Bois du Luc coal mine, Houdeng-Aimeries

Having visited the Bois du Cazier a few months back (see our review here), the next stop on Pangloss’ impromptu tour of Belgian coal mines was the Bois du Luc, located in Houdeng-Aimeries (La Louvière). Together with the Bois du Cazier, Blegny-mine and Grand-Hornu, the Bois du Luc is one of the preserved sites which form a UNESCO world heritage site.  The Bois du Luc is probably the largest and most historically interesting of these sites, covering the technical, management and social history aspects of mining in Belgium during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

The pit head of the Fosse St-Emmanuel at Bois du Luc

The Bois du Luc site is quite self-contained and located some distance from the rest of the little suburb of Houdeng-Aimeries. For most of its history, the site was the headquarters of the Société des Charbonnages de Bois-du-Luc et d’Havré, as well as the site of one of its actual mines known as the Fosse (“Pit”) St-Emmanuel. Surrounding this, the company built a kind of housing estate (known as Bosquetville) for its workers, including all the social amenities necessary as well as the actual housing itself.

To order to make the situation a bit clearer, Pangloss has drawn up a quick (and pretty basic) map. In red and green are the buildings of the company: the offices, workshops and, of course, the mine itself; in orange is the director’s house; in blue, the workers’ housing (dating from 1838) radiating out from a central street; in yellow are the community buildings: the school, theatre, church and hospital. Some of the industrial buildings have been destroyed (since the Foss St-Emmanuel closed in 1959, this is hardly surprising) but the whole site is still pretty near complete.

What is so interesting about all of this is that it provides a fantastic glimpse into the idea of industrial paternalism in 19^th century Belgium. Paternalism was, of course, an ideology shared by both Catholic and Liberal industrialists, both of whom felt that the rich had a moral duty to improve the conditions of their workers. In the Bois du Luc, this meant that pretty far reaching attempts were made to improve the lot of the company’s employees – or, at least, the virtuous, married and Catholic, employees. In exchange for genuine improvements in quality of life, the workers were expected to give the patron – the boss – even more respect and unquestioning obedience. From the balcony of his house facing down the main road, the patron could survey his workers while the workers were left in no doubt as to where power lay.

Workers’ housing

House of the “Patron”

Office of the “Patron”

Behind the monumental steel doors (installed after the general strike of 1893), the mining offices – a monumental building decorated with a neoclassical interior – are perhaps the most interesting bit. Everything relates to the social hierarchy, from the mirrors in the patron’s office to allow him to screen visitors without their knowledge to the toilet (one of three on the whole site!) that was reserved for his personal use.  The employees (one rung up from the miners themselves on the social hierarchy) had their toilet breaks timed so that they could be made to make up for them after work.

The “guillotine” steel doors to the office and workshops

The Bois du Luc museum has, to its great credit, done a lot to make this complex story clear to visitors. There are basically four elements to the tour which the museum runs. Starting at the company offices, the tour then moves to one of the workers’ houses which you can visit (the rest are inhabited) and finally to the mine itself. There is also a small museum of the history of coal-mining in the old workshops which the visitor is invited to visit at their leisure. It must be said that the tour is very good. Our guide was knowledgeable and it was pretty definitive. The whole visit lasted a bit over three hours (which is pretty impressive) and was genuinely instructive. There is obviously also the opportunity to wander out and see the workers’ housing in more detail on your own.

Pangloss thoroughly recommends a visit.  However, it is definitely worth checking the museum’s (awful) website before you visit – the museum is closed for most of the year. The miners’ church, St Barbara, is only open on a handful of weekends throughout the year and Pangloss did not get a chance to see it. A final thing for visitors to note is that, because the only way to visit the site is on a guided tour, there is a potential difficulty for non-French speakers.

The museum’s website can be found here.

Keramis museum, La Louvière

Pangloss recently happened to visit the new Keramis museum in the sunny Belgian city of La Louvière, and these are his thoughts on it.

Boch plate commemorating the Brussels International Exhibition of 1897

Boch plate commemorating the marriage of Leopold II and Marie-Henriette (1853). Note that the crown is sitting on the Constitution at the top!

As a city, La Louvière nowadays has an unenviable reputation within Belgium as a bit of a dump. Formerly one of Belgium’s foremost industrial centres, like the rest of the surrounding Pays Noir few of its factories and mines are still in business today. The city’s industrial decline is very visible, but one of the benefits has been that a fair bit of government money has been poured into interesting new cultural projects in the area and Keramis is one of them.

The site we are interested in here is the former pottery (faïencerie) of Boch Frères (later Royal Boch). The factory itself was known as ‘Keramis’, hence the name of the current museum.

At its height, Boch Frères was probably Belgium’s biggest manufacturer of any kind of ceramics. It was founded by Eugène and Victor Boch in 1841, and grew rapidly. It became a public company in 1848 and its recognisable earthenware ceramics took the national market by storm.

“Le Feu” (1948) by Raymond-Henri Chevallier, part of a series of tiled depictions of the “elements” of ceramics created for the Keramis factory offices.

