Gil & Sonia Murray wrote: > Well, I'm glad to hear the Duke said something nice to mitigate his ugly > remark. Maybe he wasn't so bad after all - but I bet he stayed in the rear > giving orders, well out of cannon range. > > "Help the girl that Tommy's left behind him..." What in the world would > have happened to the children if the father was killed? I suspect pensions > were pitifully small back then! Yes and so was income tax!! A relationship existed. But in the "good old days" church congregations were large, people knew the name of the parish they lived in. Ask your friends <what parish> they live in, you may find very few can answer. The churches were the source of charity, poor support etc in the days before Welfare and Social Security. Community power [it's coming back!] did those chores neglected by central government. Cheers, ALISTAIR

Thought you folks would enjoy this. Some of you have probably seen it, but some will find it to be the treasure I did. My ancestors worked at Niddry. Pages 303 - 307 of My Schools and Schoolmasters, or The Story of My Education An Autobiography by Hugh Miller 1854 There were at this time several collier villages in the neighborhood of Edinburgh, which have since disappeared. They were situated on what were called the " edge-coals," -those steep seams of the Mid-Lothian Coal Basin, which, lying low in the system, have got a more vertical tilt against the trap eminences of the south and west than the upper seams in the middle of the field, and which, as they could not be followed in their abrupt descent beyond a certain depth, are now regarded, for at least the practical purposes of the miner, and until the value of coal shall have risen considerably, as wrought out. One of these villages, whose foundations can no longer be traced, occurred in the immediate vicinity of Niddry Mill. It was a wretched assemblage of dingy, low-roofed, tile-covered hovels, each of which perfectly resembled all the others, and was inhabited by a rude and ignorant race of men, that still bore about them the soil and stain of recent slavery. Curious as the fact may seem, all the older men of that village, though situated little more than four miles from Edinburgh, had been born slaves. Nay, eighteen years later (in 1842), when Parliament issued a commission to inquire into the nature and results of female labor in the coal-pits of Scotland, there was a collier still living that had never been twenty miles from the Scottish capital, who could state to the Commissioners that both his father and grandfather had been slaves, - that he himself had been born a slave,-and that he had wrought for years in a pit in the neighborhood of Musselburgh ere the colliers got their freedom. Father and grand-father had been parishioners of the late Dr. Carlyle of Inveresk. They were contemporary with Chatham and Cowper, and Burke and Fox; and at a time when Granville Sharpe could have stepped forward and effectually protected, in virtue of his own statute, the runaway negro who had taken refuge from the tyranny of his master in a British port, no man could have protected them, from the Inveresk laird, their proprietor, had they dared to exercise the right, common to all Britons besides, of removing to some other locality, or of making choice of some other employment. Strange enough, surely, that so entire a fragment of the barbarous past should have been thus dovetailed into the age not yet wholly passed away! I regard it as one of the more singular circumstances of my life, that I should have conversed with Scotchmen who had been born slaves. The collier women of this village, poor over-toiled creatures, who carried up all the coal from 'under ground on their backs, by a long turnpike stair inserted in one of the shafts, bore more of the marks of serfdom still about them than even the men. How these poor women did labor, and how thoroughly, even at this time, were they characterized by the slave-nature! It has been estimated by a man who knew well them, Mr. Robert Bald, that one of their ordinary day's work was equal to the carrying of a hundredweight from the level of the sea to the top of Ben Lomond. They were marked by a peculiar type of mouth, from which I learned to distinguish them from all the other females of the country. It was wide, open, thick-lipped, projecting' equally above and below, and exactly resembled that which we find in the prints given of savages in their lowest and most degraded state, in such narratives of our modern voyagers as, for instance, the " Narrative of Captain Fitzroy's Second Voyage of the Beagle." During, however, the lapse of the past twenty years this type of mouth seems to have disappeared in Scotland. It was accompanied by traits of almost infantile' weakness. I have seen these collier women crying like children, when toiling under their load along the upper rounds: of the wooden stair that traversed the shaft; and then returning, scarce a minute after, with the empty creer, singing with glee. The collier houses were chiefly remarkable, for being all alike, outside and in all were equally dingy, dirty, naked, and uncomfortable. I first learned to suspect, in this rude village, that the democratic watchword, "Liberty and Equality," is somewhat faulty in its philosophy. Slavery and Equality would be nearer the mark. Wherever there is liberty, the original differences between man and man begin to manifest themselves in their external circumstances, and the equality straightway ceases. It is through slavery that equality, among at least the masses, is to be fully attained.