Putter

The worker — most often a boy or a youth — who moved the coal between the hewer at the face and the haulage road or shaft bottom, bringing empty tubs up and taking loaded ones away.

Historical usage

Putting was a rung on the pit's age ladder rather than a trade of its own. A boy went underground as a trapper, opening and shutting the ventilation doors for the tubs; moved on to driving ponies; then to putting, which was the hardest physical work in the pit; and only then, as a grown man, to hewing. One account of the north-east pits reckons a boy starting at ten would work eleven years from trapping to putting before he became a hewer. Putters worked singly or in pairs, and had their own junior grades — foals, meaning young putters, and half-marrows, a marrow being a mate or equal.

How it worked

The hewer's job stopped at the coal he had brought down; the putter's began there. He took the loaded tub from the face along the low, unimproved gallery — often too low to stand in — to the crane or the main haulage road, and brought an empty one back. Pay followed the work rather than the clock: putters were paid by the score plus distance, a score being the standard number of tubs a particular colliery reckoned on, generally between twenty and twenty-six, while trappers and drivers were paid by the day.

Why it was used

Because the coal had to leave the face as fast as the hewer could win it, and until mechanical haulage reached the face there was nothing to do it but muscle. Putting is also where the pit made its hewers: the work built the strength and the knowledge the face demanded, and a man who had not started young was thought never to make a collier.

Risks & limitations

The job put children and youths in the lowest and least supported parts of the mine, moving heavy tubs on rough roads in the dark, and it kept them there for years. When something went wrong in the haulage roads it was putters and drivers who were in them — at Seaham in 1880 twenty of the dead were putters or drivers, and two of the thirteen killed at Woodhorn in 1916 were putters.

Regional variation

Northumberland and Durham said putter; Yorkshire said hurrier; Lancashire said waggoner or drawer. The job was the same and the word was not, which is why a colliery record's vocabulary often places it as precisely as its geology does.

Related terminology

Coal, Deputy, Incline, Man-riding, Miners' Barracks, Overman, Tub

Mines associated with this term

Included only where MineArchive's own research gives a reasonable evidential basis — not every mine where this might plausibly apply.

• Woodhorn Colliery — Northumberland (well documented example)
  Woodhorn's record sets out the pit's hierarchy — hewers at the face, putters moving the coal, trappers on the ventilation doors.

Disasters associated with this term

Included only where MineArchive's own research gives a reasonable evidential basis, with the nature of the relationship stated — not every disaster where this term might plausibly apply.

• Woodhorn Colliery explosion (contextual relationship)
  Two of the thirteen men killed in the Main Seam were putters.

Sources

1. (secondary) A Glossary of Mining Terms — Coal Mining History Resource Centre
2. (secondary) Glossary of coal mining terminology — Wikipedia
3. (secondary) Glossary of mining terms (S) — North Staffordshire Miners Group
4. (secondary) Working in the North East: pitmen and miners — William English

Record created: 25 August 2026 · Last researched: 25 August 2026