From Pennsylvania, Henry Francis wrote to Hopkins that he had been so sickened by the spectacle of the mining towns that he had fled, ‘sick at heart’. The soft coal industry had been one of the first to crash; the local mines had closed, partly or totally; outside the crumbling shacks were garbage-strewn slags, closed company stores and filthy ragged children, all of them without shoes and ‘losing their grip on themselves’. Some of the families who had lost their homes were now living in caves. ‘Conditions on the patch are bad,’ he wrote.
