Chesterfield Online Forum
General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: Fly on April 02, 2014, 06:54:42 PM
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Sad news, around 2000 people to lose their jobs. :(
http://www.itv.com/news/story/2014-04-02/uk-coal-to-close-kellingley-and-thoresby-colliery-pits/ (http://www.itv.com/news/story/2014-04-02/uk-coal-to-close-kellingley-and-thoresby-colliery-pits/)
Just for the record, I used to drive an train underground like the one in the picture in the above link.
One of the many many jobs I was qualified for in the pit ;)
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Sad that we are losing two more pits there can't be many left.
I went down a pit in my 20's, one of the scariest places anyone could work IMO.
We were taken to the coal face, no way could I have crawled and worked were those men were.
They earned every penny
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They earned every penny
I won't repeat stuff that's been said and argued about by the miners and such for the last 30 years OC ;)
Yes it was a lousy, filthy, dangerous place to work, respect to those that did more than the 10 years I did.
I find it sad at times that those that pull the miners down had never been or seen the conditions we worked in :-X
A trainee once asked me where the toilets were, I nearly wet myself, there weren't any down there.
We were taken to the coal face, no way could I have crawled and worked were those men were.
Like wise no miner would have crawled 150yds off the coal face for a s***. He'd do it where he was. Hopefully he'd do it on a bag and throw it behind the machinery where nobody went. Not all miners were so toilet trained though, or just thought it funny to leave a log for someone to crawl through :o
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Yuk! ;D
That made me smile - toilets down a mine.
My dad did a stint down the pit, used to come back spitting black dust. He said his sarnies were dusty. Little wonder so many had chest problems.
I remember going down the pit shaft in the cage - it just dropped like a stone!
Then walking quite a distance with the wind blowing at us.
Mum always told my two brothers that she wouldn't let them go down when they were old enough to work and they didn't!!
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I'm sad to hear about the two pits. I was at the D H Lawrence museum in Eastwood yesterday which explains all about pit life in Victorian times. My grandad was at Arkwright Colliery for 45 years so I knew about pit life from close quarters, including where and how they went to the toilet! My grandad told it in such a way that I used to cry laughing at the tales.
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The National Coalmining Museum up near Huddersfield somewhere is good. I remember Eric Morecambe's description of life as a Bevin Boy - "Every day we'd be sent down the mine in this cage. If we fell off the perch, everyone ran like mad."
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Personally I don't think its a job I could do but there's something wrong if they can import coal cheaper than we can produce in this country.
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That can be a bit of an illusion Simon, for two reasons. 1) I remember Thatch banging on about that when the truth was it was from a country where their government was subsidising the mining industry - if they took away the subsidy it would cost more than UK coal. 2) It could come from somewhere that the miners are paid £50 per month - not something I would wish upon UK miners.
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Nothing wrong with being paid £50 a month. As long as beer is 10p a pint and a house £5k!!