I left school in 1936 when I was aged 15, together with four of my friends. I didn't have any relatives working down Ifton Colliery but I did have a friend who already worked there. He told all five of us that we could get much more money working down the pit than anywhere else (I was working for a butcher at the time) so we applied for jobs and I spent the next 3 years there. On my first day I started on the Day Shift (6.00am until 2.00pm) and went straight underground with no training. There were 3 shifts and on each shift there were 200-250 men working underground and on surface. I had mixed feelings when I first got into the cage and I stood by myself as all the other miners stood back from me. I later found out that most new people were sick when the cage lifted up about a foot then started down at great speed. I wasn't sick myself but that is why they gave me a wide berth! The cage had four decks with about 10 men to a deck. My first job underground was at the shaft bottom, uncoupling tubs of coal and hutching (pushing) them to the cage. This took eight tubs (two to a deck) up the shaft at a time, a similar cage coming down at the same time. The tubs weighed 5cwt and were not too hard to hutch but it was a bit harder to lift when they came off the rails. We had to lift the middle and swing our bum over but even the smallest could do this. When I came up I had to bike 6 miles home to Oswestry. There were no pit head baths at that time but I was lucky because we were one of the few families who had a bath at home.

 

At some mines the miners gave their tallies to the onsetter before getting into the cage but we didn't do it that way. We took our tallies home with us and handed them in at the lamproom to get our lamp. This also acted as a clocking in mechanism. We never actually had much contact with the lampman because everything was done through an open window. When the shift was over we took our lamp back and was handed our tally. The tally number was on our lamp and that way they knew we had come up. If there were any lamps missing they went to look for them. The first men out of the cage on descending were the firemen and shotlighters. The fireman went through our pockets to search for contraband such as matches or cigarettes. Most miners hid theirs in a tin under their bike seat for when they finished shift and in those days nobody would touch them. It was not a wet pit, some parts of it were quite cool, but the deeper we went the hotter it got. Lloyds Haulage was hot and, as we went down, one of the reasons for the manholes in the side walls was to store our clothes. We would maybe place our jacket in one and shirt in another and so on. We had to walk to work from the shaft bottom but we were never allowed to walk in the haulage way when it was running. Down below there were lots of sacks of limestone dust in the form of a fine white powder. One of our jobs was to chuck this about on the roadways as we went to our shift. This was heavier than coal dust and stopped it getting in the air as we walked to work. We had our breaks where we worked but I only remember having half an hour. This depended on the colliers as they got paid for what coal they sent out from their seam. We took food in snap tins and water in tin bottles. My favourite was jam and cheese butties. We did get mice down the pit and they did like our snap if they could get at it! I quickly learned and put mine in a tin but we did leave bits of bread for them to eat. They did use ponies at one time but not when I was down there. The stables were still there but the firemen and shotlighters used them as offices. The lamp relighter was also in the stables.

 

Although I went to night school after a while, most of what I learned was down the pit itself. I particularly wanted to know more about the engines. The clothes we wore were our own as there was nothing provided. On my first payday I bought a pair of moleskin trousers, which seemed to be the favourite item worn by miners. We were always given our pay in our own pay tin, which had our tally number on. This was 5 inches high and 3 inches across with the top half open - our money was stuffed inside it. We would take out the money and hand it back in for the following week. I can't quite remember what we got paid but I think it was about 36 shillings. My old job was working 11 hours a day for 5 shillings a week so you can see why we went down the mine. It was very poor pay working for a butcher. We had no helmet and our only lamp was a very large and heavy electric one, 9 inches high by 4 inches around the base. The light was on the top and we turned the base clockwise to switch it on. When I started driving engines I also had an oil lamp. We used our oil lamps to test for gas and were told to place the lamp near to the engines. We tested all around it and if the flame turned blue we waited for the walking fireman to check it and give the go ahead to work. If they went out, the shot lighter or a fireman could relight the lamps down below. The lamps were made by E Thomas & Williams Ltd of Aberdare. We went down like a Christmas tree with two lamps, oil can, bottle of water and a snap tin - all hanging on our belt except for the big lamp. I used to work only the morning and night shifts as the afternoon shifts were only for ripping.

 

I was eventually moved to a very deep coal seam, which we called Lloyds Haulage (also known as Lloyds Dip). This haulage way was very steep, the first stage was at least three quarters of a mile long (at an angle of 1 in 3) and then it levelled off for about half a mile. There were what was known as "Throw Ons" (or as one bright spark called them Throw Me Ons), the purpose of which was to put tubs that came off the rails back on again. They consisted of a piece of hard wood placed at the side of the rail track and a 4 foot length of rail nailed down at an angle, 18 inches wide at the end. There was one each side of the track at intervals. The tubs had to be unclipped and hutched on the level sections. They were then clipped to the rope again on an endless haulageway. The remainder of the journey went on down for maybe a mile to the coal seam, where I worked on the Pan Shaker. The only way I can describe the Pan Shaker is to imagine a 44 gallon oil drum slit from top to bottom lengthways (a bit like a kid's slide). These were much thicker, however, and about 10 feet long, all joined together in a line. A compressed air motor operated an arm which pulled the pans backwards and forwards. The colliers loaded coal onto them and it shook the coal along to the tub loaders (there were no belts in those days). Once the tubs were loaded, they were turned and sent back up the haulage way. They used compressed air drills to drill the coal face so that the shotlighter could put in the powder and detonator to crack the seam. They then used their picks (with a short blade about 14 inches long) to pull the coal down so it could be loaded on to the pans to shake down to the tub loaders. They did have a coal cutter but all it did was cut a 3 inch strip of dirt 4 feet up the seam - it looked like a chain saw on a very large scale

