The site of Ifton Colliery is in Shropshire but geologically it is on the southern edge of the North Wales Coalfield. Due to the dip of the strata, most of the haulage roads and all of the coalfaces were inclined by as much as 1 in 3. This made it very difficult to work and the miners often said that if you could work at Ifton then you could work at any pit in the country or, in a lighter vein, that to have one leg longer than the other was a definite advantage! Imagine working on a coalface where your tools, props, etc were continually moving downhill, making the job twice as hard. It would have been nice to have the luxury of working on the flat but this never happened.  Although the colliery is generally called Ifton nowadays, it was originally known as the Gertrude Mine, named after a female member of the Craig family who founded it. As officials, we always used the name Gertrude on our daily reports. I left elementary school at 14 and, since my father and brothers were already miners, it seemed the natural thing to follow them into the pit. I well remember meeting my father as he came up the shaft and then going with him to see the manager in his office. He immediately told us that I could start work underground on the very next day. Jobs were easy to get in those days providing your father was reasonably respected as a workman by the management. Up to then, I had been working part-time for a bread delivery firm after school hours so was used to the idea of working. The thought of finishing work early in the afternoon at 2.30-3.00pm was great but little did I realise that I would have to start at some unearthly hour in the morning!

 

Going down the shaft on my first day was a frightening experience. Between 12-14 men were cramped together in the cage, either standing, crouched or sitting since there was no room for movement. As the cage gathered speed on its descent into the depths, I remember experiencing a terrible feeling that the bottom of the cage was falling out, leaving me stranded in mid air. This feeling stayed with me for quite a few descents until it eventually became normal procedure. The exception was when a certain winding engine driver called Jim Evans was on duty. After a particularly rough ride, you would always hear the older miners say "Mad Jim's on today". After a week or two, I was able to buy a new pair of moleskin trousers which were the normal things worn. An old miner remarked "He's signed on for life" and my subsequent 41 years proved him nearly right. In the pit, wooden doors were fitted on the roadways to control the direction of the airflow. My first job was to open and shut one of these to allow ponies to pass through with a train (or journey) of tubs. My next job was to couple together journeys of tubs for the ponies, the tubs being pushed manually to the shunt by men called hutchers. The tubs were coupled together loosely by links and, as each link tightened as the pony began to move, the pony could tell how many tubs were in its journey. If any attempt were made to increase the allotted number of tubs in the journey, the pony would refuse to advance until the extra tubs had been uncoupled. The only names I can remember for the ponies were Prince, Bob, Dobbin and Ned.

 

At that time, roof supports in the roadways consisted of horizontal wooden bars across the roof with vertical wooden supports. On one occasion in a roadway, the roof had lowered due to weight on the supports and the floor had risen due to heaving so the pony was catching as it passed by. The drivers were very attached to their ponies and this particular driver (not very bright) refused to take his pony under the roof support and sent for the deputy fireman. On arrival, the deputy grabbed a pick and proceeded to make a temporary job since the accent was on output and the roof supports would be changed on the repairing shift. As the deputy was making a hole in the floor to increase the height, the pony driver was heard to say "his head's catching not his feet".  I can remember listening to a debate on TV on how the well-off members of the community enjoyed riding with the hounds. Someone said that he knew some miners who went horse riding and Arthur Scargill immediately answered, "So do I, pit ponies"! The ponies at Ifton between 1928-30 were reasonably well treated but theirs was a hard life, only being brought to surface during holiday breaks. They were housed in comfortable stables underground and were well fed and watered by an ostler. At the end of their shift they would run out to the stable at a considerable rate, taking everything before them. Some drivers would indulge in the dangerous practice of riding on them, giving conviction to Scargill's remarks.

 

Later on I became an engine driver, which was an important job with the emphasis on production. Tubs of coal from faces below the main level were winched up an incline, whereas those from faces above were lowered down by a method called jigging. In this, there was a full tub at the top of the incline connected to a cable which passed around a horizontal sheave wheel. The cable then passed to the bottom of the incline where it was connected to an empty tub. By using a brake on the sheave wheel, the full tub was lowered down and, in doing so, lifted the empty tub up to the top. These crude methods were phased out in 1930, soon after I started work - mechanisation was coming to Ifton.  The worst thing that could happen was to make an error and stop the flow of coal out of the mine. These were stationary winding engines without any method of gauging position and I tell people today that they were harder to drive than an aeroplane.  I then became a face worker and quickly found that it was a very hard, tedious operation. There were usually teams (sets) of three men working a section of the coalface, two colliers (coal hewers) and one filler, who was quite often a son or other relative of one of the colliers. The method used was a procedure called "bottom holing". Lying in a cramped position for hours at a time, the colliers would cut a section out of the bottom of the face using a hand pick. This was called "holing out". Wedge-shaped wooden sections were then placed into the gap at intervals and the face was ready for shotfiring.

