‘White privilege’ at the coalface

Just back from a round Britain “staycation”, and between the castles and cathedrals we also visited Southwell Workhouse (Nottinghamshire) and Caphouse Colliery (Wakefield, West Yorkshire). I suggest that our blinkered academics should visit both of these before lecturing anyone on “white privilege” [‘Uni course is indoctrination’, Gazette, October 7].

At the colliery, we were shown a trap door, which before 1842 was operated by small children, sitting in pitch blackness for 12 hours a day, opening and shutting the door to ventilate the mine.

They also pulled wagon-loads of heavy coal through narrow passages. After 1842 women and “children” did not work in coal mines, but boys of 10 and older (whom we would call “children”) still did.

As late as 1900, a thousand men and boys a year, on average, still died in British coal mines. Even in later years miners suffered appalling lung and eye disease.

So, wearing shabby clothes is a sign of “white privilege”. What about the uniform issued to inmates by a workhouse? Or baggy mesh underpants, the only thing worn by men hacking away at a coalface in sweltering heat?

Their descendants can expect scant respect for, or even recognition of, the horrors once endured by their families and communities. They are not part of the “woke” agenda.

If Yorkshire is too far away, I suggest that some part of Betteshanger or Snowdown should be reopened to give our ignorant intellectuals a taste of life underground.

Personally, I’d leave them all down there.

Rosemary Sealey

Black Griffin Lane, Canterbury