My First Shift..

[John]

I'd done my Underground Training, was back at my pit and first shift was underground....Funny thing, I spent very little time on the surface during my apprenticeship!
I was assigned to Dave George on 12's face, though not supposed to go on the face as I was below the statutory age and untrained for face work.
Of course, all the regulations were still fresh in my mind and I wasn't about to break any rules.
Clifton had exemptions for conveyor manriding with certain rules, which were obeyed at all times
No riding on mineral, twelve yards front and rear of the manriding personel, get on and off at the appointed points, one must lie down facing the direction of travel at all times
There were certain sections of belts and one belt we were not allowed to ride, 2s No2 was one such belt we were forbidden to ride due to low roof near 12's main gate.
End of shift, tools put away at the top of 12's 2's junction, "Get on behind me" said Dave, bloody great notice said NO MANRIDING THIS C/V!
Not me I said remembering the 1954 act! Please yourself said Dave.
I hadn't gone much more than two yards when I walked into a broken lagging board and sat myself squarly on my rear end....Dave just burst out laughing, after that I did as I was told, screw the 1954 M&Q Act!

[John]

Cotgrave was a different kettle of fish, riding belts was forbidden, anyone caught was fined a fiver....This was 1968.
I hadn't complete my apprenticeship when I arrived at Cotgrave, so most of my working was done under supervision.
I accompanied an electrician on one of the five faces they had at that time. End of shift, I was wondering why everyone was hanging around the GEB monorail. Eveything was soon clear, the Deputy and Overman walked passed us all, and jumped on the belt, shotfirer was next followed by the masses! Seems while the officials were up front, "they couldn't see anyone riding the belt" so couldn't book anyone

[John]

Again, Cotgrace during my brief stay there. There were two ways to pit bottom from the top of the M/G's, one was the loco down the main loco road, and the other was the "magic carpet". Problem was it was a high speed trunk belt system and it was a fiver fine if you were caught.

Still, end of shift, nobody around except the overmen and Deputies who were ALWAYS on the belt first.
I learned early on, it wasn't too easy to get off those belts at the drive end!! They were fast and they were a fair way off the ground, so it was jump at the fencing around the drives and slide down to get off!

Still, it beat walking anytime!
An old pit saying was "A second class ride beats a first class walk".

[John]

Remember what a load of scroungers the old hands were??
"Ayagorrowt?"
"Huh?"
"Ayagorrowt youth?"
"Whatcha onabaht?"
"Chow, pinch or sweets!"
"Ahhh, no mate"

[John]

I used to smoke back in them days too, took me a while to get used to being without a ciggie for 7.25 hours. Eventually, I smoke about a pack on the way to work and on pit top before the shift started then fully loaded with nicotine, could manage the shift.
Funny how it never bothered us all shift, then just before leaving the face, you'd hear, "I'd give my missus away for a cough and drag"

By the time we were on the chair riding out, I'd be gasping for a ciggie!

[amanda]

admin said:

I used to smoke back in them days too, took me a while to get used to being without a ciggie for 7.25 hours. Eventually, I smoke about a pack on the way to work and on pit top before the shift started then fully loaded with nicotine, could manage the shift.
Funny how it never bothered us all shift, then just before leaving the face, you'd hear, "I'd give my missus away for a cough and drag"

By the time we were on the chair riding out, I'd be gasping for a ciggie!

Hmmm I used to take a f*g through the baths and the lamproom and smoke it the other side before going on the cage ..... mind you I wasn't on my own doing that

However once down the pit I never bothered at all about a smoke, even if stopping a couple of hours overtime or even doing a double shift there were no cravings or anything like that. But once through those baths and back out into the car park the first thing I did was to light up, dam didn't that first f*g after a shift used to send you dizzy


mand

[John]

I used to put my ciggies and lighter in my inside overcoat pocket when I left the dirty side lockers, then when I had finished with them, throw them in my tool box in the electric shop and lock it. One day shift my chargehand caught me and waylaid me getting stuff ready for my shift. I forgot all about the ciggies and lighter until I was half way down the shaft, then had this horrible thought!!!!! I felt my pocket and nasty thoughts of a pit bottom search came into my head!

I mananged to get the onsetter to ring me out the pit again on the pretext I'd forgotten some gear. I ran from pit top to the shop!!! I've never been so scared in my life.
After that I used to keep my ciggies and lighter in my hand, never pockets!

