Chapter 3: Down t'Pit
Shoveling slag, eating pig lips, and a theft.
In the summer of 1982, I reported to various National Coal Board sites around the Barnsley area for my placement. It started at NCB Area HQ, Grimethorpe Colliery, where I spent a week in an open-plan office doing make-work: filing, checking paper stock, that sort of thing. It had something of The Office (UK) about it, looking back, though the cast had thicker accents and fewer punchlines.
One detail sticks out: the tea and coffee corner. It didn’t have a sink. So instead of walking to a proper kitchen, the staff had taken to chucking the leftover dregs out of an upper window. Years of discarded dregs had left the lower window streaked and stained in inconsistent shades of brown, caffeine-based weathering you might call it. When it rained, the window would rinse off slightly, but not enough to hide the habit.
Next, I was sent to a classroom-based training center aimed at apprentice electricians. We reviewed the basics, Ohm’s Law, and circuit theory, all familiar ground. The lads there were alright, and it’s funny how things stick in your mind, but I have vivid memories of one wag proclaiming how the pork pies we had at lunch that day contained pig’s lips and eyelids. It was a decent couple of weeks, but that was just the warm-up. The real work was yet to come.
Most of my time that summer was spent in what they called “Basic Underground Training.” It was mandatory for anyone going down into the pit, regardless of role. Most of the lads were new recruits, lined up for laboring work. There were just two of us doing student placements from Area HQ, referred to as “Area.” People would ask, “Are you Area?” and you’d nod. Hard to tell if it was respect or a reminder you weren’t one of the crowd. Trainees also had to be accompanied underground at all times, and to make sure nobody missed the point, we were issued bright yellow helmets. There I was, a yellow-hatted lanky lad in a sea of white.
One part of the training involved “Use and Maintenance of Hand Tools,” which was really just a polite way of saying “shoveling slag.” I did that back-breaking work at Darton Main Colliery, Grimethorpe Colliery, and probably a couple of others I’ve since forgotten. Same work in each place: clearing coal dust and loose slag from around conveyor belts and walkways. Dirty, monotonous, physical work, and there was simply no avoiding it.
At Grimethorpe, we were told to tidy the walkways to the main pit shaft. The reason? A VIP visit, the Right Honourable Member of Parliament Michael Heseltine, no less. It wouldn’t do for our VIP guest to think Grimethorpe Colliery was a mucky place. We yellow-hats cleaned it up as best we could, with brooms, shovels, and wheelbarrows.
About ten years later, in October 1992, Michael Heseltine announced plans to close dozens of pits, threatening around 30,000 jobs. Grimethorpe shut the following year, in 1993. The walkway we scrubbed was probably bulldozed not long after. In 1983, Britain had 175 working pits, all of which were gone by the end of 2015, along with more than 200,000 jobs.
Underground training took place mainly at Grimethorpe and at North Gawber Colliery in Mapplewell. Grimethorpe was one of the deepest pits in the country, reaching nearly 3,000 feet in depth. Not something you’d soon forget.
The training itself covered the basics of not dying. We learned to ride the coal conveyor belts, lying face down and riding them in when the coal face was too far to walk. Getting on and off without losing a limb was definitely a skill worth teaching. When coal cars jumped the rails, which they did, you were expected to manhandle them back on. They looked exactly like the mining carts from a Scooby Doo chase scene, and getting them back on the rails was a right pain for us meddling kids.
At intervals along the tunnels, loose wooden planks were wedged above our heads, piled with pale limestone dust. It turned out to be a passive explosion suppressant: if a blast occurred, the pressure wave would knock the planks down and disperse the limestone, quenching any fireball before it could travel further. This did raise the question of how frequent explosions were, exactly. Our training leader’s reply was, "It’s just in case," which wasn’t entirely reassuring.
Every miner carried a Self-Rescuer. If carbon monoxide was detected, you strapped it on, put the mouthpiece in, and breathed through it. It converted CO into CO₂, which sounds reassuring until you learn that the chemical process generates heat, and you could end up burning your mouth, throat, and lungs in the process. Still better than the alternative, but not by the margin you'd like. We were also trained to watch out for the coal cars in the tunnels. If you heard one coming, you stepped into the nearest wall recess and waited. They weren’t slowing down for anyone.