* I found but little intelligence in the neighborhood, among even the villagers and country people, that stood on a higher platform than the colliers. The fact may be variously accounted for; but so it is, that though there is almost always more than the average amount of knowledge and acquirement amongst the mechanics of large towns, the little hamlets and villages by which they are surrounded are usually inhabited by a class considerably below the average. In M. Quetelet's interesting "Treatise on Man," we find a series of maps given, which, based on extensive statistical tables, exhibit by darker and lighter shadings the moral and intellectual character of the people in the various districts of the countries which they represent. In one map, for instance, representative of the state of education in France, while certain well-taught provinces are represented by a bright tint, as if enjoying the light, there are others, in which great ignorance obtains, that exhibit a deep shade of blackness, as if a cloud rested over them; and the general aspect of the whole is that of a landscape seen from a hill-top in a day of dappled light and shadow. There are certain minuter shadings, however, by which certain curious facts might be strikingly represented to the eye in this manner, for which statistical tables furnish no adequate basis, but which men who have seen a good deal of the people of a country might be able to give in a manner at least approximately correct. In a shaded map representative of the intelligence of Scotland, I would be disposed-sinking the lapsed classes, or representing them merely by 'a few such dark spots as mottle the sun to represent the large towns as centres of focal brightness; but each of these focal centres I would encircle with a halo of darkness considerably deeper in shade than the medium spaces beyond. I found that in the tenebrious halo of the Scottish capital there existed, independently of the ignorance of the poor colliers, three distinct elements. A considerable proportion of the villagers were farm servants in the decline of life, who, unable any longer to pro-cure, as in their days of unbroken strength, regular engagements from the farmers of the district, supported themselves as occasional laborers. And they, of course, were characterized by the ignorance of their class. Another portion of the people were carters, employed mainly, in these times, ere the rail-ways began, in supplying the Edinburgh coal-market, and in driving building materials into the city from the various quarries. And carters as a class, like all who live much in the society of horses, are invariably ignorant and unintellectual. A third, but greatly smaller portion than either of the other two, consisted of mechanics; but it was only mechanics of an inferior order, that remained outside the city to work for carters and laborers : the better skilled, and, as to a certain extent the terms are convertible, the more intelligent mechanics, found employment and a home in Edinburgh. The cottage in which I lodged was inhabited by an old farm-servant,-a tall, large-bodied, small-headed man, who, in his journey through life, seemed to have picked up scarce an idea ; and his wife, a woman turned of sixty, though a fine enough body in the main, and a careful manager, was not more intellectual. They had but a single apartment in their humble dwelling, fenced off by a little bit of partition from the outer door; and I could fain have wished that they had two; but there was no choice of lodgings in the village, and I had just to content myself, as the working man always must in such circumstances, with the shelter I could get. My bed was situated in the one end of the room, and my landlady's and her husband's in the other, with the passage by which we entered between ; but decent old Peggy Russel had been accustomed to such arrangements all her life long, and seemed never once to think of the matter ; and--as she had reached that period of life at which women of the humbler class assume the characteristics of the other sex, somewhat, I suppose, on the principle on which very ancient female birds put on male plumage - I in a short time ceased to think of it also. It is not the less true, however, that the purposes of decency demand that much should be done, especially in the southern and midland districts of Scotland, for the dwellings of the poor. * The act for manumitting our Scotch colliers was passed in the year 1775, forty-nine years prior to the date of my acquaintance with the class at Niddry. But though it was only such colliers of the village as were in their fiftieth year when I knew them (with, of course, all the older ones), who had been born slaves, even its men of thirty had actually, though not nominally, come into the world in a state of bondage, in consequence of certain penalties attached to the emancipating act, of which the poor ignorant workers under ground were both too improvident and too little ingenious to keep clear. They were set free, however, by a second act passed in 1799. The language of both these acts, regarded as British ones of the latter half of the last century, and as bearing reference to British subjects living within the limits of the island, strikes with startling effect. " Whereas," says the preamble of the older act - that of 1775 -" by the statute law of Scotland, as explained by the judges of the courts of law there, many colliers, and coal-bearers, and salters, are in a state of slavery or bondage, bound to the collieries or salt-works where they work for life, transferable with the collieries and salt-works; and whereas the emancipating," &c. &c. A passage in the preamble of the act of 1799 is scarce less striking: it declares that, notwithstanding the former act, "many colliers and coal-bearers still continue in a state of bondage" in Scotland. The history of our Scotch colliers would be found a curious and instructive one. Their slavery seems not to have been derived from the ancient times of general serf hip, but to have originated in comparatively modern acts of the Scottish Parliament, and in decisions of the Court of Sessions,-acts of a Parliament in which the poor ignorant subterranean men of the country were, of course, wholly unrepresented, and in decisions of a Court in which no agent of theirs ever made appearance in their behalf.