Mining: From school to life underground - the first day down the pit at the age of 15

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Retired schoolteacher and author David Bell has just published Memories of the Derbyshire Coalfields, telling the stories of the men and women whose lives revolved around the coal mines, until the last pit shut in 1994.

AUTHOR and local history fan David Bell has turned to oral history for a nostalgic look at a bygone industry in his latest book.

David, from Ashby, a former head teacher at Sudbury Primary School, has just published Memories of the Derbyshire Coalfields.

He has spent the last year interviewing ex-miners and their families, in both north and south Derbyshire, to gather their memories of life in the county’s pits – a way of life that has been a thing of the past since Markham Colliery in North Derbyshire closed in 1994.

David, whose other books have included Derbyshire Ghosts and Legends and, of all claims to fame, Derbyshire Privies, said: “It struck me that talking to the miners and getting down their memories would be very interesting. The pits are all gone now but the former miners are still there.”

David’s book takes the reader into a world of great characters, danger, disasters, nicknames, snap tins and water bottles, pigeon racing and brass bands.

He added: “Some villages were completely centred on the mine and all the shops and pubs were dependent on it. It was a whole other world in these tight-knit communities and one thing that came out strongly was what one might almost term the miners’ gallows humour, combined with the well-known Derbyshire wit, which produced some of the most memorable stories.”

One fascinating section of the book deals with the first trip down the mine for a young teenage lad.

David writes:

What was it like to go suddenly, often at the age of 15, from the child’s world of school to a life among the men underground? Although many of the men to whom I spoke came from mining families where mining talk would be common, the transition from childhood to the life of a young miner must have been a shock to some.

Paul Liversuch trained at Donisthorpe pit in the 1960s, then spent three years at Cadley Hill, followed by 27 years back at Donisthorpe.

He described with great clarity how he felt on his first day down the mine.

“In the training room, it’d all be explained to you. But it was a bit like looking forward to having a tooth out; you knew the day would come, the first time you’d got to go down the pit.

“The first experience of going down the shaft – especially at Donisthorpe where the shaft had got a bend in it so the cages shook as they crossed – was very frightening.

“The older men would be smiling because they knew that, when there was someone in the cage on his first time down, the engine winder would lay it a bit fast. I suppose it was to get you immune to it.

“When you got to the pit bottom, you wondered what to expect, because you didn’t have a clue, no matter what you’d been told about it.

“It was a surprise to see everything at the pit bottom painted white.

“Then you’d go to a training face, an old seam that wasn’t working, and they showed you all the different ways and methods of support.

“Eventually, you went on to a real face and seeing a solid wall of coal, completely black, was awe-inspiring.

“Nothing prepares you for it, if you know what I mean. You had to learn just what it was like to turn your light out. You never knew what darkness was till you turned your light out. It was complete black.

“It literally is going into another world, where everything’s different. It’s like being a child again. You have to learn to do things from the very start.

“The main thing you have to learn is to look after yourself, so you know how to put your equipment on.

“It’s almost like road safety. You have to learn the dangers of walking up a road where haulage trucks might be going up and down.

“You have to learn about conveyor belts coming down, and junctions leading to another road.

“And, at Donisthorpe, you’d have to learn about smells because, in one direction, you’d have an intake of fresh air and then you’d have a return where the air smelt musty going out.

“From the bottom of the shaft, you went on a manrider, or, to some faces, you’d have to walk. We had one face about four miles out and we’d come out on a conveyor, but to most faces we walked.

“We walked probably two miles and part of that you would be bent double. You couldn’t stand up. The roadway was meant to be 14 ft high, but for about a mile you’d be walking with your back bent.

“You couldn’t straighten up because there wasn’t room to straighten up. I don’t think my back’s ever recovered, to be honest.”

When I asked Roy Astle about his first time going down the shaft at Granville pit in 1954, he told me: “God, that was a shock. It was steam winding, yes, steam winding, and down a big shaft.

“When the cage was loaded with men, they’d ring off. Then they used to drop you fast. It was faster than electric, much faster than electric.

“The shaft at Shonky, on the site where the ski slope in Swadlincote is now, that was the deepest shaft in this area. That went down to the face they called Raker.

“But there they’d only got two guide ropes, and the cages used to touch the sides at times. It went that slow it took a good five minutes to come up, and it would catch the brickwork.”

Walter Burrows’ first day at the pit was very different because he didn’t actually get to do any work.

