成人快手

Dennis Fisher first went underground in 1961

Dennis Fisher first went down the pit in November 1961. Starting as an electrician at nearby Bulcliffe Wood colliery he moved on to a number of other pits and increasingly responsible jobs, ending up as Acting Engineer at Barnsley Main colliery just before the pit closed. Today Bulcliffe Wood is little more than an abandoned sign warning drivers about a concealed colliery entrance (Dennis points out: "The Colliery's been 'Beware' since 1985") and Dennis is one of the guides taking visitors underground at the National Coal Mining Museum for England.

"The Colliery's been 'Beware' since 1985"

Dennis says that today many people come along to the Museum not really knowing what coal is used for, let alone what being a coal miner involved: "Few people actually have coal fires at home now. They don't actually see coal. What is it? That fact that when we switch a light on, it's actually been produced by coal. What connection does electricity have with coal? They don't know. Because you are involved with the industry you tend to think everyone should know but, when you stand back and look at it, you can see the reason why people don't know. When a kid switches a light on, it's electricity that puts that light on. Where the electricity is coming from is irrelevant as far as they are concerned."

Until people go underground, they don't always appreciate the conditions in which miners once worked. The tour takes us not only through Caphouse Colliery but through time, starting in the 1820s where families would work together in cramped narrow tunnels. One of the first jobs a young child would do would be to act as a trapper, opening and closing trap doors to ventilate the mine. Dennis says: "I don't think children really appreciate that children could work underground in those conditions and not just children. You get adults saying they couldn't do that. Well, they could and they did. It wasn't pleasant but it was done. I think people's perceptions of the value of life have changed dramatically. In the good old 1800s or Victorian times, when we looked after our kids second to none, we used to send them down roadways covered in wet sacks with a candle to set off an explosion to get rid of the methane. It just shows you what sort of a price they had on life which was very small. I mean, that's changed dramatically, but try explaining it to children. Until they go down I didn't think they appreciate that children, or anyone else, could be treated like that."

"It wasn't pleasant but it was done"

Dennis describes a typical day underground during his days working for the National Coal Board and its successor British Coal: "When I was an electrician I would start work at 7am. I was on the coal face. It was: go to work, get changed, put the overalls on, collect my lamp, check the reports from the previous shifts and if anything was required - spare parts or anything like that - take those with me, travel down just behind the men into the district where I was working and then check that everything in that district was OK electrically. Then it was a matter of doing a little maintenance during the shift or attending to any breakdowns. On some occasions you had to actually stop so they could continually mine - some of the men on the day shift would have stayed a little longer until the men on the afternoon shift arrived so that the machines never stopped and you would cover that quite often. You would work one or two hours a day overtime and then it was out of the pit, wash and change, and away home."

"You got a number of trades at each colliery"

More mechanisation meant more productivity: "When you were mechanised you could cut coal on any shift so straight away we went from producing coal on one shift to producing coal on two shifts and the night shift was for maintenance, to keep everything in good order but some collieries cut coal on all three shifts so your production went up dramatically." Although, Dennis points out, different collieries had
different ways of working: "When I went to Royston we only used to cut on what they called an extended day shift but we still produced 25,000 tons a week from two coal faces which was fairly good going."

For Dennis, this was an industry which was making big strides towards modernisation and this, he believes, is why the scale of pit closures proposed by the National Coal Board in the 1980s came as a big shock to Yorkshire miners: "When I started, mining was going to go on for ever. It was a nationalised industry, it was producing what the country wanted and there was no forethought that in thirty years time the majority of it would have disappeared. No, there was no thought of that. That didn't start to raise its head until the late '70s, early '80s." Quite a few of West Yorkshire's pits had closed in the 1960s - miners expected that pits would close when they were worked out or had become inefficient but it was difficult to understand why these modern pits couldn't be cost effective: "I think that's what led to a lot of problems in the 1980s, that miners who had worked in mines all their lives just couldn't understand why a mine was closing just because somebody said, for whatever reason, it was suddenly inefficient. After you've been working that same method for probably the last 10 to 15 years and, all of sudden, that method is inefficient - they couldn't understand it."

"In early 1962 we got mechanised"

Asked if he thinks anything else has been lost along with the mines and all the jobs they provided, Dennis says: "Well, it's like everything else. We've got to keep moving forward. I do think a lot of the community spirit's been lost, because as I say, there was a always a great camaraderie in mining. As somebody was saying yesterday, 'they always seem to stick together, the miners'. They had to because everybody underground was responsible for everybody else's safety. You tried not to do anything foolish underground because you could put other people's lives in danger and you hoped other people didn't put your life in danger so there was that camaraderie. And I mean, that existed not just in the mines but in the mining communities. All that's been lost now."