Citations:tributer

The young Jim Carter's life is described in Winston Graham's "Ross PoldarK" quoting here from ISBN978-0-330-46329-4 p156 when Jim, aged eleven, leaves childish surface tasks ("on grass") at a mine to work as a man underground. His father ("an expert tributer") had died aged 26 of mining-related disease (pthithis).

"At eleven he went below, beginning by working with another man and wheeling the material away in a barrow; but he inherited his father's talent and by the time he was sixteen he was a tributer on his own pitch and earning enough to keep the household. He was very proud of this". (Within a few years he, also, succumbed to breathing difficulties and had to leave the mine "handing over his pitch to his younger brother". He subsequently earned, as a farm labourer, one quarter of the tributer's wage.)