Coal
Poems and Thoughts from the Anxious Poet
Coal
For coal I begin with the groins and
the groaning weight of earth on stone,
the white eyes of men blinking
in black soiled faces as the cage clanks
to the surface and the soot plumes round
and the brass tallies are hung like coins
vouchsafing men back above the ground.
We cannot know, we who have not
burned in the heat of the three-foot seams
or had our bending spines tattooed,
the rending of skin by a propped roof.
We who have not felt the holy hell of a life
underground or the celestial delight
of the reverential Sunday chapels alight.
The underpanted humour of packing-up
scoffed and shared, laugh and lark,
bantering youth to a grown-up belligerence,
preparing green lads for a pitbound existence
to face the blind indifference of the dark.
The vortex of coal coalescing them
round its demands, the way homes
cluster about the work, under its
command; all are enlisted for its warfare.
And yet on Saturdays the welfare
stands ready with fields for sports
and charbangs for a day at the coast,
the Sunday church’s suited cohorts and
after the mothers’ workday roast
a sleep in the Sabbath’s fireside chair.
You don’t want it now, its dirty breath
belching us toward planetary death but
that is not the fault of the lives that mined it.
The anthracite families betrayed, portrayed
as seditious bullies because they were gutsy
enough to strike and turn the lights out.
Remember them now and know the pain;
that not a wheel turns, not a pick swings
that no-one remains in the colliery chain.
Not for long now will they be with us, no
longer registering on the barometer,
the swingometer of the red wall’s
crumbling barricade, the Tory grenade
leaving ghostly socialism haunting
the North; shades of holy radicalism.
On the rewilding pit-heads and grassed
over pit-tops, you are standing on the grave
of the coalfields that powered a nation;
to turn away from this is an abdication
of the lives that birthed this region.
That gave us the black gold obtained
in bloodstained graft, in sweat-stained
craft, in the long grief of mothers’ tears.
To hear this excerpt from Oration at a Graveside with Andy Selman’s powerful accompaniment and Wilma Scott’s haunting vocals click below.
On Wednesday last week my son Tom and I visited the National Coal Mining Museum (NCM) near Wakefield. I have passed the signs on the M1 so many times when travelling North. Each time I noticed them they acted as an incessant goad.
In my recently published collection A Sheffield Traipsing I have written extensively about mining and steel working as they are both in the bones of this region. The sense of shame that passing the museum created is explained by the fact that, for all my references to mining, I had never been down a pit. So when Tom said let’s have a day out, I finally bit the bullet and suggested a zip up the motorway to do that very thing.
The piece at the head of this Substack is from a longer poem Called Oration At A Graveside. It was inspired, in part, by my reading of Jeremy Paxman’s book Black Gold.
It is a wonderful history of the industry and the very human stories that underly that history. I had also been deeply troubled by the election, in 2019, of Miriam Cates - a right leaning Conservative to the Constituency of Penistone and Stocksbridge. This area sits between what had been the great South Yorkshire coalfields and the Sheffield steel works. It seemed incredible to me that these very areas would turn away from their past and choose an MP like Cates and a government led by Boris Johnson.
Regardless of the politics of this, or perhaps because of them, I began to speculate as to what was going on. I realised that many of those people voting now are young or newly arrived into this region and don’t remember what Black Gold among many great books and documentaries so clearly narrate. Hence the first stanza (and sung refrain) of Oration At A Graveside.
Standing at the twin graves of labour,
of coal and steel, I see a diminishing return of those who would harbour
a thought for our work’s vanishing.
So I am orating to make an ending,
for the unattending, to fan that last ember for those too young or those who just don’t remember our Northern power.
