When Saltom was built, almost every mine in the country employed children. Children were paid a fraction of an adult’s wage. To keep profits up, any job which could be done by a child was given to a child.

In 1842 the government commissioned a report on the employment of children.  In the report children described their work in their own words.  The youngest, sometimes as young as 5, were trappers working alone and often in total darkness.  They opened and closed the trap-doors that were part of the ventilation system.  George Bentley, who entered mining at the age of 7, described walking a mile and a half to work 14 hours for a shilling a day.   He was described as being ‘half starved’.  Girls were treated just as harshly as boys.  Ester Craven, aged 14, told of how she often regretted starting work in the mines but that she became used to it and thought nothing of being beaten by the getters (worked at the coal face ‘getting’ the coal).  Sarah Gooder, aged 8, told the Commission that she was a trapper.  ‘It does not tire me, but I have to trap without a light and I'm scared.  I go at four and sometimes half past three in the morning, and come out at five and half past.  I never go to sleep.’

These children experienced nothing that we would call childhood but merely struggled for survival.  Saltom Pit was opened more than 100 years before this report so it is possible that conditions for children were even worse then. 

Following the report, the government banned child labour underground.  Six years later Saltom Pit stopped bringing coal to the surface – it was too inefficient.  Did the success of Saltom depend on cheap child labour?