[Official Site] REDS VISIT NATIONAL COAL MINING MUSEUM

Going in the cage wouldn’t bother me. It’s the squeezing through tight spaces that would be a problem. If there’s none of that I’d be ok

 

Thanks for that. I know it’s stupid but watching the robbers squeezing through the tight hole in the Hatton Garden films made me uncomfortable

 

I walked down the road when I went, that's an experience in itself. Came back up in the lift..

 

THAT is fantastic

 

Some of the coal seems were like caverns. So big you could drive a lorry down. Others were three feet tall. It all depends where you were. I've been down Caphouse. My mate worked at Prince and showed me pictures of massive tunnels he used to work in.

Other mates at Selby Coalfield spent half their shift travelling to coalface and other half going back to pit top.

Towards end of Coal era it only took a few men to keep a pit running. Gary was last man out of Prince R.I.P.

 

Surely a whorehouse. See if some of them could score in a brothel!

 

Worked in developing coal faces ready for production , once opened and equipped a face and before it could commence coaling had to be sanctioned by one of Her Majesties Indpectors of mines .
Spent all morning making sure everything was right for his visit and the delegation of HMI , Manager, Under Manager , Seam overman , Overman and Deputies arrives ,
They were supposed to enter via the main gate crawl through face and leave via Tail Gate .
As soon as HMI reached entrance to the face he took one look and turned to the manager and asked if there were any men on the coal face ,
The manager replied there were and with a load of expletives and gestures told the manager to get them out and the face was closed .
The face was alleged to be so low that if you crawled up with a shovel the wrong way you had to crawl back down to the main gate to turn it round lol , an over exaggeration by the miners tbh but it wasn’t a far off the mark .
The whole seam was closed and the men deployed to other seams at the colliery .

 

I can't breath reading about this lol, i give totally give full respect to the miners who worked hard to get the coal out.

 

Sounds like something nightmares are made of! My first job on leaving school was at Woolley, but safely in the wages office. Stayed just under a year before joining the RAF. I wish I had asked to go underground though, just to have a look. I’d have been braver then.

My only close contact with miners was the Friday morning pay parade. We went to the National Provincial on the Thursday to collect the cash then on to Dodworth to make up the wage packets. Amazingly as a 17 year old I was trusted to open up the office, and safe, very early on those Friday mornings to pay the men.

 

I would recommend anyone go to the Salt mines in Poland near Krakow if you get chance, absolutely brilliant.

 

I seem to think we dropped like a stone and I swore that the pit head operator had done it to 'wind me up' (or was that down) as I was a wimpy visitor... but my escort said that was a pretty standard 'drop' and if anything a bit slower than normal with the two of us. When we got to teh bottom I thought there was lots of light and space and we boarded the train and then onto the man- rider conveyor belts which I had though, looking at them they were for moving coal from the face and rubble. The closer we got to the face the narrower/lower and gloomier it got until eventually the only light was from our own hand held lamp. It does get very claustrophobic if you are prone to that ( in my experience a bit like scuba wreck diving in very low viz in Scotland)

 

Been there on my very first trip to Poland. Amazing experience. Not far away is Auschwitz-Birkenau and, of course, we went there as well. Chilled me to the bone.

 

Hmm, you’ve talked me out of it! Not too far from where we live, in Nidderdale, are the Stump Cross Caverns. I won’t go down there either for similar reasons.

 

In the early 70s the miners wages in Barnsley used to be paid into their accounts (on a Thursday I think it was) at the York County Savings bank (eventually became the TSB) on Peel Square.The bank opened at 9:30 and closed at 3:30 A queue used to form outside and for the entire day until closing every till had queuing miners drawing their wages. I know because I spent 2 years there as a 'wet behind the ears' Cashier having left school with A levels but opted out of going to Uni. 1 year as a bank clerk and then promoted to cashier. On another day of the week I used to do the 'schools run' on my motorbike collecting the monies from the savings schemes they ran for pupils (junior mainly). I left to go to work in Sheffield for an insurance company for better money.

 

I’m talking the summer of 1969 to 1970. Must have been the last year or so of cash payments then? It was certainly a labour intensive system of paying the men and cycling from Wilthorpe to Woolley at around 4am was no fun for a recent school boy!

 

We used to have the same arrangement at Nat West, except for the Thursday morning that the strong room door refused to open. Cue a banking hall full of chuntering miners and staff dashing all over the town centre begging and borrowing every bit of spare cash the other banks had available!
It took two engineers from Chubb until Saturday afternoon to discover that part of the locking mechanism inside the door had snapped (metal fatigue) and jammed the entire locking system.

 

It’s called a cage, mate

 

I suppose that's one way of putting it lol.
I prefer. walked darnt drift and came back up int cage.

 

It's closed now but Monckton coke works at Royston was brutal, not one of them would last a shift(12hrs)

 

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