The Life of Edward Scantlebury

Edward Scantlebury’s name surfaced in census entries, in newspaper articles, and in reference to his labour underground. His name, like the names of many other Black people in mainstream archives, appeared only in fragments, like the pieces of coal he spent much of his life mining. Searching for Edward meant confronting both his presence and his absence, working inside and outside of the archive’s confines shaped by historical bias, systemic inequality, and the subjective decision-making by archivists considering what is preserved.

Edward’s life began around 1880 in Barbados, part of the British West Indies, shaped by plantation economies and legacies of enslavement. As a British subject, he belonged to a generation of Afro-Caribbean men who began settling in Great Britain before the First World War, exercising the mobility promised to him by the empire. Whether Edward imagined South Wales from Barbados is unknown. Mainstream archives do not hold his letters or his testimonies. They simply tell us that as early as 1903 he was already underground, labouring in the collieries of South Wales, part of a small but significant presence of Black coal miners in the Welsh coalfields.

I tried to imagine Edward descending the pit shaft for the first time. The air is dank and chilly, various machines are creaking and rattling, and the darkness appears never ending. I do not know what Edward thought, but I can hold space for his interior world by reasonably, and responsibly, speculating and asking questions about his courage, his necessity, and his survival. His movement across the Atlantic was part of a larger story of Black labour migration, yet the archive fails to acknowledge the intimacies of this. Instead, it primarily preserves Edward through bureaucratic documentation, as well as within sensationalist recollections of his experiences recorded by the Welsh press.

By 1911, we catch a glimpse of him.[1] Edward, 31 years old, appears in the UK census living with his wife, Edith, born in Manchester, and their young children, Clarence, Albert, and Adaline, in a cramped two-room home on Gladstone Street in Abertillery. As expected, the entry is brief. It reveals little about their household routine or their lived experiences, their love or their hope for the future. Yet it depicts a family forging a life in early twentieth-century South Wales, a region steeped in labour unrest, industrial exploitation, and racial hierarchies.

As a timberman, Edward installed and maintained the wooden beams that supported the mine’s tunnels. The role required skills, strength, and vigilance. It was a dangerous but essential job in a period when mine collapses, explosions, and accidents were tragically commonplace. Over a thousand miners died in South Wales in 1911 and 1912, their names often better recorded than those of the living.[2] The 1910-1911 Tonypandy riots between striking miners and police as well as the passage of the Coal Mines Act of 1911 only hint at the complicated social and political terrain Edward navigated daily.[3] However, Edward’s perspective about these events remains untold, instead we are met with archival silence.

Archival gaps widened as I searched for Edward’s family. One of his children died before their name could ever be recorded in the census. High rates of infant mortality during the Edwardian era in mining areas such as the South Wales coalfield meant death was a prominent part of life, and grief for one’s children would have been deeply felt.[4] Born in 1910, Edward’s daughter Adaline died before her second birthday.[5] Records offer rough dates of her life but withhold anything meaningful. We do not know how she died, or how Edward carried his grief down into the pit. We can only imagine Edith washing small garments that were never worn again, or Clarence and Albert growing up with the ache of siblings whose memory was kept alive in family stories.

Despite the silences, small depictions of Edward’s life outside of the colliery appeared in newspaper articles. In 1911, he won the Tillery Cup after coming first in a swimming race during Abertillery’s annual aquatic sports competition.[6] Three years later, Edward was awarded a certificate by the Abertillery Division of the St. John’s Ambulance Brigade for completing first aid training.[7] Revealing what the census never could, these fragments show that Edward was not just a labourer, but a man recognised and esteemed by his community for his athleticism, skill, and service.

By 1921, Edward’s family was living in Caerphilly on Nantgarw Road.[8] Edward worked as a hewer at Windsor Colliery, cutting coal at the seam, while his son Clarence, now fifteen, followed him into the mine as a “colliery boy.” Watching his son step into the same dangerous work he endured for nearly two decades underground, I wondered, did Edward hesitate to allow this? Did he feel a sense of pride, or a painful dread, or a resigned inevitability? It was extremely common for sons to follow their fathers and other male relatives into the Welsh pits, a pattern driven by economic necessity and a lack of alternative employment.[9] As such, many miners accepted this and were eager for their sons to join them at the earliest opportunity.

Around this time, South Wales was engulfed in the 1921 miners’ lockout. Again, traditional archives do not note Edward’s or Clarence’s involvement, whether they resisted or whether they suffered. Black coal miners encountered various layers of precarity as part of the racialised working class. In the years following World War I, racial exclusion in South Wales intensified, and policies like the Coloured Alien Seamen Order of 1925 aimed to restrict Black British subjects despite their legal British status.[10] Working Black seamen in Cardiff navigated this bureaucracy with resistance, asserting their belonging even as the country attempted to categorise them as “alien” and deport them.[11] Did these prejudices seep into the South Wales Valleys? How were Edward and his family affected by those that refused to see a distinction between “aliens” and non-white British citizens?