 

Shotholes were bored by hand using a long cumbersome screw drill, which was secured with wooden props to keep it parallel to the face. This was a very skilled job since the shotholes had to be positioned just right to safely bring down the maximum amount of coal when the shots were fired. The filler's job was to load the loose coal into tubs and to push these along the roadway to the shaft. If a tub was thought to contain any substance other than coal, eg rock, dirt, etc, it was rejected and turned out at surface for everybody to see. The filler had all the blame for that too - "Poor filler, what a baptism".  Each set filled and sent to surface over 20 tubs each shift, the tubs containing 7-10 cwt each. To identify the tubs, each set would have its own numbered tallies, made of leather and attached to the tubs with strong string threaded through two holes. At surface, the mine owner had a weighman who weighed each tub as it came out of the cage. He would record the weight of the tub and the set it came from, thus ensuring that each set received payment for their recorded tonnage. The miners also clubbed together to pay the wages of a checkweighman, who checked that the tubs were correctly weighed and allocated to the proper set. The colliers provided their own tools and, at the end of each shift, would bring out their picks and drill bits to be sharpened on the surface ready for collection the following day. The colliers looked after their other tools themselves and I can remember turning the grindle stone while my father sharpened his pit axe.

 

Each set was only paid for the amount of coal it sent out of the mine and there was no minimum wage in those days. This piece rate method of working suited the mine owner because it encouraged the men to send out as much coal as possible. Where coal was easy to cut, it was possible to make good money but there were times when geological problems interfered with the cutting and there was less coal sent out as a result. These lean times made the men frustrated and short tempered and even my father, normally a pleasant, placid person, was subject to these moods at times. I did most jobs at Ifton during my employment but I am convinced that my father in his time worked much harder. After hand cutting was phased out, coal was produced from 4 or 5 longwall faces, approximately 100-120 yards long. The coal was cut by machine in the middle of the seam to a depth of about 3-3(ft. Holes were then bored into the top half of the face and the coal was brought down and broken up by shotfiring. It was then loaded or "handfilled" onto the Shaker Pan conveyor. After this, the bottom section was removed in a similar way. The seams worked at Ifton were 5ft, 6ft and 7ft, we never worked in small seams as were common in other mines. In fact, some of our seams were too big for comfort and almost unmanageable. When our faces became fully mechanised, Ifton produced a lot of coal due to the size of the seams. It does not take much imagination to realise that a "strip", a complete cycle up and down a face, produces much more coal on a 6ft seam than a 2ft one.

 

In the mechanised cutting process, the shearer disc cut and turned the coal on to the moving chain. Stable holes were prepared by hand using shotfiring methods, while the shearer moved upwards, ready for its advancement on its return. The machine cut on its upward journey and ploughed downhill. Advancement, or "pushing over", was done by automatic rams attached to the conveyor chain. Before this was done, however, the machine was advanced into the prepared stable in the roadway. Another innovation was the introduction of storage bunkers. When a stoppage occurred to the flow of coal out of the mine, it could be directed into the bunkers so production could continue at the face. When the coal began to move again, the bunkers could be emptied. Stoppages were frequent due to haulage mishaps on the inclines. In later years, conveyor belts replaced rope haulage and most of Ifton's production was conveyed by belts to a loading point less than 100 yards from the winding shaft. I was eventually made a Deputy and placed in charge of a section of the mine called a working district. I was responsible for the health and safety of the men and answerable to the manager for the working of that district. He was required to make statutory reports daily, which were signed by over-officials and kept securely on the surface. In the old days, the Deputy was called the Fireman and fired all the shots. In later years, second grade Deputies were introduced to fire most of the shots and they were called Shotfirers. This allowed the Deputy more time for his other duties such as supervising work, safety and of course production, which was always the dominating factor. To become a Deputy, I had to pass an exam for (air measurement) gas detecting, etc. This detecting was always done by reading the down turned flame on the safety lamp which Deputies always carried.