“La Terre” (1948) by Raymond-Henri Chevallier

Like the rest of the ceramics industry in Europe, the period after the Second World War was a difficult one for Boch. After some increasingly desperate manoeuvres (including its move into toilet production), the firm went bust in 1985. After an attempt to resuscitate it (under the unenviable brand name ‘Novoboch’), the Keramis factory was closed in 2009 for the last time. Two years later, it was almost totally demolished, leaving a large hole in the centre of La Louvière which, at time of writing in 2016, has yet to be completely filled.

La Louvière la belle. I believe the plant in the background is a Glaverbel factory, producing industrial glass.

One of the large brick bottle-kilns, used for firing clay during the nineteenth century.

Now, there are a number of reasons why Boch should be interesting to people who generally wouldn’t care about this kind of thing. For a start, Boch’s dominance in the Belgian market means that its wares provide an interesting way to trace the course of Belgian history, all the way from basic changes in aesthetics to the obligatory commemorative royal plates.  Second, the popularity of Boch products – among all social classes, even the fairly poor – provides an interesting way of cutting through Belgian society as a whole to give us a cross section of it.

The current museum is a new and fairly attractive building which surrounds the only surviving part of the old factory: the nineteenth century bottle kilns used for firing the factory’s wares. These form the centre-piece of the current museum and are surrounded by a number of small galleries which display some of the factory’s products, mostly produced during its pre-1960s heyday. Some of the pieces are very interesting and the displays are very attractive and modern.

Some of the company’s more interesting designs from its experiments with Art Deco styles in the mid-1930s.

Sadly, none of this is gone into in much depth in the museum which dedicates itself to its primary material rather than using it as a gateway to explore wider issues. There is a decent film on offer, giving a narrative account of the company, but that is about it. In fact, the museum’s enthusiasm for the aesthetics has led to an irritating tendency not to label the material on display. There is an online visitors’ guide which provides these captions but, alas, we did not know about this at the time. This aside, though, it is a bit of a shame thought that more couldn’t have been made of the objects themselves.

Regardless, the museum makes for an interesting visit of 40 minutes or so, and there are plenty of other interesting things to see in the region anyway to complement it.

For the museum’s official website, with opening hours and other details, see here.

Bois du Cazier coal mine, Marcinelle

Today, as a bit of a trip, Pangloss was able to make the trek all the way to the Pays de Charleroi to visit the Bois du Cazier mine. Astonishingly, this is one of four mining museums in Belgium listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Sites, making it a peer of historical sites such as Pompeii and Venice. Quite how UNESCO justified this to itself, we have no idea. It is presumably a ploy to regenerate a fairly grim bit of Wallonia and, to give it full credit, it hasn’t done a bad job.

View of the mine’s main site from the around the front gate

The Bois du Cazier, despite its name, is a small coal mine fairly typical of the many that once dotted Belgium’s Pays Noir (Black Country) around Charleroi. Serious exploitation of the site began in 1899 but there had been mining on the site as early as 1822. Under the direction of the small Société anonyme du Charbonnage du Bois du Cazier, the mine became one of the most modern in the region, with two shafts of its own stretching up to 1,000 metres below ground. By 1955, the mine produced over 170,000 tonnes of coal each year and employed some 779 locals while work on a new, third shaft was just beginning.

The Bois du Cazier is best known for the mining disaster that occurred in August 1956 when a fire broke out in the shaft, trapping several hundred miners underground. 262 were killed, many of them immigrant workers, and the disaster remains Belgium’s most infamous industrial accident.

The 1956 disaster aside, the mine returned to operation and finally closed its doors in 1967 and had fallen into disrepair when it was chosen for restoration as a museum site.

The mine’s front gate, the border between the community and the mine itself.

It is no great wonder that, in searching for a mine to preserve, it was the Bois du Cazier was chosen. More than anything else, the 1956 accident pervades all aspects of the museum. Despite being comparatively average in magnitude by global standards (compare with, say, China’s Benxihu disaster in which 1,500 were killed in 1942) the disaster has a particular – and surprisingly deep – importance to many in Belgium and even further afield. Part of the explanation for this lies in the particular fascination the general public has always had for mining disasters in general, perhaps a sign of ‘guilt’ for those who took the use of coal for granted. Another is that, within the trade union narrative of history, Marcinelle is a potent reminder of the ‘sacrifice’ of workers. The main explanation, however, must be the international nature of the disaster – the majority of those killed were not Belgian but migrant workers, many of them Italians recruited directly from Sicily and southern Italy. It was a European disaster. In total, 12 countries’ nationals lost their lives. The disaster is thus one of the very few lieux de mémoire for the ‘forgotten’ guest-workers of post-war Belgium and their families, and one of the rare places where nationality does not divide people’s memory of the past.

One of the lieux de mémoire of the 1956 disaster, perhaps inspired by a panel from Constantin Meunier’s ‘Monument du Travail’.

