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HARD TIMES AND THE BIRTH OF A LEGEND
BY ANDREW WOOD
In the early 19th century, one commentator who had visited the
Denhall coal mine near Ness, said that it was the most miserable
and desolate place he had ever seen. Not only men but whole
families, including small children, went underground for a few
pence a day. Not surprisingly, they also lived in squalid cottages
which were alive with vermin and insects. Of all the people who
worked in the coliery at Denhall, Wirral’s first coal mine, the man
who comes closest to fame is one Henry Lyon, but we will leave his
story until later.
Some small scale extraction of coal in Wirral was recorded from as
early as the 17th century, but commercial mining did not begin until
the 1700’s. Ness was nothing more than a small farming hamlet until
the Stanleys of Hooton opened the Denna (Denhall) Colliery in 1760,
to extract coal from a seam which ran out under the Dee towards
Flintshire. (It was the same seam that was mined from a colliery at
Point of Air on the Welsh side of the Dee.) The Denhall shaft was
located a few metres from Denhall Quay, one of a succession of
quays built as the Dee silted up, and coal was shipped from the quay
to Chester and Liverpool. About two hundred yards (180 metres)
north of the pit was the miners’ pub, the ‘Harp Inn’, which still offers
a refreshing pint and a fine view over the Dee (and never a coal
blackened face to be seen).
Working conditions even towards the end of the pit’s life were bad,
but in the early years they were truly appalling, scarcely better than
slave labour. Boys began work there as early as seven years of age,
and everything was done using hands or feet. The Stanley family, the
owners of the mine, living in the elegant splendour of Hooton Hall,
six miles (9.6 km) away, probably knew little and cared less about the
lives of the miners scraping out a miserable living on the bleak shore of
the Dee. The coal seam was thin and, in this “History of the Hundred
of Wirral”, William Mortimer describe how the poor quality coal was
hauled to the bottom of the shaft in small boats along underground
canals. Each boat carried four hundredweight (0.2 ton) of coal in
baskets. Four or five of the boats would be roped together and then
propelled along by a man lying on his back on the coal in the first boat.
He would push with his feet against the tunnel roof, a method similar
to that used to propel narrowboats through tunnels on the canals,
known as ‘legging’. Denhall colliery was closed round about 1855 when
it became impossible to extract any more coal using such primitive and
dangerous methods.
Perhaps at this point we should return to Henry Lyon. In 1764, he
had married 21 year old Mary Kidd who came from Hawarden, and
they moved into Smith’s Cottage (which still exists) near the road to
Denhall, in Neston Road, Ness. Henry worked at Denhall Colliery,
although he also worked as the village blacksmith. The small house
was one of a number of similar cottages that belonged to the Stanleys.
It was a hard life and Henry no doubt suffered from ill health like most
of the miners, although least some of his working time was spent above
ground. Even men of twenty were bent by the backbreaking work
within a few years of starting work. They had to crouch in muddy, icy
water and hack at the sides of the flooded levels. Others died, poisoned
by pockets of methane or killed by rock falls underground. Henry
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and Mary’s daughter, Amy, was born on Friday 26th April 1765. Her
prospects were not good, her life promised to be poor and short.
Two months after she was baptised, he father died suddenly. He was
buried in the churchyard of St Mary and St Helen, the parish church
of Neston. No cause of death is recorded for Henry Lyon and his grave
is unmarked. Of course, the life expectancy of men who worked as
miners was short, although deaths from respiratory diseases could be
agonising and long drawn out. But there is no record of an accident
at Denhall, or of an epidemic of any kind, in the spring or summer of
1765. Mary did not receive a pension or compensation from the mine,
which might have been the case if Henry had died at work there. The
Lyons’ baby daughter seemed destined for a cruel and meagre life,
backbreaking labour by the age of ten, a hard marriage and an early
death.
With nothing to keep her in Ness, Mary took her daughter back
to her family in Hawarden, where the air was clean and the living
conditions not so desperately poor. In time Amy, who preferred to
be known as Emma, rose far above her humble beginnings. Having
moved to London, she met Charles Francis Greville, who installed
her in his London home and provided her with music and drawing
lessons. Greville unloaded Emma on his elderly widower uncle, Sir
William Hamilton, in return for Hamilton making Greville his heir.
Emma duly married Sir William who was the British envoy to Naples
from 1764 to 1800. In due time she achieved lasting notoriety as the
mistress of Admiral Horatio Nelson. Mining began again, not far away
from Denhall, at a new location in Little Neston in the middle of the
19th century. There is evidence that when William Lever built his soap
works at Port Sunlight in 1888 at least some of the coal for the works
was brought by rail from Little Neston. The coal owners were two
brothers by the name of Platt, and the manager of the colliery was J S
Taylor. Despite the fact that there were plenty of men who had worked
at Denhall, they preferred to bring in skilled miners from North Wales,
Lancashire and even Yorkshire rather than recruit locally. This influx
from other mining areas probably accounts for the fact that Neston
developed a dialect noticeably different from the rest of