[nytim]

In September of 1964, I was only fifteen years old but I had to leave school to begin my working life. I’d been a delinquent, in and out of the revolving door of the Scottish juvenile justice system, for most of the past four years. My criminal record had sealed my fate; I was to be a coal miner. Many of my schoolmates started work as apprentice carpenters or welders but those doors had firmly closed in my face. To get one of those jobs a teacher would have to write a letter of recommendation and a character evaluation. My school performance and my social interactions had left a lot to be desired. No teacher was about to give me, Johnny Dillon, a reference that would help me to escape from employment in the coal mine.
I reported to the Nellie Pit at 5:30 on a Monday morning. Around Cowdenbeath, Scotland, many of the pits were named after the mine owners’ families. The Mary, Alice, Jenny Gray, and Lady Anne pits revered the fairer sex and the Michael, William and Aitken, collieries represented the paternal side of the family. That first day while sitting on the pit bus, I felt excited, not excited about coal mining, but excited about a new cycle of life.
The bus stopped outside the showers -- a low red-bricked building. Carrying a bag filled with clean work clothes, I followed a line of men into the pithead lockers. The pit baths were warm and steamy, unlike the early morning chill outside.
The bath attendant’s office was behind a waist-high door, just inside the front entrance. A thin middle-aged bald man, a withered left arm hanging at his side, sat in a black office chair. He was even shorter than my meager height of five feet. Hairy toes, jammed into yellow flip-flops, sprouted from his feet. The good arm, covered in hair, rippled with sinewy muscles, but the other was as bald as his head and as wrinkled as an old orange. He saw me standing on the other side of the door and bounded from his chair, sending it rolling into the corner the small room. He lurched toward me, like a skinny hunchback of Notre Dame, his shriveled arm flopping on the outside of his undershirt. With bulging eyes, dark pupils framed by blood streaked whites, he stared at me. In a voice like gravel underfoot he rasped, “What’s your name?”
“John Dillon.” I answered.
“I’m Jimmy Millar. Mr. Millar to you.”
“Okay, Mr. Millar. It’s Mr. Dillon to you.”
“You’re Taffy Dillon’s son, are you?”
“Aye.”
Leaning on the door, like a cow peering over a fence, he said, “Your Dad’s a miserable old bastard. I worked with him.”
I knew my dad is miserable, but I did not know that others had that knowledge. . I really didn’t care what this deformed creature thought about my about my father. I didn’t want the miners to think that I was like my dad in any way. This was my first day as a workingman, and yet I could not escape the tentacles of Dad’s reach. I thought I was nothing like him, and I didn’t want anyone to think that I was related to that blustering old fool.
The attendant, scraping his left foot behind him, led me to my locker. He pointed to a locker, one of hundreds, one row on the bottom, another on top. Twenty bays of aluminum lockers stood like metal canyons, their shiny walls rising up to the roof. Pipes wrapped in puffy insulation crisscrossed the ceiling and quietly hissed steam into the air like conversations in church.
“Here’s your key,” the bath attendant said. “Number 306. Take off your street clothes on this side. Put them in your locker and bring your towel and soap over to the dirty side. Your locker on the other side of the showers is where you keep your dirty clothes. Never let me catch you on the clean side of the baths with your pit clothes on, or you’ll get my foot up your backside.”
“Okay, okay keep yer shirt on,” I said. “Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it. No need to be so grumpy.”
“Listen, sonny boy, you’d better respect your elders, I’ve only got one good arm, but I could still kick you up and down the pithead.”
“In your next life maybe, until then, just f**k off.”
“Well the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it? I also worked with your big brother, Frank. He’s a loudmouth, just like your dad. You’ll be no different, I’ll bet.”
“Listen you crippled old bastard,” I said. “You don’t even know me. Go crawl back under your flat rock.”
He walked away muttering under his breath something about respect for elders. He showed me no respect. He’d used me to vent his dislike of my father and brother --I’d no such outlets -- so I answered in kind. My smart-mouthed remarks, my youth and my undamaged body only added to his unenthusiastic first impressions.
I had to get ready to work, but shockingly there was no privacy to change. Men of all shapes and sizes nonchalantly undressed, hung their clothes in their locker, then walked stark naked through a white-tiled passageway to the dirty side of the baths. Men, some with bellies so big they looked pregnant with twins and others hairy as apes, undressed next to me. Pale bodies, embossed with blue scars from where the coal had cut and left its mark, shared my space. Shocks of gray hair, looking like dusty feathers clung to shoulder blades, but no one, except me, cared about nudity.
