Collier Boys
Going to Work
The journey the young lads might
have made to work would perhaps have been a fairly short
walk. However, some miners would have a fair distance
to travel to the colliery.
Will Paynter*,
describes the journey from his home in Trebanog to work
in 1917:-
| There were no buses or other
transport to take us the 2 and ½ miles or
so from Trebanog to the Coedely Pit … On
the morning shift we were raised from bed
at about 4:20am to dress and walk to the
pit, collect the pit lamp and be down the
pit before 6am. This shift would start to
ascend [come up] at 2pm which meant, with
the uphill walk we had, getting home at
around 4pm. … It was a state of affairs
in which we were living only to work. |
|
This first harsh fact of the
hardness of the miner’s life would not yet have affected
the young schoolboys who might have looked forward to
their first day in the pit with the same eagerness of
Joseph Keating**
:-
| All the boys in school looked
forward with longing to the day when they
would be allowed to begin work … my happiness
was not so much in leaving school as the
idea of actually going underground. We saw
the pit boys coming home … They adopted
an air of superiority to mere schoolboys
… They had experienced danger … They associated
with big men and wonderful horses. They
earned 6 shillings and nine pence every
week … For me, the prospect of going to
work in the mine contained more glittering
romance than if its black mouth were the
entrance to Ali Baba’s cave of gold. |
|
Keating goes on to say about
his first day in the Pit in 1883:-
| I was up at half past five
… My mother put my food in a small tine
box and filled a ‘tin’ jack with cold tea,
and said, 'May the Lord bring you safe home!
as I left the house. I had on my duck trousers,
pieces of string around below the knee known
as Yorks, and my hobnailed working boots.
I went to the pit-head in an ecstasy, with
a thousand men and boys ... |
|
Along with his ‘water-jack’
for fluid and ‘Tommy-box’ for food, the tools that the
young miner would require, as well as his lamp were:-
| hatchet, powder tin
and coal-boxes; boring-machines and drills
and several other things. He valued them
at eight pounds, and he was forced to buy
them himself. Nearly every week he had to
buy a new handle of some sort … so that
his wages were not all clear benefit... |
|
* W. Paynter, MY GENERATION, 1972
**J. Keating, MY STRUGGLE FOR LIFE, 1916
|
