A miner's poem.

Seeing Mr Viz’s moving picture of ‘the beautiful old girl’ and Mr sooty9’s mysterious crest made me remember something I came across years ago. I’ve just dug it out. This was written by 1925 by Arthur Eaglestone, a miner at the New Stubbin Colliery, near Rawmarsh. As fine a tribute to where we come from as I’ve read.


“I don’t know who my forebears were, for storied urns and animated busts are not in our family keeping.

Our names are not preserved in ornate brass, and long stone effigies stiffly recumbent are not of us, and our house.

We have no ancient banneroles, no antiquity of rags on poles, no ancient heraldry, no splendid armour of Castile.

No mediaeval parchment has our name; no cunning fingers traced our lineaments or gave us awkward life upon the old-time screed.

And yet we are not upstart here.

Our roots are deeply driven in the earth and all we are, and all we have, is of the soil.

How intimately you, who do not know the mine, can never guess.

Three hundred years and more my horny-handed forebears were wrestling with the coal.”


Arthur Eaglestone, From a Pitman’s Notebook. 1925

 

I agree with you.

 

It's spooky walking through New Stubbin pit yard along old railway line into Rawmarsh. You wade through the nettles into a haunted plane crash site and an overgrown graveyard. Always felt like someone's watching me when I've walked through.

 

Details of the Vampire jet crash and memorial stone here
https://aircrashsites.co.uk/air-crash-sites-5/de-havilland-vampire-t-11-xe854-rawmarsh-rotherham/

 

That's the one creepy place.

 

Yes, very spooky I agree.

 

Another pit rhyme.
Worked darn’t pit
Apart from’ t wit
Thought it was sh@t
So I quit
Not true in my case, but I could relate this to some people I know

 

I haven't met any ex-miners who enjoyed it down the pit. My Dad included. They've all said it was a good craic but they were down there to provide for their families so they didn't have to do it. I hope I'm not taken out of context but these blokes didn't know much better it was a way of life.

 

In my case and many others, working underground paid that little bit more than many unskilled manual Labour. In February 1977 I left my £20 a week job working in the Slaughterhouse at Barnsley Abbatoir to work at Houghton Main Colliery for about £28 a week. I was fed up of my mates having a few quid a week more than me.

 

Thank you for that. As a descendant of mining stock on both sides of the family, with one line going back to North Wales in both the coal mines and slate mines, I find that a very touching tribute indeed, even though, personally, I only ever set foot in a mine as part of a school outing to Dodworth Colliery in the early 1960's. It prompted me to have a look for more about the author (his pen name, apparently, was Roger Dallater) and it would appear to be an interesting story as he ended up, a few years later, at Oxford. A follow up 'A Pitman At Oxford' is available to down load and read online and the preface contains the following:-

"That he (the author) is a class-conscious being goes without saying. Are we not all class conscious?

At the bottom they must know we are really superior, don’t you think ?

Don’t you think, really, they know we ’re their superiors ?

He will not regard with too urbane an eye the presumption upon service, and the grosser evils consequent within a university fed by public schools which are not public at all. He will not consider easily the many features still established to minister to this foible or to that prejudice of the ruling classes. With the recollection of so much excellent material in the mines from which he came, and the evidence upon every hand of values that still render Oxford and its colleges an upper and middle class preserve, he cannot plead forgiveness for incursive foray or display of arms."

Timeless.

 

My uncle recited this poem to me. He said that it was a true epitaph on a gravestone somewhere local. (sceptical, here)

Here lies the body of Herbert Elginrod
Have pity on his soul dear God
As he would do if he were you
And you were Herbert Elginrod


I would like to hear if anybody has heard this rhyme before....

 

My old man was Polish and a farm boy. When he came over here after the war it was the only job he could get and lucky to get that given the anti-foreigner sentiment of the time. He told me he'd seen an ad recruiting for miners. "They said it would be a picnic. It was hell." My mother told me that when I was born and he first set eyes on me, the first thing he said was, 'he's not going down there."

 

Another excerpt from A Pitman At Oxford's preface:-

"He springs from a generation of miners, that order of working people who can spend but little, and live by manual labour. From the age of thirteen, until entering the university, he has been compelled to earn his own living, beginning as a bottle-washer in a mineral-water factory, and moving progressively as carter, steel-worker, and lastly, with eight years’ service underground, as a colliery timekeeper.

He did not—for it is increasingly the mode with working-class writers— ' drift ’ into the coal mines. He accepted what the colliery had to offer because at the moment conditions there were distinctly better than those obtaining in the iron and steel industry."

It was, unless you broke free as the author managed to do by securing a Miners Scholarship, most definitely a way of life.

 

My Dad did same with me. I was offered an underground induction at Kellingley Colliery in 2001. I turned it down because of his advice.

 

"haunted" plane crash site; really?

 

Yeah there's sumat on youtube about it.

 

It must be reyt then.

 

I thought so

 

Statis, you're a bankender. know the Fuelops?...

 

i loved my time at the pit, i started at cortonwood , where i worked with many ex stubbin men, after cortron shut i went to barnburgh, as the pit closures accelerated i finished up working at ten pits in total