These are some of the inspirations and reasons behind the poem. The fact that in the region I had grown up in mining was so prevalent, the fact that I had lived in a mining town (Maltby) during the ‘84-85 strike, the fact that my Dad was from Ashington (once known as the biggest pit village in the world), all of this coupled with what Jeremy Paxman says about here about coal :
‘Coal is the commodity that made Britain. Dirty and polluting though it is, this black rock has acted as a midwife to genius. It drove industry, religion, politics, empire and trade. It powered the industrial revolution, turned Britain into the first urban nation and is the industry that made almost all others possible.’
All of this was part of the alchemy that led to the poem. When I was writing the coal section I was very struck by Paxman’s extensive quotes in the book from George Orwell who describes so powerfully the experience of actually going underground in the 30’s.
You get into the cage, which is a steel box about as wide as a telephone box and two or three times as long. It holds ten men, but they pack it like pilchards in a tin, and a tall man cannot stand upright in it. The steel door shuts upon you, and somebody working the winding gear above drops you into the void.
The Road to Wigan Pier
After Black Gold I read the Road to Wigan Pier and for our Grim Up North Podcast we interviewed Orwell’s son Richard Blair. These passages are some of the most gripping descriptions of mining in the 30’s and were a big part of the imagery in the poem.
To return then to our trip to the Museum. One of the great features of the place is that you can actually go down the pit! The original name of the mine was Caphouse Colliery and through the NCM it has been preserved. We paid our £7.50 and went to the appointed place at 2.50pm and were greeted by a number of orange-overalled ex miners who were to be our guides and protectors.
Having divested us of all our electrical equipment, even down to our car key fobs, we were given our hard hats and head torches. We had been given a replica check. This was a little brass coloured coin with Caphouse Colliery-Visitor stamped on it. Miners were issued these Checks, Tallies or Motties as a safety measure. It gave those above ground a clear way of knowing who was underground by looking at the board with the checks hanging on it.
Then we entered the cage to be transported inbye, the industry term for going into the mine. Orwell’s words came back to me as his description was absolutely accurate. For three or four minutes we plummeted into the void and watched the damp brick lined shaft pass us by. One of the reasons I had avoided this was because I have suffered from anxiety and mild claustrophobia. I managed to counter this with my curiosity and a steely determination; informed by the fact that if I had written about it all, I should experience it first hand.
We exited the cage and opened the large wooden doors that aided ventilation down the mine so as to continue inbye. Our guide Rob, had been a miner for much of his working life and had that unmistakable humour I had heard in places like Maltby. He asked if any of us were left handed, as he would provide us with left handed shovels when it came to us having to dig!
Then began our one and a half hour tour proper. Again I was reminded of another Orwell quote.
What is surprising, on the other hand, is the immense horizontal distances that have to be travelled underground. Before I had been down a mine I had vaguely imagined the miner stepping out of the cage and getting to work on a ledge of coal a few yards away. I had not realised that before he even gets to his work he may have to creep through passages as long as from London Bridge to Oxford Circus.
The Road to Wigan Pier
We walked a good distance and as we trained our lights we could see endless corridors and passages from older workings. We trudged along, stooping and often bashing our hard hats on supports and places where the roof lowered.
We came to a little mannequin of a child beside a tunnel with a trap door, that illustrated the state of mining in the 1800s, when the work was a family business. The man would hew the coal, his wife would haul it in a tub from the face and the child would keep the trap door opened and shut for ventilation. Children sat in the dark for hours. We all turned our lights off and you could not see your hand in front of your face. How those children dealt with that was hard to imagine.
Down there where coal is dug it is a sort of world apart which one can quite easily go through life without ever hearing about. Probably a majority of people would even prefer not to hear about it.
The Road to Wigan Pier
This is even more true today, when there are no mines, out of sight out of mind is definitely the case. That is why this little taste of the being inbye was worth every penny. It makes present an underground past that, as Paxman notes, involved the gaining of ‘the commodity that made Britain’.
As we continued our tour the talk turned to safety, Canaries and Davy Lamps, Fire Damp and explosions. It made me think of the Gresford mining disaster in 1934.
