As black as Soot

On the 1st May, hubby and I went to the Medway annual Sweeps’ Festival…. we’ve lived in Kent for so long, I’ve taught in Medway schools for 8 years, but we’ve never been. And seeing as we are moving 450 miles away to live in Yorkshire this summer, we thought we really ought to seize the opportunity to attend while we could.

It was a wonderful day, full of Morris dancing and local bands, but I found myself tinged with a little sadness when thinking about the reality of Life as a chimney sweep.

Children as young as 4 years old were bought from workhouses to be apprenticed to a Master Sweep. They were forced to climb hot flues which were 23 x 23cm wide. The raw skin on their elbows and knees were toughened with strong brine, which was scrubbed into their damaged flesh in an effort to harden it.

The boys and girls slept on the floor under the carcinogenic soot sacks and often died if ‘chimney sweeps’ cancer’ by the time they were in their early teens. If they survived that long, as many climbing children became trapped in the compressed soot and suffocated.

The Sweeps’s festival also struck a very personal note, as I am very proud of my sweeps’ heritage….. my great grandfather was a chimney sweep.

He struggled to eek out a living pushing his cart between the private houses that he swept, until the early 1960’s, when he gained a sweeping contract with Cardiff Council and proudly swept the Mayoral home in his long johns and vest. He was often paid to attend local weddings, walking ahead of the bride’s car to the church, where the groom would pay him a crown to kiss the bride on her cheek. He was even once photographed for the South Wales Echo doing just this!

The soot itself was precious, and could be sold as potash for gardens for precious extra pennies. Mum says she can still remember the smell and taste of the soot which clung to his clothes and was engrained into his skin.

It all makes me think of a passage in the Bible - in the book of Lamentations (4:8) which says, ‘But now their faces are blacker than soot. No one recognizes them in the streets. Their skin sticks to their bones; it is as dry and hard as wood.’

No one recognised those poor children, who suffered cruelly in deep silence, barely a thought given to those trying to make a living spending their lives in service to others by sweeping their chimneys, whose sacrifices were often remembered only by their families. They spent their lives with their dry skin hardened, calloused, withered by darkness. Their faces were engrained with dirt, and they literally were ‘blacker then soot’.

But I believe they were recognised. Isaiah 43:1-3 says,

YOU ARE CALLED BY NAME AND YOU ARE MINE.

And the promise of protection: ‘When you walk through the fire you shall not be burned’.

I love you, and I miss you, Great-Grampy.