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Mining StoriesYou are in: Bradford and West Yorkshire > History > Mining Stories > 'It was never the same again!' 'It was never the same again!'Coal mining has always been a dangerous activity. An exhibition in 2006 at the National Coal Mining Museum looked at the real price of coal based on accounts from those involved in both disaster and rescue. We talked to one of the survivors.  Once the pit wheel was a familiar sight in the West Yorkshire landscape.Ìý Witness: Disaster, Rescue and Recovery is the first of a series of exhibitions to be held at the Museum which uses the experience of mining families to help us understand what it meant to be a miner and live in a mining community. The exhibition focuses on five key disasters, the most recent being that at Lofthouse near Wakefield on the night of March 21st 1973 when 3.5 million gallons of water and sludge poured into the pit, trapping seven men underground.Ìý Only one body was recovered in what turned out to be Britain's biggest ever mining rescue operation.  Equipment used by mine rescue teams Tony Banks was underground on the night of the disaster. He told us: "You never think when you go to work on a night, next morning you are not going to see those men so it sticks in your mind.Ìý I'll never forget on the night of the disaster I was on the coal face with the machine team. We were in the middle of the coal face and at about half-past-two in the morning there was a sudden surge of wind and the ventilation went off and everything seemed to go quiet.Ìý It was as if somebody had turned your mind off and then it all came back to normal – the wind started blowing back in your face and there was the clanging of the machinery.Ìý We didn't know what had happened. It was about half-past-four when I got a call to go to the deputy in the loading gate." The mining rescue operation continued for another six days but for those in the pit, like Tony, it was more like a month: "It was all in vain and we knew there was no chance for those men…The men at Lofthouse were never the same again.Ìý I'll never forget I used to have to go and inspect the roadways and you used to take a man with you so you weren't on your own but none of them would go up there.Ìý There was this concrete wall with this big cross painted on it in white and it said R.I.P." Tony remembers that, just six weeks after the disaster, water was coming through the roof of the pit: "I thought, 'What a job, water coming down and we're drilling for over a week," but it was just some water which had got into the strata. After that a rule came out that we had to drill ahead if we were going towards any old workings. I think another lesson learned was to check old maps of the area."  1973: Relatives wait for news at Lofthouse Lofthouse Colliery closed in 1981 but Tony had already moved to the new Selby coalfield where things were very different:Ìý "We'd always known we were going to the promised land…I knew it was never going to be like Lofthouse.Ìý For a start they had 800 lockers but at Lofthouse they had over 1000 so that told me straight away we weren't going to have the same sort of manpower.Ìý Our lockers were separate to the overmen's lockers and we weren't used to that, officials had always stripped and washed with the men…Everything at Selby moved at 100MPH compared to 10MPH at Lofthouse."Ìý For many mining families the move was not a happy experience: "They uprooted homes and moved to Selby and a lot of them ended up getting divorced and moving back…I thought there would be jobs for life for them but it didn't prove to be like that. My son finished in 2004 and he was the sixth generation of my family that I know about.Ìý He's come out of the pit, he's got a job and he's better off all round so he's happy in a sense.Ìý There's still coal at Selby and it's all going to be left."  Tony (right) and Mike Now Tony helps keeps the memory of Lofthouse - and the miners who worked and died there - alive through the Outwood Community Group. This started when Mike Hooley from Outwood, the nearest village to the pit, discovered that film recollections of the area north of Wakefield seemed non-existent: "I said to myself, 'I'm going to make sure future generations have something to see." He dug an old video camera out: "The first thing I found was going to happen in Outwood was the erection of a pit wheel to commemorate the people who had worked at Lofthouse."Ìý Soon he found himself being asked by Tony and some of the other miners to make a video and the Outwood Community Video Group was born. Mike says: "Future generations will be able to watch that pit wheel go up and some kiddies who are not born yet will be able to look back on it, and that's probably the most satisfactory part of making it." Mike and Tony show the video, The Quest for Coal, to whoever invites them along. Tony sometimes finds himself crawling under a table demonstrating to pre-school children what it was like to work as a coal miner. He takes along the first and last pieces of coal ever to come out of Selby.  'There are no pits now...' All proceeds from the video go to maintaining the Lofthouse memorials including the painting of the pit wheel.Ìý Tony says: "It's 33 years but we still go every year on March 21st to the memorial. There are no pits now. While they were still going they kept the flowers coming but now we get them out of our funds every year." last updated: 30/04/2008 at 13:08 You are in: Bradford and West Yorkshire > History > Mining Stories > 'It was never the same again!'  |
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