The Gresford disaster occurred on 22 September 1934 at Gresford Colliery, near Wrexham, when an explosion and underground fire killed 266 men. Gresford is one of Britain's worst coal mining disasters: a controversial inquiry into the disaster did not conclusively identify a cause, though evidence suggested that failures in safety procedures and poor mine management were contributory factors. Further public controversy was caused by the decision to seal the colliery's damaged sections permanently, meaning that only eleven of those who died were recovered.
Wikipedia
The implications of poor safety procedures could not be more poignantly obvious than in the Gresford disaster. It also made me realise just how resilient the mining communities were, in their ability to bring beauty from tragedy. I have on my shelves a moving book entitled the Pitmen’s Requiem about the piece of music you can listen to by clicking the link below. It is known as The Miner’s Hymn and was written by Robert Saint from Hebburn in South Tyneside. The book, by Peter Crookston, charts the remarkable story of this piece of music and its composer whom he met as boy in 1946.
He quotes at one point Ian Lavery, the man who succeeded Arthur Scargill as the president of the National Union Of Mineworkers:
I've heard "Gresford" played all over the place, and every single time it means more and more to me. It makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck every time I hear it played and I think it has the same impact on a lot of other people. It always makes me fill up, thinking of all the people who have died in the mining industry, or been entombed in the earth, or maimed or lamed.
It has truly become a requiem for the Mining Industry. Ian organised the playing of it when his own Ellington Pit closed down, he says:
"Gresford" was the only fiting tribute to the end of Ellington and to the end of the Great Northern Coalfield. It's a fantastic tune.
Standing in the dark, torch-pierced gloom all these thoughts took on a deeper relevance and made me appreciate what a necessity, in safety terms, nationalisation was. Suddenly money was invested in underground safety and not just siphoned into mine-owners pockets.
If you want to a good read that delivers a powerfully emotional insight into these issues you could do worse than to read my maternal grandfathers’s favourite novel The Stars Look Down by A J Cronin as it takes you into the heart of pre-nationalisation mining.
As the tour continued we followed our guide through examples of the increasing mechanisation of the pits, moving from pit ponies to machines. None of this meant the job wasn’t hard and demanding, however, and that it wasn’t dirty and dark, oh and hot! Some of the temperatures in these mines reached 40 - 50 degrees centigrade. Rob shows the underpants he wore in high temperatures, a lovely orange mesh, and also explained the coal induced tattoos I had seen on miner’s backs when they’d had a few pints in the club on a Saturday night in Maltby. Having to bend barebacked in low seams permanently blued the skin down their spines.
We finally followed Rob outbye towards the cage. I felt a powerful mix of memories and emotions. In our group was an ex miner from Easington Colliery in County Durham. He worked there for 14 years and had brought his wife and son to see what he had experienced day in day out for all that time. His voice took me back to my Dad’s home town of Ashington , known once as the biggest pit village in the world.
Many of my Father’s relatives and friends were miners. He didn’t want to go down the pit so he joined the Navy, ironically as a Second Stoker and therefore shovelling coal in to the engine of a ship! He was very proud of his home town and the fact that Bobby and Jacky Charlton came from there. In another Grim Up North podcast Matt and I visited the Mining Museum up there and saw the work of the Pitmen Painters. Miners who in their spare time took art classes and became accomplished artists known as the Ashington Group.
As we came up into the light of day again, we were surprised at how bright the world looked. No wonder the Pitmen Painters had such an ability to capture their daily lives, if their vision was made so clear by hours, days, months and years underground. When I arrived back home I re-read the coal section of my poem and felt a sense of poetic competence that my imagination, based on my reading and the people I have met measured up pretty well to the actual reality of a coal mine. I would highly recommend visits to both the National Coal Mining Museum and to Woodhorn Colliery Museum in Ashington. One final visual reminder of this incredible industry and its part in our country’s history. This is another pitman painter Norman Cornish from Spennymoor - County Durham.
A haunting piece, a stunning duo!
He died of Black Lung Disease.