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Cobb, Francis William

During his tenure as Rector of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, Reverend Francis William Cobb was also busy photographing the nearby collieries of Barber Walker and Company. Between 1907 and 1917 he produced a series of illustrative slides for a lecture entitled “From Pit to Fireplace: A Talk about Coal and Those Who Get It”. Several of the images in the series were photographed with the aid of artificial lighting in cramped or dangerous conditions underground. Hand Holing documents a tried and true coal mining technique that was then becoming increasingly obsolete as a succession of innovations in coal-cutting technology made machine-holing both more precise – thereby reducing the likelihood of a roof collapse – and more efficient (Duncan and Penman 1908). Cobb’s photograph could well have been from a scene in Zola’s Germinal, set fifty years earlier: “the seam was so thin, hardly more than half a metre thick at that point, that they were more or less flattened between the roof and the wall, dragging themselves around on their knees and elbows, unable to turn round without bruising their shoulders. In order to get at the coal, they had to stay stretched out on one side, with their necks twisted, so that they could swing their arms far enough back to wield their short-handled picks at an angle” (1993:39). CMF