It was hard, it was dirty, it was dangerous. But coal hewers were actually the elite of the pit; indeed, it’s surprising Hutton was allowed to do the work as young as eighteen, and without working his way up through gruelling years at the back, and then the front, of a corf of coal. Francis Frame perhaps used his own position in the pit to make it happen. Hewers were relatively well paid: quite possibly better paid than manual workers in other fields like agriculture. And they worked shorter hours than the trapper boys and the putters: seven or eight hours of the day, starting in the very early morning.
The stars are twinkling in the sky,
As to the pit I go;
I think not of the sheen on high,
But of the gloom below.
Not rest or peace, but toil and strife,
Do there the soul enthral;
And turn the precious cup of life
Into a cup of gall.
That was Joseph Skipsey, the ‘Pitman Poet’, in the 1860s: but the words could have applied to Hutton, or to many and many another.
Charles Hutton had known, briefly, the life of a country schoolteacher, and had felt the stirrings of a talent for both languages and mathematics. A world wider than the pit had come into view more than once during his short life, in the person of John Wesley and in that of Jonathan Ivison: university graduates both, and holders in their different ways of promises about what life could be.
In a pamphlet for children, printed in Newcastle, Wesley wrote that you shouldn’t ever wish for more than you have. Men are fallen, grace is a gift, and if we had what we deserve we’d all be in hell. But however docile Hutton was, and however resigned to the will of Providence, it’s hard to imagine he didn’t wish.
I think Charles Hutton’s return to the coal pit must have represented desperation – perhaps exasperation – on the part of his family. The hope that if he stayed in school he might somehow make a better or a different life for himself was showing no clear sign of paying off, so far as we know. Children younger than him were earning their keep; the favoured youngest son had been indulged for many years, but he would not be indulged for ever. One source says he was ‘taken from school’, and there is almost the sense of a violent abduction away from his natural element to the now quite alien world of the pits.
The pit, and its cup of gall, could have been the rest of his life: for a time there must have been no reason to imagine anything else was going to happen. Two things made a difference.
One was that Hutton was bad at hewing coal. The pay bills show him bringing down less coal than his fellows, and as a result he was employed less – much less – than they were. In old age Hutton would say his injured arm was to blame for his poor performance at the coalface. Maybe it was, though we never hear that the lame arm affected him later in his life. Maybe it was simply that his schooling and his comparative lack of experience down the mines had left him without the strength, the endurance and the skills the work needed.
The other thing was that Hutton was using his time away from work to exploit his connections, to invent a way out of colliery life and make something quite different for himself. Who knows just what hustling Charles Hutton did during the months he worked down the pit, in the winter of 1755–6. But it came to the point that he knew he had it in his power to escape, and some sort of scene appears to have taken place at the colliery. He was ‘laid idle’ one day, whether for some fault or simply because a more able man was available, and he made a fuss about it. He told the overman that he’d soon be out of his power, that he was going to go to a more respectable life. It must have been quite a row; men who were there remembered the scene seventy years later.
But Hutton was speaking the truth, however ungraciously. Jonathan Ivison had been the curate at Whitburn for four years now, and if his Jesmond schoolroom had been limping along meanwhile, it was time to pass it on for good to someone who lived near by. Ivison knew the man for the job. Presumably he squared it with the owner of the building where the school was held. And presumably he squared it with Francis Frame. For he wanted Charles Hutton to take over.
At the age of eighteen, Hutton was legally a minor and too young, in theory, to set up on his own in any trade or profession. (He was also, perhaps crucially, too young to have signed any sort of binding contract at the colliery.) But it’s hard to imagine his parents having much hesitation about an offer that would get the useless hewer away from the coalface, where he was little more than an obstacle in the way of fitter, stronger men, and would secure him – if he pulled it off – an income and even a career. One day in March 1756 Charles Hutton clung to the rope and ascended to day for the last time.
Autumn 1758. High Heaton, near Newcastle. Silence (or almost). Boys seated at rows of desks. Slate pencils squeaking; quills scratching on paper. Another harvest is in the fields, and the coalface is as hellish as ever. But Charles Hutton is above ground now, in what was once Jonathan Ivison’s schoolroom.
The young schoolmaster is seated at the front, where he can see all the boys. One at a time comes forward, shows his work, is praised or blamed. Can he spell the words set the class; has he written his fair copy fairly enough? Can he read the passage assigned? Has he worked the sum correctly and by the right method? Does he know his catechism answers? He is given a new exercise to do or a new instruction or definition to copy down in his book; sent back to his desk.
Over the course of the day and the week the work cycles through reading, writing, arithmetic, divinity. The boys spell from a textbook: probably the same one, by Ann Fisher, that Hutton learned from himself. They read from the Bible, learn to count or do their sums from another book. Start again on Monday.
It would be intriguing to know how Charles Hutton spoke to his students. Firmly or gently? Leading or prodding? What was he really like as a teacher? We shall never know.
A master and his pupils.
But the books he wrote, later on, record something of the quality of thought that went into Charles Hutton’s work in the classroom; they hint at a man who had his material impeccably organised, who always had something new to show the student, a new trick, a new bit of complexity to stretch the growing mind. The Georgian classroom involved lots of one-on-one teaching, most of the children working quietly while the teacher spoke with each in turn at his desk. It demanded huge agility of mind from the teacher, as each student to be seen was at a different place and needed a different sort of help.
It’s easy to imagine that a teacher with a less than perfect grasp of the material, or who relied too heavily on a printed textbook, would end up with most of the students spending most of the time on repetitious exercises they only partly understood, and would quickly find he had lost the weaker ones. But for the exceptionally wide-awake teacher the system provided a maximum of flexibility and opportunity. It depended on having the material very clear in your mind, and above all minutely graded into separate steps. Hutton seems to have excelled at this. He would make a few enemies during his long life, and pick up criticism, some of it deserved. But no one ever denied he was a superb teacher.