Every miner also carried a lamp and battery set. Each morning, you’d collect them from the lamp cabin along with your Self-Rescuer, clip the battery to your belt, and attach the lamp to your helmet for hands-free use underground. If you needed to look more closely at something, the lamp unclipped and doubled as a torch. At the end of each shift, everything went back to the lamp cabin so the batteries could be recharged for the next day. It was a simple, well-worn routine.
At North Gawber pit, I was assigned to an electrician who was responsible for my “close personal supervision” underground. I’ll call him Bill, though his name is lost to time. The routine was simple enough: meet him at the pit shaft, ride the lift down together, then catch the underground train out to the working area. One morning, I arrived, got kitted out in my yellow helmet, bright orange overalls, Self-Rescuer, battery, and lamp, and headed to the shaft. No sign of Bill. I figured he'd gone ahead, so I rode the lift down alone and went to catch him at the train. No sign of him there either, but by that point I’d talked myself into the logic that he must already be on board, so I got on with the rest of the lads and boarded the train. North Gawber and the neighbouring Woolley Colliery were connected underground, close enough that a ten-minute ride linked the two workings. We pulled in at the Woolley terminus. Everyone disembarked and went their separate ways, and I was left standing there, alone, two thousand feet underground. Bill was nowhere to be seen. This was, it should be said, entirely my own fault.
After some anxious wandering, I found one of the telephones dotted around the workings and called up to the surface. Explaining the situation was not a highlight of my summer. Getting back meant arranging both a train and a lift, in the right order, which added a certain logistical humiliation to the general embarrassment. I made it back eventually and spent the rest of the shift in one of the surface workshops, which was probably where they put people who couldn’t be trusted not to get lost underground.
The pit canaries deserve a mention of their own. At Grimethorpe, the canaries shared the lamp cabin, an oversized shed with a tin roof where the Davy lamps were stored and maintained. The lamp cabin attendant looked after both the birds and the lamps as part of his regular duties. They were well looked after, treated less like equipment and more like pets. In some pits, special cages fitted with a small oxygen supply meant that if a canary began to stagger, you could seal it in and bring it round.
We took a canary underground as part of the safety lamp training. The Davy lamp had been around since 1815, its gauze-enclosed flame able to detect gas without igniting it, which was a considerable step up from the open candles miners had previously worked by in tunnels full of explosive methane. The canary predated even that, pressed into service because its faster metabolism meant carbon monoxide would take it down before it took you. Ours came back up fine. Within a few years, electronic detectors would make both the lamp and the bird obsolete.
That summer at the NCB stuck with me, not just the work but the scale of the thing. The industrial infrastructure down there was vast, and everything underground had a purpose: ventilation systems the size of barns, endless rail lines, and machinery that was clearly never meant to see daylight again. When its job was done, it stayed put; it was cheaper to bury it than bring it back up.
With my group of fellow trainees, we had extensive tours of the mine. One detail that caught my attention on those tours was the remnants of the old stables. Underground! In years gone by, before mechanization took over, pit ponies had been used to haul coal wagons underground. Some of the stable structures still existed, timbers, feeding troughs, the faint suggestion of a bygone system carved into the rock. I only recently learned that pit ponies were used in the UK until the 90s, though the practice had mostly died out by the mid-80s; I don’t know when the last pony was used at Grimethorpe.
You’d walk past sections that had been dug out decades earlier, held up with old wooden pit props, and then suddenly be in a newer area where hydraulic systems did the heavy lifting. Some tunnels were high enough to walk through. Others required a crawl. Either way, you got used to the feeling of the roof pressing down on your thoughts.
A coal mine is many things: an underground factory, a subterranean rail network, and a feat of heavy engineering. But at its most fundamental level, it is a giant ventilation system. At a typical mine, the two main shafts serve as the intake and the return. Massive fans at the surface act as a set of mechanical lungs, blowing fresh air down one shaft and sucking it out of the other to flush out the CO2 and noxious gases that would otherwise pool in the workings. The entire mine is a single, interconnected air circuit.
