Germinal - Emile Zola [294]
onsetter See banksman.
pit-bottom In French ‘à l’accrochage’, literally where things are hooked on or attached, and where the tubs full of coal are loaded into the extraction cages. Throughout the novel Zola refers variously to ‘l’accrochage’ or ‘la salle d’accrochage’: the former usually designates the pit-bottom in general and the latter more specifically the chamber or loading-bay hollowed out of the rock at the foot of the pit-shaft. Similar loading-bays were also situated adjacent to the shaft at intermediate levels in the mine.
pit-head In French ‘la recette’ (and later ‘la salle de la recette’), literally where the coal is received. In British terms the pit-head, or the area at the mouth of the pit-shaft where the coal is unloaded.
putter In French ‘herscheur’. Bulman and Redmayne refer to ‘trammers, putters or hauliers’ and describe them as ‘big lads who convey the coal-tubs to and from the working places’ (p. 47). Earlier in the century, as we learn from Germinal, most of these ‘big lads’ were in fact girls, or ‘herscheuses’ – that is, before the French passed a law in 1874 making the employment of women underground illegal. (This practice had been outlawed in Britain in 1842 when women – and children under ten – were thus protected. The age limit for children was raised to twelve in the Coal Mines Regulation Act of 1887.) None of the British terms distinguishes the sex of the worker. Since ‘putter’ seems to be the commonest term in the books that I have consulted, I have preferred it to the others, and on one occasion invented the term ‘putter lad’ where the sex of the putter is relevant and not otherwise identifiable.
roadway In French ‘galerie’. Zola also uses the term ‘voie’. Although he used the two terms for the sake of variety, and without there being any important distinction between them, I have almost always maintained his distinction by translating the former with ‘roadway’ and the latter with ‘road’. These are both standard terms for a tunnel in a colliery pit: the word ‘tunnel’ itself is absent from standard late-nineteenth-century handbooks.
rope-works A factory which made not only ropes but also steel cables, which were known as ‘wire ropes’ at the time.
screening-shed The place where the coal was passed over screens to separate it from clay and small stones. The larger stones were removed by rake and hand.
shifter So called because they worked a shift, not because they shift rubble; ‘a class of men who do the necessary repairing and preparatory work at nights, when the pit is not drawing coals – such as ridding falls of stone and setting timber, to make the pit ready for the following day’ (Bulman and Redmayne, p. 95 (their emphasis)).
spoil-heap In French ‘terri’. In British terms ‘spoil’ is ‘earth or refuse material thrown or brought up in excavating, mining, dredging, etc.’ and accordingly a ‘spoil-heap’ is ‘the place on the surface where spoil is deposited’ (OED). A ‘slag-heap’, on the other hand, is found beside a blast-furnace or smelting-works since ‘slag’ is ‘a vitreous substance, composed of earthy or refuse matter, which is separated from metals in the process of smelting’ (OED).
stonemen In French ‘les ouvriers de la coupe à terre’. In British terms ‘stonemen’ belonged to the category of miners known as ‘off-hand’ workers (to distinguish them from those who actually dug out the coal, or ‘coal-getters’). According to Bulman and Redmayne: ‘their work, which may be termed the ‘‘dead’’ work of the mine – consisting as it does in a very great degree, if not entirely, of opening out and development – constitutes one of the most important branches of the underground department’ (p. 83). ‘Ripper’, used in some translations of Germinal, was an alternative name for a stoneman (see Bulman and Redmayne, p. 406).
supervisor In French ‘surveillant’. In British terms this person would have been subordinate to the deputies, themselves subordinate to the overman, and might have been either a ‘master shifter’, a ‘master wasteman’, or someone in charge of a particular area or activity.