He explained: “I’ll tell you about my first day at Markham. When I’d done all my basic training to work underground, I went to Markham on my first shift as an actual workman.

“My dad and brothers went down to their end of the colliery and all the workmen were stood in a heap. A chap called Tom Swain, who was the NUM secretary, later MP for North East Derbyshire, he was shouting and eventually he asked all of us did we want to go to work or did we want to go home?

“Everybody put their hands up to go back home, including me because I followed the rest. And I was on strike. I had to get changed again and go home. I knocked my mother up and she said: ‘What’s this all about?’ I said: ‘I don’t know what it means but I’m on strike.’ That was my first day as a miner, but we did go back to work the next day.”

Walter had not wanted to be a miner at all but had to face the hard economic reality of life in a mining family.

“I started work in 1950. I wanted to join the RAF, actually. I’d been in the Air Training Corps for three years, but I couldn’t join the RAF until I was 17 years old. I was 15 so I went down the pit for two years.

“When I was 17, I went and sat four examinations for acceptance into the RAF, at Cranwell College.

“I came home on my first leave and, obviously, I could see we were struggling. There were a lot of kids at home and my dad had had an accident and was on low pay. So I went back to college and said: ‘Look, I’m going to have to finish. I’m needed at home more than I’m needed here.’ So I went back down the pit.

“I did all work underground as a haulage worker till I was 18 years old, when I became a coalface worker, a development worker and then, when I was 23, a shot firer.

“That’s when I joined NACODS, the National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers, and when I was 25, I became a deputy. A deputy is the name for the man deputising for the colliery manager.”

Walter’s younger brother, John, explained the family background: ‘I was one of 11 kids, six lads, five lasses. Only one of the lads didn’t ultimately work in the pits – and he worked on the railways.

“Even some of the lasses worked at the pits. For three or four generations, we were coal miners and I’m proud of that. Mum married my dad after the First World War, after her first husband got killed in the war.

“We had a fairly standard bringing up – poor mining background, no money and plenty of love.

“Always a bit of snap on the table, perhaps not always the best sort, lard and salt, that sort of thing.

“I went to school at Duckmanton Infants School, which had been bombed during the war, so my first school days were spent in the temporary schoolroom in the chapel.

“I were that bad at going to school as a five-year-old that they used to have to fetch my brother out of top class to look after me. Well, my dad died on my 13th birthday. I came home from school, full of life on my 13th birthday and my dad had died.

“I didn’t pass the 11-plus, unlike our Walt, who did. It went like that in our family: eldest lad passed, next ’un didn’t, next eldest lad did, next ’un didn’t, next ’un did and I didn’t. I started work at Markham pit at 15, as everybody did and I hated the place.

“I were put in a pit bottom job, simply watching the tubs coming off the chair up two separate levels. My job was to stop ’em meeting on the point where they came together. Bored, dreadful, lonely, dark – I hated it. I stuck it for a while but kept coming home poorly.

“It got to the point where obviously the powers-that-be spoke to my eldest brother, Ellis, who at that time was a deputy. Ultimately, he said to me: ‘Why dun’t tha go for a mechanical apprenticeship?’

“So I said: ‘Good idea, I will,’ because I was always into that sort of thing. I applied, got an interview, got accepted, went on to an apprenticeship and transferred to Ireland colliery as a consequence.

“It was the best move I ever made because, while I was at Markham, I’d got so many members of the family there – brothers, uncles – I was never John Burrows. I was always “Ellis’s brother” or “Walt’s brother” or somebody’s nephew.

“I went down Ireland pit as an apprentice fitter. First day there, I got changed and I had to clock on. I’d never had to clock on before. I’d always had a check. This was 1957, a year after I’d started at Markham. It was the best move I ever made. I enjoyed every minute.”

When I asked John how he felt on going down the shaft for the first time, his reply was very different from those of Paul Liversuch and Roy Astle.

John answered: “Going down the shaft never bothered me. It wasn’t a consideration. I’d already been to Grassmoor Training, so I was aware of the process.

“The only time anybody ever bothered about it was after the shaft disaster at Markham, but even that didn’t deter 99 per cent of people. It was a freak one-off incident and I’m always preaching – I always have preached – that riding the shaft was the safest ride in the world.

“When you think about it, the number of times the shaft has been ridden and the number of men, and look at the number of incidents that happened in the shaft, it’s still the safest journey you’ll ever take.

