Miners Have Always Been The Salt of The Earth (9 February 1973)
MINERS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN THE SALT OF THE EARTH
One day my father said: “How’d you like to be a journalist?”
“What’s that?” I asked, in all innocence and ignorance.
I am not sure I know the full answer yet. There are almost as many sorts of journalists as there are sorts of men and women. But I suppose the answer he gave was as good as any.
“It’s a chap who writes reports for newspapers – like you do your school’s football and cricket reports,” he said.
I was reminded of this long-gone episode by last week’s Gazette story about the £100-a-week Irish miners who were making a tunnel about 40 feet down for the Milton Keynes main sewer.
You see, my father was a miner. Physically, he was utterly unlike myself. He was short and swarthy and his muscles rippled all over as he bathed his top half at the sink corner after eight hours down the pit – my brother and I having to stand outside the house to prevent accidental intrusions by neighbours while he did his bottom half.
After that and a wholesome meal he was prepared to do another few hours’ work on an allotment garden which gave us potatoes all the year round and other vegetables for most of the time. So I can confirm from years of personal experience the claims for allotments recently made by Mr. Bruce Hardwick and other North Bucks allotment champions.
My mother’s home-made bread – baked on a Thursday and still fresh the following Thursday – and the dairy products brought to us by an uncle made up the rest.
I reckon the only foreign foodstuffs that came into the house were tea, pepper, treacle – and ginger for making parkin-cake. Which maybe why even today I eat to live, not live to eat and am not attracted by any of the foreign concoctions and drinks people rave about as though it were somehow necessary to work up an appetite. In my job I have sometimes had to attend as many as four slap-up dinners a week, with all the trimmings, without ever feeling as satisfied or pleased as with much plainer fare.
Sometimes my father had to work overtime and sent word by some home-going workmate that he needed something to eat.
We boys used to be excited about taking it. For sometimes we would be allowed to go down the 400-foot shaft in the cage – which seemed almost a free-fall for the first 300 feet or so – and meet my father at the bottom. Incidentally, cold, unmilked tea seemed to be the only acceptable drink to the miners while down there.
When I grew older he sometimes had permission to take me the two or three miles from the pit bottom to the coalface on a by-working shift and from that experience I know it will be nothing new to our Milton Keynes miners to be working with 4ft.6in. headroom or even less – though it is probably wetter here.
I have watched nearly naked men picking and shovelling coal while lying practically full-length on their sides among the wooden props which they preferred to steel ones because they gave more warning of breakage.
You may now understand why for me miners have always been the salt of the earth.
Even during the dark and desperate periods of strikes and lock-outs that lasted for months on end I could not have wished for a better father than the wiry, hard-working, amusing, music and sport-loving Methodist and Liberal who cropped our heads, cobbled our shoes, dealt out corporal punishment instantly, and generally kept us alive without recourse to the “Boots for the Bairns Fund” or any other then existing form of outside help. I don’t suppose that even when he became a deputy he ever received more than £3 10s a week, but he managed to collect and read a better library than I have ever owned. There were several such men at our village chapel.
The oldest boy of a family of ten, he himself had had no option but to become a miner. But he turned the old jingle about “Don’t go down the mine, daddy,” into one of “Thou shan’t go down the mine, sonny,” And he succeeded.
My late brother became what now would be called a radio and electronics technician and during the war was a captain in the REME. He died shortly after returning from the Far East. But while we were both still on demob leave he suggested that I shouldn’t come to Bletchley, but should help him develop an instrument which would be able to do all the book-keeping there was to do in his county borough. I could not believe him, but I have often wondered since whether that would have been the first computer.
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