When I was a child in the Victorian style houses of the Huxley Estate in the early 1900s, coal fires were our only means of heating. So coal was an essential item. There was a fireplace in every room, although the fires in the bedrooms were seldom lit for financial reasons.
The coal was delivered by the coalman using a horse and cart. The cart was a flat platform with metal railings round it to keep the sacks of coal in place. The sacks were packed in cwts (hundredweights). [One cwt is just over 50 kg]. The coalman never dealt with money. That was the job of the coal agent, who would call at the house to take the order and the payment.
A horse-drawn coal delivery cart in the early 1900s loaded with sacks of coal. The photo is courtesy of Gillian Smyth. It was sent to her by a family member as showing a James Smyth, who could be either her great grandfather or her great great grandfather with one of his brothers. The Smyth family were resident in Edmonton at one time.
The placard at the top of the cart reads: COALS SUPPLIED DIRECT FROM THE COLLIERIES; the one at the front reads DARFIELD MAIN COAL COMPANY; and the one at the side reads 1/- [one shilling] per cwt. The puzzle is that two men are wearing white coats which would not have been practical when delivering dusty black coal. It is impossible to see whether their hats had the long leather back protectors at the back, but the straps below the knees that my mother mentions are clearly visible.
There was a big difference in the coal and sometimes my mother didn't get the quality that she ordered, which was usually Derby Brights. Poor quality coal would usually look all right, but it would not burn properly on the fire, being more like slate, and the grate in the morning would be a mass of grey ash. With good quality coal, a fire would look wonderfully welcoming and cheerful, but it would always be allowed to die down towards the end of the evening, so as not to waste coal, and then it would look most depressing.
We used coal for the kitchen range as well as the open fires. The range had an oven on one side of the fire and a hob for cooking on top. Just above were two dampers that would control the flow of air and hence the heat. The whole thing was polished with black lead except the edges which were made of steel and had to be cleaned with emery paper. There were bars in front of the fire. When my mother wanted to build the fire up quickly, she would do a very dangerous thing. She would hold a newspaper in front of these bars to get the fire to draw up, which it did. Then as she could see the newspaper getting hot and going brown, she would grab it, just as it was about to burst into flames and throw it onto the hearth which had a metal dust pan. Women always liked to have a good fire when their husbands came home from work, although they themselves usually worked through most of the day in the cold while they were alone in the house.
There was nowhere to store the coal outside the house. It, like all the other houses on the Huxley Estate, had what was called a 'coal hole' which was a cupboard which ran under the stairs and looked like a wooden wall from the outside. This was made out of tongued and grooved planks, so no coal dust seeped out into the room. The door was in the scullery. To get to it, the coalman who delivered the coal had to come through the passage [hall], and then the kitchen [living room], into the scullery.
We could never be sure what day or time the coalman would arrive. This made my mother rather cross, particularly if she had done a lot of cleaning before he did arrive. When he knocked at the door, my mother's first tasks were to tie back the lantern which hung from the ceiling and the curtain which hung at the bottom of the stairs, so that he wouldn’t hit them with his sacks. Then she had to push the table and chairs into the living room, to give him a clear run. It was a dirty business and everything in the house stopped for it. (In contrast the large houses in Pymmes Villas in Edmonton had their coal cellars underground, which the coalmen could access from outside. The openings were in the front gardens and normally covered with a metal lid. I suppose one gets what one pays for in this life. Those houses were bought outright whereas my parents' house, along with all the others on the Huxley Estate, were rented.)
If you have an old photo which would illustrate the way of life that my mother describes, I would very much appreciate a copy. Pat Cryer
The coalman's face and clothes would be black with coal dust. He didn't have a uniform, but wore a leather hat with a flat leather flap down the back to protect his back and shoulders as he carried the sacks. He also wore narrow straps just below his knees, possibly to prevent the coal dust getting up his legs, but I'm not really sure why. The trousers always seemed to be corduroy but that may have been chance. When he shot the coal into the coalhole, the noise was terrific as the coal hit the wooden wall.
As the coalman left, my mother would always tip him two pennies which was a lot of money in those days. It was expected and was presumably so that he would remember to be careful not to touch the walls or knock anything over next time. Afterwards he would respectfully touch his hat in acknowledgement.
These childhood recollections from around the time of the 1911 census are of deliveries of coal to a working class family in north London (then Middlesex).