wharf on the edge of Kelsford, came in on time and within budget. Friday evening was pay night. During the summer months, when longer days and fine weather permitted the digging to go on into the late evening, he would take the heavy pay satchel out to the main cut but now, at the end of December, it was different. Work stopped soon after dusk and the men were back in town soon after seven o’clock. Few, if any, returned to their dingy lodgings to eat a meal and clean up before venturing into town. Friday was pay night, and pay night meant drinking night. Since the middle of October, each Friday at nine o’clock sharp, Cufflin had sat himself down behind the wooden table at the far end of the bar in the Prince Albert. As the men lined up, each in turn made his mark or wrote his name in the heavy ledger and received his week’s money from the depths of the satchel slung on its heavy leather strap across the Agent’s shoulder.
Some pay nights were fairly relaxed, others not so easy. When the weather was fine and the cutting progressed well, Friday night was good. Arthur Cufflin had been in the business for over thirty years. Starting as a digger for the old Union Canal Company back in the 1850s, he had quickly worked his way up to being a foreman. At the age of twelve he was working in the blacksmith’s shop near to his tiny back-to-back home in Sheffield, pumping the bellows and learning to hammer out the soft