 

In the old days before mechanised mining, the Deputy measured the work done by each set of road rippers, etc and recorded any allowances due to them for other work. Unlike the colliers, these sets were engaged on non-productive but essential work, such as driving roadways, and they were paid per foot of passage driven. The Deputy would mark the side of the passage at the extent of their work and measure the distance back to the mark made the previous week. The difference would be the distance on which their pay was calculated.  The Deputy's lot was not an easy one. The responsibilities were massive and, with the manager on one side and the men you had grown up with on the other side, it was very difficult (if not impossible) to find a happy medium. Looking back over the 20 plus years that I was a Deputy, however, I pride (or console!) myself that I came through reasonably well and that I can look both the men and the manager in the eye when we meet today. One thing that I remember well were the mice that lived underground. They had presumably first come down in the ponies' food but, when ponies were phased out in the 1930s, they had to look elsewhere and preyed on our food. We had a constant battle with them over our "snapping", which we used to hang from the roof. For some reason, they could negotiate string but not wire. If you did not have a tin container and had wrapped your food in paper hung up by a string, you could guarantee that the mice would get to it before you! I remember once coming off the face at snap time to where we had hung up our food. One miner was in time to see the mice scampering away, with large holes where they had burrowed through the paper into his butties. Nonplussed he reached for his snapping and one of his mates was shocked that he was going to eat it. He replied, "If it’s good enough for them it’s good enough for me". One of the roadways was nicknamed "Mouse's Alley" - it was so low that even the mice caught their backs on the roof! All of the roadways had names such as Lloyd's Dip, Hatton's Level and Rodway's Crut.

 

Around 1930, a terrible disaster happened at Gresford Colliery, about 10-12 miles from Ifton. I didn't know a lot about practical mining at that time but I remember my father telling me that bad mining practices had played a part in that terrible happening. Repair of airways had been neglected since this was regarded as dead work, ie non-productive. On that memorable Sunday afternoon, an enterprising bus contractor organised a conveyance to Gresford. There were hundreds of sightseers at the pithead and I regret to say that I was in the crowd. It struck me at the time how helpless everyone was and from that time I decided that, if my future was to be in mining, I would make every endeavour to be of some use. I decided then to become trained in the Rescue Brigade. You couldn't just become a Rescueman and it was some time before I was even given the chance to attend a selection course. This involved daily attendance over a period of two weeks for extensive training. We had to spend 2 hour sessions in a prepared gas-filled chamber erecting sandbag stoppings, etc. This was very strenuous work and it succeeded in its objective of "separating the men from the boys". I am pleased to say that I came through successfully and I stayed in the service for over 15 years, only leaving because of the age limit.  After qualifying, rescue practices consisted of four visits per year to the Rescue Station at Wrexham or at one of the neighbouring pits. Rescuemen always visited other pits in their area to become familiar with them in case of emergencies. At the station each man assembled his own apparatus, which was checked by the Captain before we entered the gas-filled chamber for a gruelling 2 hour session in a red hot atmosphere. The cumbersome apparatus consisted of a heavy canister containing a supply of over 2 hours of oxygen, which was breathed through the mouth and controlled by valves. There was a clip over the nose and, of course, no talking. After donning the apparatus, everything was done by a code of signals sounded on a small hooter attached to the apparatus. The Captain gave the signal for each operation and was required to make a detailed report after each session.

 

Rescue teams were a vital part of mining and every colliery had to have by law a percentage of trained rescue men. Ifton had two teams of 5-6 men. It was a voluntary service for which we received no extra pay, until later years when a small retaining fee was paid. The job was very strenuous and demanding but the worthwhile feeling of being prepared and involved gave us all a great deal of satisfaction. I became Captain for a number of years and received the three medals awarded for 5 years (Bronze), 10 years (Silver) and 15 years (Gold) long service. We attended most pits in the area during that time, mostly for underground fires, etc but were fortunate that no lives were involved. Underground fires were quite common and I remember one time where our team was on duty waiting to go down. The manager came over and remarked "We can't sell our coal as people say it won't burn - they should see it down there". I well remember the first callout that came soon after I joined the Rescue Brigade, to a fire down a small old pit called Llay Hall near Wrexham. I was the youngest member on the team and the hundreds of villagers sightseeing at the pithead did not help my composure as it brought back memories of Gresford. The fire was situated at the bottom end of a face where the coal cutting machine turned round. That machine cut a long wall face (a method not used at Ifton) as it went up and down, cutting in both directions. Again, bad practice had prevailed with the stable (turning point) not being packed off securely. There was water available so we proceeded to put the fire out with hoses. We did a two hour stint that night before being relieved by another team and found that the fire had been extinguished when we returned the following day.