Miners walked around with their penises exposed for the entire world to see. Some had little buttons, snuggled in nests of hair. Mushroom shaped heads hung on knobs of flesh, stunted and thick cocks balanced on forests of curls. Skinny and gnarled, bloated and thick, scores of cocks materialized before my mesmerized eyes. Most were uncircumcised, and wrinkled, but a few had had the skin lopped off, exposing the heads of blue-veined appendages. Drooping balls swung free like monkeys at the zoo. I had seen penises before but never in such variety and profusion.
Hair, hair, everyone had hair except me. If only I had a little snatch of hair on my groin, I wouldn’t have felt so uncomfortable. I saw other boys who looked about my age swagger through the baths displaying their hairy groins. Why should a fifteen-year-old adolescent trapped in the body of an eleven year old boy have to expose his physical immaturity? But I had no choice. I couldn’t go home and tell my mum that I decided not to work because I didn’t want to show my hairless wee willy to all those naked monsters.
I undressed as if I was on the beach. Contorting and twisting under the protective shell of a large white towel, I managed to disrobe without exposing my private parts.
I kept the towel around my waist and walked to the dirty side of the baths to change into my work gear. My mum had bought me special clothes for the pit, overalls, dark-colored shirts and underwear. It was the best I’d been dressed in years. Her attitude toward me had changed. She hadn’t spent much time monitoring my school progress, but there was money to be earned working at the pit. Suddenly I was a commodity with value, rather than just a smelly wee boy.
I slipped on my underpants under the towel then donned the rest of my working clothes. When I tucked my mop of Beatle hair under my white hard hat and pulled my steel toe-capped boots on to my feet, a surge of pride coursed through my body. I’d show everyone at the pit that I wasn’t like my dad. Now I was a man in my own right. I would earn my own money. I’d make my own decisions. I was John Dillon, not Taffy Dillon’s son. I swaggered toward the mine manager’s office, ready for work.
It was a crisp, sunny morning; the first streaks of dawn peeked above the huge black slag heap, silhouetting the winding gear. Except when a miner’s lamp chased away the shadows, the morning sun etched every shape into a black silhouette. My new life had begun.
My pride left soon after I was sent to the picking tables -- a typical task for a young man before sending him underground. The coal, raised from underground in a steel box -- the cage -- was poured onto the tables -- huge conveyers where rock was separated from the coal by hand. Working frantically, men of all ages lifted lumps of rock, then them dumped down a chute. A conveyer underneath whisked the rubble to the slag heap. Housed in a giant red corrugated-iron shed, the tables straddled the railroad tracks.
The small coal was mechanically screened for rock and other debris, but I had to ensure that the big coal was picked clean of unwanted rubble. Assisted by three youths who had earlier pranced naked in the bathhouse, and two older men -- no longer deemed fit to work underground -- I started on my dusty endeavor.
The cleaned coal tumbled off the end of the picking table and landed in railroad wagons. For months, I picked the rock from the never-ending river of coal that flowed over the tables. The din was incredible, as giant machines moved back and forth and up and down. Everywhere objects were in motion. Screaming sounds of metal on metal sent shivers through my skinny body. The coal dust was thick and black. Every surface and crevice was a depository for dust. It was in my clothes, my eyes, and my skin; it penetrated my garments and clung to my frame.
That first winter I froze in the table shed. The heating system was a huge empty oil-drum with the top lid removed and ventilation holes punched in the side. The drum was filled with coal. When lit, it looked like a prehistoric barbecue grill. The smoke crammed the noisy surrounds with noxious fumes and the emanating heat localized around the drums. Facing it, my front was toasty and my back was freezing and vice versa. Feverishly working, I would run to the drum to warm my hands, and then run back to the picking tables. I had hated school, but I prayed to be sent back; this was hell.
When my shifts were over, exhausted from my labors, I walked into the bathhouse and hung my dusty clothes in my dirty locker. My body was the color of the coal dust. The pit baths were a happy place. After a grueling shift underground, the miners were happy to be on the surface far away from the underground gloom. Joining me in the rite of cleansing the dust from my body were scores of laughing and singing miners. Relentlessly but affably teasing me the miners made fun of my hairless wee body -- I’d given up trying to hide my hairless groin since I’d long lost any chance of privacy.
Cornering me, a monster from the deep would whisper, “Aye, Dillon, you’ve the skin of a wee lassie! Wait till I get you underground, then you’ll lose your virginity in a way you never imagined.” Grabbing me, some would pretend to kiss and fondle, saying they loved me and wanted to take me home. It was embarrassing, but not overtly humiliating. These were real men, not like my teachers. These men would have laid down their lives for each other; I felt little malice toward them. I was their mascot and I wanted to be one of them: big, burly, and obscene.
