Knappers’ rot: Silicosis in east anglian flint-knappers

Abstract

It is a paradox that one of England’s industrial diseases should only be known in one of its predominantly agricultural regions, for East Anglia’s diseases are those traditionally associated with a rural way of life.81 This has come about through a feature of the region’s geology whereby a deposit of flint, claimed to be the finest in England,82 was deposited in certain areas of Norfolk and Suffolk. Neolithic men’s exploitation of this flint for weapons and tools has bequeathed to Norfolk the largest and best-known group of Neolithic flint mines in Britain. It appears to have been Collis in his Milroy lectures of 19153 who first suggested that the Neolithic flintworkers in Norfolk and elsewhere might have suffered from silicosis, thereby entitling them to the record of suffering from the first known occupational disease. Although this idea has been taken up by others since, from the evidence reviewed in this study there is not only no proof, but it appears improbable, that they suffered in this way. Among the reasons for disagreement with Collis’s postulate is the evidence available from the second period of East Anglian flint mining some 4,000 years later when Brandon in Suffolk became the main source of supply of gunflints for the British Army and achieved an international reputation and trade, that it still retains, for the quality of its gunflints. The method of mining for flint in this second period was almost identical to that in the first and has provided a model to help answer the health hazard problems of the Neolithic mining period. However, while the technique of mining in the two periods was similar, that of knapping Neolithic spears and axes differed from the knapping of gunflints in that the latter is conducted with metal and not stone hammers thus provoking more dust, and it was undertaken not in the open air but, when the industry was at its height, in ill-ventilated workshops. Here the Brandon gunflint-knappers were exposed to a high concentration of pure silica dust for long periods, and, as Collis first showed and as this study has been the first to confirm, they suffered from a very high prevalence of silicosis leading to pulmonary tuberculosis and premature death. Though many gunflint-knappers have paid this penalty for their labours, they have the distinction, as have the twelve gunflint-knappers of Collis’s day and the two Brandon gunflint-knappers of today, of being, as Collis wrote, “the lineal occupational representatives of the oldest of man’s industries”. © 1981, Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.