Girls from the black stuff

‘They did not look like women, or at least a stranger new to the district might easily have been misled by their appearance, as they stood together in a group, by the pit’s mouth.’ As opening sentences go this is a cracker, but few modern readers of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s That Lass O’Lowrie’s get far beyond it because the novel’s characters speak in a Lancashire dialect that makes Mark Twain’s Huck Finn sound like a Harvard preppy. In real life, though, it wasn’t the Lancashire pit girls’ lingo that put contemporaries off so much as their costume. For these ‘pit brow lasses’, as they were known around Wigan, strutted about in the Victorian era wearing what the Manchester Guardian fastidiously described as ‘the article of clothing which women ought only to wear in a figure of speech’. Trousers!

The last pit brow lass retired in the 1970s, but for more than a century before that the women of the northern coalfields had pulled their financial weight by working at the pit mouth emptying coal tubs, sorting coal and shifting it on to wagons.