The museum is generously funded and the entire site has clearly been immaculately restored. It is, if anything, too neat and clean. Not much of the mine workings themselves are preserved and so the site’s main offerings are two small museums – an ‘Industry Museum’ and a ‘Glass Museum’. Both are enjoyable enough. The Industry Museum preserves an eclectic mix of old machines and artefacts relating (loosely) to Wallonia’s industrial heritage and (even more loosely) to coal mining; the Glass Museum boasts a fairly small but really rather nice collection of domestic glassware dating back to the Roman period and Renaissance. There are also a whole host of memorials to the 1956 disaster. They are linked by an audio guide which, in its English version, attempts to evoke the mining ethos by dubbing its narrators, ‘Luigi’ and ‘Monica’, into Lancashire-accented English. This aside, the museum is informative and actually rather engaging.

The mine’s two headframes which sit over the two mine shafts. It was a malfunction in the smaller of the two (left) which caused the 1956 disaster.

Our criticism, if we have one, is that the focus on the 1956 disaster is not put into any particular historical context. There is little detail about mining companies, their management, government regulation or, for that matter, the workers’ family lives, trade unions, political engagement – in fact, even what the coal they mined was actually used for. More broadly, the ‘lived experience’ (or social history) of the mine’s employees is not dealt with in particular detail. There is an excellent documentary and attempt to explain why so many Italians came to work in Belgium but this occupies only a very small part of the museum and is clearly only deployed as padding for the main display about the disaster. The museum is also surprisingly silent about the broader history of coal mining in Belgium. This is a real shame but does not detract from what is an interesting and quite enjoyable museum.

One of the slag heaps that dominates the small town of Marcinelle

An interesting piece of social history: a statue of Saint Barbara, the patron saint of mining, above the workers’ changing rooms.

Above all, the museum does resist the temptation of falling into the nostalgic schmaltz which pervades, say, British coal mining history. It is worth finishing with the comments of Jean Van Lierde, a Belgian pacifist who was sent to work in the Bois du Cazier in the early 1950s after refusing to do national service in the army:

…it was hell. It was much worse than a prison. I would not want anyone in the world to have to re-live such an experience.

—J. Van Lierde, La guerre sans armes: douze années de luttes non-violentes en Europe, 1952-1964 (Brussels, 2002), p. 23.

“Train World”, Brussels

I admit that I’ve never been particularly interested in railways. Of course, I’ve used them  but that’s about it. However, I must admit that I thoroughly enjoyed Train World, the new museum of the Belgian National Railways in Schaerbeek.

Train World sits in the buildings of Schaerbeek station, a classic example of the belle époque architecture so typical of Belgian stations.

The museum itself has the ambitious aims of catering to several different demographics. There are the railway enthusiasts, of course, for who revel in piles of old junk (labels optional); the engineers, who are obsessive about the mechanics behind the whole process, but care not a jot for anything else; plus, of course, the casual observer who want to be shown what the railways did and why it was important – and children who just want to climb on things. The museum does an admirable job of catering to all of the above but, of course, it is the historical narrative it presents which is the most interesting here.

View of one of the museum’s early rooms, displaying locomotives from the pre-World War I period.

The Type 12 locomotive, produced just before the Second World War, represents something of an apogee of the Belgian rail industry.

The museum starts with the first railway in Belgium, the Brussels-Mechelen line, opened in 1835. This is really important, not least because it was the first passenger railway in continental Europe, and thus a key moment in the spread of the mechanised travel beyond Britain. It then, slightly abortively, traces their rapid spread and development across the nineteenth century.

This early sections is particularly interesting. The museum claims that 11,000 locomotives were built in Belgium before 1939 – enough, presumably, of it to qualify as a major national industry. Remember too that one engin, Le Belge, was the first locomotive built outside Britain in 1835. Naturally, there’s a replica of that in the museum too.

What it then covers is how the private sector was increasingly rolled back in the 20th century and how one state provider, the Société nationale des chemins de fer belges (SNCB), emerged to dominate the sector. One of the most interesting things which emerges here is how the cheminots (railway workers) under the company’s employ considered themselves a kind of “labour elite”. Though not especially well-paid, their connection to other cheminots through the myriad associations which Belgian society has traditionally promoted separated them from other workers. This makes them quite an interesting historical demographic and one worth considering in more depth. The museum even preserves a cheminot‘s house…

Badges of some of the Belgian companies which produced locomotives – a very diverse bunch.

The Trans-Europ Express, resplendent in 1970s beige, which makes the valuable point that the railway’s social importance continued beyond the 19th century.

The museum then moves into the social implications of rail travel and, with an admirable lack of nostalgia, out of steam and into the electric and diesel age. Belgian railways turn out to have been surprisingly innovative, adopting electrification before the Second World War. It also covers the Orient Express, created by a Belgian, and the fact that the Belgian railways, like many monolithic government organisations past and present, also sprawled into unrelated sectors. They even ran their own postal service apparently.

One of the most interesting exhibits are the personal rail carriages of King Leopold II and another of Leopold III. Again, this provides an interesting glimpse of the SNCB’s perception of its own status and the curious prestige which certain big companies, and their employees, have historically enjoyed in national politics.

So our verdict? It’s worth a visit. There are no accessible or general studies on the Belgian railways in any language and Train World does an admirable job of providing a narrative instead. The exhibits are interesting, usually well-presented, and help to build a coherent story.