In the steam of the baths, our bodies metamorphosed. Under the hot streams of water, the black bodies turned to gray; then pale white skin emerged from the coating of dust. To get really clean, soapy washcloths rubbed up and down a neighbor’s back scrubbed the dirt away. Two hundred naked men of all shapes and sizes helped each other wash the dust and grime into the sucking drainpipes embedded in the concrete floor. Some men weighed 300 pounds, and hair covered their backs and chests. I was a skinny wee thing and washing a huge hairy bear’s back took some time. In exchange, my back would get washed in about three seconds. Not a fair swap.
My workday started at four forty-five in the morning, when my mother wakened me. I ate a slice of toast, drank a cup of coffee, and headed out the door to catch the pit bus. I returned home at three thirty in the afternoon, not relishing the thought of my mother’s gourmet cooking:
Take one pound of chopped meat.
Boil a pot of water.
Drop lump of meat in boiling water.
After twenty minutes, retrieve lump of meat.
Voila!
Serve with boiled potatoes. Yeuch!
Immediately after this gastronomic delight, I went to bed until it was time to get up the next morning. I spent those first working months at the pit, on the pit bus, and in bed, nowhere else. I was too exhausted for outside activities. My first pay was five pounds ten shillings the -- U.S. equivalent of eight dollars. I gave the cash to my mother and she returned the ten shillings to me for spending money. Ten shillings for all that effort, ten shillings wouldn’t buy enough cigarettes to last the weekend.
When my Mum would waken me for work, I would beg, “Let me sleep for five more minutes” and plead, “I’m too tired to go today.” To no avail. If I was particularly insistent she would say, “Aye right, Johnny, go back to sleep.” For about three seconds I was in heaven, until the roar of a powerful motorcycle, my mother’s vacuum cleaner, erupted in my ears. The noise was enough to get me up and out, no matter the condition I was in.
Six months after I started at the tables, on a fine spring day in March, a piece of rock the size of a basketball escaped my grasp. I dashed along a gantry, and attempted to retrieve the lump of rock from the conveyer before it landed in the coal wagon. Why was I concerned about a chunk of rock landing in a coal wagon? The question never entered my mind, but there I was playing chase with it. I reached over the conveyer, and triumphantly rescued the rock from the indignity of mixing with coal. I cuddled the rock against my chest like a long lost lover and leaned back against the non-existing guardrail to secure my prize. Wheee! I landed with a thump, clutching my trophy, on the railroad tracks, fourteen feet below.
Recovering from the ignominy of this event, I assessed the situation; my hand was flopping at the end of my wrist; my chest was pinned down by the rock I had so gallantly rescued, and to compound matters, I was lying across the railroad tracks. Nobody had noticed my disappearance. I shouted, “Help, help!” but no one heard me. Pinned to a rail by this lump of rock, my body ached, and my broken wrist sent undulating waves of pain through me. It couldn’t get worse. Wrong, Johnny. I looked up, and noticed a railroad wagon slowly lumbering toward me. The wagons, released further up the tracks, rolled down a slight incline to be filled with coal from the shed from which I had fallen. This wasn’t good.
I screamed in terror, at the fate that was about to befall me. A workman, who happened to be taking a shortcut through the rail yard saw me. He dragged me off the tracks, but my arm twisted under my back, dumping the full weight of my body --- and let’s not forget the weight of my prized rock --- on to my mangled wrist. As my body scraped across the rails, I screeched, “You stupid thingy, watch what the f**k you’re doing!” He had come upon this black-faced wee lad cuddling a rock and yelling his lungs out. He saved his life and his reward was abuse. Sorry.
I fainted then, groggily awoke in the nurse’s station. A splint was on my arm and cascades of nauseating pain rippled through my body. An ambulance took me to the hospital, where my wrist was set and my arm was encased in a plaster cast; I was relatively pain free. My other injuries were minor, and fortunately, because of workers’ compensation laws, miners injured at work received full pay. My mother was content as my income was secure. And I was happy, not slaving away in the dust of the picking tables.

[John]

Welcome to the forum mate, very funny story, takes me back a wee bit!!
It always seemed when your back had been washed it was always the biggest bloke in the pit! I often looked at the huge back I had to scrub in return and wished I had a stepladder to reach his shoulders!

Funny how naive we were on our first day at the pit, I didn't strip and dress behind a towel, but I was embarrassed, we soon got over that and all the jibes though. Like you said, those blokes would have risked their own lives to get us out if we'd got trapped.
Great crowd of blokes are miners, always watching each others backs!

[Sam from Kent]

Talking about ciggies, it wass amazing that we could spend all that time underground without a thought for a fag, but as soon as we got up pit we had to light up and have a shower. I remember it was an art smoking under the shower keeping the fag lit with your face just outside of the water spray!!!!