3-077-894 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Colliery Strike and the London Coal Exchange: risky business, 1890. 'The anxiety felt during many days, not only in the manufacturing districts, where coal for the steam-engine is the mainspring of the staple industries, but also in the households of many private families, alarmed by the rapidly increased price of a commodity so necessary for domestic comfort, is happily relieved by the termination of the great colliery strike...It was resolved that the men should at once resume work, with an immediate advance of five per cent of their wages...Our Artist has exercised his faculty of humorous observation in sketching typical portraits of some characters and moods, perhaps equally to be discerned on the Stock Exchange, the Corn Exchange, or in the Mincing-lane Colonial Produce Market, or in any other place where men habitually congregate for the purpose of buying and selling. We have no doubt, from authentic official statistics of the prices of coal at the pits...that very large profits are sometimes made by importers, merchants, agents, and middlemen, in wholesale dealings; and everybody knows that the retailers of coal in London, selling by the ton, or to their poorer customers by the chaldron, are wont to get as much as they can'. From "Illustrated London News", 1890.