This article is about William English, (1875-1915), a miner originally from the North-East of England who through hard work became a mining engineer in the gold mines of South Africa. It is based on the website williamenglish.net which includes his journal, poems and additional commentary. Creating the website has been a project for William’s descendants, Hilary Norris and Larry Cunningham.
William was born in Wylam in 1875. If the movement around the pits of the north east which his grandparents, parents and then William himself made during the eighty years from 1815 to 1895 are plotted on relevant maps, it can be seen that the family moved from Wylam and Tow Law in the west, to Whitburn and Blyth in the east; from Coundon in the south to Amble in the north. In other words, they traversed almost the whole of the northern coalfield! William’s family can truly claim to be Northumberland and Durham miners.
He found his own first job as a trapper when he left school at thirteen but after a week: ‘I didn’t like the mine, and wanted to leave, but my father said I had looked for the job myself and would now stay there. Well, that fixed my destiny, but I know I should never have been a miner.’
William later followed in his father Henry’s footsteps and found work in the mines of South Africa. When he arrived in 1897, the original shanty town of some 3000 people that had sprung up around Ferreira’s...