“Let me tell you what happened at home on my first day. When I got up, my mother got up with me, as she had done with all the lads, packed my snap, made me a cup of tea, never stopped talking. Five o’clock in the morning and she never stopped talking – totally unusual for my mother.

“The others had gone cause they’d got to get there earlier than me. I got home from work that day, got asked how I’d got on, said OK and that were end of conversation.

“And I said to my mother: ‘Don’t get up with me any more. I don’t want a woman talking and yattering at five o’clock in the morning.’

“And she said: ‘Thank you very much. That’s what everybody else said to me.’ She’d purposely got up that morning to talk and talk and talk so I would say: ‘Don’t get up.’

She was very, very clever. And she didn’t get up any more and I didn’t want her to.”

Terry Butkeraitis grew up in the mining village of Whitwell, though he didn’t work at the pit there to begin with. Terry himself is Derbyshire-born and bred, but his unusual surname comes from his father, a Lithuanian, who came to work in the Derbyshire pits after the Second World War.

When Terry was 15 he left school and his last day was quite eventful.

“I was in a Catholic school. I weren’t due to leave school till the summer of 1965 but, before Easter, I’d applied for a job with the Coal Board, the NCB as it was then, and I’d got interviewed and did some tests and exams and actually got a job as an apprentice electrician.

“I’ll never forget the school headmaster sending for me this day. They were staunch Roman Catholics and I’d got to have a thrashing for smoking in the toilets.

“So I got my six-of-the-best in front of the school at lunchtime, when we had assembly; then, in the afternoon, he sent for me and said you can leave school early because you’ve got a job.

“I grew two foot taller that week because I were going to work. But one thing I learned: school had never, ever prepared me for work. It was such a shock, a culture shock, to go and strip off in a bath with your uncles, with people you’d looked on as grown men and you were still a child. It was a bit of an embarrassment to step into a communal shower and scrub yoursen’. It were a bit daunting and frightening. I’ll never forget that.

“I started at Oxcroft pit, which was a drift mine. And my first day at the pit I went along and I was put with an old Communist.

“He still wore a flat cap and his helmet on top. He was the union secretary. In them days, the union used to put a tin down to collect the subs and I joined the union, the NUM. I worked at Oxcroft all through my apprenticeship. Then I moved to Manton pit just a mile over the border into South Yorkshire.

“From the very first day of getting there, it was like dropping off the end of the earth and going to hell. It was the deepest mine shaft in Europe.

“I’d come from a pit where you wore a donkey jacket and overalls. Everybody at Manton were looking at me as I was going down for the first time.

“I didn’t realise till I got to the bottom that all they wore were their boots, their knee-pads, and a pair of women’s tights with the legs cut out, to stop their danglers thrashing about. It was very hot and dangerous.

“It took me two years to get away from there because, in them days, they wouldn’t let you just transfer from pit to pit. It were seen as poaching men. Anyway, nobody wanted jobs in pits in those days because a bus driver and a farm worker were getting more money.

“I then moved to Whitwell pit, back in North Derbyshire, which was similar to Oxcroft except it were a shaft mine. Whitwell were a nice family pit. You knew everybody.

“Because Whitwell had got every type of conditions that you could ever encounter in a mine – wet, cold, hot, dusty, inclines, broken strata – they used it as an experimental pit for trying out all new machinery.

“If it worked at Whitwell, it would work anywhere else, so we were at the forefront of new technology. It was a happy pit. It were one where the management and the unions shared the responsibility and the management were pretty fair, at least until the strike.”

Ron Wain started at Stanton Lane, also known as Bretby No 3, after three weeks’ training at Donisthorpe.

He later worked at Bretby Drift and Donisthorpe collieries, ending up as a deputy. He remembers the pit ponies that were still used in a number of pits when he started work.

“I hated being a pony lad. They’d got one, Nova, and he were wild. The biggest pony they’d got.

“I had to turn him round against the face and one place was only 10ft by 8ft, another was 8ft by 8ft. Well, you ain’t got a lot of room, especially if there was subsidence!”

One man who would disagree about working with ponies was Roy Astle, who told me: “We had ponies at both pits at Granville – the Big Pit and the Little Pit.

“When Donisthorpe went over to haulages and did away with their ponies, they were sent to Granville. I’m very near sure that Granville was the last pit round this area to have ponies down the pit. I enjoyed working with them.”

Memories of the Derbyshire Coalfields by David Bell is published by Countryside Books, priced £7.99, and is available from all local booksellers.

Contact www.countryside books.co.uk, or telephone 01635 43816.

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