On Coal Mining…

Growing up in Leeds we were unaccustomed to life in a pit village for we had life in the big city, a city of heavy engineering and clothing manufacturers, the pits were all to the south and east of us – and the north-east…

In the north-east Suzanne’s family background was in mining, her family all lived in the same small coastal village and while her dad escaped the magnetic draw of the village mine, or even the next (huge) one three miles up the coast by joining the Army, her mothers family had coal dust deeply ingrained in their DNA.

When I first moved up there the industry was in turmoil, their village pit where her mother had worked in the canteen and her grandfather and uncle had worked underground had closed a decade ago, her mother became a housewife and her uncle was invalided out of service after a conveyor belt fire in a tunnel had trapped him and the poisonous fumes had damaged his lungs – he couldn’t work again for the rest of his life and lived in a Coal Board house on his meagre Coal Board pension, a bachelor with no hope or desire to marry and raise a family when you cannot support one, such a shame too for he was a lovely man with simple ways and several physical disabilities from his mining days, filling his days on his allotment, growing leeks, onions and chrysanthemums and breeding canaries in a small shed in his back yard (traditional activities among mining communities).

He was the mining past though, one of Suzannes brothers was minings present, Derek worked at Bates colliery, a large, modern, well equipped flagship pit that was always in the local newspapers for breaking another production record and like all the pits located on the north east coast their tunnels went out miles under the North Sea following the coal seams that originated in the North Penines and then traversed the counties of Durham and Northumberland until they disappeared deep down under the Sea and joined up with the North Sea oil fields, for of course oil and coal are all but one and the same.

If going down a coal mine is guaranteed to make you wary of the dangers then surely going down a coal mine which tunnels several miles out under the sea would make you simply refuse to do so, it certainly would me but Derek, like all his “marrars” was blase about the fact that a short distance above his head on every shift was a couple of hundred feet of water constantly trying to invade his working space, and succeeding if it were not for the state-of-the-art pumps that saved the miners from wading knee deep through water to get to their workspace.

But only just, Derek spoke constantly of the conditions underground, where many mainland pits were warm places to work in, what with you being several hundred feet inside the earths crust and all that, the sea pits were always freezing cold and wet, not just damp but soaking wet, water ran down the walls constantly and you couldn’t put your kit down anywhere without it being ruined. Equipment was constantly breaking down due to water penetration, shifts would be stopped, production interrupted, it was a very expensive pit to maintain and yet the quality of the coal and the ability of the miners to extract massive quantities of the stuff when the machinery, and they, were working properly meant that it was an invaluable pit and one of the most desired in the country.

In 1983 the colossal sum of £1 million was reported to have been spent at Bates on new pumping and roof support systems, self adjusting hydraulic rams that would compensate automatically for the varying pressures of the roof bearing down on the tunnels were installed in every seam. Without them the roof would simply and slowly compress itself back to the floor of each tunnel again, miners fight an ongoing battle against nature and gravity when working underground its not sufficient to simply put some props in, the roof is constantly bearing down and if left to its own devices would close up the tunnels completely in a fairly short space of time.

Less than twelve months later the UK Miners Strike began, its gone down in folklore now as the National Union of Mineworkers final stand, a sort of Alamo for the Unions vs Government war that had been waged since the 1960′s, and indeed it was to prove to be the NUM’s Alamo, and a farewell to Bates pit.

The miners were on strike for almost a year, two days short of a year, with no wages for the tens of thousands of men employed in the industry and during the year over 11,000 were arrested on public order offences as the fight to oppose the Thatcher Governments plan to close a vast majority of pits grew bloody by each day.

Every pit in the North East observed the strike from day one to the end but it was common knowledge to the Bates miners that they would not have a job to go back to, when they walked out the pumps were switched off, the machinery abandoned underground, management were supposed to leave maintenance cover in place but the task was massive and required far more than the handful of pit managers that the task was left to and within a very short space of time the rumour circulated that the shafts were flooded, the investment lost.

My brother-in-law Derek joined the picket lines for a short time but with the realisation that their own personal cause was now lost and that they would be jobless when the strike ended he and most of his colleagues started to look for ways to earn money, mortgages and loans needed to be paid, food still needed to be put on the table, many miners still came from traditional family backgrounds where they earned the money and the wife looked after the house, they were the only earners and they earned nothing from mining for a year and while those in council houses were treated with a bit of leniency, for the local council simply dare not start evicting miners in a mining area, the ones with mortgages were not given any leeway at all, repossessions were commonplace and there was eventually no choice, if you wanted to stay out on strike you had to find another way to earn money.

Derek had several cash in hand jobs during that year, the black economy was boosted incredibly in the area and there was no shortage of window cleaners, milkmen and building site labourers but in the eyes of older Union men Derek and his ilk were strike-breakers, “scabs”, and it caused fallouts within the family, the situation being made even more complicated by the fact that another of my brother-in-laws, Dereks older brother, was a police officer in the Metropolitan Police, the most despised police force during the strike due to their alleged violence in dealing with pickets when they were distributed on relief duties around the north of the country – they never met on opposite sides of the picket lines but its an interesting one to ponder on.

True to the rumours Bates pit never opened again when the strike ended in March 1985 and Derek and his colleagues reported back to work to be handed redundancy notices or the chance to work at another pit, as he didn’t have many years service he chose the “other pit” option to find himself and a couple of busloads of friends being taken ten or so miles to South Shields every day to work.

And here is the surprise.

For all the solidarity and comradeship of the miners during the year long strike, when it came to sharing their pit with those who were less fortunate the South Shields miners were very vociferous in their opposition.

Miners are very protective of their pits as are the communities which depend, often solely, on the pits, many generations may have served down any given pit and the current generation still had the old view that they were protecting the community’s future – the influx of a group of miners from ten miles away was simply taking money and jobs from their own, and they were having nothing of it.

After a month of verbal, physical and mental abuse (having dog feces placed in your locker or worse in your “bait tin” (lunch box) does tend to weary the sole) Derek and most of his colleagues accepted their redundancy offer and left the industry and as everyone now knows the coal mining industry in this country accepted its redundancy just a few years later.

Those were great communities to live in, I had six very happy years living in Seaton Delaval, it didn’t look like much on the surface but, and it sounds corny, if you arrived without airs and graces you were accepted with friendship and without prejudice.