General Chat

I suggest a cup of horlicks

That's an equivalent payrise of over £80 a week - pretty good in my book by today's standards

Annx, Your post reminds me of my Dad, We where from a long line of miners and as with most miners none of them wanted their son's to go down the pit,
My grandad never wanted my father to go down the pit when he left school so dad did an apprenticeship and became a painter and decorator but when he and mum married and started a family he had to go down the pit because his wage as a painter and decorator was not enough to live on so he only worked their for the money and that was just after the war

Roy

Kay, You can Add to that the FREE coal miners never paid for coal and the very small nominal rent paid on the pit house where they lived

Roy

There were many who didnt pay or paid little rent with their jobs,they wasnt alone on that scale ,,,,so that left a bag or two of free coal.

Not sure what your getting at with "so that left a bag or two of free coal" Miners got far more coal than they could burn, They where always selling what they couldn't burn to others who wanted it.

Roy

Miners had it pretty good, but not surprising as the taxpayer was subsidising the best part of half their wages.

I had what was considered a good job in charge of a bank sub-branch in 1974 and I earned just over £1,000 a year or £20 a week before tax. My wife earned about 3/4 that amount, so total income around £35 per week.

We were married the previous year and bought our first house for £6,500 having saved £500 between us over the previous two years.

By the third week of the month a tin of beans was a luxury.

Well, I have been wrong all these years - fancy that - my grandfather must have lied about how hard life was in the valleys.

And was utterly mistaken to think his uncle lost a leg in a mining accident. Or that his grandfather fell into such despair that he cut his throat down at the coal face unable to bear the filth and poverty any longer.

According to some people here mining was an absolute doddle - I have no idea where people got the idea that it was dangerous, or that it could wreck your lungs, your back and your hands.

Wow! Free coal as well! What more could a man ask for?

A living wage, perhaps. But some begrudge them that.

Compassion flows in GR, as ever.
:-(

I had to trail back for your post AnnC ,agreeing with J cos reading that came as a bit of a surprise to me ! :-)

Guinevere I don't think anyone is trivialising the very real dangers of working at the coalface.

Roy, my dad got his house deposit together by working at the pit, then he biked 20 miles a day to work in the shoe trade while he did up the old bungalow he and mum bought. He bought books on how to do it and built cavity walls all round and made the windows by hand. He even dug and concreted a cess pit in the back garden.....all while working full time of course. My mother always worked some hours too, taking me with her on the back of her bike to do domestic work at one of the big houses a few miles away before I was school age. My grandfather worked in the pit from age 13 I think till he was 78. My grandparents never seemed very well off, but I think that was more to do with the 'pub' and of course having a family of 9 children usually means money will be tight, especially when the last is born at age 50!


The same sort of thing happened here in the Midlands Sylvia. We had many shoe factories, hosiery factories and shoe and hosiery machine builders. My dad was self employed by then, doing work for both those trades. Every year huge export figures were quoted for the local machine builders, both shoe and hosiery but dad didn't think it bode well. He said that once all these places abroad had bought the machines to make the goods themselves, they would sell them to us more cheaply than we could make them as they had much lower wages. How right he was!! Cheap shoe imports started to come in and our shoe factories began to close, one by one. The same happened with hosiery and that caused some big factories to close. Then, of course, once these places abroad had bought the machinery they needed, the hosiery and shoe machine building businesses also suffered and eventually closed. One, Wildt mellor Bromley was one of the largest manufacturers of knitting machines in the world. The old building stands empty and decaying as do some of the others. Many of the little connected businesses like my father's also went to the wall. As you say, thousands of jobs lost.

bit of a shock eh Sandie :-D never thought the day would come - he must be in shock too - not seen him since

Err....lets not forget that 'coal face miners' did a very tough job, risking their lives

That's not the impression I'm getting, Errol, I'm quite nauseated by the half truths and outright lies being told about miners.

Miners in a village near here were certainly not selling their coal. They needed every piece of it to heat their badly built, crumbling, freezing houses.

Guinevere, Unless your a 20 year old then what your grandfather endured working down the pit is irrelevant, in his day it was all Manuel work, from the mid 60's when mechanisation started it changed everything.

Times change and we are talking about the miners and their strike action in more recent times,

And i did attend down the pit, I say attend because as i stated in another post once their i was not allowed to work

Roy

edit, I stand by my statement that miners did sell the coal they could not burn, it happened here in Yorkshire, It was not allowed but it did happen in the dead of night

No one is disputing that mining was a doddle, yes it it was extremely hard and dangerous work.

On the other hand, compared to other workers, miners have always been relatively well paid.

My own example for the early 70's says just that. I had a grammar school education, 8 O levels and 4 A levels and had what was considered by many as a good job, but yet it paid half what a miner earned.

In fact it was only a fraction more than what a refuse collector earned - and I know as I worked as one in the summer after leaving school.

Guinevere I don't think people are knowingly or deliberately telling lies and I agree with Roy in that the era we are discussing is the 1970s onwards

My grandfather didn't work down a pit.

His mother made sure her sons got an education and got out of the valleys so they wouldn't leave a young widow and children as she was left a widow with 3 small children.

The village I'm talking about was built in the 1950s to house miners relocating from the north. It was falling apart almost as soon as people moved in.

Mining is still a filthy, dangerous job but it was all some men had, all some men could do. Mines were capped with plenty of coal left but to Thatcher et al breaking the unions was more important than investing in people's lives.

And I repeat, the miners there did not sell coal - they needed it all.

Edit - and even in mechanised pits miners got psittacosis - or are we forrgetting that?

I am sure that if the coal mining industry was a massive profit making enterprise then it would surely still be around today.
There may have remained large coal reserves but one of the most important factors was the exorbitant and loss inducing cost of extracting it.

I used to do my dad's books till 1974 IGP and £20 a week is what he and the chap who worked for him both got too. My hubby was paid a bit more having done a 6 year apprenticeship on a pittance before, and with the addition of about 6 hours overtime.

No-one is saying the work isn't dangerous, grandad's davy lamp he took to and fro to work was a reminder of that, but then so are lots of other jobs.