The Dean Tavern - A Gothenburg Experiment

The Village In The Thirties

The miners in Newtongrange were given a choice in 1932 - bathrooms and back kitchens or pithead baths. They voted for bathrooms and pithead baths were not build until the 1950s. Midlothian County Council began building houses in the village in 1933 and the first street completed was called Gardiner's Crescent after Sandy Gar-diner, the popular chairman of Newbattle District Council. Old Abbeyland, dating from the 1840s, contained the oldest miner's houses in the village and these were demolished about 1933. The Lothian Coal Co. was clearing the ground for what was to be their final housebuilding scheme in Newtongrange, Galadean. Newtongrange House was by this time a derelict shell, having lain empty since 1924, when the last surviving daughter of John Romans had died. The Coal Co. had bought the house and its few acres from the Trustees and it was demolished. Some of the stone from Newtongrange House was used in the building of shops at the top of the village in the early 1930s.

Burgari Quinto had a chip shop and a cafe, the Midlothian Soda Parlour, at the top of the village and another chip shop and an icecream shop at the other end. Mr. Quinto was the one man in the village who ignored the summons to appear in front of Mungo MacKay's "green table." "Tell MacKay to come and see me," he is reported to have said and there was nothing Mr. MacKay could do. Mr. Quinto owned his own shops and indeed owned most of the other shops at the top of the village. He was beholden to no one in Newtongrange.

There was no Roman Catholic Church in Newtongrange, although there were a considerable number of Catholics in the village. Dalkeith was their nearest church. Newtongrange United Free Church became Church of Scotland in 1929 at the union of the two churches. The Salvation Army had a hall and so did the Ebeneezer Church ('the Tin Kirk'). The other church in the village was the Church of Christ, which was called 'Allan's Church', after Willie Allan, the mining contractor.

There were two paper shops in the village, Syme's and Samuel's. Samuel's was near the Dean and the paper laddies vied with each other to be first in the shop at night to collect the evening papers. The first one out always made for the Dean where he could easily sell seven or eight dozen on a Saturday night. The Evening News was by tar the more popular. The Dispatch came a very poor second. The Daily Herald was the daily paper most in demand in the '30s with the Daily Express not far behind.

The first person in Samuel's shop every morning was Johnrae Gilmour, the chief wages clerk at the pit. He cycled up on his way to his work from Lothian Bridge and came in for the Colliery Office papers at 5 a.m. every morning.

Mr. Syme and Mr. Samuel got the Institute newspaper order six months each at a time. It was a good order - the Institute got a lot of papers and they were read avidly by the older men, particularly. There had to be total silence in the Reading Room, and in the Billiards Room, too. Jack Davies, the caretaker, was very strict. Billiards was one of the main things then apart from football.

Jim Reid recalls, "They had dominoes up in the Institute, there. They had a huge dominoes room. Ye see, they started tae gamble an' the authorities wisnae too pleased about it. At the holidays the men had maybe a pound or twa in their pocket an' there was one or two went down the Institute and by the time they came out there was maybe nae pound at a'. Well, a pound or a couple o' pound was really something. So the authorities really frowned on the gambling. They did stop it to a certain extent.

There wis pitch an' toss. Oh, ah went doon the wids as a laddie because ye could hear them talkin' an they would be jist be in a cleann', a wee clearin' below a tree. Theyjust stood roond aboot. The mair there was, the bigger the kitty. Somebody would say, 'Ah've got the toss.' They put two pennies on their finger and tossed them up and if ye got two heads you've cleaned the rink and if ye got one head and one tail

ye got another throw and if ye got two tails ye wis out. ye wis beaten.

They wid say,

'Ah'11 hae 2/-.'

'Ah'll hae 10/-.'

'Ah'll cover that an' ah'll cover that. Well look ah'm cleaned oot ah.

canny cover any mair.' It ye couldnae get yer bet on that wis too bad. ye

had a wmmn' steak ye could jist say. 'Well look, ah'll hiv' another birl.

If yer wantm' yer money back ye'd better get it in now.' Ye jist threw yer pennies tae somebody else. It wisnae big money, of course. They wisnae paid big money then. But it's died out. Ah never see anybody playin' that now.

In the auld days the bookies had a man standin' at the Institute. Now, whenever he saw the police he scuttered in tae the Institute. They knew, the police knew, that he was collectin' bets so it was maybe yince in six months they lifted him. The bookie was Johnnie Banks o' Bonnyrigg an' there wis a chap frae Loanhead. It was a local miner here, that stood. He was on the night shift. Of course, the bookies would bring across the lines that had won an' he stood there till maybe the racin' finished. Tucker Bennett they called him. He was on it for years and years.

Thomas Strang had the Erst football pools. He was just a wee bookie - he started somewhere in Rosewell or Bonnyrigg but he gradually grew an' grew. No' the money that they get now, of course, maybe £500 or £1,000. It was a' fixed odds. Ah remember one he had. It was 12 results an' ye had tae mark 1, 2, X. It wisnae 8 draws, as it is now, tae win a million pounds. If ye had the 12 results up, well ye wis on a good thing but if ye had 11 that was nae good. An' then gradually in comes Littlewoods and Zetters an' then they made the gamblin' legal. They got a shop here an' a shop there, ye see."

Football was the biggest interest for most of the miners. Jim Reid says, "They were a' fitba daft. Anywhere ye could get eleven men together ye had a team an' ye entered intae a juvenile league. The main thing that every miner wanted was tae draw on the blue jersey of Nitten Star. Ah've seen in the opening league match they always drew Arniston at home or Arniston away an' ah remember walkin' up the braes frae here tae auld Newbyres Park. If there was one person there, there would be two thousand five hundred of a gate - 3d. in tae see the match. Ye never referred tae them, that ye wis playin' Arniston Rangers toot-ball club. Ye wis playin' 'the Germans'. Ah think it was a relic o' the First World War. Sometimes they ca'd us 'the Chinks' or the Nitten Bills [Bulls]. Auld Arniston folk yist tae say, 'How are ye daein'. Bill?"

