Ian McMillan: Another day that we hoped would never come

IT was June 1975 and I was on a morning bus from Barnsley to Darfield. I remember it as being a bright blue day but I could well be wrong about that; remembering is a strange activity, a mixture of real events and imagination and things that are somehow both at the same time.

I definitely got off the bus at the roundabout at Darfield where the road goes on to Doncaster or turns towards Wombwell and I noticed something strange.

There were people standing around in groups, talking. A woman in a headscarf rushed towards someone in a cap and they had a hurried conversation and then the woman in the headscarf moved on.

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It was the morning after the explosion at Houghton Main Colliery, which killed five men and which has seared itself into the memory of this place forever, and of course last week’s events in South Wales brought back to us how dangerous mining is, and how much the men risk their lives every time they go into the dark.

There are many differences between 1975 and now, of course; in 1975 people were scrabbling for news, hanging on to bits of gossip and scraps of hearsay and trying to digest the dry language of official announcements.

These days, the 24-hour rolling news rolls on, hoping against hope for a Chilean-style miracle and every inch of the story is told again and again until it’s threadbare and almost falling apart. But it still keeps getting told.

I turned the TV off in disgust as the cameras zoomed in on weeping relatives and exhausted rescue workers and the question “How does the community feel?” hung in the air like a slap in the chops.

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The other difference between then and now is that in 1975 Houghton Main was part of a vast Yorkshire coalfield that itself was part of a huge coal industry.

Now that small pit near Swansea is one of the few mines remaining in the country, and one of the tiny handful of private pits still operating against the industrial and cultural odds.

I recently did some work with the photographer Ian Beesley at Yorkshire’s last private mine near Denby Dale. It’s a remarkable place, under the same family’s ownership for a hundred years and, although it’s a safe and efficient place to work, it really does feel like you’re stepping back into the past when you walk down the little track off the main road and suddenly you’re in a pit yard and there’s a coal-washer and a big truck taking the coal away and men with mucky faces are coming out of the earth.

Under the posh estates and converted barns and pubs that do a roaring lunch trade there are men at work.

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These are skilled men too, men who can fix anything, men who can find a solution to mechanical and logistical problems that would have the rest of us ringing for the experts and that’s because down this track from the main road these miners are the experts. They’re men who, despite the fact that it’s a backbreaking and filthy job, love the work they do.

They told me that they’d tried other things but they always came back to the pit. One of them got stopped by a copper on his way home after a shift; the copper was doing a routine check and he asked the man from the private pit what he did for a living and the pitman told him. “You can’t be,” the policeman said. “There are no miners left.”

I’m a scaredy-cat so I’ve only ever been down two pits: one is the mining museum at Caphouse, near Wakefield, and the other one was a tiny private mine in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire.

In the Forest of Dean, they have this tradition of “freemining” where anybody can dig a pit on their land if they’re born in the Forest.

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So me and a radio producer joined a couple of freeminers at their pit in the woods, bent double and slithering a few hundred damp and restricted yards down a roadway that got narrower and narrower.

As I kept saying (or, rather, gasping) to the producer: “This isn’t telly, you know. We could just stand at the entrance and pretend we were at the face, or even do it in a studio with some sound effects.”

“It’ll sound authentic,” he replied. Authentic. That’s one word for it. I was glad to get out, after only half-an-hour that felt like a month and my back ached like heck and my thighs were on fire.

“That’ll be really authentic,” he said again, as he stretched his long legs that had been telescoped underground. I didn’t reply. I couldn’t. I had no breath to talk.

So for a while the miners are back in the news again, until the crews move on, as we know they will, as we know they must. Until the next time that we hope will never come.