In the remaining colliery districts in 1871 truck was prevalent only in West Scotland and South Wales.

In West Scotland it was yielding ground before the pressure of the unions.  The companies only maintained it by active coercion.  If a miner held out for money, they had to yield; and if they were malicious, they marked him as a sloper and dismissed him the first when a depression came.  ‘Black lists’, said the Truck Commissioners, ’are often kept of slopers; threats of dismissal were repeatedly proved; and cases of actual dismissal for not dealing at the store are not rare.’[63] However, the masters themselves were getting tired of it, since it led so frequently to strikes.

Truck in South Staffordshire was bound up with the butty system; in railway construction with the system of contracting and sub-contracting, and similarly in South Wales, as also in the west of Scotland, it was bound up with and dependent on the system of long pays.  In order to carry on from one pay day to the next, the men got advances on the company’s store.  In this way many lived permanently ahead of their wages.  The thriftless and drunkards were always ’advance men, but the provident miners hated it and only dealt there on compulsion’.

The Commissioners drew a vivid picture of Turn Book morning in South Wales at the close of the pay month.

At 1 or 2 a.m. the women and children begin to arrive with their Advance Books.  Perhaps one hundred would be there, wet or fine, sleeping on the doorsteps or singing ballads until morning.

At 5.30 a.m. the doors opened, and the waiters made a rush for the counter.  Advance Books were produced, and goods handed over up to the amount of wages which would shortly fall due.  Women took their pick of the articles, groceries, tobacco, occasionally a few shillings.

‘It is quite usual’, say the Commissioners, ’for shoemakers and other small tradesmen in the neighbourhood of Abersychan to be paid by the workmen in goods....  Tobacco in several districts of South Wales has become nothing less than a circulating medium.  It is bought by the men and resold by them for drink, and finds its way back again to some of the Company’s shops.  Packets of tobacco pass unopened from hand to hand.  An Ebbw Vale grocer who took the Company’s tobacco at a discount declared:  “For years, when they were selling it for 1_s._ 4_d._ a lb.  I used to give 1_s._; but I was so much over-flooded with it that I was obliged to reduce the price to 11_d._ That would not do still, and I had to reduce it to 10_d._ I told the men to take it to some other shop if they could get 11_d._ or 1_s._ for it.  I was obliged to do that many a time, in order to get rid of the large stocks I held in hand.  Tobacco will not keep for many months without getting worse."’

Weekly pays, therefore, were the constant demand of the miners’ unions.  In Northumberland and Durham, whence truck had disappeared long ago, pays