Arniston folk were also called 'the Square Heids' but there was never any real animosity.

The Burns Club had a good drama club in the 1930s. George Humphrey was the producer and he got Joe Corne, a Fife miner and playwright, to write a one-act play for the club. 'Hewers oi Coal was entered into the Scottish Community Drama Association One-Act Play Festival in 1936 and won the Scottish Final at Inverness. This got them through to the British Finals at the Old Vie Theatre in London in May 1937. This is an extract from the programme:

Adam Haldane remembers. "In the actual play we wore oor pit claes. Oor make-up was coal stoqr. except for a wee bit lipstick and a bit o red in the corner o' the eves. In the final oo was criticised for talkin' in Scots. The adjudicators said it would have been better in an English dialect so the folk could have understood it! Well, it was ave oor contention, we might have been wrong, that the cup went tae the North of England as it had never been there before. It was no long efter the War that the club broke up. The TV kinna put a stop tae it. The voung vins wasnae interested."

The other drama club in the village was started up by Sandv Noble. O;ie time they did a production of 'Brandy Andy and thev had a realistic looking bar made up at the pit for the set. The club borrowed all the props from the Dean including half a do/en big bottles of'Daikeith'. Only the till was not real.

In 1935 there were three thousand men employed at the three New-battle pits. Lady Victoria. Lmgenvood and Easthouses. Most of the men worked at the Lady Vie. Anderson Duncan says. "It wis a guid pit tae work in, the Lady. We hid oor bad times, tae, but ye got through. We hid some laughs - no mony - mair sweerin' than anythin'! Ye got yer fun on a Friday night. A couple o' pints and 20 Capstan for a couple o' bob. Takin' it all in all, it wis a pretty good village."

Although the miners lived in Lothian Coal Co. houses most of them were not employed directly by the Coal Co. but by individual contractors. George Armstrong recalls, "Ye worked tae a contractor. The contractors paid ee. They were paid well, right enough, but the men were only gettin' pandrops. Ah worked tae him that has the garage up at the Toll, there, Willie Allan. He wis a hard taskmaster, tae."

Some of the men worked a pool system called 'penny a boot'. Anderson Duncan remembers, "Ye appointed a man from yer am crowd tae look efter things. He collected the pays at one o' clock on a Friday and made them up. Ye had ten men - maybe one or two o' them old men. If somebody wis in a bad bit and you were in a good bit an' if ye were loused early, ye went in tae help. There wis mair comradeship then. Ye had tae work harder. The union had nae say at a'. If ye got the seek ye had tae flit."

Mungo MacKay could sack anyone over the head of the contractors and they had to be out of their house within 24 hours. The Lothian Mine Owners kept a blacklist and if you were on it you might not get ajob in another Lothian pit. No other coal company in the Lothians had such tight control over their work force as the Lothian Coal Co. had. Some men found it oppressive. Hector McNeil worked there for a time but he hated it. He used to say. "The dugs in New York are barkm' the name o' the Lothian Coal Company!"

The Lothian Coal Co, however, never had any difficulty in getting men to work at Newbattle. Ever since the company had been formed in 1S90. it had been their intention to build good houses to attract steady workmen. There were huge coal reserves at Newbattle and the Lothian Coal Co. was prepared to invest very large sums of money on developing the Lady Victoria Pit to ensure future company profits. Building good houses was part of this plan, although the cost of the housing was minimised by cheap Government loans and clever accounting.

The Lothian Coal Co. was far ahead of other coal owners in this matter. Housing for miners was generally so bad in Britain that a Housing Commission had been set up in 1912 to investigate conditions. Miner's leader, Robert Brown, called the Newtongrange houses, "probably the best houses built for miners in Scotland."

The establishment of the Dean Tavern in 1899 was intended to regulate drinking in the village and to create profits to provide amenities in Newtongrange and Easthouses. To some extent these aims conflicted and the management were well aware of it. Company chairman, Mr. Hood, had stated at the opening of the bowling green in 1902 that, "The company felt that by establishing this public house it would be the means of repressing drinking - drunkenness certainly - because they offered no encouragement to drink." And further, "... I have heard it suggested that it would be an inducement for people to spend money in consideration that they would derive some benefit from it. Personally, 'I would be very glad if the profits from the public-house were to diminish rather than increase, provided the reason was a diminution of drunkenness."

The Dean Tavern made large profits which provided Newtongrange with a wide range of amenities at no cost to the Lothian Coal Co. Indeed, some of the directors benefited handsomly by lending large sums of money to the Dean Committee at 5% interest (a good rate dien).

The Lothian Coal Co, represented by the notorious figure of general manager, Mungo MacKay, was able to exert control to a unique degree over the lives of its employees. Historian, lan MacDougall, writes "Authoritarian colliery managers were commonplace in the days of the coalmasters, but none of Mungo MacKay's contemporaries appears to have earned quite so much notoriety among Scots miners as he did. His autocratic methods, ruthlessly applied, gave him control not only over the pits around Newtongrange but the pubs, the churches, the people and whole villages." (Odyssey, 1982)

Midlothian miners had never been conspicuously militant at any time and the Marquis of Lothian was able to control his work force closely before the days of the Lothian Coal Co. By providing good housing, steady work and a well-regulated village the Lothian Coal Co. was able to be very fussy about whom they would employ. Naturally, they took on rnen they thought would fit in with the system that Mungo MacKay had so successfully established.