceivable amount of effort or training could I become a coal-miner, the work would
kill me in a few weeks.

Watching coal-miners at work, you realize momentarily what different universes people
inhabit. Down there where coal is dug is a sort of world apart which one can quite easily
go through life without ever hearing about. Probably majority of people would even
prefer not to hear about it. Yet it is the absolutely necessary counterpart of our world
above. Practically everything we do, from eating an ice to crossing the Atlantic, and from
baking a loaf to writing a novel, involves the use of coal, directly or indirectly. For all the
arts of peace coal is needed; if war breaks out it is needed all the more. In time of
revolution the miner must go on working or the revolution must stop, for revolution as
much as reaction needs coal. Whatever may be happening on the surface, the hacking and
shovelling have got to continue without a pause, or at any rate without pausing for more
than a few weeks at the most. In order that Hitler may march the goose-step, that the
Pope may denounce Bolshevism, that the cricket crowds may assemble at Lords, that the
poets may scratch one another’s backs, coal has got to be forthcoming. But on the whole
we are not aware of it; we all know that we ‘must have coal’, but we seldom or never
remember what coal-getting involves. Here am I sitting writing in front of my
comfortable coal fire. It is April but I still need a fire. Once a fortnight the coal cart drives
up to the door and men in leather jerkins carry the coal indoors in stout sacks smelling of
tar and shoot it clanking into the coal-hole under the stairs. It is only very rarely, when I
make a definite mental-effort, that I connect this coal with that far-off labour in the
mines. It is just ‘coal’ — something that I have got to have; black stuff that arrives
mysteriously from nowhere in particular, like manna except that you have to pay for it.
You could quite easily drive a car right across the north of England and never once
remember that hundreds of feet below the road you are on the miners are hacking at the
coal. Yet in a sense it is the miners who are driving your car forward. Their lamp-lit
world down there is as necessary to the daylight world above as the root is to the flower.

It is not long since conditions in the mines were worse than they are now. There are still
living a few very old women who in their youth have worked underground, with the



harness round their waists, and a chain that passed between their legs, crawling on all
fours and dragging tubs of coal. They used to go on doing this even when they were
pregnant. And even now, if coal could not be produced without pregnant women
dragging it to and fro, I fancy we should let them do it rather than deprive ourselves of
coal. But-most of the time, of course, we should prefer to forget that they were doing it. It
is so with all types of manual work; it keeps us alive, and we are oblivious of its
existence. More than anyone else, perhaps, the miner can stand as the type of the manual
worker, not only because his work is so exaggeratedly awful, but also because it is so
vitally necessary and yet so remote from our experience, so invisible, as it were, that we
are capable of forgetting it as we forget the blood in our veins. In a way it is even
humiliating to watch coal-miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your
own status as an ‘intellectual’ and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to
you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out
that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit.
Supp. , and the poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of
Marxism for Infants — all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor
drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving
their shovels forward with anns and belly muscles of steel.


NORTH AND SOUTH (1937) (FROM “THE ROAD TO WIGAN

PIER”)

As you travel northward your eye, accustomed to the South or East, does not notice much
difference until you are beyond Binningham. In Coventry you might as well be in
Finsbury Park, and the Bull Ring in Birmingham is not unlike Norwich Market, and
between all the towns of the Midlands there stretches a villa-civilization indistinguishable
from that of the South. It is only when you get a little further north, to the pottery towns
and beyond, that you begin to encounter the real ugliness of industrialism — an ugliness
so frightful and so arresting that you are obliged, as it were, to come to terms with it.

A slag-heap is at best a hideous thing, because it is so planless and functionless. It is
something just dumped on the earth, like the emptying of a giant’s dust-bin. On the
outskirts of the mining towns there are frightful landscapes where your horizon is ringed



completely round by jagged grey mountains, and underfoot is mud and ashes and over-
head the steel cables where tubs of dirt travel slowly across miles of country. Often the
slag-heaps are on fire, and at night you can see the red rivulets of fire winding this way
and that, and also the slow-moving blue flames of sulphur, which always seem on the
point of expiring and always spring out again. Even when a slag-heap sinks, as it does
ultimately, only an evil brown grass grows on it, and it retains its hummocky surface.
One in the slums of Wigan, used as a playground, looks like a choppy sea suddenly
frozen; ‘the flock mattress’, it is called locally. Even centuries hence when the plough
drives over the places where coal was once mined, the sites of ancient slag-heaps will still
be distinguishable from an aeroplane.

I remember a winter afternoon in the dreadful environs of Wigan. All round was the lunar
landscape of slag-heaps, and to the north, through the passes, as it were, between the
mountains of slag, you could see the factory chimneys sending out their plumes of
smoke. The canal path was a mixture of cinders and frozen mud, criss-crossed by the
imprints of innumerable clogs, and all round, as far as the slag-heaps in the distance,
stretched the ‘flashes’ — pools of stagnant water that had seeped into the hollows caused
by the subsidence of ancient pits. It was horribly cold. The ‘flashes’ were covered with
ice the colour of raw umber, the bargemen were muffled to the eyes in sacks, the lock
gates wore beards of ice. It seemed a world from which vegetation had been banished;
nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes, and foul water. But even Wigan is
beautiful compared with Sheffield. Sheffield, I suppose, could justly claim to be called
the ugliest town in the Old World: its inhabitants, who want it to be pre-eminent in
everything, very likely do make that claim for it. It has a population of half a million and
it contains fewer decent buildings than the average East Anglian village of five hundred.
And the stench! If at rare moments you stop smelling sulphur it is because you have
begun smelling gas. Even the shallow river that runs through the town is-usually bright
yellow with some chemical or other. Once I halted in the street and counted the factory
chimneys I could see; there were thirty-three of them, but there would have been far more
if the air had not been obscured by smoke. One scene especially lingers in my mind. A
frightful patch of waste ground (somehow, up there, a patch of waste ground attains a
squalor that would be impossible even in London) trampled bare of grass and littered
with newspapers and old saucepans. To the right an isolated row of gaunt four-roomed
houses, dark red, blackened by smoke. To the left an interminable vista of factory



chimneys, chimney beyond chimney, fading away into a dim blackish haze. Behind me a
railway embankment made of the slag from furnaces. In front, across the patch of waste
ground, a cubical building of red and yellow brick, with the sign ‘Thomas Grocock,
Haulage Contractor’.

At night, when you cannot see the hideous shapes of the houses and the blackness of
everything, a town like Sheffield assumes a kind of sinister magnificence. Sometimes the
drifts of smoke are rosy with sulphur, and serrated flames, like circular saws, squeeze
themselves out from beneath the cowls of the foundry chimneys. Through the open doors
of foundries you see fiery serpents of iron being hauled to and fro by redlit boys, and you
hear the whizz and thump of steam hammers and the scream of the iron under the blow.
The pottery towns are almost equally ugly in a pettier way. Right in among the rows of
tiny blackened houses, part of the street as it were, are the ‘pot banks’ — conical brick
chimneys like gigantic burgundy bottles buried in the soil and belching their smoke
almost in your face. You come upon monstrous clay chasms hundreds of feet across and
almost as deep, with little rusty tubs creeping on chain railways up one side, and on the
other workmen clinging like samphire-gatherers and cutting into the face of the cliff with
their picks. I passed that way in snowy weather, and even the snow was black. The best
thing one can say for the pottery towns is that they are fairly small and stop abruptly.