BBC Art That Made Us - Industrious Women

The Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust will, as part of the BBC Art that Made Us festival, be exhibiting a rarely seen watercolour from our collections.

This important piece, entitled Adam’s Engine and Ironstone Pit Madeley Wood Shropshire was painted by Warrington Smyth in 1847. The artwork reveals an industrial landscape, and importantly shows the women who were working in industry in Shropshire; an often overlooked or hidden part of industrial history.

In the East Shropshire coalfield, many women and girls worked on the pit banks of mine shafts. These women were known as ‘pit girls’ or ‘Shroppies’. In other coalfields, women worked underground in mines, but this wasn't the usual practice in Shropshire.

The most common job for Shroppies was to pick out ironstone nodules from clay at a mine waste tip. Gangs of girls would work across the bank, picking out the nodules and putting them into iron containers. The girls would carry these containers on their heads to the ironstone heaps, which were called ranks. The nodules were then loaded onto railway waggons, which were sent on to furnaces. 

This artwork will be displayed next to an oral history recorded in 1980, featuring Anny Payne (1887-1990) who was the last ironstone pit girl in Shropshire, talking about the work of a ‘Shroppie’. Anny started working as a pit girl in 1900 aged 13, earning 1s6d per day.

This display will be housed in the Museum of Iron which tells the story of the industrial revolution - the innovations at Coalbrookdale that shaped the world we live in today.