Last updated 20:49, Thursday, 17 April 2008

NAKED he was, stood on his front doorstep, his taut frame caked with sweat and coal-dust.

He’d just doffed his pitman’s working clothes before setting off for the river to bathe. He made his unclad way through Blennerhasset down to the nearby river.

This was back around the 1870s. And nobody batted an eyelid.

And why not? He’d probably no piped water in his house and the river was only a few hundred yards away. It was eminently practical.

He’d been doing it for years. And he wasn’t offending anyone in the village.

All very well, until he was spotted by an outsider. He was not amused . . . and he complained. So the miner’s naked lavatory peregrinations had to end.

So did he subsequently bathe in the river with some clothes on? Or did he resort to a zinc bath in the house?

If the latter, then pity his long suffering wife. She’d be the one to ensure that there was enough hot water, obtained from wherever, to fill the bath.

A regular task for any miner’s wife. And if she’d sons working different shifts, it was a really time consuming chore. And stayed so until well into the 20th century when pithead baths appeared.

The first pit-head baths in England were built in 1911, the first in Cumberland opening at Lowca in 1930.

The second pit-head baths in Cumberland were officially opened in August 1933 at St Helen’s Colliery, Siddick, at a cost of £14,000. Some 1,500 people attended the opening.

Sir Samuel Kelly, chairman and managing director of the company, did the honours. The great and the good were all there and speeches were made. The occasion had a feel good factor because most people in the audience were only too aware that the decision to build such facilities was a vote of confidence in the pit’s future.

References were made to miners now being able to go to and from their work looking like city clerks, instead of going home in wet and dirty work clothes.

Tom Cape, the local MP, recalled that early in his union career he’d been attacked by both employers and employees when he advocated the building of pit-head baths. He was glad that situation had changed. He hoped all miners would use the facilities. He told of a man who, when listening to Dr Isaac Fletcher extolling the virtues of baths, got up and told the good doctor that he disagreed with him, saying “We have had a bath in our house for years and have never had to use it.”It seems that some miners didn’t want to use the new baths. They’d had the same problem at Lowca.

Apparently, unless it is a myth of long standing, some colliers believed that having a daily bath weakened the back.

The West Cumberland News told of an aged miner over in the North East who turned up at his newly opened pit-head baths with a woman in tow. When the bath attendants wouldn’t let her in, he complained “But this is my wife, I’ve brought her to wash my back.” So he obviously didn’t believe in that back weakening story.

Some miners, if you believe it, were said to be unhappy about stripping off in public (unlike Blennerhasset Man) and they also thought that their health would suffer if they showered before going home, probably something to do with rheumatics.

Come 1956, when Tom Stephenson opened the new £52,000 pit-head baths at Clifton, it seems that miners’ wives insisted on their men using them. To quote from a report in the WCT: “Said a miner’s wife who for 30 years has had to boil water in pans and kettles in front of the fire; I didn’t give my man time to make up his mind whether he would use the pithead baths or not. I told him he had to, and that was that. Now I can put away the zinc bath and get a bit more fun out of my life.”

Another wife put it more strongly. “If there’s a miner in Clifton who won’t use the baths, then he ought to be kicked to death!” I wonder if any brave, or foolhardy, soul did choose not to use the baths.