Sparing a belated thought for the generations lost down the mines

ONCE again a mine has become a tomb. As the tragic events deep under the earth of South Wales rise, sadly, to the surface we cannot help but brood on the plight of any trapped miner. While fatal industrial accidents occur each day in Britain, for which we do not lift our head, the soot-smeared face of this ancient, fading trade will always have the power to break our heart.

For the fact remains that the miner undertakes a profession so perilous that few of us could contemplate it. Like the astronaut or the submariner, their “office” is an environment utterly hostile to life. We are not meant to be there, and when things go wrong it can be exceedingly difficult to once again set them right. Last year the world watched with held breath as the greatest rescue operation since Nasa teased back Apollo 13 from the inky depths of space was carried out in Chile, with the successful return to the surface of 33 miners after 69 days buried alive. Yet it proved the exception rather than the rule, for all too infrequently do mining disasters end with tears of joy.

Scotland has had its share of both, but perhaps the most famous were the events at the Knockshinnoch mine in New Cumnock in Ayrshire on 7 September, 1950. The coal seams of Scotland run in a diagonal line, just 30 miles wide, from the Firth of Forth to the Ayrshire coast, and have been the scenes of both misery and camaraderie for centuries. For 150 years, from 1606 to 1760, miners and their children and children’s children were the effective serfs of the colliery owner, with runaways vigorously pursued. Despite the later abolition of such acts and a subsequent rise in wages, the career carried the stigma of slavery into the early 19th century, with the Irish immigrant the only enthusiastic visitor to the mineshaft. Pride in the profession resurfaced at the turn of the century, with output peaking in 1913 when 42.5 million tons were carved out by 150,000 men. By the time 129 men began their shift at Knockshinnock the profession was already in decline.

At 7pm a huge tide of liquid peat broke loose from the walls and poured into the main coal seam, sweeping away wagons of coal, killing 11 men instantly, (two more would die later from their wounds), while 116 men were trapped behind a seemingly impenetrable wall, 24ft thick, of coal and rock, and crammed with pockets of poisonous and highly explosive methane gas.

Two pieces of technology would prove to be their salvation. The first was a hand-cranked underground telephone link, a lifeline, with which they were eventually able to contact the rescuers on the surface. Together they agreed to begin a rescue tunnel 2ft high by 3ft wide. The rescuers would begin on their side and the trapped miners would tunnel on their side, with luck they would meet in the middle. Luck, however, was on the clock. The men’s entire rations consisted of a cardboard box of sandwiches and four squares of chocolate. Their only light the torches from their helmet lamps. As they toiled in shifts those resting held a makeshift concert. John Robertson sang The Old Rugged Cross. At one point, the particular choice of words of their rescuers had an unfortunate effect. One of them said they were “still hopeful” of achieving a rescue. As Matt Sanderson, one of the miners, recalled 49 years later: “The implication being he wasn’t sure if it could be done. I would have preferred no news to bad news.”.

Outside, the press and television carried constant reports and there was celebration when, on the third day, the two tunnels met. Yet in order to traverse the pockets of deadly methane gas the miners, like their Chilean comrades in grime 50 years later, had to come out one at a time, not sealed inside a steel bullet, but in the second piece of new technology, a Salvus breathing apparatus. Over many hours each of the 116 trapped men emerged blinking into the light. Three years later, their plight and rescue became a popular film The Brave Don’t Cry.

Bill Douglas would have been 18 when The Brave Don’t Cry played the cinema at Newcraighall, where, as a child, he secured a seat with two jam jars. The spectre of the pits, the looming coal bings and the poverty of Scotland’s mining communities was captured in the director’s masterpiece, a trilogy of films, My Childhood, My Ain Folk and My Way Home. The illegitimate son of a miner, who was raised, first by his maternal, then paternal grandmothers, he later learned that his mother was incarcerated in a mental institution. He rebelled against the notion that his only source of employment lay underground and absorbed the insults and abuse of a child from a poor working class background that dares to insist he can become an artist. For when I think of the mines I think of the films of Bill Douglas, (and the novel Docherty by William McIlvanney). Next Friday, Exeter University, will host a one-day symposium on his work, while on the weekend of 29 and 30 of October his home town of Newcraighall will mark the 20th anniversary of his death with a dedicated weekend of talks, screenings and the deliberation of a new memorial.

Perhaps Bill Douglas would have believed that the greatest memorial is the fact that the youth of Newcraighall no longer spend their lives in the dark of the earth. Coal-mining has all but vanished from Scotland, and, if we are honest, few would mourn its passing. Dirty, dangerous and so physically demanding that its practice coined a word for heroic endeavour, (“Stakhanovite” after Alexey Stakhanov, the Russian miner reported to have set a new record by mining 227 tonnes of coal in a single shift) yet its skilled practitioners brought a great deal to Scottish life, much of which is now missing.

The small mining villages of Fife and Ayrshire lost a strong sense of community when the pits closed and, as if in reaction to a working life spent in the dark, many miners then illuminated their social life with the music of the brass band, the pit choir and the art class.

However, few miners ever wished for their children to pick up their pick. During the miner’s strike of the 1980s, the battle was to preserve jobs for those that, in future, would want them, even if the current practitioners did not.

Today so few of us use coal that any personal link between us and what heats our homes has been lost and so, sadly, we only hear of miners during their hour of greatest need, by which time it is so often too late.