Slavery in Beer

Last weekend we spent a long weekend in Branscombe, Beer and Lyme Regis, visiting the Beer Quarry, which has been worked since Roman times.

There's hardly a cathedral in England which doesn't have Beer stone in it somewhere.

The quarry workers were treated like slave labour and even had to buy their candles from the quarry owner. If a block they were hewing out of the seam was flawed in any way, they didn't get paid for it and were out of pocket. 

The expression 'not worth a candle' comes from stone quarrying underground - if a block was condemned, it wasn't worth the candle that was bought to cut it out of the seam. Also the expression 'it rings true' from the knocking of freshly hewn blocks with a hammer to test it, a ringing sound indicating it wasn't flawed and a dull sound suggesting a flaw.

I guess the expression 'you can't hold a candle to it' comes from the explosives industry.....

Masons got paid more than quarrymen and didn't have to buy their own candles. You might think it strange that sculpting the stone took place underground, but it did, as the stone remained soft in the cool temperatures and didn't dry out, making it much easier to carve. Limestone cures in daylight.

A quarryman's working life was between 10 and 12 years, after which he was either knackered from the backbreaking labour and limestone dust in his lungs, or dead. Yes, they could move elsewhere, but only to be exploited by the next rapacious capitalist who attended church every Sunday, like the family that owned the Penrhyn slate quarry near Bangor in North Wales.

When you look at a beautiful cathedral, think of the exploitation that took place to obtain the stone, with the church being party to it. When you're told slavery was abolished in the 1830s, give a thought to the poor in England, who were treated abysmally by the free market with no protections whatsoever. Thank God the Labour Party was started up to stop this exploitation.