 

Then I was moved to the "500ft Down" haulageway to where men were opening up a new seam. This consisted of a static engine operating a single rope. It was hard work since two empty tubs were pushed to the top of a dip and lowered down to where to men worked. When they reached the working face, the colliers pulled on a signal wire once to let me know to stop the engine. When the tubs were loaded, the colliers pulled on the wire twice and I pulled them up and let two more empty tubs down. I was not allowed to ride down in the empty tubs but once two big miners made me! One night the same miners rang the bell to pull them up in the tubs and I pulled them up too fast. One didn't like it at all so he got me by the neck and told me he had buried better ****** than me down there! I never did find out where this roadway went as it was a long way down to where the two men worked but it carried on down with no rails. I asked one of the colliers where it went to and he did say about another 400ft but never try to go down there. I wondered if it was an escape road as I did read that they made a steep road to Black Park Pit. The top of this incline joined the main two line roadway to the shaft bottom which was operated by an endless rope. This rope was not so thick, it pulled about 16 tubs (called a "journey") and I had to stop this rope to put my two tubs on the back of the journey. When the two tubs had been hauled up the incline, I used locking pins that were 1 inch thick and 18 inches long placed in the spokes of the wheels to stop the tubs moving. There was a chain about 5ft long with a hook at each end, one hook went in the tow bar of the first truck and the other on the rope. After the locking pins were taken out of the wheels and the haulage restarted you took the last 18 inches of the chain and, as the tubs moved off, you wound the chain around the rope then the chain was slipped in the hook. We then had to hold the chain so it slipped along the rope, it could not be too tight and it had to be done this way because the 5 tubs closed up. This is when fingers could be lost as it had to be held until the slack was taken up.

 

It was not long before I moved back to Lloyds to a side working where I worked on a Main & Tail engine, which pulled out about 16 tubs on a flat roadway. It had a rope attached to the front tub and one to the rear, the front pulled the tubs from the working and the rear rope pulled the empties back to the working. The haulage signals were 1 bell to Stop, 2 bells to Start and 3 bells to go home. On an endless rope you knew when you had a problem such as a "thitener". This was when two tubs came off the rails and wedged up against the wall side. You then got out of the way fast as the rope whipped like a snake. We had man holes cut in the side of the roadway so we could shelter from this. Operating an engine could be a lonely job as we were on our own most of the time. However, I remember once when I worked on the Pan Shaker that we were having our snap and there was little chap bragging that he could hurt anyone who put their finger in his mouth, even though he had no teeth. One of the colliers got a rail spike and put it in this chap's mouth. He thought it was a finger in the semi dark and he was biting like hell with the water running from the side of his mouth! One sad memory was when a collier tried to hold up a roof with his back. They left his cap where he died and it was still there when I left the pit. When the coal tubs came up to surface they were tipped into a washer which took out the rock and dirt. The coal was then loaded into railway trucks and in those days the company had their own name on the trucks (W Y Craig and Son ). The only time I saw any coal dumped on the surface was when we over-produced. The colliery was linked to the main Paddington-Liverpool railway line at Gobowen. The pit had two shunting engines. The waste was taken up to the tip (or slag heap as we called it) by tubs running on railway lines pulled by a rope engine. There used to be a very large tip but it has since been bulldozed and landscaped. There were the offices, lamproom and blacksmiths shop where they sharpened the colliers' picks. Winston Churchill once visited the pit and mark the occasion a one yard square of coal was cut out, placed on a flat bogey and sent to where he lived.

 

Most miners came from St Martins but others were from Whittington, Gobowen, Chirk and Weston Rhyn. The Chirk miners came when Black Park Pit closed. Myself and my pals did not take part in the life of Ifton village as we lived at Oswestry and it was a 12 mile round trip. There was a miner’s welfare there, I believe it was built some time in the 1930s, but I only used it once. The only holiday I can remember having was once when we over-produced and were put on a 3 day week. The company got the dole people down to sign us on for 4 days dole. When we were laid off, the younger ones were taken by bus each day for 3 days to the Derbyshire Miners Research Centre near Buxton. We were taken into different buildings, one with miners' tools which were explained to us then to a room with safety things in it. On the third day we were taken in to a narrow passage with a mockup of a mining roadway with coal tubs, pit props and a half ring that held up the roof, as well as lots of coal dust. We were taken through this roadway and out of the other end and then taken to sit on the hill side and told to wait. They told us to cover our ears and then all hell broke loose with a mine explosion. Everything came flying out - tubs, pit props, rings and rock - with a hell of a bang and flames. I left the mine when the war started and five of us who had started in the pit together from school were all called up into the army. They asked us if we wanted to go back down the pit but we all said that we didn't as we thought the war would last so long. I am sorry to say that only three of us came back. When the war was over I got married and went to live in Lincolnshire. Ten years ago I went back to the old pit but only the offices, lamproom and blacksmiths were still there.