MINERS HOUSES.

Taihape Daily Times, 19 May 1919, Page 6

MINERS HOUSES.

SMALL, CRAMPED, AND INSANITARY.

Mr Robert Smillie 's statement before the Coal Commission that miners are *' brought up in starvation" and "housed worse than swine" is less exaggerated than many people think, says a wr'ter in the Daily Mail, who r..is

I'vod in a typical miners'S cottage. Here arc .some facts from my own l:f.« fifty years of which have b~vn Fpc.it in £-nd about the Durham coil mine?.

As a boy I have eaten and slept in the same rcom as my parents whilj -.tie deul body or a sister (another time it was a brother) lay there awaiting burial. My other sisters slept in a -very low, fireless, garret, which was Tcached by a wooden ladder. It was a •two-roomed house.

After marriage I was entitled to a free house. At one colliery I had efioie* of two houses. I rejected one with two rooms and a garret because it was next door to the pit ponies' stables, with a ihin partition wall between, only one fireplace, and a cesspool at the foot of the garret ladder in the kitchen! Tho house I accepted for myself, wife, and three children, had only a kitchen and garret, with connecting ladder, and one door and window in the kitchen opposite each other. The garret roof was of bare slates, in bad condition. Snow and rain lussd to come doAvn on the bed while we slept. The owner of the colliery lived in a fine hall less than half a mile away. He was a breeder and exhibitor of prize cattle, of which he took such care that his workmen envied their shelter. These stables were substantially built, weather-proof, and as perfect in their sanitary arrangements as they could be made. His cattle were indeed housed far better than his workmen. The locks on the doors of all the houses in one street I lived in were all alike, and one key fitted all the locks. If we lost our key we borrowed ; our neighbours to get. into our owm house.

The daily bath in winter was taken in front of the kitchen fire in the presence of the family and sometimes of neighbours. Coal hewer's houses arc not provided with bathrooms and baths. Present-day colliery owners have inherited a legacy of small, cramped, insanitary workmen's cottages. Their built badly. It seems that the miner of to-day is not satisfied to live as his predecessors lived. Much has l>een done during the past ten years by colliery owners to remedy the defects of the past, but it will yet require a vast amount of capital and work to achieve the full measure of the housing reform.