 

During the years, I saw some phenomenal changes in the pit. Ifton changed over to longwall faces, a new steel headgear, electric winding engine and a modern washery and screens at surface. One of the most welcome changes in later years was the pithead baths - Ifton was then really "on the map". The changes underground were intended to make it safer for working but they were not always welcomed by the older miners who were set in their ways. Wooden roof supports were replaced with steel props on faces and steel arches on roadways. Coal dust in the air could be a danger as it sometimes exploded, so dust suppression was introduced on faces and at loading points. Better lighting and first aid appeared, together with compulsory steel helmets and safety boots for the miners. As trained first aid personnel we had access to morphia, which we were able to administer when necessary because it took so long to get a doctor to the scene.  Despite rigid safety measures, accidents occurred at regular intervals and some of these were fatal. It was noticeable that there was a spate of bad accidents when long wall faces came into vogue. I will give two examples of bad accidents to demonstrate how dangerous the job was. In the first example, a friend of mine in my early days was waiting to unhook a journey proceeding up dip. An overhead girder snapped and fell, striking him on the head and killing him instantly. The girder was a used tram line, a cheap form of roof support that had found its way into mining. Following the accident, this type of girder was condemned since it was realised that they had lost structural strength and could snap like a carrot at any time.  In the second example, I had a rare week off work and my workmate was allowed to change shifts from nights to days. During that week he was crushed between tubs and a steel girder which crossed the roadway to carry a motor and gearing to drive a small conveyor at a loading point. Again, this method of operation was condemned after the accident and a new construction was erected on future loading points.

 

We took these occurrences in our stride at the time but they gave cause for much reflection in later years. One old miner often said that there was no such thing as an accident; the fault could always be directed at somebody. I also remember the first overman in charge I worked for, who often spoke in similes. He would say "Its surprising what a lot of difference a bit of difference makes". He would use these words when a lift or some help was required because many jobs were much easier when done by two persons.  During my time, Ifton had always been connected to Chirk Green pit, the latter acting as the upcast shaft. After Black Park Colliery closed, I recall a connection being driven to join up with that as well. As a safety measure, officials had to regularly travel these roadways to check on their condition. They went one way underground and returned on the surface. It was necessary to be familiar with these ways out in case of emergency where we couldn't use the main shafts.  As the colliery began to expand, the National Coal Board built a number of new houses to accommodate the influx of workers from other areas, whom we in the village regarded as foreigners. One such family came from the Midlands and was obviously used to different ways from us. Their father sadly died quite young and the 17 year old son Frank, who was working with us, was asked by the deputy in charge when his father's funeral was to be held. He replied "I don't know yet but I hope its not on Saturday as the Wolves are at home"!

 

Closure of Ifton was due to several reasons, the chief one being the underground fires which we referred to as "heating". We encountered a lot of trouble over the years with heating at our colliery and I firmly believe that bad mining practices were the main reason for their occurrence. Old workings and roadways were often not packed with waste or sealed off securely and this allowed oxygen to circulate. Even where packing was done, this sometimes included combustible material such as coal which would readily ignite.  There was only one sure way of dealing with breakouts of fire and that is by erecting a complete wall ("stopping") of sandbags on the intake side. This sealed off the workings and prevented any further oxygen getting in. The problem with this, however, was that it meant the loss of a working face and complete stopping was only done at Ifton as a last resort. The alternative usually employed was to dig the burning coal out of the sides of roadways and to replace it with sandbag stoppings. In later years, a quick setting cement mixture was pumped into the cavities instead.  We once had a rather long fight against a fire at our colliery over several days. Our team went on duty on the afternoon shift to do our allotted two hours stint and we were met by the Overman. He informed us that good progress was being made due to the help of the rescue team preceding us, who had organised the filling of sandbags and thus released men for other jobs. Such work was outside the required duties of the rescue team, which was supposed to only be on standby with apparatus fitted ready for emergency.

 

A member of our team appointed himself as our spokesman and bluntly informed the overman that we intended to comply with the regulations. The manager was informed and he came down to speak to us. He hadn't been at the colliery long and he was a real down to earth product of South Wales. I well remember his words "What's going on here lads! When I went home last night my daughter said 'Who's this strange man'. It was that long since she had seen me. We all want to get home so let's get this job done. It's our pit". Needless to say we all got stuck in.  The bottling up procedure for fires went on for some years and, with constant observation of danger spots, proved quite successful. In the last few years, however, breakouts became more frequent and too close to the main shaft for comfort. I was at Ifton until the end and have a photograph of a small consignment going down on the last shift, taken by a local paper.