In 1926, Edward was charged with loitering for betting in the fields of Caerphilly Castle.[12] Albeit a minor infraction, this interaction revealed how working-class leisure, coupled with the colour of his skin, attracted the attention of both the police and the press. In 1930, Edward suffered a major accident when over one hundred pounds of coal fell on his head in Windsor Colliery.[13] He firmly objected to faking his injuries after being accused of doing so by the company. In 1932, Edward’s youngest son, Albert, was fined for stealing coal, and Edward was fined for receiving it.[14] Edward’s response reflected the desperation of many families’ navigating unemployment and poverty during the interwar period: “We wanted enough to last us through the summer, and then I was going to stop him…”[15] These experiences, documented in the newspapers, each offer small glimpses into Edward’s life and shed light onto the realities of how a mining family, of how a Black coal miner, lived and survived.

These fragments rarely give us Edward’s voice. They do not say much about what he dreamed of, feared, or hoped for. However, in acknowledging these absences, we can imagine his resilience as a Black Afro-Caribbean man carving space for dignity and family amidst an industry that was both life-sustaining and deadly. In this way, we can see Edward not as a small part in census lines or newspaper articles, but instead as a human who mattered.

Reconstructing Edward’s life required gathering materials in mainstream archives, recognising what shaped their preservation, and then interpreting them through a critical, and empathetic, lens. The archive’s silence is not accidental; it is a symptom of social, racial, and class-based power structures that decided who and what deserved documentation when and how. Writing about Edward meant resisting those decisions, insisting that his story, in however many pieces, is a story worth telling.

Edward Scantlebury was a man, a husband, a father, and a coal miner who crossed the Atlantic, settled in South Wales, and survived the endless brutality of empire and industry. His resilience inspires not because the archive says enough about him, but because the various fragments that exist simultaneously tell us so little and so much, and because we choose to look at them, to question them, and to learn about his and his family’s lived experience anyway.

[1] “‘Edward Scantlebury’ Census of England and Wales, 1911.,” Wales, 1911, https://www.findmypast.co.uk/transcript?id=GBC/1911/RG14/31836/0499/1&expand=true.

[2] T. Boyns, “Work and Death in the South Wales Coalfield, 1874-1914,” Welsh History Review = Cylchgrawn Hanes Cymru (Cardiff, United Kingdom) 12 (1984): 514–37.

[3] David Smith, “Tonypandy 1910: Definitions of Community,” Past & Present, no. 87 (1980): 158–84.

[4] Hannaliis Jaadla and Alice Reid, “The Geography of Early Childhood Mortality in England and Wales, 1881–1911,” Demographic Research 37 (December 2017): 1861–90, https://doi.org/10.4054/DemRes.2017.37.58.

[5] “Deaths Registered in April, May, and June 1911,” 1911.

[6] “Aquatic Display at Abertillery.,” South Wales Gazette, September 27, 1912, British Newspaper Archive, https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/BL/0002852/19120927/146/0008?browse=False.

[7] “Ambulance Brigade.,” South Wales Gazette, November 6, 1914, British Newspaper Archive, https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/BL/0002852/19141106/061/0002?browse=False.

[8] “‘Edward Scantlebury’ Census of England and Wales, 1921.,” unpublished manuscript, Wales, 1921.

[9] Ceri Thompson, From the Cradle to the Coalmine: The Story of Children in Welsh Mines (Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru / University of Wales Press, 2014), http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cardiff/detail.action?docID=1889203.

[10] Laura Tabili, “5. “We Shall Soon Be Having 'Rule Britannia’ Sung in Pidgin English”: The National Union of Seamen and the Uses of Race,” in “We Ask for British Justice”: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Cornell University Press, 2019), https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.7591/9781501737930-007/html.

[11] Peter Fryer, “The Cardiff Seamen,” in Staying Power (Pluto Press, 2018), https://search-alexanderstreet-com.cardiff.idm.oclc.org/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cbibliographic_details%7C5556094?utm_campaign=AlexanderStreet&utm_medium=MARC&utm_source=aspresolver.

[12] “Black and White.,” Merthyr Express, June 5, 1926, British Newspaper Archive, https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/BL/0002970/19260605/072/0009?browse=False.

[13] Western Mail & South Wales News, “Negro’s Hard Skull. Hit By Hundred-Weight of Coal.”

[14] “Coal Stealing Fines.,” Caerphilly Journal, May 14, 1932, https://www.findmypast.co.uk/image-viewer?issue=BL/0004373/19320514&page=0004&article=053&stringtohighlight=edward%20scantlebury%20wales.

[15] Andy Croll, “Poverty, Mass Unemployment and Welfare,” in The Gwent County History: Volume 5, The Twentieth Century, ed. Chris Williams and Andy Croll (University of Wales Press, 2013).