Life underground

Because of the risk of sparks, visitors to the National Coal Mining Museum are usually banned from taking anything containing batteries on the tour below ground: cameras, phones, watches, car key fobs and suchlike are all surrendered at the pit head. Our camera club had negotiated a special private tour, and we were allowed to take with us down the mine our cameras, with batteries installed and switched on above ground, plus a tripod. We were all given safety helmets and small lamps and had to wear face masks too. Crammed together in the clanking lift cage with its mesh sides, I got a real taste of what my forebears must have endured every working day. The guides are themselves ex-miners and have very interesting tales to tell (though of course my deafness does not help when someone has a mask on. I couldn't lip read him, so I couldn't decipher much.) It was really dark so lighting for our photos was tricky - the supplied lamps didn't throw much of a beam. I was pleasantly surprised how well some of my images came out, after some careful processing, considering the gloom and the difficulties of positioning when there were a dozen of us in the same space. 

The tour passes round a circular route through tunnels, some wide and quite high and others very narrow where you had to duck under beams and doors. I was glad of the hard hat! It is broadly arranged so that you walk through a timeline from the earliest days of deep mining through to the later, mechanised operations. There are various vignettes set up to illustrate life below ground. 

In the early days it was common for women and children as well as men to work full shifts (12 hours) underground. Children could squirm into tinier spaces and were also employed to load and haul baskets of coal. Little ones as young as five were tasked with opening and closing the doors that allowed air to flow through the mine (see photo above). They sat for hours alone, with only a small lamp for light, which often burnt out. Read some of their stories HERE. It was not until 1842 that an Act of Parliament forbade the employment of women and children under 10 underground, though many women evaded this and continued to work illegally,  and they were still able to work at the colliery above ground. My own great grandfather was working as a miner aged 16 in 1881 and on the same census sheet one of the miners is shown as aged 14. 

When children were banned, mines started to use sturdy pit ponies to haul the loads of coal. The last of them was retired in the 1990s. Many of them lived for months on end in stables underground, only seeing daylight for a short break every now and again, though I think they were generally well looked after.

Miners worked in the dim light, using picks, shovels and brute force in the early days to hack coal from the seams. The tunnels were often so narrow they had to crawl and work lying down. In the 1920s/30s, mechanisation crept in. Pneumatic drills (using compressed air) had the advantage of not being likely to spark, and became the tool of choice. Read about a miner's day in the 1930s HERE.  (I found this article and photos really interesting, illuminating the life my ancestors led.) 

Coal was placed in tubs on tracks to be transported and, later, conveyor belts made the the moving around of coal and waste rather easier. 

Eventually larger drilling machines and 'ploughs' that scraped the seams made the extraction of coal quicker and easier, but of course needed men not only to work them but to install and maintain them. As a child, I remember being taken to the annual miners' galas in the 1950s/60s. There would be tents with displays and mock-ups of mines, and arrays of huge machines that looked (to a child) like menacing creatures, maybe dinosaurs or deep sea creatures, with rows of enormous teeth! Impressive.