Because the system is interconnected, there are points where intake sections sit right next to return sections. To prevent the air from taking the path of least resistance and short-circuiting the flow, literal airlocks are installed between these areas. Passing through them felt like stepping into a scene from a science fiction movie, though the reality was much grimmer. I can still hear the blunt warning from our training leader, his voice echoing in the tunnel: “Dun’t you lads open both them doors at once! Tha’ll short-circuit ‘ole pit, and tha’ll get sucked right through!”
Moving through those heavy, functional doors, I always felt a sharp spike of danger. It was a feeling born in equal measure from my own imagination and those words of caution.
And then there was that day at the coal face.
We were taken to an active cutting site. It was loud, hot, and confined. The coal seam we visited was just tall enough to crouch through, though it must be said that even at the best of times, this six-foot-three lad was often trying not to bonk his yellow-hatted noggin on the roof. The rotary cutting drum chewed through the rock with slow, brutal power. We were only feet away, which felt entirely too close. Ahead of it, hydraulic props kept the roof up. Behind, the void was allowed to collapse in on itself.
Natural caving, they called it. The idea was that the earth filled in the space as the coal face advanced. In theory, it didn’t cause problems on the surface. But I wasn’t convinced. With all that movement underground, how could it not show up on the surface? The state of the roads in Barnsley seemed to say otherwise. I put that question to one of our supervisors, and the reply was vague. Something along the lines of “That’s not really how it works, lad.” Maybe it wasn’t. Or maybe it was just the answer you gave to a student on a summer placement.
Being down there, three-quarters of a mile under the ground, pressed in on all sides, surrounded by rock and metal and noise, it wasn’t a place I wanted to stay long. I wouldn’t say I was outright scared, but I wasn’t comfortable either. There’s a particular kind of silence underground when the machinery stops. You become very aware of how much rock is above your head.
I still think about that experience, more than forty years on. It wasn’t just a job. It was a look into a world that was already disappearing. Coal was still king in 1982, but its grip was slipping. The signs were there if you knew where to look. And in hindsight, the picket lines we crossed, called “sympathy strikes” at the time, were early warnings. Tensions were already simmering. The national miners’ strikes of 1984 and 1985 were just around the corner.
Other details stuck. The communal showers, for one. Hundreds of miners covered in black dust from head to toe, stripping off and stepping under the spray. The steam, the muck, the clatter of steel-toed boots on tiled floors. It was part of the routine. There was no modesty, no pretense. It was just the practical business of washing off a day in the pit.
And I learned some other important life lessons, too. Like, don’t have a fried chicken leg for lunch when you’re thousands of feet underground in a coal mine, with nowhere to wash the coal dust from your greasy hands and face. To this day, I can’t bear to get grease on my face, which is why I can’t abide ribs or any other messy-face foods.
As work experience goes, it did exactly what it was supposed to. I came away with a clearer sense of the world I’d briefly been part of, and a fairly strong feeling it wasn’t where I was headed.
After that summer underground, I went back to Manchester for my second year, back to lectures, labs, circuits, and probably code. I still didn’t know where my path was heading, only that it wouldn’t involve a hard hat and a Self-Rescuer. Even so, something felt off from the start.
Over the summer, flush with my hard-earned NCB trainee wages (£50 per week!), I’d bought a brand-new blue Suzuki GP100 on finance from George Ward & Co. on Doncaster Road in Barnsley. It was small and sharp, a single-cylinder two-stroke, and I rode it everywhere. Within days of arriving back in Manchester, it was gone. I’d chained it to the residence’s embedded security hoops; thieves cut the lock and took the bike and the chain. Classes hadn’t even started yet! At Chorlton police station, the desk officer shrugged: “It’ll be long gone by now, lad.” The insurance payout didn’t clear the loan, so I kept making payments on a bike I no longer had.
Back on the bus, I lost time and patience. The course load was as heavy as ever, and I couldn’t seem to get traction. Concentration slipped, and so did the grades. By spring, I knew I was done. I told the department, then I told the Coal Board.
“We always have to deal with some amount of wastage.”
Telling my mum was worse. She’d carried the pride of me being the first in the family to go to university. I carried home a box of books and no plan.
I went back to Barnsley feeling smaller than when I’d left. Diminished. I slept badly and woke early, looking for something I could throw myself at. I didn’t know what it was yet, but I was about to find out.
This chapter is the third part of an ongoing series. An evolving list of chapters is available on the contents page.