Nothing perhaps indicates more clearly how the progress of events had in some respects passed the North Wales coalfield by in the 1920s and 1930s than the persistence there in however residual a form of the subcontracting or ‘butty’ system of employment among underground workers after it had died out in every other coalfield, chiefly in the Midlands, where it had once been the norm. (According to the History of the British Coal Industry, Vol. 1, p. 417, the subcontractors were known as ‘charter masters’ in Shropshire and Derbyshire, ‘chalter’ in North Wales and ‘butties’ in South Yorkshire and Staffordshire. Ashton and Sykes, writing of the eighteenth century, describe the ‘chalter’ as ‘the remuneration of the group’. In North Wales the terms seem to have been interchangeable.)

The system had its roots in the geological and economic conditions of the areas in which it developed—broadly, a terrain rich in minerals, especially coal and iron, but not in wealth on a scale necessary to promote and sustain a well-organised industry, except perhaps during the reign of John Wilkinson in North Wales in the eighteenth century. Both minerals were found not far beneath the surface and were mined together—coal, as one observer put it, being ‘subservient’ to iron—and with no regard for the environmental consequences. Readers of The Old Curiosity Shop will recall the industrial landscape through which Little Nell and her grandfather passed on their journey north. A less emotional but no less striking description of the scene was given by Thomas Tancred, a Commissioner sent ‘to conduct a special inquiry into the condition of the persons employed in the mines in the counties of Worcester, Warwick, Stafford and Shropshire … and generally into the circumstances which affect their social position’. Tancred's investigations were confined chiefly to South Staffordshire, where a strike and associated rioting had paralysed the coalfield during the summer of 1842, but from other evidence it seems likely that he would have found similar scenes if he had crossed into parts of North Wales at the same period.