Black Diamonds

This weekend I’d planned to visit the magnificent North York Moors, but unfortunately the weather forecast wasn’t quite so magnificent. As I’d planned to spend almost all day in the great outdoors on walkabout (and filmabout), I decided to wait until a nicer day. I wasn’t abandoning Yorkshire altogether, however – nay, lad!

Whilst driving around during my working day, I often see signs pointing to places that seem worthy of interest. One of these is close to Wakefield – The National Coal Mining Museum. I was brought up in Sunderland, located in the former Durham coalfield, and my mother’s brother had been a Bevin Boy during WW2, before becoming a mining engineer and emigrating to Australia, where he would continue mining activities until retirement.

To digress briefly for a moment, the history of the Bevin Boys is mostly unknown and confined to footnotes about the war years. This description about their role is provided by the Wartime Memories website, from where the recollections and stories of Bevin Boys may be read in more detail. More information can be gleaned from the Bevin Boys Association.

As Britain was unable to import Coal during World War II, the production of coal from mines in Britain had to be increased. There was an extreme shortage of labour for the British Coal Mines, because most of the miners had been conscripted by the Government for active duty. The Government made a plea to Servicemen to volunteer for this vital service, but few did. The program, The Bevin Boys, was named after the Minister of Labour and National Defence, Ernest Bevin. In December 1943, due to the urgent need for coal for the War Effort, it was decided that a certain percentage of the conscripted men would have to be assigned to the mine. This caused a great deal of upset as the many of the young men wanted to join the fighting forces and many felt that they were not valued. In his speech to the conscripted miners, Bevin referred to them as his boys, hence the name, “Bevin Boys”. Many suffered taunts as they wore no uniform and were wrongly assumed to be avoiding serving in the armed forces. Many were not released from their work until several years after the war ended, long after their counterparts in the armed forces had returned to civilian life.

In a 1995 speech made by the Queen, some fifty years after the end of the war, the contribution of these men was finally recognized. In 2007, the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, announced that a special honour would be presented to all conscripts who served in the mines. The first badge was presented in March 2008. This was the sixtieth anniversary of the last Bevin Boy being demobbed.

The National Coal Mining Museum (NCM) is built around the site of the former Caphouse Colliery that closed in 1985, and so I found myself winging my way up the M1 on Sunday morning in order to pay it a visit.


I arrived good and early so that I could get some decent photos and videos without the McFamillies in size 28 Manchester United shirts spoiling the views. Some of the video footage is required for a film project I’m working on, and creating an image of a working pit is essential to the atmosphere of the piece. Ronald McDonald and kids on Heelies just don’t do that.

Seeing the pithead winding gear instantly brings back memories. All around the North East, literally within a couple miles of home, we had collieries. Ryhope, Silksworth, Herrington, Philadelphia and the last to go, Wearmouth – all dominated the skyline. One by one they closed down, but the staggering thing is that as I was growing up in the 1970’s and ‘80’s, it was just part of the normal process of life. I didn’t appreciate at the time that history was being made and the shape of the North East – and the country as a whole – was changing forever. As a young ‘un, I naturally had more important things on my mind, such as which pubs would serve you without having to produce forged ID, and how to get into Julia McCulloch’s knickers for a start.


Surprisingly, looking back, Sunderland was somewhat detached from the famous national miner’s strike of 1984 –5. By then almost all of the local pits had closed, and the survivors lay mostly north of the River Tyne – a foreign land as far as many Mackem’s were concerned. Events in Ashington might just as well take place in Aberystwyth or even Azerbaijan. During 1985 I departed from Sunderland to start work in Stratford-Upon-Avon, and with a whole new life beckoning, the pits seemed a long, long way away.

I’ve wandered away from the story again, as usual, so back to the present day. Having arrived at NCM, my first task was photos, followed by getting an underground tour booked. Tours fill up quickly on busy days, and should not be missed. Fifteen people go down at a time, assembling at the top of the lift shaft. We were greeted by our guide, Keith – a former career miner from Grimethorpe Colliery (“we didn’t get a lot of coal out, but by ‘eck, we ‘ad a good band.”) All ‘contraband’ was removed – that is anything electrical or battery operated to prevent ignition sparks underground – and in exchange we received a miner’s hard hat, and a 2 kilo battery pack with a light attached. Once we were kitted out, Keith led us to the lift that used to transport the workforce below ground. It was cosy, to say the least – and pitch black as we descended 140 metres underground. That’s a long way – the height of Blackpool Tower.

At the bottom, the informative and well-designed tour began. Using the original mine workings, various sections have been created as dioramas to represent the history of coal mining from 1800 up until the 1970’s. The earliest sequence was quite haunting. Each seam of coal belonged to one family; the man would hack away at the coalface with only a pickaxe. Once he’d hacked enough coal to fill a box, his wife would have to drag it down the corridor, known as ‘roads,’ for transporting to the surface. Children as young as six years old would be stationed outside the family seam, and their job was simply to sit there and open and close the wooden door that provided the access to the family’s area – an important task, because this provided the only ventilation in each seam. Many kids were tied to the door by rope, simply because, as Keith explained, they would get bored and wander off in a pitch black mine. Countless children died in this manner. Each working had only candlelight to work by – to demonstrate this, Keith asked us all to switch our lights off, and a representation of a candle was lit in the diorama. The light was pitiful – the seam was around 20 feet long at that stage – and to think that people had to spend 12 hour shifts like this, for six days a week, is incredible. The children on door duty had no light whatsoever – just sit in total darkness for 12 hours, waiting for a bang on the door to open and close it. Sobering thought. No wonder they wandered off.



The tour continues in this manner for well over an hour – Keith knows his stuff, and a knowledgeable and informed guide makes a tour so much more interesting. The trip works around the mine chronologically until the 1970’s are reached, by which time huge boring machines had taken the place of manual hacking away with a pickaxe. Nevertheless, it was always a tough and extremely dangerous job, because with each new technological advance, the pit owners always wanted an increase in productivity. The more kit that went down the mine meant more coal had to come back up, so it was always a case of drive harder and deeper.


Departing the mine is by the same lift that took us down, and by then it was almost as if we’d done a shift ourselves! The atmosphere is very realistic, and the history and stories that I learnt about were extremely interesting. Back at the surface, we handed in our gold tokens – every visitor who goes in the pit is given a token that is handed back when they emerge, a safety system to ensure that nobody gets left underground. These are the same tokens used by real miners going on and off shift. Hard hats and lights are handed in, and contraband is returned. Then you’re free to tour the rest of the site, from visiting the pit ponies to inspecting the showers (no, I didn’t try them out!) to riding on the Paddy train – the narrow gauge railway that would ferry miners to and from their place of work.


I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed my visit, and stayed for a good five hours looking round. I would recommend it as a day out to anyone with an interest in British Heritage or engineering. Entry to the site is free, which includes the underground tour, and I think that’s just amazing for everything that is on offer.