Mining, hellish? Plenty of men miss it

Glamorgan workers ready to descend into the mine
Glamorgan workers ready to descend into the mine - Getty

There were a lot of ways to die in a coal mine. You could stumble upon a deadly gas, which they called “damp”: “choke-damp” (carbon dioxide and nitrogen), “white damp” (toxic carbon monoxide) and the most dangerous, “fire damp” (flammable methane). The pit could flood or the roof could cave in. Weil’s disease, contracted from the urine of underground rats, could lead to kidney failure.

Most of the former miners to whom Emily P Webber has spoken for Mining Men: Britain’s Last Kings of the Coalface, an engaging history of postwar British mining, were pretty sanguine about these constant perils. In interviews woven throughout the book, they tell their horror stories with gallows’ humour. Retired Nottinghamshire miner Tony recalls how his father, who worked in the pit with him, had to fetch a man’s leg that had been cut off by a coal-transporting mechanical belt. As he walked across the pit yard carrying the leg in a paper bag, he called out, “Does anybody want to buy a boot?”

Another, John, describes how he and a colleague discovered another man sitting with a bandage around his finger next to some dangerous machinery. “He said ‘I’ve cut the end of me finger off,’” John recounts. “The other man says, ‘How on earth have you done that?’, and he picked his left hand up and shoved it in, and he said, “Like that”, [and] cut both fingers off.” John found this hilarious.

There were other, slower dangers to working in the depths of the earth, sometimes near-naked in heat that could reach 45 degrees Celsius. Dark days underground could lead to involuntary eye movement (nystagmus), while new machinery that eventually replaced the pick and shovel could cause deafness and damaged nerves (vibration white finger). And the dust. Multiple baths after each shift could not clear it. As Orwell wrote, it would enter every cut in your skin: “Then the skin grows over it and forms a blue stain like tattooing, which in fact it is. Some of the older men have their foreheads veined like Roquefort cheeses from this cause.” The dust could wreck your body over time, and left many men dying of silicosis shortly after retirement.

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To me, it all sounds terrible. Yet almost every miner Webber speaks to is nostalgic for their days under the earth. Stewart, a miner at Bickershaw Colliery, says he told his wife that if he were to die underground, he’d like to be left there. “I was married to t’pit, and you must have talked to other men like me, and you look at pictures of men working underground, [and think] what on earth is the love affair with working underground, ‘cause I don’t know.”

Coal miners travel to the pit by rail at Mere Grove, Armthorpe (1941)
Coal miners travel to the pit by rail at Mere Grove, Armthorpe (1941) - Getty

But this love couldn’t last forever. One miner describes the shame of seeing a man in his fifties standing with hands on head, having wet himself as mounted police charged at him during the strike of 1984-85. The strikes caused tragic rifts, too. Webber writes of divides within families where one brother went to work and one stayed on strike. Friends never spoke again. A 33-year-old Wolstanton miner, who returned to work after 14 weeks of strike, was spat at by colleagues on the picket line and received death threats against his family. He was found dead in his garage with the car engine running.

Webber’s writing can occasionally feel a little strained: at one point, she describes “that almost ineffable essence of mining villages”. But she rightly notes that many of our old coalfield towns – which a century ago employed 10 per cent of Britain’s male workforce – now have deep problems with poverty, addiction, social disorder and high male suicide rates. In the mines, older colleagues would act as mentors and role models to young men entering the pits; today, few jobs offer such close intergenerational relationships. The pits’ closure was inevitable – but reading Mining Men, you can understand why so many miners miss their old jobs. One tells Webber that his son is now a master scuba diver. “It’s in his blood. He has to go down.”


Mining Men is published by Chatto & Windus at £22. To order your copy for £18.99, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books