THE PRICE OF COAL
By Harold Brighouse
Gowans & Gray, Ltd., London
1911
FOREWORD: BY THE DIRECTOR OF THE SCOTTISH REPERTORY THEATRE
“The Price of Coal” came from a Manchester author; it was in Lancashire dialect, but was freely translated into that of Lanarkshire, before its first production on Monday, November 15th, 1909. The whole week was foggy, dense, yellow and stinking, but the audience (whose scantiness, thanks to the fog, was unregarded by the players), enthusiastic outside the Theatre, as they were within, bruited its excellence, and the many and urgent requests for its speedy revival were complied with.
It has been performed by the Repertory Company at Carlisle, Edinburgh and Perth, while a number of performances have been successfully given by amateurs.
A. W.
Glasgow, March, 1911.
[EXTRACT FROM THE REPERTORY THEATRE PROGRAMME November 1909]
THE PRICE OF COAL
A play in one act By Harold Brighouse
Mary Brown, Jack Brown, Ellen Brown, Polly Walker,
Miss Agnes Bartholomew. Mr. R. B. Drysdale.
Miss Elspeth Dudgeon. Miss Lola Duncan.
The Scene is laid in a Lanarkshire Colliery Village.
Modern industrialism has evolved its special types, and the Lanarkshire collier is small and wiry. He swings a pickaxe for hours on end crouched in an impossibly small space in heated atmosphere, and physique on the grand scale is unsuited to such conditions. He takes tremendous risks as part of his daily routine. His recreations are, to a fastidious taste, coarse. He works hard under ground and plays hard above ground. Constrained attitude is so much his second nature that he sits in perfect comfort on his haunches, in the pictured pose of the mild Hindoo, his back to a wall, discussing, amongst expectoration—a long row of him—, football, dogs, his last spree and his next, the police reports, women.
Altogether a most unpleasant person, this undersized, foul-mouthed, sporting hewer of coal-until you come to know him better, to discover his simplicity of soul, his directness, his matter-of-fact self-sacrifice, the unconscious heroism of his life: and to lose sight of his superficial frailties in your admir